I’ve been thinking about The Big Bang Job again (like always), and the crew’s pasts, specifically their response to Eliot’s:
Sophie: Look, we all have a past. You don't have to tell us anything, Eliot.
The crew agreed, essentially from the beginning, not to ask about each other’s histories. Yeah, they’d be inclined to, and they would share if they wanted to, but there was never any obligation to tell each other anything they didn’t want to.
The first conclusion I originally drew from that, without thinking about it, is that they didn’t care about each other’s pasts. They don’t care about what each other did.
But that doesn't make sense. They care about each other and their mental well-being, right? And they’re all in a healing process. They’re all trying to figure out how to deal with their pasts and who they are now.
Understanding and untangling your past experiences and emotions is essential to healing. Your past is not separate from who you are now. It’s a piece of you, something that shapes you, how you act, what you do. You can change that with time and effort—but those experiences will always be there.
To help someone heal, you have to care about their past, in order to recognize how it impacts them now and what they need to move past it.
From the very beginning, the crew helps each other deal with and process their struggles. They help each other heal. They do care about their pasts. But it’s more complex than that, clearly, so how does it work?
That brought me back to this quote, in the same scene, and once again from Sophie:
Sophie: Kill Atherton? (scoffs) You can't. You're not that man anymore.
“You’re not that man anymore.” They know of Eliot’s past. But they also know who he is now, and that what he did doesn’t represent that.
Eliot is the most convenient example, thanks to this scene, but this is true of all of them. Nate is not the old insurance investigator who believed himself above them. Hardison isn’t the careless, arrogant kid who cared only to prove himself and didn’t always think about the consequences of his actions. His origin as a foster kid doesn’t define him, nor does it define Parker. Parker’s history of abuse doesn’t represent who she is now. She doesn’t have to sit in it, to let it haunt her.
Sophie… as of the original canon (I don’t know about Redemption), we don’t know much of Sophie’s past. But the hurt her grifts caused, the heartbreak, the people she preyed on—that doesn’t define her, either.
They live in the present. They see what they can become, not what they were, not what they are now. It isn’t that they don’t care; it’s that they don’t let the past define each other.
Why? Because you cannot change the past. Lingering on it only leaves you stuck in the moment.
And I might be wrong here, but I wonder… isn’t this what Nate’s story is about? Isn’t he trying to stop lingering on Sam, to move on, to define himself beyond the insurance investigator?
Isn’t that what his declaration at the end of The Maltese Falcon Job represents?
My name's Nate Ford, and I am a thief.
Nate is redefining himself. He’s spent the last two seasons calling himself a man of honor, thinking of himself as the insurance investigator instead of who he is now, trying to hang on to that…
Nate: Okay, you want a message? Here's a message. You're wasting your time. All right? You know, y-you don't figure out who you are by -- by roaming the earth, you know, or -- or hiding in London, you know? Look, nobody -- nobody knows who they are. Nobody knows who they are. I mean, you know, you think you do, And then life -- it just - it tears it out of you, and -- and you live with that, and... Look, there is no answer.
…and I think, partly through Sophie, he figures that out. He thought he knew who he was. For the last few years, he’s been clinging to that, to that vision of himself. But he has to accept that that isn’t who he is anymore. He’s not totally sure what he is.
But there’s one thing he does know: he’s a thief. Nate has recognized that he is something new, and he may not know all of what it is yet, but this is a starting point.
And that starting point also happens to be defining himself as one of the people who helped him figure that out. It’s identification with his new family.
Anyway, there’s a longer meta there, but back to my original point: the crew helps Nate to let go of that past and redefine himself, and they do it for each other, too.
Here’s the thing: for Nate to move on, he had to deal with his past, and the crew cared about it. They cared about Sam, about what he lost. Eliot even confronts him about it right at the start, apologizes and offers sympathy:
Eliot: Listen, I’m sorry about your kid.
Nate: You don’t know anything about that.
Eliot: Everybody knows. A guy like you goes off the street, a lot of people notice. And it was a bad story, too. How did they justify that, huh? The insurance company just not paying for his treatment?
But their journey is about helping Nate define himself beyond the grief. He confronts it, and then he begins to move on. It’s not just him, either, even if he’s the most obvious.
It’s Parker, with the crew learning about her history, about what she went through, and helping her build a family beyond it and understand that her strength is in who she is.
It’s Hardison, learning that he doesn’t have to prove himself, that he can have confidence in himself and who he is.
It’s Sophie, realizing she doesn’t have to hurt others to feel good: she can build up by teaching them, by showing them these things and how they can move on.
And it’s Eliot, seeing that they do not care about who he was, that the blood on his hands is not all he is, that he can help and heal and defend and build instead of tearing down.
Let’s come back to The Big Bang Job. This is why they don’t respond to Eliot with disgust, with judgement, with hatred. No… they answer with sympathy, with care, with love! Love! In the face of a gory and bloody and horrible history, they answer with love!
What else could you call the protectiveness they immediately answer with? They distance him, they say no, we’ll handle it, we’ll keep you safe, they keep him away from Moreau at all costs, and not once do they mention their fury that he didn’t say anything again. They understand.
See, Parker’s abusive past, Nate’s grief—those things hurt them in ways we get and easily sympathize to. Things were done to them, tore them apart. But Eliot’s past hurt him too.
It’s not just the PTSD from battle, either. Hurting other people, Moreau’s manipulation, all of that, that hurt him, and his grief and guilt from all the horrible things he did haunts him every day. They know that.
Yeah, he did horrible things, but it left him just as broken. But he surmounted that! He chose to become someone better! If they linger on that past, judge him by it, think of him as that person, they’ll only hurt him and his progress. He needs to be seen as what he is now. Just as they have to look at Parker and Nate as more than their grief, they have to see Eliot as more than the blood on his hands.
Eliot doesn’t totally get that at first, I think, because he doesn’t see himself as anything more than that blood, yet. He spends the whole season in fear of what they’ll think of him when they find out he worked for Moreau. To him, that’s who he is, no matter how he pretends otherwise. He makes his choices, and he’s chosen to be a better man, but isn’t that still what he is? Doesn’t he deserve the anger, the hatred, the fear?
Yet this season is… it’s also about showing that the crew as a whole doesn’t believe that, I think. Parker reveals her past in The Inside Job and The Boost Job, and they put it aside to raise her up and aid her. Three Card Monte shows off Nate’s childhood, the vicious anger and grief over his father, and yet, like always, they support him anyway. Sophie even reveals a piece of the person she once was in The King George Job, how cruel her past grifts could be, and they show no judgement.
Hardison… Hardison’s harder, because he didn’t cause much in the way of pain. But that, in and of itself, is powerful. He’s compassionate, he’s done the least harm, he’s had the best raising of all of them. Of all of them, he has the right to judge. It seems he shouldn’t extend that kindness. But he does. Every time, he puts their pasts aside and welcomes them with open arms.
We see some of the fruits of that in the fourth season: Parker begins to recognize that she’s worthy of love. Eliot knows he can reveal the darkest and deepest pieces of himself and process them safely. (Could he have said the things he did to the interrogator in The Experimental Job, without that? I wonder.)
All of them can see that they are safe to say “here, this is what I’ve done, this is my pain,” and that they’ll receive support and care in place of judgement.
The crew answers with compassion for the grief and agony that Eliot’s past has caused him, not with disgust and anger over what that past consists of, because that’s what he needs. He’s their family. How else could they answer?
This is the strength of Leverage's storytelling. It does not excuse their characters for what they have done. It recognizes their pasts and the damage they have done, and that lingering on it won't change a thing now.
And what is Leverage but that? What is it but a demand for us to recognize the things this human greed has done? What is it but a call to action?
This is what it says to us: "This is in the past. This is not something we can change. But we can do better now. So stand up, and change things."
(Quotes taken from transcripts provided by Leverage, Seriously.)
