Leverage - Nate Ford, not a nice man
Let me talk about Leverage some more because, well, it’s Leverage. And let’s talk about Nate.
Mastermind Nate Ford.
When you first watch the show, Nate is the character that you possibly just kind of tolerate while you instantly fall in love with Hardison (or Eliot / Parker / Sophie). Nate is probably not the one you’d name as your favourite.
And let’s get this straight: John Rogers repeats over that Nate Ford is not a nice man. And boy, he isn’t kidding. Nate Ford is, in fact, a massive dick.
One of my favourite, and soooo not-talked-about-enough things about Leverage is the reason why the team comes together: Dubenic kinda underestimates just how vengeful and smart Nate is, yes, but he is spot on when he - very deliberately - picks Nate Ford, a supposed white hat, to CONTROL a group of the world’s greatest criminals.
I think we tend to underestimate just what that means at that moment. That’s because we all know very early on - thanks in huge parts to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the flashbacks - what good people Parker, Hardison, and Eliot actually can be. And because of that we underestimate who they are at that moment, to the world: Eliot is Moreau’s favourite and most efficient killer (“Please, don’t ask me, Parker”), Hardison is the a brilliant hacker in the age of the geek whose fingertips could unleash the collapse of civilization, and Parker is a loner thief who actually blew up her parents’ house as a kid, with them potentially inside. These are SERIOUSLY dangerous people.
Yes, Dubenic kindles Nate’s need for revenge and strokes his ego by telling him that he needs an honest man. But the real reason why he picks Nate to wrangle those three is that he rightfully assumes that Nate is both smarter AND more ruthless than the world’s best criminals combined.
Nate Ford is not a nice man.
Nate is the one who figures out that Dubenic withheld the money in The Nigerian Job, so he can get them all in one place to kill them. And his reaction is to LAUGH OUT LOUD and wait with a fucking smirk on his face until the slower kids in the class figure it out, too.
Nate is the one who, throughout the show, easily plays the sleaziest of lawyers, the hardest of CEOs and five-star-generals. Sure, because the cons often call for such a character (someone the mark can focus all their hatred on, distracting him from what is really going on), and someone has to do it. But it’s usually Nate playing them because he really doesn’t mind being the asshole that everyone hates and wants to get rid off.
Nate is the one who goes after the world’s most influential and ruthless villains with just his brain as a weapon, and he is not afraid, not for a single second. Nate takes on Moreau, the man even Eliot is fucking afraid of. It’s very likely that he kills Chesney - a man who was perfectly okay with letting a boy die, so he could get the donor heart - with just his voice and over the fucking phone. And he absolutely manipulates Dubenic and Latimer into killing each other (the look when he walks away and the two of them fall in The Last Dam Job? SO underrated).
Nate is the one who has Jimmy Ford for a dad, a character even less likable than Nate himself - apparently near to no empathy, very egotistical / self-centered, hella manipulative, very set in his ways. And it’s Jimmy who actually kind of fears Nate, not the other way around; he fears both his incredible cleverness as well as his ruthlessness, even if he does a good job of hiding it behind contempt.
Nate is the one who runs a con on his own team in season two and who deliberately keeps secrets from them in season three AND four. Hell, he runs a con on US throughout the entire first half of the series’ finale by making us believe everyone died.
Nate is also the one who, week in and week out, has to run dozens of scenarios in his head, including several in which members of his team die. “Hardison dies in plan M” is played off as a joke in The Nigerian Job, yes, but The Long Goodbye Job lets us experience first hand what that ACTUALLY means. I am still fucked up from that, even after seven years, and even though the OT3’s death is fiction within fiction. Nate lives with that scenario week in and week out.
Nate Ford really is not ‘hard on the outside, soft on the inside’. He is granite on the inside.
And yet?
Maggie, “the most honest person we know”, loved him and - even more importantly - still loves him. Eliot, who time and time again proves that he has the best people skills of them all (fight me on this), trusts his judgment right from the start. (Seriously, watch The Nigerian Job solely for the interactions between Nate and Eliot, oh God, it’s soooo good. - Parker and Hardison are great as well, sure, but nearly all of the serious conversations have Nate and Eliot at the center - and for a reason!).
Sophie loves him. Hardison loves him. Parker loves him.
Why is that? Is it because Maggie doesn’t see the ‘real’ Nate behind the insurance man? Is it because Nate plays to Eliot’s own need for revenge (and eventually: redemption)? Is it because Sophie is forever blinded by her crush on him, Hardison too naive, Parker too broken to know better?
We know it’s not that.
Maggie is fucking smart, and we get ample proof for that in The Second David Job alone, where we also see how well she understands Nate. Eliot is the team’s shield from the moment in The Nigerian Job where he hauled Hardison out of the warehouse. He can kill people with an horsd’oevre; he knows how to run risk assessment. Sophie proves time and time again over the course of the five seasons how well she knows Nate, Hardison’s heart is never wrong, and Parker? She understands Nate as well as she understands herself (which is, I realize, an ambiguous statement, but one to explore in another post :)).
They trust Nate because Nate IS granite on the inside. Because his moral code is unwavering.
They trust Nate because Nate is smart enough to surround himself with people to call him on his bullshit. They compensate with their compassion what he seems to lack. They could very well get by on their own but chose that they are better together. They know that he might run the occasional con on them but he would never try and twist them into something they aren’t or don’t want to be.
And they love Nate because Nate’s capability to love is unconditional and boundless. All it takes to prove that to us is that gut-wrenching six second long scream when Sam dies. Watch that scene again, I dare you, and then try to contradict me. And if you then haven’t tortured yourself enough yet, watch the bookend scene to that in The Long Goodbye Job when he pretends to grieve for his dead team. That grief is so real because Tim Hutton is a brilliant, brilliant actor, and it’s so real because that is what Nate feels, every time he thinks of fucking plan M.
I love him so much. I love Leverage so much.
its currently 3 am and i too, love nathan ford and Leverage s o m u c h . [starts crying]
