God Forbid 5000 Year Old Girls Do Anything

leverage has always been pretty obvious with it's messaging, but redemption season 3 starts off with a generic american white guy who sells hot wings stealing water from american towns and then selling it to the highest bidder on an international auction from his private villa in paris that is attended by government official and terrorists both.

this is as subtle as a cannon shot.

started watching white collar because the venn diagram of the white collar and leverage fandoms appears to be a circle and you know what. yeah. i get it now.

Inspired by this post by @lemissingmask

The team holding Eliot back from violence, either with a simple gesture or by putting themselves in front of him.

And the time the violence was encouraged:

Sophie: We can't leave. The Crown is still in the museum.

Eliot: No, Sophie. We gotta get you to safety.

Sophie: No. We know Wilde wants to take me down, but he wants to humiliate me by putting me in prison without the Crown ever having left the museum.

Parker: But if we find the Crown...

Sophie: We put it back. We turn Wilde's humiliation back on himself.

Eliot: Mm-hmm. Does anybody else think this sounds like a trap?

Harry: I do. I hate this idea. Sophie, let's go home. Let's regroup. Let's live to fight Wilde another day.

Sophie: No. We are taking Arthur Wilde down today.

L:R S2E13 The Crowning Achievement Job

god. it’s eliot fucking spencer.

because it always has been eliot spencer.

eliot, who let himself be tortured, who resisted torture, in a situation he could get himself out of in five minutes, because they were torturing homeless veterans.

eliot, who only counts himself as saving someone’s life two and a half times because that half time he was the one sent to kill him.

eliot, who was willing to take down a billion dollar corporation, who begged nate to do everything he could, because of one guy with a hardware store and one near-closing grocery store.

eliot, who offered to kill a man for parker in less than a breath because she asked, who broke his rule on killing because nate could take down his biggest demon, who ran toward a bullet because he knew parker could take care of a city-killing virus.

eliot spencer, who started this season stabbed and bleeding, who was told someone didn’t want him to keep taking hits meant for him.

eliot, who was tired and just wanted his own bed.

he wakes up every day and acknowledges that he still has work to do.

and he never, ever, needed convincing to take down a corrupt mayor who was running drugs in his town. he knew that it needed to be fixed, what needed to be done to save the town, that this is the worst of it. he wanted more time. to do it right. so the surprises wouldn’t happen.

and if you’re looking at it, really looking, i think, parker doesn’t try to convince him to stay.

she knows he’s in.

because it’s who he’s always been.

in Leverage, in the background of some scenes you can see ads for or clips of another Dean Devlin production, The Librarian movie series. seems like The Librarian movies exist in the Leverage universe. BUT! at the end of the first david job, sophie’s storage unit contains the Judas Chalice, which is the titular arrifact in "The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice". it’s not an actual artifact irl. so there’s kinda 2 possibilities in my head at the moment:

sophie stole the prop, and considers it so precious that it’s stored amongst her stash of very real, very old artifacts. she’s like the worlds biggest Librarian fan.

the plot of The Librarian movies & tv show are real in the Leverage universe, and the movies are dramatic retellings of real events. sophie owns stolen cursed artifacts because of course she does.

(notably, sophie is seen holding & blowing into the judas chalice right after admitting that she has the real second david… you know, her big betrayal? the reveal of her judas kiss? etc etc)

did no one else think Mr. Romance Novel Heartthrob was a little too perfect? he’s a vet and a fire captain and runs the bnb and is the only good one on the town council and is hot and kind and- like no one’s actually LIKE that in real life. this is the kind of character eliot would play in a con. I get that this is sophie’s little hallmark fantasy but I did spend the entire episode waiting for the other shoe to drop with this guy.

Thinking again about the discussion around "The Fractured Job" rewriting Eliot's backstory and undoing the original series' implication that he was abused by his father. It's a 100% valid read that's supported by the text, but it's also worth noting that it wasn't intended by the creators (at least John Rogers, who's been pretty vocal about it).

From "The Tap-Out Job" commentary:

John Rogers: “And there is—you know, a lot of people look at this one, and ‘Order 23,’ to think that maybe Eliot had been abused or something as a child, and it’s—that’s facile. This is just a guy with a relationship with violence. He’s beaten up, he’s been tortured, he’s a guy who has learned bad things can happen to you and this is how he internalizes it.”

From "The Order 23 Job" commentary:

John Rogers: “And it's also interesting to see how fans react to any sort of storyline like this, where they just assume you're trying to reveal something about the character’s past or some sort of subtle hints that we’re laying in. It’s like no, Eliot doesn't like guys who beat up kids. It's not—I mean there's plainly other stuff going on that Christian chose in order to base his acting around…”

(Thanks to @leverage-commentary for the transcripts)

I find it interesting that in 2009/2010, he devoted commentary time to debunking this. What that tells me this interpretation was prevalent enough to seem worth addressing (probably because they didn't do themselves any favors with how they told their story, leading a huge chunk of the audience to the same conclusion...)

(x)

how did we go from "we agreed we all change. for better or worse, we change together" to "everybody changed. i thought we were done changing."