Leverage/Awesome

As noted on the main Leverage page, the show's producers try to go for at least a 1:1 ratio of Funny Moments and Moments Of Awesome in every episode. Here's the awesome.

• In the pilot episode, Hardison is used as bait to draw the attention of building security. Four guards pull guns on him and tell him to raise his hands, one of which is holding a large duffel bag. He does and drops the bag. The bag is shown falling in slow motion as Eliot, at normal speed, takes out every single one of the guards before the bag hits the floor. Now consider what the scene would have looked like if the bag had been shown falling at the normal rate of speed.
  • Parker's introduction in the same episode. Her evil foster father takes away her stuffed animal. She not only steals it back but then blows up the entire house with the evil foster parents still inside, and afterwards, the flashback ends and Parker jumps off a building.
• Also in the pilot episode:

Eliot: "What's in it for you?"
Nate: "He used my son."

• From "The Wedding Job"

Nate: "Did you just kill a guy with an appetizer?"
Eliot: "I dunno. Maybe."

• In "The Stork Job", Parker, while pretending to be a waiter, stabs corrupt politician/arms dealer with a fork, and then leaps out of a window. Later in the same episode, she takes out the arms dealer, who is twice her size, and then plants herself between a group of armed gunmen and a bus full of orphans.
• Both Nate and Sophie get one in "The First David Job":
  • Sophie arranges a meet to trade the MacGuffin for Parker on top of a sky scraper. She is trapped and no talking, flirting or conning in the world is going to get them out. So, in her own word, "I asked myself, what would Parker do?", flings off her coat to reveal a rapelling harness asParker throws herself at the woman and they dive off the side of the building. The awesome is accented by the look on Sophie's face as she and Parker jump off the building. First time they did this Sophie could barely look down, this time she looks exactly like Parker when she's doing crazy stuff.
  • Eliot's disrupting Sterling's momentum when he's doing his triumphant parade of boasting as he takes down the group one-by-one:

Sterling: And now let's see how Mr. Spencer is doing. Mr. Quinn?
Eliot: (limping away from Quinn's unconscious body, speaking into Quinn's earpiece) Hey Sterling, I owe you some dental work. How's about we meet up so I can give it to you?
Sterling: (discomfited) ... it would seem that Mr. Quinn was not as effective as advertised.

• • At the same time, to facilitate the trade above, Nate gives himself up to different location at which Hardison is being held hostage. Surrounded by six high-end goons, Eliot shows up, complete with broken ribs and a concussion and is declared that there is no way even Eliot can take all of them. Which Nate agrees with, and in his own words, "So I asked myself, what would Hardison do?" at which point Eliot pulls out a electronic doodad which connects to the local wifi to send out a signal that produces a screeching tone in all the goons' earpieces so severe that the three good guys can overpower the goons.
• Nate's performance in "The Second David Job" certainly qualifies.
  • Maggie gets hers in the same episode: "Screw therapy. That felt really good."
    • Echoed in "The Experimental Job", from one of the veterans after punching a mook.
    • Maggie also has the date with Eliot where she makes a series of disparaging comments about Nate before revealing that she knew he was watching the whole time, and when she calmly cons the museum director with her "Everyone knows it's a fungus" moment. For a character who appeared in only two episodes up to that point, Maggie manages to rack up impressive levels of awesome.
• In "The Three Days of the Hunter Job," Hardison convincing the soldier who's interrogating him as a terror suspect that he has a higher rank than the soldier does and completely turning the authority tables.
  • Hardison is just filled with this trope. Seriously.
• An in-show example: in "The Bottle Job" the team managed to pull off a con that normally takes 3 weeks in an hour and a half. Hardison considers that their crowning moment of awesome.
• Eliot beating the crap out of Sterling in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job" while Hardison bribes the McRory's bartender not to call the cops and he and Parker look on in approval.
• In "The Three Strikes Job," the last 30 seconds. "James Sterling... Interpol. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?"
• Nate has one in "The Maltese Falcon Job" that also counts as a Crowning Moment of Funny. He must stall Sterling from reaching the 14th floor of a hotel before the rest of the crew is done working up there. Now, normally you would expect Hardison to hack the elevator, or something similar. Instead, Nate chooses to stall Sterling by running up every single flight of stairs, one after the other, and hitting the elevator's call button a moment before it arrives, forcing the elevator to stop on every single floor. After the first few flights of stairs Nate is clearly winded, but just keeps charging up each floor one after another, hitting the button and immediately charging off to the next, and it's awesome, especially since Sterling gets more and more pissed as the elevator keeps stopping.
  • If you do some thinking, Nate does this every episode. He outsmarts everyone he cons, some of which being done in the most ridiculous ways possible.
  • Two quotes from the same episode are also quite awesome:

Eliot (after being asked to count the number of hired goons with guns): Thirteen. (beats one down) Twelve. (takes down another) Eleven. (and so forth...)

• • • Later:

"My name is Nathan Ford, and I am a thief."

• A special meta-example. In "The Reunion Job," in order to protect someone, normally non-violent Sophie goes after a professional assassin, hitting her with a fire extinguisher and getting a few good shots in before scampering away. The meta comes into play here: Gina Bellman missed the second half of season 2 because of maternity leave. The woman recently had a baby, and one of her first days back on the job, she has to film a fight scene where she is supposed to hold her own against a hired gun. The woman is tougher than she looks.
  • And again in The San Lorenzo Job, where she takes out a pair of guards with champaign bottles.
• The mindhacking of Duberman in "The Reunion Job." The team gets so deep into his head they are literally able to make him set his computer passwords to a phrase they've selected.
• In "The Studio Job," Nate is alone with two huge guards and Eliot is indisposed. When we next see Nate, both guards are unconscious. He says later they "got into an argument," and that's all the explanation we get. Given Nate's previously demonstrated knowledge of psychology, mental programming, and hypnosis, we can safely assume that in five minutes, he just talked two guys into knocking each other out.
• Some addicts have kidnapped a woman, forcing her husband and son to try to rob a bank for the ransom. Eliot makes the drop then gets a message that they need the money back, and beats up all three of them.

Eliot: What smells like crank and screams like a little girl?
Addict #1: Huh?
(Eliot kicks him in the kneecap and he does indeed scream like a little girl.)
Elliot: (as he disassembles the man's gun) Good answer. (proceeds to kick the rest of their asses)

• There's also the time he and Hardison are threatened by some gang members, the leader of whom displays a gun in his waistband. Eliot simply reaches forward, grabs the gun, and flicks off the safety. Without removing it from the leader's pants.
• And then there's Nate. To name just one example, in "The Order 23 Job" he gives a man a nosebleed using nothing but psychology. And then there are the KansasCityShuffles he pulls in "The Nigerian Job" and "The Second David Job", where the marks knew he was after them and still fell right into the trap.

Parker (to Nate):Did you just give someone a nosebleed with the power of your mind?

• • The con in "The Order 23 Job," was getting the mark to run to his hidden money stash by convincing him that Russia had just attacked the local area using a weaponized virus and he'd gotten caught up in the epidemic. It's a Moment of Awesome in itself for the sheer audacity of it.
• This troper found Parker's pickpocketing dance in "The Studio Job" incredibly, mind-blowingly awesome. There's also something vaguely Summer Glau-ish about it.
  • This troper got a distict River Tam vibe from Parker navigating the laser field in "The Hot Potato Job."
• Behold the first part of the season 3 finale, "The Big Bang Job." Behold Eliot finally, finally, taking up a pair of guns to protect Nate. Behold Eliot utterly destroying an entire hit squad without taking a scratch, while the building blew up around him.
  • Doesn't hurt that they play homage to every single gunplay trope from Improbable Aiming Skills to Concealment Equals Cover to Guns Akimbo to Bullet Time to Click. "Hello.".
    • Likewise doesn't hurt that, since it's him, you never even question the above's validity. Ladies and gents, I give you Eliot Spencer, Badass.

Head mook in charge: I thought you said you don't like guns?
Eliot: I don't. (fires four shots into mook's chest) Never said I couldn't use them.

• Hardison disarming the massive EMP bomb at the end of "The Big Bang Job." No wonder Parker finally wanted pretzels when it was all over.

Hardison: If I do this right, I overload the batteries, they'll explode, and this thing is worthless.
Parker: And if you do it wrong?
Hardison: The bomb triggers a giant EMP pulse, Washington, D.C. is fried, thousands die, we go down as the biggest terrorists in American history, but we'll be dead too, so it's not really our problem.
Parker: Well, there's that.

• • And remember, this is all intercut with Eliot's destroying the hitmen in the warehouse...
• Moreau's guards aren't really buying Hardison's con. One asks who Eliot is. Eliot tells him. Every single guard is terrified.
• "Let's go steal us a country." And they did.
  • "I'm a thief. And thieves don't win elections; we steal them."
  • Nate: (Hands Ribera a warrant for Damien Moreau's arrest.) You're going to be signing that before I finish my drink. And he does.
  • "You had the army, the security forces, the entire country... you know what I had? A 24-year-old with a smart phone and a problem with authority. You never had a chance."
• In the season 4 premier, "The Long Way Down Job", the victim gets one because he already had a method for taking down the crook of the week. He just needed his phone in a service zone, which team Leverage accomplishes.
• Nate luring the killer into the library, where a pipe wrench has been conveniently hidden for his use in "The 10 Li'l Grifters Job."
• The double Hoist by His Own Petard moment at the end of "The 15 Minutes Job" - not only do they bring down The Mark by using his own business practices, they frame him for a drunk driving accident in which he wasn't driving to make up for an earlier incident in which he'd done the same to someone else.
• Parker's Squee in the "15 Minutes Job." Doubles as Fetish Fuel.
• Nate's stall for time at the end of "The Van Gogh Job," in which he pretends to light the Van Gogh on fire in front of an investigator who had been chasing it for 20 years.

Nate: "I'm not trying to talk you out of anything... I just want you to know why I'm doing this."

• • Also a meta-example: the actors in "The Van Gogh Job" flashback are Hardison, Parker, Nate, Sophie and Eliot playing subtly to intensely different roles, which really shows how phenomenal the acting on this show is.
• Eliot vs. Roper (played by mixed martial arts champion Urijah Faber) in "The Carnival Job". With a concussion from having very recently been rammed into by a carnival ride, fighting disoriented in a hall of mirrors, Eliot then has to go up against a hired martial arts expert that proceeds to outclass him in every respect and repeatedly leave him gasping on the floor... and then the Theme Music Power-Up kicks in, Eliot closes his eyes and breathes deeply, and gets up and uses blindfighting training to completely kick Roper's ass.
  • What's particularly great about the scene is the subtlety; they don't go with the cliche that 'Eliot can kick more ass with his eyes closed than he can with them open'. Instead he closes his eyes (presumably to avoid the disorienting effect of the mirrors) and concentrates on nothing but all-out defense, not even trying to attack... but his ability to duck everything Roper is sending his way while blind, when immediately earlier Roper was hitting him practically at will, completely spooks Roper into thinking that Eliot is some kind of superhuman ninja. At which point he's off his game enough that Eliot can just open his eyes again, slam Roper in the gut, and then drop him like a bad habit.
• In "The Boiler Room Job", the team concocts a plot to take down the episode's villain by getting each and every person he had stolen from involved in the con, allowing them to personally confront the thief that had stolen their life savings. The villain is so flabbergasted that he thinks the team is lying to him.
• Hardison, pretending to be an air traffic controller, using Microsoft Flight Simulator X to land an actual, 300-passenger jet on his own in "The Cross My Heart Job."
  • From the same episode:

The Mark: "God helps those who help themselves."
Nate: "And I help people who can't. And God help you if anything should happen to that boy because if he spends even one second longer in that hospital than he needs to, I will make it my mission in life to end you. I will ruin you. I will ruin your name, I will ruin your company. I will bring down everything you have ever touched. And when I am done, I will hunt you down, and I will kill you myself.

• • And the ending.

The Mark: "You killed me, Mr. Ford."
Nate: No. God killed you. I just...made sure it took.

• Pretty much everything Sterling does, but "The Queen's Gambit Job" really counts. To reunite with his daughter who is also his informant, he hires the team in a pretty much unrelated heist so he can get in the same building that she's in. He then drugs Eliot, betrays Parker's position and screws the team over as a distraction to make off with her and get her away from her stepfather. Said daughter is the only reason that he didn't get the crap beat out of him for doing what he did. That and flattering Nate's ego for telling Nate that he was the best person for the job and Sterling refused to risk less.
  • Even more so, is that even with all that, they still completed the required job anyway.
• Eliot vs. the interrogations expert in "The Experimental Job". When you can give a career CIA man the heebie-jeebies just by talking, not in a Hannibal Lecture but about what you've done (and yet without really saying anything about what you've done), you know you're good.
• Personally I think kudos must go to the random Mook security guard in "The Schaherezade Job" who fought Eliot and got knocked out, woke up, went after him again, got blown up by Parker and dropped a full story into a vault, and still came back for more. Whoever that guy was, Moto got his money's worth with him.
• Parker's Locked Out of the Loop Nice Girl friend Peggy (described by Sophie as "disgustingly normal") gets one in "The Girls' Night Out Job" when she attacks one of the villains with a frying pan and hits him hard enough that a hardened thief winces afterwards.
• "The Radio Job": Eliot handling 3 "terrorists" with duct tape, and then finishing them off even after letting himself get the crap kicked out of him to prove something to an onlooker.
• The third season premiere, where a group of at least half a dozen men with guns burst into the doorway of the apartment -- and Eliot rushes toward them. Only Nate grabbing his shoulder stops him from attacking, and it says something that it's hard to tell who'd have won.
• The Season 4 finale. Quinn and Eliot kicking ass as a team, Maggie's return as a substitute grifter, Archie using cake to infiltrate the villains' headquarters, Chaos breaking into a system specifically designed to recognise Hardison but not him...it was just all around awesome.
• The season 4 finale, "The Last Dam Job," is full of these, but two of Nate's stand out. In the first, the villain has a gun pointed at him.

Nate: You were so focused, you forgot about the little details. *trigger is pulled, nothing happens* Like counting bullets. This one here, my father's gun? It has five bullets. I'm quite sure of that.

Then, later, the two villains have both been trying to convince Nate that he should kill the other one.

Nate: So the problem I'm having with all of this is if only one of you dies, the other goes free. I have five bullets. Who would like to go first?

• "Hey, Sterling. Get out of my house."