Leverage/Headscratchers

• How did Nate beat up those guys in "The Studio Job"? Elliot even asks, and Nate says multiple times "They got into a fight."
  • He may have talked them into fighting.
• How exactly did Hardison and Elliot trigger that make shift bomb at exactly the moment they wanted it to go off in the "Gone Fishing Job"? Even the flashback didn't help make it any clearer....
  • Rogers said that there was a scene cut that explained it.
• In The First David Job, just who the hell is this nobody that somehow manages to pull equal and even threaten Elliot? Every major threat he'd faced up until then was something meaningful, demonstrated in some way or another. This guy appears from nowhere and really just looks like a yuppie in a suit. I really wish he had had some explanation... some SOMETHING.
  • Considering that Elliot himself generally looks like some blue-collar guy until his fist is speeding towards your face, I'd assume he's just a good fighter, like Elliot.
    • Yes, but when we first met Elliot, we've had it established that Elliot's badassness is part of him. Every other major threat has had something to establish menace. That's part of why it bothers me. This show is usually good about handling that kind of thing.
    • For the moment you're right we've got no idea who he is. However with any luck the fact that Elliot didn't kill Mr. Quinn leaves the door open to us learning more about him. Maybe he'll show up again if We get an episode dictated to seeing things from Sterling's point of view and Sterling decides he needs his own team. For now, we'll just have to accept he was the most badass guy Sterling could hire. What's more of a "Just bugs me" to me is that The Badassness of that one guard in the Shahrazad job comes out of nowhere considering Elliot is normally able to take down building security without even breaking a sweat.
      • Given that Alexander Moto's brother is the President of Watanda it stands to reason he'd have better guards. Maybe that security guy was Watandan Secret Service?
    • Also , Sterling knows how to shop hence the term not as good as advertised. If the situation was possible he would have hired that Mossad Amazon from the Psycho Rangers episode. Mr Quinn was very good, but it looked like he ran out of steam and Elliot ropadoped his butt.
    • Mr. Quinn was a device, like the guys who went after Hardison and Parker. His purpose was to make us genuinely scared for roughly the first time in the series. Here's Eliot, built up into this unstoppable machine, and he runs into a guy who can hand his ass to him. As if this isn't enough to make us nervous, we have people tailing and kidnapping Hardison and Parker. They were going for effect on this one, and for that, I don't really think we need to know who Mr. Quinn is. And Eliot beats him anyway. They're really, really good at avoiding The Worf Effect on this show.
      • I think that's what bugs me the most about it. Quinn is so blatantly a device, and not a character with personality and purpose. And this is a show that's normally really good about giving even bit parts sparks of characterisation.
        • Really? I thought he did quite a bit with just a couple of lines. He was cocky and smug and had a right to be both.
    • Quinn comes back in the S04 finale, and gets a lot more development. Basically, Eliot in a suit.
• At the end of The Studio Job, it seemed a bit presumptuous of Kaye Lynn to make that "We could be the next Johnny and June" comment to Eliot when asking him to go be a country star with her. Not only does that comment imply she thinks they'll be insanely famous, but it also implies an intent to marry Eliot, who she couldn't possibly have known more than a few days. Even if she meant it only on a professional level, would she really want to keep working with him after finding out he used to be, essentially, a hired killer?
  • Presumptuous, maybe, but it seemed in-character from what we saw of her. Plus, don't lie. If you had a chance to spend lots of time with Christian Kane, you totally would.
• In "The Stork Job", why didn't the villain just let the couple keep the kid? It's not like they didn't have plenty more . . .
  • The kid might have let his guard down and said something about their operation. Not to mention that if they had this policy very often, they would soon be out of children to use in scams.
• In "The Bank Shot Job", Hardison posing as an FBI agent, takes a brief phone call, no more than five seconds at most, and then, to distract the local cops from Parker entering the bank, gives off a lengthy list of the bank robber's "demands" The cops never stop to wonder how he could have gotten so much information from such a short call.
  • It's amazing what you can do with a Bavarian Fire Drill.
• In "The Homecoming Job" the team acts like this is their first case together. What about the couple they were talking to at the end of the pilot episode?
  • Doesn't mean they actually took that case, or it took place right after the Nigerian Job.
  • I always assumed that the scene at the end was stylized and intended to take place later on, once they were more established as a team.
• In "The Maltese Falcon Job" The gunshot wound Nate suffers doesn't make any sense. He's able to completely shrug it off like he never got hurt, stand up straight and walk around for minutes after without showing any pain, the side he was shot on is the opposite side that he was presenting to the shooter, and there's no hole ine his coat where a bullet might have torn through, but when The Plot Demands It he collapses in pain and is nearly bleeding to death.
  • It's very possibly to hide the severity of an injury for a good length of time before it becomes too much and overwhelms you, especially with something like a non-lethal gunshot where the main threat is of blood loss. Even if you're not as willful a person as Nathan Ford.
  • You dump enough adrenaline in someone and its entirely possible they can fail to even notice they've been shot -- until they've bled out enough that the drop in blood pressure catches up to them and suddenly they start feeling lightheaded. There is a reason that the US Army's combat lifesaver course teaches people to take a moment out to look at themselves and visually check for any new holes in their anatomy immediately after having ducked behind cover to avoid enemy fire, and that's because the human body's reaction to trauma is often far, far weirder than people would assume.
• Another complaint about The Maltese Falcon Job: At the beginning of the episode it's pointed out that they're not going to get out of the city with anything but "the clothes on our backs" before they go hide out in the hotel. Once inside, every member of the team changes clothes at least once (Eliot wears a sweatsuit, Parker wears a maid uniform, Hardison wears a suit, Nate and Tara both put on more casual outfits). Where the heck did these clothes come from? I can imagine Parker lifted the maid uniform, but what about the rest? It especially bugs me with Nate and Tara because what they end up wearing genuinely looks like it came from their own closets and we know they weren't carrying around a change of clothes.
  • You put the greatest thief in the world in a midtown hotel and she can probably scare up clothing in your size without having to think about it too hard.
• The team goes through con after con without making any real effort to cover up their faces and fingerprints. We know from the Pilot episode that their fingerprints are on file. We know that the bad guys have access to tech too. So why is it that they're not being arrested and/or tracked preemptively in their schemes?
  • The same way that organized crime like the Mafia is well-known, but ultimately can't be easily arrested. They always manage to pin everything on the Big Bad of the week, so really all they can be accused of is impersonating officials, and whenever that happens they pull a Bavarian Fire Drill.
  • Also, given Hardison's skills their fingerprints probably don't stay on file very long. The only reason they're still on file in the pilot episode is because the team hasn't really gotten together yet... and even then, Hardison needs only one smart phone to convince the computers that no, he's really an undercover FBI agent and the criminal ID is just his cover.
• Maybe I am mistaken in the plot, but in "The Mile High Job," they help protect a woman who a company has put a hit out on. Let me get this straight... a company hires a hit man to kill a woman who knows all their secrets, and then sabotages the plane, making it crash, so as to hide the fact that they hired a hitman? Seems a bit redundant to me.
  • I have not seen the episode in a while, but as far as I remember Team Leverage overhears that the firm put all evidence they wanted to keep hidden an that plane. They board that plane to steal the evidence. Hardison finds out that there two employees on the plane, an accountant and a someone from security. Team Leverage thinks that the accountant knows to much and the other guy is there to kill her, but later find out that both know to much and the plane crash is supposed to kill both. We never see who sabotaged the plane.
    • I get that, but my question is why bother with the hitman? The plane crash should take care of the woman without hiring an expensive assassin. In fact, hiring an assassin just draws more attention to the crime itself. Just sabotage the plane!
    • The second guy isn't a hitman, he was the one the Big Bad of the episode used to bribe some researchers, so that they would fake the safety studies/wouldn't testify in court. Team Leverage thinks at first that he is a hitman, but later find out that he is another target. In fact, he is the reason the big bad had someone sabotage the plane: as a former navy seal who knew he was a liability he was prepared for an assassination attempt (that's why he had the knife) the big bad couldn't get the drop on him easily. As Eliot says "I would take him out in transit." That the big bad could get the accountant with the same plane crash is just a bonus.
    • Short version - they're trying to wipe out EVERYONE who knows about the scheme, which includes the second guy - they've conned him into thinking he's working on a hit to get him and the accountant in the same place.
• Okay, so in "The San Lorenzo Job" Nate states that Hardison is 'a 24-year-old genius with a smartphone', or something along those lines. Go back to "The Rashomon Job", same season, the team are retelling a story of a night five years ago. Does that make Hardison nineteen when he is impersonating a minister?
  • That's not so farfetched. Between the ages 16 to 18 Frank William Abagnale, Jr. successfully impersonated a pilot, fooling Pan Am and its pilots. He used the identity to catch free rides off Pan Am flights since flight staff get to fly for free. When he was 19 he actually taught sociology at the Brigham Young University by forging a degree from the Columbia University. That's from a real life teenager with self-taught skills. Considering that Hardison is a fictional Renaissance Man, it's not that unbelievable at all.
  • Made even more glaring in light of the fact that the showrunners have already said that Hardison was in his early twenties during the flashbacks, so there's really no way he could be 24 years old.
  • What bugs me about this is during The Renuion Job you see Hardison during his prom hacking into iceland, it looks like a scene from the 80's. Though he would have graduated in like 2004 or so.
    • All of the flashbacks, even Nate's, are subject to Unreliable Narrator, says Word of God
  • Keep in mind that Aldis Hodge, the actor who plays Hardison, really was 24 when "The San Lorenzo Job" first aired.
• Okay, I understanding I'm going back a bit here, but I just got into this series, and something is really bothering me. In "The Homecoming Job", are we just supposed to take it at fact that the PMC can just have dudes armed with carbines hanging around their one shipping container in a private port, which has its own specific Law Enforcement Division? And, that they are allowed to just pull over people and threaten to shoot them with guns? I've done a bit of research about PMCs before, and while I know some of the large ones have small armies and intelligence assets and so on, I'm pretty sure they do not have the legal ability to do some of those things.
  • Rule of Awesome. Or, as per the commenters on Kung Fu Monkey, "no impediments to the fun train."
  • The entire caper started because this PMC was willing to murder US soldiers in a war zone just for having looked at their precious container. Its not exactly a stretch for them to be willing to break the law detaining and threatening people outside their legal remit. (As for hanging around the port, presumably there was some kind of legal paper trail saying they were hired to guard a shipment; it is, after all, a security company.)
• Okay the first episode of season four "The Long Way Down Job" left me feeling somewhat empty, maybe I need to rewatch it but a number of things felt unresolved. 1: Why did Parker need to slip the Russian bad guy the cell, when she and Elliot could have just carried it down themselves, given that they showed up at the tent in time to see the arrest they couldn't have been that far behind him, (they did show up didn't they?) so they couldn't have been that far behind. 2: It seemed like the Russian guy got arrested and if so for what? Yes he effectively kidnapped/took Parker hostage in order to steal the journal but there's next to no proof that he did it, unless Parker managed to somehow record the entire threatening conversation on the cell phone they'd just recovered... which combined with point one is only more proof for why they should have held onto the cell phone. 3: The hiker's dieing words may be admissible in court, doubtlessly enough to get the guy arrested and bring him to trial, but would it really be enough to get the guy convicted without material evidence as well? Unless Parker and Eliot found some in the cave which they took with them before they escaped (since they did listen to it just before they left) but if so there was never anything saying they did that was there? Or was the resolution that the guy would get tied up in legal battles with the murder charge long enough for the Leverage team to prove his wheeling and dealing when it came to the phony foreclosures? Either I zoned out during the episode or it felt like they needed another 3 to 5 min to wrap things up properly....
  • Parker slipped the cellphone to the Russian so he would get it down the mountain fast to a place where it could transmit the recording before the other CEOs left. Parker and Elliot showing up so quickly was most likely a screw up in the script.
  • This troper assumed that Hardison called the mountain patrol guys in the red jackets and they gave Elliot and Parker a ride. He could still talk to Parker and Elliot, knew that the Russian was on his way down the mountain with the phone that contained important information, and needed someone to head him off so that the team could get at it. The Russian didn't know what he was carrying but there's no reason to assume that the rest of the team was totally unaware.
  • Once the police reopen the case, they will probably uncover more evidence to prove that the guy lied about how his partner went missing on the mountain. The Russian might testify as well. There is probably enough for a conviction. More importantly the guy's business is ruined. There will be an investigation of his finances and business practices and all the other banks will wash their hands of him.
  • Simply having the phone might have been enough to take the Russian into custody. Combined with the confession happening on screen it's proof that he went gone up the mountain illegally for the possessions of the dead man who was now claiming foul play. With the conditions on the mountain the missing climber would have been a proverbial needle in a haystack, so the natural suspicion would be that the only way the Russian could have found the body was by inside knowledge because he was somehow connected to the killing. Maybe not an open and shut case but certainly enough for the rangers to want to hold him for some more questioning. As for the rest, the edits make it a little hard to follow the dead man's speech but if you listen closely he says something about how his research showed the company's crimes were bigger than he thought and that he was e-mailing something right now. Presumably that e-mail contained the same incriminating information written in his journal and was transmitting like his final message to base camp now that his phone was far enough down the mountain. Word of God admits that Parker and Elliot shouldn't have been able to get down the mountain that quick, but they wanted to have them there for the emotional payoff of Parker seeing the widow get the final message because Parker had been so adamant about "bringing him back to her."
• The shooter in "The Morning After Job." He goes to all this trouble to set up the gun, line up a shot..... and fires on full auto. With frightening accuracy. For noticeable lengths of time. And no reloading shown. All from a gun that looks like a sniper rifle. And when the police are on the way, he just grabs his gun and runs. What about the metric ton of shell casings he just left behind? How did he manage to bring so much ammo without attracting attention, for that matter?
• In the episode in which Hardison is buried in a coffin and Parker tells him to move to the left because she's going to shoot a gun into one side of the still buried coffin, you could tell the length and width of the coffin by the outline of disturbed earth, but how could she be sure which way the coffin was oriented? That could have been a really unfortunate Your Other Left moment if he had been facing the other direction.
  • They'd unearthed enough of the coffin by then to be able to see part of the lid. Otherwise there would have been no point in Parker shooting an airhole for Hardison.
• There seems to be an unfortunate tendency to cast unrealistically sociopathic Card-Carrying Villain types as marks. The ep "Experimental Job" has a college student getting all lulzy about how he gets to torture people for just $50 each a day! Of course, there's also the way there seem to be no good rich people. Basically, rich=evil. Not exactly subtle.
  • It's not so much that rich=evil its just that you don't find yourself in a position where you can commit the kind of wrongs that the Leverage team get called into solve unless you have enough power of one form or another to be able to beat the system, which is why the villain is always "rich"/"powerful". As for their being no good rich people, Nate, Sophie, Haridson, Elliot and Parker. Given that in the very first episode the payoff was described as "It's go legit and buy an island money," it'd be foolish to think that they don't count as being rich.
  • "The Lonely Hearts Job" addresses this. The client is quite rich (it's noted that he donated more money to charity than Bill and Melinda Gates) but apart from Nate's initial apprehension, which is quickly dismissed, he's not treated as a bad guy.
    • And according to Word of God, most of their marks are based upon REAL people, who's actual crimes and deeds were actually far worse than their fictional counterparts. They actually had to tone down them down to make them believable. Scary thought.
• In "The Guys Night Out Job" while the ending was heartwarming, and I loved the Foreshadowing of Jack talking about how he has a cat now, in the previous episode did Peggy ever directly talk about how she liked tacos?
• At the end of "The Last Dam Job," where did Nate get Latimer from? They sure were able to retrieve him from the Caymans pretty quickly.
  • He was never in the Caymans. They just made him believe he was in the Caymans so that he would persuade Dubenich of it and Dubenich would try to double-cross him.
• In "The Last Dam Job," why does Nate go to Archie Leach for help? He says he's going to people that Dubenich and Latimer wouldn't know as friends of the team and, under that criteria, Chaos and Mr. Quinn are logical choices, but Leach is the closest thing that Parker has to family. Shouldn't Dubenich know about him, if he's familiar with all of the team's known associates?
  • Archie lives under the radar and was mostly retired at that point. and Only he(and now the team) know he trained Parker.
• In "The 10 Li'l Grifters Job" the Corrupt Cop mentions that Nate was arrested five years ago for making threats against IYS. Clearly this was pre-series, but if this occurred before his divorce wouldn't Maggie have wondered why Nate was suddenly threatening the company? (She did not know about IYS/Ian Blackpool's role in Sam's death at the time.) Or did she just assume that Nate was doing crazy stuff because he was drunk? Or did that happen after the divorce? It's only brought up once.
• This can probably be explained away by Dubenich not being as cool/smart as he thinks he is, but did he forget that Nate had chased everyone on the team BEFORE Dubenich ever assigned him to run them? Furthermore Nate chose Sophie, not Dubenich, which is specifically mentioned in "The Lonely Hearts Job." How can Dubenich possibly think he knows them better even than Nate with these things taken into consideration?
  • Just like you said; ego.
• Why didn't the team take Latimer's offer? I mean sure they'd be working for him, but they could have taken down people they didn't even know about! I mean the only way they even found out about the guy in "The Cross My Heart Job" was due to luck! If Nate had taken Latimer's option there is the possibility that they could have prevented the entire situation. And when they had what they needed from him, they could burn Latimer at almost any point!
  • The point was that is exactly how a con works. It looks like there's no downside, everyone wins, everything perfect...except they would have been working for a guy who would eventually sanction the murder of Nate's father. How long do you think it would have been before they were just taking down people Latimer wanted out of his way. Not to mention, Latimer was working for Dubenich, who really only wanted revenge for being put in jail. Eventually, they'd be working on something for Dubenich without even knowing about it. How long would it have been before one of their cons went bad? Obviously, foresight would have let Latimer be able to call the cops in in the middle of con and get everyone arrested...at the very least of things that could go wrong.