#Leverage 3x04

[lehdenlaulu]

Leverage 3x04

Wadata? Guess they couldn't use Wakanda... Ah well, at least that's a real word in Hausa.

Giancarlo Esposito??

Yikes.

I see we have this Eliot today. *sigh*

I know, girl, me too. 🙄

Oh, you can be serious? And not a douchebag? Good.

Election, coup, same difference...

Oh here we go.

Good call, Nate.

Yup, that's how it usually works...

Oh there you are, babe.

You went to junior high? 🤨

"Perception Management". Oof. Yeah.

Islam Karimov and Tan Shwe? Nice. Again, love that they do use real people and places too instead of just making them up.

Stalin quote, too? I believe he said "million", though, not "thousand" but eh.

Nice accent, Hardison.

1812 Overture? Hah, nice. That one sure is loud.

You can do it, Hardison, don't worry.

10 years ago? Sometimes I forget he's the baby.

That's kind of horrible pressure to put on him, though.

Glasses! And ponytail.

What, you became a conductor in prison? 🤨

Poor Hardison. At least he has his orange soda.

It's okay, Eliot, she's okay. 🥺

Ooh, new tactic!

Parker's always so happy when Eliot kicks ass. 😆

Wow, it's not often that Eliot gets beat right back.

I wish I could see that pendant more clearly.

You can do it, babe.

(*grumbles about how you don't do solos standing up*)

Aw, the reactions. ❤

The audio and video don't quite match but it's okay.

Well done. ❤

Oh Eliot.

Poor Hardison. I know the point was to show Nate's a bitch, but ugh. He's a genius, they could have had him pull that off without that.

Kind of inconsistent episode, but it was alright,

[leveragecentral]

Gina Bellman: Celebrate the women in your life on International Women’s Day. Here’s my director, friend and co-star ⁦Beth Riesgraf ⁩ crushing it alongside our cameraman Gary Camp! Ep 4- Season 3- #LeverageRedemption [x]

[inthemoodforsomepretzels]

timing a heist to a concert is insane btw

[leverage-ot3]

everyone stopping the heist to listen to hardison play the violin solo that he was a nervous wreck about

sophie being a proud mom

eliot and nate listening in awe

parker crying listening to it

them getting so distracted that they accidentally set the alarms off

I stan one (1) found family dynamic

[kajaono]

I was thinking excatly both of those things.

Most unrealistic thing about the Scheherezade Job is not Aldis' violin pantomiming (though pretty good, it's just some very clear shots where the bow isn't quite on the strings)

It's that bit near the middle where ANY fucking orchestra conductor would be okay with ANY player, let along the KEY SOLOIST, missing the ONLY REHEARSAL

[eliotspencerr]

Bonus:

[applejuiz]

Thinking about the found family trope and leverage a Normal Amount and recontextualizing my understanding of Nate and Hardison into a juxtaposition. When looking at the team and finding family where they were previously alone, there’s the obvious. Parker never had a family, Sophie and Eliot have left behind the families they once had in differing degrees of choice, and they find in the team this new opportunity for belonging and love, for family where they previously had none.

And then there’s Nate. Nate, who had a family, who still partially sees himself as having a biological nuclear family (still refers to Maggie as his wife, never ever forgets how old Sam would be right now, what their lives would look like at any point in time).

Hardison sticks out like a sore thumb bc he’s such a people person, he had a good home with Nana, there’s no real reason we’re given for why he works alone. Except, he’s young, he’s 22 at the start of the show (and this is where I project a little as a recent college grad in my early twenties going through an identity crisis). He’s at this huge transitional point into adulthood, where you leave home, where you start to make your way in the world, where you look for a place to plant roots and people to share your life with.

He and Nate are opposite ends of the same spectrum: Hardison leaving his family because that’s what you do as you grow up, Nate having his crumble around him through unexpected tragedy.

And through this lens, their moments in the Scheherazade Job and the Gold Job Carry this new weight?? Nate in 3x04 saying you don’t have what it takes to run a crew (family) because you’re not hardened enough, because you won’t push enough or be cruel enough, vs Nate in 4x16 saying you’re making it too complicated, focus on the big picture, don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t trust plans.

And also, somehow, together, they bring both of their experiences to Parker, Eliot, and Sophie, Hardison’s experience with healthy stable family and Nate’s familiarity with tragedy and loss and being willing to sacrifice everything again and again to keep their family safe from external threats (the Maltese Falcon Job, my beloved).

[leverage-ot3]

SHES BABY YOUR HONOR

Parker + 3x04

[transmutationisms]

Cam you’re so good at all the motifs, what’s your take on “we’ll have you doing the mail, keep you rattling around” delivered in that awful affectionate voice (and the mirror scene with the ShivRome secretary bit)

okay yes i do have thoughts on this thank you...

so first of all, the other parallel, to me, is in 3x04 when connor brings up shiv's childhood 'post office':

CONNOR: Remember... remember when you had that, uh, play post office? And you used to stamp all the mail that came into the house?

SHIV: Yeah.

CONNOR: This is a little bit like that. Isn't it, Shiv?

so there's this running thing where shiv and kendall specifically are Number One Boy and Daddy's Girl, but they're also relegated to these secretarial roles, and "doing the mail" is sort of representing that whole thing. you're nearby, but you're invisible. you're demeaned by how pointless and insignificant your work is. and logan is rhetorically relegating kendall to the exact role that shiv has been trying to outgrow since childhood.

it's also very interesting in this sense that it's roman (at the beginning of 3x08) and connor (in 3x04) who are the ones reminding shiv of this secretarial/post office role. roman and connor are usually the cast-offs, the useless brothers, the clowns. but here they're acting very much like logan, reinforced when he delivers the "doing the mail" line to kendall at the middle of 3x08.

it's a rare moment where roman perceives himself as being on top, AND connor has some leverage. people talk about the shiv-logan parallels in 3x08 and i do think they're important. but so is this temporary roman-logan parallelism-alliance that's happening.

BUT ALSO. @tomcatwambsgans pointed this out to me, and it's been rotating in my mind ever since: 'chiantishire' is a fascinating episode in that it's packed with these moments where there are these breaches in reality: things that are true but are supposed to be unspoken, and they're said out loud, and it's like the whole world is fracturing. (and this is foreshadowed by billy joel 'honesty' in 3x07.)

so the most obvious example is caroline admitting she didn't want kids. we've had this hinted at before, but like... a mother rejecting the maternal role so openly is, like, tearing a hole in the social fabric. then there's shiv telling tom she doesn't love him.*** matsson "tweeting unverifiable information outside normal disclosure channels". roman sending the dick pic to logan by mistake. logan using iverson as a poison tester. kendall ultimately trying to (physically, literally) break through reality by passively attempting suicide.

all of these things are so destabilising they more or less have to be undone: shiv trying to take back her words the next day, logan trying to get roman to demonstrate normative attraction to kerry, etc. (caroline's betrayal of the kids is the exception here, and also why it's so devastating yet ultimately so satisfying as a season finale.) so 3x08 is in some ways the truest episode of succession, and also the most terrifying for the characters.

so like, reading the logan-kendall dinner in that context, i do think that the affection in logan's voice is true, in his twisted way. i think he loves his kids, i think he loves kendall, i think he really does want him nearby. it's an incredibly harmful and awful and demeaning love, but i think he's genuinely admitting something here. he wants kendall close, and it's painful for him to consider actually losing him.

and that's also fucking devastating for kendall, who has finally. finally. gotten to a point where he can admit he Does want out. he wants freedom, because "we can't do this bullshit forever." for him, that's the breach in reality, admitting that he needs an escape. and he thinks the most awful thing logan can say to him is "yes, i hate you, i want you to leave" but it turns out there's another breach, and it's logan admitting that he loves him. so the truly awful thing logan says, actually, is "no, i love you, i want you to stay".

which means that for kendall, he thinks he’s come to this grand fucking revelation: this needs to end. i’m willing to walk away from the glory, from being the heir apparent. i’m doing what we both need, finally, and we can end this tortured thing between us. and then logan completely undercuts it, prevents kendall from reaching any sort of self-actualisation, and that’s what drives kendall to the semi-suicide attempt. there’s no escape, he’s always going to be the little mailman, and he can’t lie to himself anymore because logan’s finally said it out loud. so there’s nothing for kendall to do but lie down in the water and wait for it to go away.

just... that fucking dinner. it's the one time kendall's not asking for love, and yet he's receiving it, and it’s only to fucking destroy him.

*** i'm not arbitrating whether or not this is true with a capital T. but it's what she's feeling in some sense, and also something she's not supposed to say. so it belongs on this list imo

[indelibleevidence]

We're in hiatus mode with the rewatch for the next couple of weeks or so, but I have 90 minutes until I can call to make an appointment before I sleep, so here we go with 3x05 - WTF Edition. Really hope this cut works, since we have a) plenty of negativity and b) spoilers right up to 5x11 in this post.

So. The Avery twist technically began in 3x04, but we don't get any fallout until this episode. So I'm going to go into an overview of why Avery bugs me before I get to 3x05 stuff.

Let me just start out by saying Kristina Reyes did really well with the material she had to work with. BUT I object to Avery's existence, because she's only around for one season (and thirty seconds at the end where she doesn't even interact with Jeller), and even though it would have been an angst gold mine to have Remi return and deal with her daughter being back, they didn't go there. And everything they had Avery tell the team about Crawford, they would have been easily able to get from other sources. She just plain didn't need to be there in season 3.

I once saw someone speculating that Jaimie and Kristina had a spat, based on Instagram unfollowing or something. That would make a lot of sense, that one of them refused to work with the other and ruined what the writers had originally planned for season 4 Remi and dying!Jane. But I digress.

Overall, I'm glad they wrote Avery out of the show, because when your ship has a kid, they become really boring. Even their shippy moments revolve around the kid. The things they were worrying about pre-kid are now background for kid-related angst, and there aren't that many ways to make that unique and interesting.

The writers kind of averted that with Kurt and Bethany in season 2-4, because Allie wasn't part of the team, she moved away, you only saw a few moments of 'going to be a dad' and they were buried under all the Sandstorm shenanigans, then Allie and Bethany only pop up a few times afterwards. And of course, every single character forgets about Avery's existence after 4x01. But season 3 parental!Jane and season 5 parental!Kurt were just annoying.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying real-life people shouldn't make their kids the most important thing in their lives. That's good parenting (assuming it's not overbearing). What I'm saying is that watching well-developed characters become the Worried/Protective Parent Trope is like replacing characters with cardboard cutouts, because there's not much to differentiate one worried parent TV character from another. They all just go 'MY BABY MY BABY' and it wastes screen time that could have gone towards fun team moments, or shippy playfulness, or whatever.

So yeah, from the moment I heard 'this says I have a daughter' I was already rolling my eyes. The amnesia angle makes it slightly more interesting, but the faked death plot point, when it was revealed, was just far-fetched. Roman's disregard for the only family he has who's not Jane is weird, given how family obsessed he is. A better revenge on Jane would have been what he said he'd do to get Avery to fake her death - getting her involved in his schemes against Crawford, getting her to break the law and become his permanent ally that way. No death-faking required, and a different plot point for getting Kurt to take tattoo help from him.

Basically, I just don't think there was a convincing enough reason for the whole Jane-has-a-kid storyline. Yes, conflict with Kurt and Roman being able to leverage Kurt were worthwhile plot points, but they could have found something else to make it about, that actually made sense.

But yeah. On to 3x05 discussion:

The absolute last acceptable moment for Kurt to put off telling Jane about Berlin was just before Jane got the envelope from Rossi. I mean, Kurt, you're a great FBI agent, you can't string these clues together and read the writing on the wall? Going into the seconds after Jane reads Rossi's message, he already knows that a) Roman knows about Berlin, b) Roman has promised there is more pain coming, c) Roman knows he can use Berlin to leverage Kurt's cooperation, to some as yet unknown end, and d) Jane now knows she has/had a child. When Jane said, 'I have a daughter', Kurt's response should have been, 'I know.'

The writers do have Jane say some stuff that's supposed to give Kurt an excuse for not telling her, like not wanting to disrupt the child's life, but all of that ignores the fact that they had at least twelve off-screen hours to process and discuss this information. I doubt Jane went 'I have a daughter - oh well, we'll ask Patterson about it in the morning, let's get some sleep.' She would have spent at least a couple of hours awake and stressing, and Kurt would have been talking her through it. So he totally would have had time to come clean before she started with her 'I can't have my sense of who I am ripped away again' stuff. Not cool, Kurt.

Jane reacts exactly as I would expect someone to act in her situation, except for one thing - the moment she says, 'How could I forget I had a child?' Like that's some sacred thing someone should never forget, even when they've had their entire memory wiped. She didn't say, 'How could I forget I was a terrorist?' or 'How could I forget I had a brother?' or 'How could I forget my parents were murdered?' So why should having a kid be any different? It just makes me think the implication was some 'sacred bond between mother and child' bullshit. You'd never get that if the amnesiac character was male.

Also it kinda sucks that they had Jane be processing the child reveal at the same time as the case was dealing with untested rape kits. Sure, Roman says the father was Remi's high school sweetheart, who was a 'nice enough guy', but the show seems to be nudging you into unacknowleged parallel territory up until that point. :/

Okay, I'm done. Sorry for the ramble. XD

[5ivebyfive]

Do you remember the first time you saw The Scheherazade Job (Leverage, 3x04) and that scene came on? Do you remember how you felt? Did you tear up? Was your jaw on the floor? Were you taken aback by how the rest of the group was reacting?

Every time I watch it, I stop everything I’m doing and just...stare in wonder.

[aceofwhump]

No. 5 EVERY WHUMPEE'S NEEDS: Running Out Of Air

Graceland 2x13 | Sherlock BBC 1x03 | Doctor Who 3x01 | Leverage 5x13 | White Collar 1x08 | Hudson & Rex 3x04 | Eureka 1x11 | Stargate Atlantis 3x16 | Warehouse 13 3x01

@whumptober @whumptober-archive

[leverage-ot3]

were we ever going to talk about how hardison had a dog called megabyte or

[exactingleverage]

↪The Scheherazade Job

[eliotspencerr]

It's based on a story from the "Arabian nights" about a sultan who marries a new bride every night and has her killed by morning, until Scheherazade. You see, every night, she tells him a story with such a suspenseful cliffhanger that he daren't execute her for fear that he'll never know the ending. She told her stories for 1,001 nights. Until the sultan fell deeply, deeply in love with her.

[thelittlecoughsomewhere]

At 1:13 Alan Ruck: "So if I have some shit on what he did with my mother, yeah, I might call a press conference."

I never even considered that Connor could use his mother's fate and Logan's treatment of her as leverage. In the show he only listed his knowledge of Logan's business crimes, discriminatory practices ( mysogyny/racism/antisemitism) as leverage. (ep 3x04).

I hope we viewers someday get more backstory of Connor and Connor's mom. Hopefully this season. I just know that Alan Ruck has already maybe background information from Armstrong and that he has contemplated extensively about Connor's origin. Out of the whole cast he's the one I would like the most to have a conversation with about their characters.

(but J. Smith Cameron is following by a very small margin)

also when Kieran Culkin said Roman had a history with disordered eating? his mind....

the whole cast is just soo invested in their characters, I love it