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laser-tripwires · 3 months ago

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what is your read on the scene in the pilot where eliot and nate are playing pool? do you think eliot was being genuinely empathetic or just making small talk? was eliot genuinely hurt by nate?

neither, and both. he wasn't making small talk, he wasn't genuinely hurt, but it's more complicated than that. that scene exists for a wide number of reasons, and very few of those reasons actually have anything to do with eliot. nate is the protagonist, and that scene is arguably the most important character exposition we get on him in the entirety of the nigerian job - BUT there's still a lot you can read about eliot and the team dynamics as a whole, as well as foreshadowing for the wider show.

the scene actually opens not with the pool game, but with hardison pulling nate over to tell him he got dubenich's financials. i call this out because - in the original pilot script? this got cut off from the pool scene by a dubenich interlude which didn't make it into the final show.

now, that's probably information management - much, much easier to focus on nate and eliot's convo if we're not thinking about what dubenich is doing, and the exposition from the dubenich mini-scene wasn't very important. but there's another reason, too -

nate smiles and claps a hand on hardison's shoulder before heading back over to the pool game. it's a fatherly moment! a lot of the nigerian job is dedicated to setting up nate's relationships with the trio (the fact that parker gets mentorship instead of fatherliness in this ep is kinda long goodbye job foreshadowing, even if likely unintentional), and this reiterates that he's gonna be a father to hardison. it's placement just before this conversation with eliot is also telling us that this relationship with the team is going to be the thing that heals nate, which eliot all but says aloud a minute or so later (i'll get there).

right, so the next beat of the scene is eliot offering nate a beer and nate refusing. which is... interesting, given as nate was practically drinking himself to death at the beginning of this episode and will spend the rest of the season doing just that. he clearly has an issue with alcohol and that's clearly being set up to be a large part of his arc. so refusing a drink is significant, and we cut from a wide shot (featuring some truly adorable parker lockpicking, parker picks locks like other people knit) into eliot and nate's game because like eliot, we're curious about this.

nate takes his pool shot - eliot looks to nate, to the beer bottle, and back to nate. he's not paying attention to the pool game because eliot is very smart and has just picked up on the thing i pointed out to all of you a second ago - that refusal of the beer is weird and significant. nate's doing better - which eliot says.

nate almost looks up at eliot but takes his shot instead, and eliot continues. nate mutters a "yeah," without looking at eliot. which eliot again notices, and points out that it bothers nate.

eliot's turned around and sat on the pool table now. his focus isn't on the game anymore, it's on nate. it's really hard to critique this scene from eliot's perspective because the whole point of the scene is to get us as the audience inside nate's head, and eliot's needling is the vehicle through which we do that - he's asking the questions and making the assumptions that we as the audience are doing here. nate's a prickly bastard.

nate does, however, admit that it bothers him. with another of those despondant yeahs. he moves away from the pool and towards eliot, but still isn't looking eliot in the eye. "I mean, this isn't supposed to feel-"

"Good?"

camera change on eliot's line there so we get a better look at eliot's face, and nate's finally looking at him. "good" is likely not the descriptor that nate would have stammered out if his sentence had been allowed to continue, but eliot's a blunt person and more importantly eliot's not wrong. he then smiles, which catches nate off-guard, and after a beat eliot continues.

"It's not hard to figure out. Dubenich screwed ya. He cheated by stealing from that other company and your good guy brain sees him as the bad guy. Your conscience is clear."

midway through that speech, we cut to nate's reaction so we're watching him instead of eliot. he's stony. everything eliot's saying is correct, and most of it is explaining subtext that the audience should already have picked up on. but, y'know. nate is a prickly bastard.

(side note on the script again - the change from "ripped you off" to "screwed ya" is a great example of the kind of edits that get made on the fly after you cast actors with certain affects. not relevant here but i think it's cool - WISH we had the scripts for the rest of the show, because the amount to which this one is useful for analysis and insight cannot be overstated.)

now's when it gets interesting. without a change in facial expression, nate asks eliot if he wants to take his shot - he's not quite interrupting, but he's also clearly trying to cut the conversation short. there's two possible meanings to that line - one, nate's meaning, of shut the fuck up and keep playing. two, the subtextual meaning and what eliot takes it as, which is; get to the point.

eliot takes another swig of beer, nods, and we cut to a close up of him as he pauses and reconsiders the tack of the conversation. i very very much read this as eliot trying to figure nate out here - he had a hypothesis about the state of things, and nate's response let him know he was on the right tack. it's worth remembering that (despite what people tend to percieve him as) eliot is an extremely emotionally intelligent character, and that's being established here as well as everything else.

so he starts out another speech, looking nate in the eye - it's the most intimate moment of the conversation so far, and that's important. "Listen, I'm sorry about your kid."

to me, it's abundantly clear that eliot could have kept talking from there, made whatever point he was about to. but he leaves the space open for nate to respond. small talk is the wrong word for this, and eliot's not exactly feeling out an emotional connection; but he is clearly and deliberately giving nate the opportunity to open up and respond, both out of genuine empathy and (as we already saw) a desire to unpick a little more of what makes nate tick. that's part of eliot's job, after all. he is being a nice person here.

and nate... well, nate's expression doesn't change. the sensible and expected thing to do here would be to say, y'know, thanks, and then move on with the game. but, as i've already said, nathan ford is a prickly bastard. worth pulling up the script again here:

because yeah, he shuts down. we're two thirds of the way through the pilot episode and once again this is serving as exposition for the viewer - nate is in a lot of emotional pain, and he doesn't exactly do touchy-feely feelings. he'd much rather hide at the bottom of a bottle than sort out his issues. anger, and grief, and anger.

now, eliot says that "everybody knows." he half whispers that line, which i think is a really great touch - it's a lot more tender in tone than the response could have been, and i don't think nate picks up on that. my reservations on them as people aside, christian kane and timothy hutton's acting throughout this scene is superb. it's hard to explain, but eliot's affect changes for the next line - "Guy like you goes off the street, a lot of people notice." he's still almost whispering, but he's trying to tug the conversation a little bit towards levity. the emphasis on "a lot" is almost jokey - people smarter than me have pointed out that eliot in early season one has a soft sarcastic vibe that isn't present for a lot of the rest of the show. it's a continuation of what we saw earlier in the episode in the hospital scene.

but once that's said, he halts, and we see his eyes soften a little - he stops quite meeting nate in the eye.

it's a soft little moment of comprehension. eliot has lost a lot of people close to him, and has witnessed the deaths of many innocent children. he absolutely does know what nate is feeling. arguably, bereavement destroyed eliot's life infinitely more than it did nate's. so we get a genuine flash of empathy here. he's thought about this, after hearing of it, maybe before even taking the job for dubenich. "And it was a bad story, too."

we cut back to nate for a second there. he's lost - trapped in a hospital in los angeles rather than a penthouse in chicago. as a first time viewer, though, we don't quite know what he's thinking.

so eliot asks. "How'd they justify that, huh? The insurance company, just... not paying for his treatment?"

and the thing is, coming from someone who's watched seven seasons of eliot being unfailingly protective of every child and vulnerable party who's crossed his path... i genuinely think eliot meant that. yeah, not as an actual question, but as comiseration and sympathy for what he can tell is an awful situation.

but this is nate's show. and we're in nate's head. so we follow nate, across three years of anger and pain and into that hospital room. we see for the first time where nate's standing here, the depths of that sorrow in the moments before it manifested.

worth noting that it's not the full scene - nate running in to grab sam's body was filmed with the pilot but cut back to be saved for the finale, which was a damn good choice. but even what we see here is enough to fully ground us in nate's backstory - we've been watching him dance around in chaos for most of an episode, clearly greiving his son, and now we see the cause of all that hurt. once again, this exchange makes much more sense from the perspective of the writers trying to establish and expand on crucial emotional beats.

when we flash back to nate and eliot, the camera angle has changed. noteable, because we were on a solid back-and-forth talking shot for a minute or so there, and this fully segments the scene instead of plopping us back where we just were.

we've just experienced first-hand the spiral that nate's thoughts have gone down. he answers eliot, still lost in thought - "They claimed it was experimental."

from eliot's perspective, that's a response to his question and an accepting of his empathy. from our perspective, it's an anguished statement of pondering, the re-rotation of a thought that's been trapped in nate's head for three fucking years. they claimed. he is, as we will see in the david episodes, so, so, so angry.

eliot smirks, then drinks. we cut back to his face and the original camera angles. his is where the pilot rewrite between scripting and shooting is the most obvious - in the original script, nate picks up the beer, and that's what prompts eliot's next line.

in the filmed episode, we stick instead on nate's face and let eliot continue. the emotional beat is identical, but it places a greater emphasis on nate's pain and eliot's powers of perception. it's an unimportant script edit, but an interesting one.

what happens next... "Should have kept one of those Monets you found, hm? You fence that -" and it's only at this point nate actually interjects.

i don't think eliot here is deliberately being insensitive nor do i think he's directly trying to just raise nate's spirits. you gotta remember that we as the viewers in nate's head for this scene, not eliot's, and from eliot's perspective the tone has just gotten less gut-wrenching, not more - but eliot's also, as i previously noted, an extremely emotionally intelligent person. it's why i've gone through the whole scene instead of jumping directly to this bit you asked me about, because i really do think the full context is needed to understand.

so, nate interrupts. "Eliot, you and I are not friends."

this is again where context is so important. it's not that he cares about what eliot's actually saying (though i could write a very different essay about how that line of eliot's is lampshading a pretty obvious plothole) but that he's just had to forcibly pull himself back to the present day and he thinks eliot's being annoying and would like him to shut up now, please. not all that different from him asking eliot to take his shot earlier, really, though i think eliot picks up on the curtness.

nate raises his eyebrows. it's a nice attempted reversal of power dynamics - yes he has just interrupted and been rude, but he also immediately attempts to swing the conversation's psycoanalysis onto eliot and why are you talking to me about this i don't know you. of course, we as the viewer can tell nate's in deflective mode, but we'd expect eliot to take it at face value -

which. he doesn't. we get this super interesting little "oh... right." face, and i think it's less eliot realising he's struck a nerve (though it also is that) as it is eliot properly clicking in to what nate's thinking here. i stress again that eliot really is a tremendously emotionally intelligent character, definitely moreso than nate is, and that's reflected in this scene. both of them bounce off one another here a little bit differently to how you'd expect them to just looking at archetypes, and it's this kind of thing that makes the leverage pilot so good.

because eliot picks up on the messaging nate's putting down, the prickly i'm-not-having-an-emotional-conversation-with-a-criminal-i-just-met facade, but he also kinda sees right through it. "...Right. 'Cause you have so many of them."

and it's again this softly sarcastic vibe that's pretty unique to early season one eliot, but it really works here in reestablishing that A) eliot's more observant than nate is giving him credit for, B) he's not going to let nate get away with being tacitly kind of a dick, C) he's really not easily rattled and D) eliot is as much of a chaos gremlin as the rest of the team. this is not the affect of a man actually hurt by what nate said.

all in all, good stuff. but now for the reason i dug the script out to begin with - the ending. it's a well-known piece of trivia that they shot the pilot without a defined ending for the next nate/sophie beat only for aldis to improv the world's best "oooooooh," but what's really fun is if you know that this is because the nate/sophie beat here was actually a late addition. in the script, eliot and nate's conversation finishes like this:

and end scene. eliot still gets the final word, so as to speak, but nate gets a lot more quiet reflection and a much more overt point that nate and eliot are at least peers if not friends right now. but here, instead, sophie presumably starts walking towards nate off-camera and eliot steps back - "Incoming."

and then we're on to nate and sophie, and the scene continues with a new focus as nate is left reeling.

but i really, really like the ending we get because it's that same establishment of peership, of eliot calling out nate's crap, but also of the fact that the power dynamics here aren't as they'd first seem. nate's greiving too much. eliot understands but isn't gonna let it get to him or impact the team. this... is all crucial as far as character establishment is concerned.

this answer got long. i think that this scene is just so, so important for establishing both nate and eliot's characters - and i think people miss an infinite amount of nuance when they take the surface-level reading that eliot said something which annoyed nate and nate was mean. that's very much not what happened, but it also kinda is, and it's what makes this so fun to pick apart. eliot and nate have a fascinating relationship, and it's one that's all too often overlooked. here's john rogers's take on it:

and... yeah!!! you can see all that really clearly in this scene. they respect one another, but that doesn't mean they have to like one another, at least not yet. it's good stuff.

#leverage #eliot spencer #nate ford #nathan ford #john rogers #leverage meta #my posts #......uh. so.#this sat in my drafts for basically half a year.#(i'm genuinely so sorry anon)#(life Happened)#(i really really really meant to get to it sooner but i wrote like half and then burned out on it so have had to come back and. aargh.)#anyway who else wants a really really long post about a scene no-one but me has ever thought this much about? here you go!#i never don't have things to say about leverage.

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