I think one of the reasons that the fakeout in The Long Goodbye Job works so well is also one of the reasons I love Leverage as a show. Yes, we’re so deeply invested in these characters that the idea of them coming to harm is heartbreaking, but it feels believable because we’ve been conditioned, by media, but also by our own lived reality, that no one can always win. Maybe you make a mistake, forget or overlook something, maybe you’re outsmarted, maybe your luck simply runs out, but at some point you will come to the end of the line. (”Give all of us...the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable. And we will all, at some point in our lives... fall. We will all fall,” says Coach Taylor.)
And amid the competence porn, the show doesn’t shy away from that very human aspect of it all, gives us Hardison buried alive, Parker’s childhood and its lasting effects on her, Eliot’s violent past, Sophie’s uncertainty about herself. The show gives us Nate, troubled and gray and full of hubris and flawed all to hell - couldn’t save his father, couldn’t save his son. But it also gives us this, ends with this: the hammer never drops. The villains do not win in the end, do not come close to winning. This unlikely, outcast group, this family, wins, they keep winning, and sometimes, in shows like this, we’re allowed to have faith in that.
