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The thing about Leverage is it prioritizes what it takes seriously exactly right.
It's a fun, pulpy, goofy show but it has the most nuanced, thoughtful, and lasting character development.
A love story unfolds between a socially inexperienced thief and a hacker who doesn't hesitate in his willingness to be patient and understanding as she works out her unfamiliar feelings.
Wil Wheaton gets electrocuted and you can see his skeleton like a cartoon.
A grifter has an identity crisis and embarks on a lone journey of self-discovery, to return better and more certain of herself than before.
The team invents the Holodeck so they can hack into the dreams of off-brand Steve Jobs.
It's ridiculous. It's silly. It's brilliant. I've watched every episode over a dozen times.
i am occasionally reminded that parker knows how to shoot/handle a gun competently in redemption s1e3 and it's like, eliot, mr. "i dont like guns", why are you teaching people this.
(i am aware parker has a handgun in s1e1 but i dont think the skills are transferable to shotguns and its never really established if she can actually hit anything and also i doubt archie would train her in it bc its not a gentleman thief skill and by the same logic i doubt parker would teach herself bc its not particularly thief-y)
anon, this ask was like an early christmas present for me. i love when people are "wrong" in interesting ways, or if not wrong then... take a different view to what i do. so, parker and guns. i can't believe i've never made a post about this.
(heads up, i've stolen vast swathes of this post from conversations i've had with both @ghostlyarchaeologist and @aardvaark. words are all mine but ideas are mutually borne, so thank you both for being sounding boards at various points in the past. everyone go follow heather and adrian cos they're better at this than i am.)
right, let's talk about the pilot, becuase parker can absolutely hit things with that. both eliot and nate know immediately that hardison isn't a real danger, but the second nate hears the safety being turned off there he whirls around and matches her threat; that's what you do when you know someone's not making pointless bluffs.
also, boiling this back to it's utter basics, what's the main skillset you use in order to handle a pistol competently? hand-eye coordination. which is something we know for sure parker has in spades; she's a master pickpocket and she learns fast.
we need to remember, also, that parker's initial sense of morality is completely fucked. or... not morality, exactly, but sense of what does and doesn't count as wrong, what does or doesn't count as harm? because there's that scene in homecoming, right, where everyone's protesting the concept of eliot having to do the thing they hired him for, and parker weighs in with "i never hurt anyone." except... like, the FIRST thing we know about parker is that she blew up a house as a child. it's canonical that the parents survived, but parker also spent six months in juvie and has broken out of prison multiple times and lived on the street for god knows how long and stork job shows she can fight pretty well pre-leverage, too. i'll come back to all this in a minute.
her being a crack shot with a gun is... not really incongrous with who she was pre-leverage. archie describes her when he found her as "a danger to herself and to others" and like YEAH no i buy that. i buy that completely.
next up, what about things that aren't pistols? well.
that's a fucking sniper rifle.
that's a fucking sniper rifle.
that is, and i cannot stress this enough, a fucking sniper rifle.
so yeah, i'd say that those skills are transferrable. she can take out an armed gunman and tie him up with duct tape, without causing a scuffle, and re-aim the gun. with enough consistency that nate knows for sure she'll manage it in less than three seconds. sure, we can chalk some of that up to parker at this point having had four seasons of eliot here's-how-you-take-out-thugs-with-guns fight training, but... i think at this point it's pretty fair to say that (regardless of the provinance of her skills) parker's kinda a good shot, actually.
okay, let's revisit that point about morality, because there are kinda a bunch of really important touchstones here.
so, john rogers once said that "parker is the second most dangerous person on the team, and eliot would argue first most dangerous." she's the team member with the least qualms about hurting people, always, and that's a detail that tends to get brushed over.
she would have killed tara here. she makes that extremely clear. i can't listen to that "Bye, now." and not get shivers.
talking of shivers.... "I want to do the right thing."
because, look, parker's not eliot. she's not thawing ice all the way through, and yet we're shown again and again that, despite that, "She has the nuclear winter inside her." there will always be a part of her who's first instinct is to jump, to hide, to run, to kill, to not care because caring hurts. but there's also a part of her that is softer than any of the team, that is a child who'll never grow up and yet grew up too fast. she grew up beaten, bruised, neglected and starved yet she's something wonderful - but she knows she's broken, she knows they all call her crazy, and it hurts. she wants to do the right thing, make the right choice, but she hates that it'll never be her first instinct. and the thing is? that's okay. she went through hell and back and turned out someone strange and weird and at times unkind, but... the team like how she turned out. hardison likes how she turned out. and that's worth the world - she just needs to remember it and believe it and use HER skills instead of trying to be something she's not. that is what parker and eliot's conversation in the ice cave is about, if you strip it back to it's bare essentials. parker doesn't want to be normal, she just wants to be normal enough for her friends.
has parker ever killed someone? i don't know. i don't know if she even thinks like that, in such clear terms - as i already talked about, parker's definition of 'hurt' is not the same as anyone else's.
so let's talk about broken wing job for a second, because absolutely everyone overlooks the reason why parker does the job in the first place - "You brought a gun? To my bar?"
because. yeah.
"Those guys are gonna rob this store, right? Which is fine. I don’t mind robbers who aren’t robbing me, or my friends, or kids or… But they brought a gun to the party, and that changes all the rules."
this is season five. she investigates the theives because she's bored - but she only decides to stop them because they brought a gun. that's the kind of very specific morality you only get after being the good guy for a very long time, and i do think that hanging around eliot probably helped affect that a bit.
actually, fuck it, look at what else she says about this whole thing in the broken wing job.
"No cops. No cops. That will actually increase the chances of people getting hurt. [...] Seeing a uniform in the middle of stealing something could cause you to panic, make bad decisions..."
"These guys aren’t that good, which is actually another reason why we should do this, ‘cause sooner or later, they’re gonna make a mistake. Someone’s gonna get hurt."
so. yeah. on the one hand, this is weapons safety 101, for someone in parker's position. "[The Leverage crew] don't use guns because - when guns come out, people die. This attitude very much comes out from traditional American crime literature, and also from talking to our professional criminal friends. Guns are messy, when they show up things escalate, you take a longer, harder fall when doing a crime with a gun - professional criminals are pathologically averse to carrying weapons." i'm quoting john rogers here, because i can, but you'll hear similar in any training manual, and it's especially relevant to parker's actions both here and elsewhere in the show.
on the other hand, mix up all those statements and it definitely implies parker has fucked up badly in the past. again, i don't know if she's ever killed someone. but.
well, for funsies, let's look at the rest of JR's above statement about gun safety (i'm quoting from his blog on the gone fishin' job, in case you wanted to find the source): "You do not point a gun at anything or anyone you are not willing to kill. [...] I had that drilled into my head at an early age. A gun has two settings - holstered and murderous. 'Wounded' is an accidental condition. Eliot in particular is aware of this, and one of the many reasons he does not use a gun is because he is trying to, well, not kill people anymore. Hardison is magnificently awful with weaponry. Although Parker is probably a fine shot, she's trying to play nice by the new rules, and only brought a weapon to the meet in the pilot because she wanted to get paid."
and all that is, more than anything else, the core and crux of everything i'm saying here. factor in how broken parker is, how we know she's made mistakes in the past, throw in archie's "a danger - to herself and to others" line, think about the tara rooftop incident... there's a picture emerging here. it's not a nice one, but it's unpleasantly clear.
so. where does that leave us?
well, it at least leaves me extremely certain for a vast number of reasons that eliot didn't need to teach parker how to shoot a rigged game.
Thinking about The Long Goodbye Job after finishing the show for the first time last night. Namely thinking of what this series finale says about Eliot and his relationship(s) with Parker and Hardison.
The fact that in Nate's story he spins, Eliot, Hardison, and Parker die holding each other's hands, Eliot not left out of it, that really hits for me (even if that isn't how it played out, that the three of them were never in that van together like that, let alone dying together).
I really enjoy myself an aro Eliot headcanon and I love the idea of a queerplatonic thing going on with the Leverage OT3. So much in The Long Goodbye Job proves that regardless of Hardison and Parker being romantically together, Eliot means just as much to them as they do to each other, and Nate and Sophie both see that.
Nate's telling of the Heist Gone Wrong sees and recognizes how much of a Unit the three of them are, that just bc Parker and Hardison are together romantically, doesn't mean that Eliot doesn't get to hold both their hands at the end too. Sterling has the line of "Does Parker even know that you got Hardison killed?" bc he doesn't recognize that Eliot is just as vital a part of their dynamic. Whereas Nate does. In Nate's telling of their "deaths", Hardison while dying asks if Eliot got out okay, and they take each other's hands. Parker takes Eliot's hand. She dies holding Eliot's hand, not Hardison's, you know? Eliot dies holding both their hands. Nate's story sees them as the unit they are, that Eliot is an intrinsic piece of their relationship to each other. Eliot is the bridge between them as they die in Nate's story, while Sterling only acknowledges Parker's relationship to Hardison in his antagonizing.
At the end of the ep, Sophie says "Promise me, you'll keep them safe" to which Eliot says "Til my dying day." She says it bc she Knows he will. Sophie sees it too, like Nate, just how much of a Unit they are together.
And Nate to Eliot, "You know, Eliot, I'd say call if you need anything. But you never, never need anything." And Eliot's "Yeah, I did. And thanks to you, I don't have to search anymore." Because he knows it too, he needed this work and he needed these people.
Nate and Sophie know that they can retire and leave the team bc they know the team of the three of them is percectly balanced and capable as it is. Eliot is not a third wheel, he's needed by Parker and Hardison as much as he needs them. And I'm normal about it
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I love the idea of Parker's POV being black and white, especially in the context of one of this season's main themes: legal doesn't mean right, and illegal doesn't mean wrong. When you look at things within rigid categories of Right and Wrong but can't use the law to guide you, what can you use? Parker's emotions and insights are colored by the people she loves, and that's represented literally in this episode. The con, aka the story she tells the mark and herself: black and white. The interactions between her and her crew, her family, her complicated loved ones who don't fit perfectly into definitions of "good" or "bad": color.
John Rogers wrote the hell out of this episode. Marc Roskin directed the hell out of it. The actors acted the hell out of it. This honestly was The Episode.
It’s called the Big Bang Job because this is where we learn the story of Eliot’s beginning. Of the violence that birthed the man we know as Eliot Spencer, that obliterated whatever he might have been before. Whatever he could have been otherwise. And yet out of that violence came the man we know as Eliot Spencer: a man who is kind, and loves to create, and gives without expectation of return. The Big Bang was an all-encompassing violence, but from it came life.
It’s called the Big Bang Job because this is where Eliot begins anew. He takes every tie he had to his old life, he takes every bridge yet unburned, he takes every scrap of the man he once was and he blows it all up in a single unstoppable act of violence. The Big Bang is a transformation, and this is the episode where Eliot tears free of the chrysalis. The Big Bang is a paradox, a destruction which is a creation, and Eliot Spencer walks into that warehouse a killer, kills, and thereby creates for himself the life where he will never be a killer again.
It’s called the Big Bang Job because Eliot shoots a lot of guns and they go ‘bang bang!’ real big :)
One of the things that makes Eliot hard to write for in-character (but also such an interesting character to explore) is that he believes he is damned to Hell and he is at peace with that. He has a lot of guilt, oceans of guilt, but it's not so much the tortured, anguished catholic guilt à la Nate or like, Daredevil.Â
He has done monstrous, unforgivable things. But, on his own, he came to a realization of what he had done, and pulled away from that world. On his own, he left the worst person he ever worked for, and stopped using guns, and stopped killing. On his own, he switched from wetwork to retrievals. This all occurs before we ever meet him, so while there are many hints and inferences, the specifics of how that happened, how he came to those decisions, are left up to the audience’s imagination.Â
Eliot wants to make the world a better place, and he works everyday with the team to help people, and he genuinely enjoys helping people and the work he does on the job. But he does not believe that he can be redeemed. (Not my own personal belief about him, but it is what he thinks). When he dies, he will go to Hell for his sins, and there is nothing that can possibly be done to change that. He doesn't need to angst over it, because it’s just a fact. It is what it is. There is no point agonizing over whether his soul can be saved, because he knows it cannot. This is both a keystone of his character, and also something he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about day-to-day, because it’s a settled matter.Â
And as much as we love Eliot the character, he has a point that lives are not tradable for equivalent exchange. If he killed a specific family 25 years ago, that was snuffing out the light and potential and future of those particular parents and children. The surviving extended family lost those particular relatives. Saving a family now does not balance that ledger, because each person is a unique life and not interchangeable for another. While I may have different beliefs about Hell and redemption than Eliot, I still want to acknowledge that he has a point. That changing now doesn't necessarily help the people he hurt in the past, and unlike Harry, he can’t work down a list of making amends, because almost all of his victims are dead. There is no atonement to the dead.Â
Eliot’s redemption is in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and helping others get to it. Particularly the team, and particularly the pair he’s going to protect until his dying day. He will stay down there in the dark forever (he believes), but getting the others out is his redemption.Â
I do not believe that Eliot will actually go to Hell when he dies, but his belief that he is damned is fundamental to who he is as a character, and he is going to believe that for the rest of his life. It can be really challenging to balance that when writing his POV, particularly when delving into events that dredge this stuff up for him (which we writers love to do because it’s so delicious). Eliot doesn’t exactly have a low self-esteem. He knows he has many skills and is exceptional at them (cooking, fighting, grifting, guitar, sports, etc). He pretty much knows his teammates love him, and care about him, and want him to stay alive for them, and spend the rest of his life with them. He has professional pride, and he will argue when he wants something. He is certainly not a doormat. However, he also believes he is fundamentally and irrevocably a bad person. Balancing between him not being too self-deprecating in normal situations / about his usefulness to the team, with his inherent belief in his own moral depravity can be a thin blade to walk without falling to one side or another. But it is also one of the biggest aspects of his psyche that makes him such a fascinating and complex character to explore.
