some of sophie devereaux’s most iconic & hilarious lines, in my humble opinion:
"what kind of world would it be if everyone who committed a silly little crime went to prison? complete madness!"
"EX art thief! EX!"
"is this about fear of the russian mob, or fear of intimacy?"
sophie: "i don't have a lot of rules in this world. three, actually - don't count the money till after the con, know when to walk away from the con, and-"
nate: ""the gambler"? you're basing your life philosophy on a kenny rogers song?"
[after everyone’s been making fun of her accent in the rashomon job] "i hate you all."
sophie: "nate, i have to say, of all the deceitful, unprincipled, corrupt things i've done in my entire life - nothing is as bad as..."
nate: "politics?"
sophie: "i can’t even say it."
"i start telling the truth all day, i stop being sophie devereaux."
nate: "you’re not supposed to root for the criminals [in movies]."
sophie: "always root for the home team."
"darling, nobody knows all of [my aliases]. not even me."
[about gifts for the team] "oh, i wouldnt say ‘bought’, exactly… we, ah, obtained."
"i am a grifter. if i’m doing my job right, then the mark just… [clicks tongue and mimes turning a dial] …turns off the alarm for me."
sophie: "pack your bags everyone, we’re going to make news!" [walks away dramatically]
nate: "yeah, she’s walking into the closet."
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So you know how in the Heart job he starts really talking about how god brought the mark death and how he sped it up? You know how the season focuses on Nate’s ego being the newest problem that gets in the way of the job? The fact that Nate ended the season *monologuing?* Or in other words, preaching?
In season 1, he was an honest man thinking he was doing good, but he was drunk. That made him ambitious because he was reckless.
In season 2, he was a sober thief, ambitious because he wanted to push himself and his team to higher and higher scores just so he had a high that could beat the bottle.
In season 3 he was figuring stuff out, with his main motive simply being staying out of reach of someone holding a gun to his team’s head- imma be real idk how to make this poetic.
Season 4, he was ambitious because he was letting his moral compass get in the way. He wasn’t doing things because it was good, he was doing them because they were righteous. They were THE good- he started getting dramatic, trying to guide his flock and preach, worship through action, sanctify his actions and deem himself unquestionable.
He was a priest because he believed in a good that had no room doubt, a divine justice. That’s dangerous, because it’s blind and mad.
in season 3 he says that he tried being an honest drunk and a sober thief, and that now he’s going to give being a drunk thief a try for awhile. season 3 i’d say is when he’s trying to find his compass again, because his sense of self has been upended, and with moreau hanging over his head he’s trapped. “the fact that we don’t have a choice i can barely stomach.” so i’d argue, especially in context of episode 1 setting the tone, that in season 3 he’s a prisoner. in himself, in his team, and with his team.
Despite it being a riff on the “women can’t drive” stereotype, I like how driving does play into offering a peek into Sophie and Parker as individuals and their relationship. It may be one of my favorite little mini things.
The first mention of driving skills (or lack thereof???) gets dropped in 3x07 “The Gone Fishin’ Job”:
Parker: Who knew a sedan could hit 140?
Sophie: Parker, you are never to get behind the wheel of a car again, okay? Never.
Now, Nate seemed unperturbed by the experience from his front row perspective riding shotgun. Maybe Sophie was just exaggerating. Or maybe being in the back seat just made it worse. But then we get to the next episode, 3x08 “The Boost Job”:
Eliot: Parker, where’d you learn to drive?!
Parker: Before I stole cars, I was a getaway driver.
Hardison: Before? You started stealing cars when you were twelve.
The flashback sells it. Along with the horrified expressions of Eliot and Hardison when we come back to them. Later, when they swing around to pick up Nate and Sophie, How long do you think it took Sophie to realize Parker was behind the wheel? Mind you, the back seat would have had Nate, Sophie, Eliot, and Josie crammed together like sardines.
Not that Sophie has much room to cast aspersions on driving abilities according to 3x15 “The Big Bang Job”:
Parker: Who taught you how to drive?
Sophie: Taxi driver in Istanbul.
Parker: I like it.
I feel like this should be one of those “Your approval fills me with shame” moments. Not that Sophie cares. (And, really, there’s a whole story there, because at what age was Sophie learning to drive from an Istanbul taxi driver???) It might be more important to her to keep Parker in the passenger seat. Certainly it was Sophie behind the wheel of the ambulance in 4x07 “The Grave Danger Job.” (Parker did have a different, very important task at the time.)
But, for all that, I couldn’t help but notice that in 4x15 “The Lonely Hearts Job,” who is behind the wheel to pick up Lady Charlotte Prentiss after her date?
Nate: Okay, Meredith is off comms. Parker?
Parker: I’m here. Sophie ready?
Parker in the cutest little pageboy! Sophie doesn’t even hesitate to get in. Of course, fast forward five minutes llllater:
Oddly, despite all their collective past experiences, the whole team still lets Parker drive. Their reactions are so them, too, because Hardison doesn’t criticize Parker, but he airs his fear as a form of disapproval; Eliot outright commands Parker to not be herself; and Sophie doesn’t need more than the scolding tone in saying Parker’s name to convey “You need to tone it down.” And there’s something about the underlying arc that threads through Parker’s driving, wherein they all know that Parker’s driving is bound to include illegal maneuvers at best and be life-harrowing at worst, but they trust her and her skills (and she is skillful to have been a successful getaway driver, not to mention that she has the reflexes of a cat) enough to not kick her out of the driver seat. She does get them to places quickly, alive and in one piece.
Or maybe just a carful of otherwise smart, intelligent, competent people really can’t see this bad decision for what it is. Or maybe they just love Parker enough to let her do the driving if she wants to do the driving. The smart move in “The Rundown Job” would have been for Hardison or Eliot to quickly replace Parker in the driver seat, but instead their immediate recourse was to panic over the lack of seatbelts.
Honestly, though, if I could make gifs, I would gif Sophie telling Parker she could never get behind the wheel again and then do a set right under it showing Sophie getting into that taxi. I feel like that sums up so much about how these people protest about not being able to stand each other or finding one another incomprehensible, but truly appreciate each other’s presence and trust each piece of the team to hold their own whatever they’re called to do. (Except for the Ice Man. Never rely on the Ice Man.)
Ah, so THAT’S why nobody ever complains that Nate is usually the driver even though he can’t pass a breathalyzer to save his life. If they tried to stop him he’d just be like “okay, so who SHOULD drive?” and so much chaos would ensue that they’d just give up and give him the keys back.
I don’t like zombies or video games or typing on my phone but I saw a poll about this and it ate away at my brain until I did something about it. @what---i-dated-a YOU like zombies and video games, I hope you like this.
They were safe, for now. They’d managed to barricade themselves in a breakroom. Even mad scientists needed a breakroom. Tables, chairs, a microwave, a refrigerator, a bulletin board with a set of standard-issue OSHA printouts pinned to it. Two more doors, one to a bathroom, one to a supply room. But most importantly, leftover food in the fridge, some of it still edible, and an unused first aid kit in a drawer.
While Eliot checked the others over and fixed up their injuries — all minor sprains and cuts, thank God — Nate rifled through the shelves of the supply room. The break room might look normal enough, but he was sure in a place like this that there would be more than staplers and ink cartridges back here. He was right.
“Eliot, I need you in here when you’re done.”
He leaned forward against the shelf, head resting on his left arm, eyes closed. The right arm hung limp. He tried to breathe himself through the pain. It wasn’t working. It had to work.
“You okay?”
He hadn’t heard Eliot come in, hadn’t even realized he’d been waiting long enough for him to get here. “Yeah, yeah, fine,” he said as he straightened up, and then reached up and turned off his earbud. He nodded to Eliot, who frowned but followed his lead.
The door was ajar, but not enough for the others to see, and they were making enough noise not to hear anything as they busied themselves with pilfering the cupboards and finding out if the microwave worked. Nate shrugged off his coat.
“Dammit, Nate.”
The shirt underneath was a bloody tatter. The wound near his shoulder was ragged, a sickly purple-green already spreading out around it. Any of the others would have pretended it wasn’t obvious what it was, or would have insisted that it probably wasn’t bad enough, or turned to any number of other bullshit ways to lie to themselves. That was one of the reasons it had to be Eliot. He needed to skip the denial and get right to the point.
“How much time do I have?”
“It’s not like I’m an expert in —“
“Well, you’re the closest thing we’ve got.” Never know when you’ll need to fight a zombie, Eliot had said earlier, as they all stared at the shovel in his hands and the decapitated thing that shouldn’t have existed on the ground at his feet. “How much time?” Nate asked again.
“Shit, man, I don’t know, if it was just the arm maybe we could tourniquet it, slow it down—“
“But it’s not. I need a number, Eliot.”
“Less than a day. Maybe twelve hours, tops. Probably less.”
“Okay, good, so Plan A is twelve. That’s enough, we can get this done.”
“Get this done? You’re not seriously gonna try to finish the job? No, Hardison has the files on the antidote research, we just have to get him to a lab, he can finish it —“
“Yeah, and while we’re wasting our time on that, the guys who made this happen are getting away and covering it up and starting it all over again someplace else. Next time it’ll be worse. So yeah, we finish the job. And no, we don’t tell them, because they’ll say exactly what you just said, only the difference is they won’t listen when I tell them no.”
For a moment he thought he had misjudged, that maybe Eliot wasn’t going to listen either. His face twisted up into an awful but inscrutable expression, he tensed like he was going to yell or hit something or maybe even break down. But then his shoulders relaxed, he bit his lip and nodded and all he said was “Right. Okay.”
There was one more reason why it had to be Eliot. Nate turned back to the shelves behind him. As he had hoped, a corporation on this level of evil had to at least be aware of the fact that something might one day go so wrong that it couldn’t be fixed with briefcases and documents in triplicate, and they had stocked the supply closet accordingly. The whole back wall was racks hung with guns and shelves stacked with ammo. Eliot might be the expert, but Nate knew as well as anyone what you needed for this. He pulled a shotgun off the wall and held it out. Eliot reached for it automatically, but he didn’t pull it away. And so they stood for a moment, face to face, both their hands on the weapon they held between them.
“I can get us there,” Nate promised. “I can beat them. But when it happens, I need to know you’ll do it.”
In the next room, the microwave dinged. The smell of popcorn drifted in to them, along with snippets of conversation. Sophie was displeased with the food selection. Hardison was ranking his favorite zombie movies based on “realism,” now that he’d seen the real thing. Parker was still trying to figure out why they needed to steal an umbrella.
Eliot wrenched the shotgun out of his hands and turned away from him.
I do actually have a half-plotted file somewhere on a flash drive titled Let's Go Steal A Zombie Apocalypse but it was more me seeing all the fix-it fics in the Leverage tag and being like "The Crew would be so much better at doing a post-zombie outbreak town than anyone on The Walking Dead."
Anyway, I really like this take on a Leverage Zombie AU. Also on your tags,
your gut was correct this is absolutely Resident Evil. They would be one of the top best candidates for a crossover like this, if not the best.
A sillier less angsty version of this would have to include how they found the lab because to my knowledge (almost?) all the Umbrella labs are like. Hidden underneath mansions or in a castle and accessible only through bizarre puzzle entrances.
You're totally right. I think she would freeze up when it happens but the second he moves her reflexes would kick in. She would probably shove Nate out of the way first and then go for the shot. I also like the idea of them being alone; she gets up high somewhere he can't reach and gives herself a minute to center herself before doing it.
Sophie I think could do it, but it would require nobody else getting to it first, which probably is not going to happen, because of the above. If they were alone she'd manage it, but he's definitely going to get a good swipe in first. She's not frozen so much as in denial. It takes the real danger of a near miss to get her to do it.
Hardison, I think, freezes long enough that he gets himself bit before he gets the shot off. Which is why Eliot makes sure they're never alone after he's bit; he knows he can't risk it.
All of these are dependent on the turn being very fast, because otherwise it'll be handled before he gets up. He'll make sure they know how much time they have. I think he'd also consider leaving them so he's not risking them at all, but decide against it because he doesn't want to be a danger to anyone else. Also dependent on him not being able to take care of himself before dying in the first place, because he will if he can.
Hey I'm sure some of you already have novels about this but I'm just thinking about Eliot's timeline. I just noticed in his speech about Toby, it sounds like it was fairly early in his career -- out of the army, he says as if he means fresh out and not sure what he's doing, second PMC he says and crossing the line, as if crossing the line is still maybe new to him, and he meets Toby and he spends a couple months with him and he credits that with stopping him "from falling all the way down."
Except I don't see any room for Moreau in that story. So he didn't stop because he met Toby. He even got worse after that. Moreau came after that. But it still meant he had something else, something that let him feel things, something that was still there even when he did hit bottom and because of it he was able to come out of it.
That's honestly so much more believable. Kind of reminds me of the insistence on not having Nate have a full recovery arc. Reality is messier than that. "I met a chef and found meaning in life and quit killing people" would be just as much of a cheesy unbelievable thing as "I learned the power of friendship and quit drinking." But it's so hopeful to say that that seed could be planted even years earlier and could be powerful enough later to save you when you were ready.
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OP, you understand my thoughts exactly. Especially about him testing the limits; Eliot's always called the muscle, but he loves playing the mind games as much as Nate, if a little less sadistically.
OP, you understand my thoughts exactly. Especially about him testing the limits; Eliot's always called the muscle, but he loves playing the mind games as much as Nate, if a little less sadistically.
while we're appreciating catholic symbology this fine evening...
someone needs to give the leverage writers room a raise because there's a particular thing they do with saints, like, three times and it's imo emotionally devastating even if you aren't catholic. firstly and obviously, they tell us that saint nicolas..
...is the patron saint of theives.
which, fine, cute, nice thing to anchor a random episode around. but it's not the only time leverage does this, even though the other two are a bit subtler.
if you've watched the dvd commentaries, you'll know that saint bridget...
...is the patron saint of wanderers.
which they say in the commentaries is very much to symbolise where nate is at this point in the show - very much "not sure yet" about a lot of things, but i think sophie's use of it in the order 23 job also ties the meaning to her in a lot of ways, and it's obviously prescient when you look at both nate and sophie's arcs in the latter half of the season.
now, the last of these three, which did make me tear up a little upon first learning of it, is the fact that saint lawrence...
...the italian/spanish form of which, "san lorenzo", of course appears in a lot of place names in southern europe for obvious reasons...
...is the patron saint of restaraunt owners, cooks, and chefs.
If you got all the Rockford gut punches we put into the scripts actually shot, Nate would just be doubled over every episode. We’d just punch the hell out of Tim all year long. And then noooo, we never have time … we’re in public … the set doesn’t work. But we assure you we’d be beating the hell out of Nate on a fairly regular basis.
-John Rogers, in the DVD commentary for The Grave Danger Job
"Sophie, I hate when you make me wear these dang cufflinks."
I'm watching The Grave Danger Job, and I'm thinking not for the first time about how the team spends time outside of cons doing stuff for the team. They're masters of their craft, so it makes sense that we know that Hardison spends a lot of time doing research and cleanup, for example.
So I'm thinking that this means that Sophie actually spends a lot of time shopping/stealing stuff for the team to wear. For the team to be fully effective, they need everyone ready to be able to grift on a dime, right? Costuming is an important part of every theater production.
She's probably got measuring tapes stashed in Nate's place, Lucille, and in her purse. She's taking members of the team shopping every other weekend. Hardison's super young and still growing, so she probably has to take him for multiple suit fittings. He's the one who most visibly likes learning about her world, so he's happy to learn and she's happy to have an audience.
The team walks into their offices between jobs and maybe she's not there yet, but she's got new clothes laid out for everyone. She's regularly leaving clothes in Lucille just in case. She makes sure to keep up-to-date on the things that Parker has stolen in case it's a good idea for Parker to wear them for a con.
Eliot...tends to have good stuff hanging in his closet already, but I like the idea of him letting her get him situational clothing that lends itself well to a fight, and him teaching her how to fight people in return. For them it's more of an exchange, and I can see them being whiny and grumpy to the other because it's kind of their love language.
Nate's repertoire of grift characters tends to be stuff he already has, but he gets out of the shower and rolls his eyes when the steam on the mirror clears because Sophie's left new things for him hanging in his bathroom again. "It's not like I saw anything, Nate!" she says in the early days, but also he ends up needing that exact outfit the following week and it's not like she doesn't know what she's talking about.
But also Sophie has multiple full closets because she's storing four other people's con clothes in them. The truly impressive number of shoes she bought with the money from the Leverage team's first score? Used on shoes not just for her. This is a woman who commits to the bit. There's no way her team's going in for a con without looking the part.
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fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"
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I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
