~moved~

Oh, Eliot indeed.

Okay, so I’m gonna say it anyway so you might want to keep scrolling.

I just… he’s smart, really smart. Black Widow smart, and almost as lethal to boot (it’s a very specific haircut/footprint/handgun/way of breathing – Eliot Spencer has you figured out in seconds). He’s got a code, and morals, and he was scared of who he was becoming. And then he let the people he met change him (the chef who he was meant to kill and instead befriended, the alcoholic mastermind who gave him a family). And he’s honest (Don’t ask me that, because if you ask me, I’ll tell you. It’s for both of them. But he’s not that man anymore). He rarely laughs, but he remembers how to smile in a way that reaches his eyes. He’s not proud, but he’s confident. He doesn’t really want to kill anymore, if he doesn’t have to, but he will. He doesn’t use guns, and I think in part it’s to give everyone a fighting chance, but it’s also because he doesn’t like the way guns make people (I think he saw enough of that on his first tour when farm boys were given rifles and told to kill. But I also think it’s because he wants to remember what he does, wants to consider what he’s doing. It’s always intentional, you know?). 

He’s not just a weapon. He’s an amazing cook, and he can sing, and grift, and…

When you are writing characters, it can be really easy to make them into caricatures, or to just mash two seemingly contradictory characteristics together. Like Buffy (no shade thrown on Buffy), the girl who would be a cheerleader was also the slayer. But Eliot’s not that. In fact, none of them are. He says it best himself, when he left he was this kid with God in his heart and the flag on his shoulder, and he looks in the mirror for him everyday, but he’s gone. And that’s Eliot Spencer. Gifted hitter, talented chef, isolated by the ghosts of what he’s done (for country, for money) and who he has become because of those things. Leverage is a redemption arc, all five series, right up until the end, when he says ‘until my dying day’.  Because it’s at that point that he lets himself be defined by something other than his ability to hurt, destroy, kill.