Leverage: Redemption: The Tower Job
July 10, 2021 5:33 PM - Season 1, Episode 4 - Subscribe

One member of the team seeks redemption and justice by convincing Leverage to con a developer out of an entire luxury apartment.

Parker: Well, he spent the money 'cause he's living in this one, It's like the Klingon metaphor goes--[speaks Klingon]
Eliot: "Even a fool buys stone for his house." [Parker pounds her chest, Breanna gives them a look.] Hardison bet me that I couldn't learn the language. He lost.
Breanna: Did he?

Wilson: All right, let's go steal a luxury development condo financier!
Parker: [exchanges look with Sophie] It doesn't work if you say it like that.
Wilson: What do you mean? You guys act like there's rules to this, but then nobody ever explains what they are.

Breanna: Hey, look. We're going to mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?
Sophie: Oh, yeah. Never forget that, Breanna. We're not heroes. We're just necessary.

Eliot: For what it's worth, we all got regrets. You'll move past it.
Wilson: How did you learn to live with what you've done?
Eliot: I decided not to care. I didn't care who I hurt. Who paid me. When Nate put this team together, I thought it was one and done, that I'd go back to that. But Sophie, Parker, Hardison, and Nathan Ford showed me there was another way. And little by little, you get a piece of your soul back. Ain't that right, Parker?
Parker: [muffled from inside rolly-cart] Absolutely.
posted by oh yeah! (18 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Much as I miss Hardison's presence, Breanna really does embody his energy/schtick very well in her scenes with Eliot. The painting scene, the watching-Eliot-fight scene, both very cute bits. And her 6daze persona was fun, reminded me of Parker's Bjork-ish persona in the music studio con. (And for a second there from the accent I thought Sophie was bringing back her Annie Kroy character.)

I'm kinda finding the evil-guys-of-the-week not terribly impressively love-to-hate-them evil so far as compared to Original-Leverage. Not sure if it's a difference in the show or a difference in me after having lived through these post-Leverage years. Krista's evil-speech-of-evil was a good one though.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:47 PM on July 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I... actually got tossed out of the watching-Eliot scene. It moved the violence from in-universe-necessary-evil to in-universe-amusing, and I found I didn't like that.

Not the actress's fault. I want the writing room to rethink this, is what I want.

(I often mute and turn my head away during fight scenes in this show, honestly. Always have.)
posted by humbug at 7:40 PM on July 10, 2021


if it's a difference in the show

It's likely both. Breanna mentioned something last ep about "My first memories was 9/11. I've lived through endless war, two economic collapses, and the return of actual Nazis. So this worst world ever thing you see, it's the only thing I've known."

I'm digging Aleyse Shannon in the role. She's cute as a button and her face is very expressive, a worthy originalParker successor so far. Also a pleasant update to the hacker stereotype where tech savvy is less out-of-touch and more just-normal-folk.

I like the choice to make Breanna slightly more a Parker than a Hardison.

Tho', Breanna getting into the Eliot fight scene is definitely a Hardison callback, and was absolutely unnecessary. The jump/ chute thing was also unnecessary (I'm really regretting renting a place on the 12th floor).

The Krista villain does feel a little bit oldschool in that she's equally despicable and pitiful, and gets easily played for her hubris. But, certainly, relatively underpowered compared to the original slate of villains. The congressman last episode as well - he's being used by the Russian mob, rather than using the mob.

The iris scanner - I'll give it a pass. iirc There was an iPhone version that advertised as being an iris scanner (letting the consumer assume that meant retinal). Nope. It's a "facial recognition" thing that just looked at the area around the eye. The Samsung S8 actually had something close to an iris/ retinal scanner that looked at blood vessel patterns (albeit at a much lower resolution than a real retinal scanner) through the iris. It's a shame they got rid of that and went with whole face recognition in the S10 (doesn't work with masks/ sun-/ glasses whereas the S8 did. Mostly.).
posted by porpoise at 8:51 PM on July 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


The evil speech! "They don't matter. We matter." Oooooof.
posted by brainwane at 9:25 PM on July 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


I loved the Krista villain because she was such a poke at white femininity. I wish they'd played that angle a little harder, but it seems like Redemption (like Classic) isn't interested in investigating racism that much.
posted by snerson at 12:41 PM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


poke at white femininity

Not even just that, but a particular economic class also - her keeping on dropping that she "spent a year at Royal College of Arts [at the Sorbonne]" (or wherever).
posted by porpoise at 7:00 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


Eliot's response to Krista's mangling of the French in the menu was just perfect. Possibly my favorite bit in the whole episode.
posted by suelac at 9:00 PM on July 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


"I went to the Royal College of Art for a year." Repeatedly. So how come it was only a year, one wonders?

So Sophie and Harry are going to get together, right? It occurred to me he's probably her type. The second they brought up him needing help with cufflinks, I was all "ohhhhhhh, yup, it's gonna happen."

Breanna's stunning thing....eeek!

"I'll go get some chopsticks." No, just go get a picture with good resolution.... "Still think chopsticks would work, though." *squick*
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:41 PM on July 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


So how come it was only a year

Precisely. She's either a dilettante or a dropout. Not a good look either way.
posted by porpoise at 5:21 PM on July 24, 2021


Or got kicked out or went broke.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:34 PM on July 24, 2021


Ooh, I like the idea that she/ her family went broke and was forced to drop out.

Very Elizabeth whatshername of Theranos. One story was that her family used to be rich, then lost much of their fortune, and when asked what she wanted to be as a child that her answer was "to be rich" - and that was the driving force behind her fakery and fraud - being butthurt that her family had once lost face and fortune.

She's too much of a suck-up/ game-player to have been kicked out for transgressions, so my primary read was that she simply wasn't good enough/ talentless and was forced to drop out.
posted by porpoise at 11:35 PM on July 24, 2021


Oh I just assumed she did a year abroad while in college in the US, as a lot of people do.
posted by brainwane at 8:34 PM on July 25, 2021


Which may be even worse than studying seriously there; maybe I've been giving the character the benefit of the doubt?

I have friends who've done that and the vast majority just treated it as a vacation that mom&dad paid for. In that case, they might even be exaggerating a semester for a year.
posted by porpoise at 9:14 PM on July 25, 2021


The people I know best who studied abroad for a year did not just treat it as a paid vacation; they studied intensely, genuinely broadened their perspectives, and so on. Sounds like your acquaintances and friends had different experiences; the world is vast and people differ.

If you want to build up this particular villain's backstory into the most awful possible one, then sure, treat that year as just another particle in it - she did a year's vacation-style study abroad year, she enrolled at the school but couldn't keep up and got kicked out, she dropped out, it was only 1 term, it was only a summer, she's just 100% lying, her parents paid for her to do a super-easy one-year program at an otherwise rigorous school, she had a sinecure of a job there for a year and took like 1 easy class along the way, the school she's talking about is a predatory fake-prestigious scam thing, etc.
posted by brainwane at 10:19 PM on July 25, 2021


At first I was skeptical about bringing not just one but two new major cast members in, but it's really necessary since the Old Guard are seasoned experts now (except Sophie is rusty). This means the team can make mistakes, get into scrapes, train up new folks. It really works. The formula had been really wrung out by the end of Leverage, but they found more juice!
posted by rikschell at 6:13 AM on August 22, 2021


The painting scene was good and Christian Kane being annoyed at not getting the art reminds me that he is such a gifted comedian. (I really wish they'd spin off his weird character from "The First Contact Job" as I could listen to him do that accent all day.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:25 PM on August 29, 2021


!! 15siml - I had no idea that Christian Kane just starred in a first season (2020) show Almost Paradise (action/ crime/ drama).

I kinda don't even want to watch it, in case its terrible.
posted by porpoise at 10:49 PM on August 30, 2021


It moved the violence from in-universe-necessary-evil to in-universe-amusing, and I found I didn't like that.

Agree. There were some previous scenes like this with Hardison, but Hardison was learning to be a fighter and it's not at all clear that the Breanna character is going to go in that direction.

I like the idea of the Krista villain being a poke at white femininity and how it almost doesn't matter why she was only at the fancy art school for a year but that she's made it her "I talk about this at every opportunity" thing while still not knowing how to pronounce French words which basically screamed "She's rich and shallow but thinks she's erudite and cultured."

Speaking of culture, it felt weird having glasses of wine out for the Al-Abadis. I know that's just a broad religious stereotype, but it felt like serving ham to the Cohens, you know?

I was also surprised that no one on the team noticed that Krista was stepping out with her driver, maybe that all happened in scenes that only we saw? Jason was kind of a good villain here in that he was a total shit but they were always showing you a small part of his humanity (his panic attacks, how he made the second building so much better, his maybe-gonna-jump bit etc.) and then taking it away again.
posted by jessamyn at 8:36 AM on December 29, 2022


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