Fridge / Leverage

Fridge Brilliance:

• Parker mentions in "The Ten Li'l Grifters Job" that her first grab was a palace in the Philippines full of shoes. She robbed Imelda Marcos.
• Hardison mentions offhandedly in "The Reunion Job," right at the beginning of Season 3, that he is capable of rigging an election. Nate apparently stored this tidbit somewhere in the back of his mind for six months in which it was completely irrelevant and then made it central to his plan in "The San Lorenzo Job."
• In season 5's "The Blue Line Job", Eliot becomes the enforcer for a hockey team. In season 3's "The Morning After Job", he mentioned watching hockey games for the fights because "You never know when you might have to fight a guy on ice."
• In the pilot episode, when Nate states that Hardison dies in Plan M, Eliot comments, "I like Plan M." Fewer than twenty-four hours later, guess who helps Hardison to his feet when fleeing a bomb?
  • There is also an interesting motivation one can interpret from Eliot's constant snarky comments to Hardison. While part of this is the natural Vitriolic Best Buds relationship they have, part of it can also be an extension of Eliot's protective nature. Because Hardison is so often cocky and overconfident, Eliot is always trying to bring him down to protect him from himself.
• One might wonder how an actress as bad as Sophie keeps getting cast as the lead in various productions. Simple enough: she's a grifter. She just cons her way through an audition until she gets the part. The problem begins when she actually has to play a part onstage.
  • Which then makes you wonder why she never tried "conning" the audience into "believing" she's a great actress (which would in the end be no different to actual good acting).
  • Because she doesn't do stage acting for the sake of the audience, she does it for herself. It's Sophie's attempt at "honest" self-expression.
  • Sophie gets cast as the lead because she's usually the producer and director of the play, too, as well as in charge of casting. She casts herself. We see her do an audition, and utterly fail at it. It actually foreshadows how she ends up directing rather than acting - she always makes good publicity and she has fans who attend her "funeral", but most likely not for how she acts (unless they all find her So Bad, It's Good). And you're right, it is because she's a grifter she can do this - a grifter's job is to direct someone to do what they want. They don't have to act, they just have to say the right things. Acting is just to conceal identity, but what good is that if they can't manipulate or direct someone? Acting and being an omniglot are just Required Secondary Powers for a grifter.
  • Even moreso... a grifter usually has to overplay the party, and a large, overthought backstory is rather essential. If you look at her audition in Episode 2... she thought WAY too much about the part, and tried to put far more depth than needed. It was a soap commercial, she didn't need some tragic backstory. But a lot of backstory is crucial for a Grifter, since random stuff will likely come up. Also, a grifter makes her OWN role... while an actor has to twist it to someone ELSE'S style. See "The Stork Job" for an example of this. Sophie goes INCREDIBLY overboard with a two-page scene, turning it into a giant production.
  • Word of God, meanwhile, from the commentary is she really does audition, as she'd find running the play "cheating". Similarly, her issue is she gets caught up in the role, and can't be authentic. She can only let herself loose on a grift.
• Eliot at first seems like just the average Handsome Lech trope. He hooks up with a different girl every week, but besides one ex who appears in an early episode, none of them seem to stick around more than a night. Then I really thought of the Ironic Echo in "The Reunion Job" about knives:

  Eliot/Girl: Knives are like people. Everything's in context.

  • You know how Eliot always explains away knowing various things as "slept with a ____"? He really pays attention to the girls he picks up, and he learns from them. It's not much, but it certainly plays into the "big softie" theme they have going with him.
  • It comes up again in "The Lonely-Hearts Job", when Eliot tells Sophie that contrary to her assumptions, he does indeed remember the names of the women he's been with. Of course he does. He pays attention to them. It's how he learns the info associated with their various jobs. It's also why he's so successful with them.
• Parker? A Christmas fanatic? Seems a bit odd... but no more odd than her other quirks. Then this troper remembered something. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of, among many others, THIEVES.
• The opening narration mentions that the Leverage team "steals back" things that have been taken. One of the recurring themes is people slighted or humiliated publicly; many clients are quick to tell Nate that they don't want money, what they want is to get their dignity and reputation back. The team steals these things back for them (and usually some money to go with it).
• Victor Dubenich says that all a man has in the world are his business, his possessions and his name. So to ruin Jack Latimer, the Leverage team sets about stealing those three things; pretty simple. But remember the end of the speech: if you take away those three things, "any man will kill." Nate wasn't just trying to bring Latimer down so that he would stop protecting Dubenich; no, Nate was systematically ruining Latimer to the degree that he would be willing to kill Dubenich himself!
• In "The Boiler Room Job", it was stated that their mark was a fellow conman who knows everyone they could possibly go to for help. This leads to the obvious question of why he didn't realize who Sophie was given that she is an infamous grifter herself. However, she had operated in Europe primarily and so he might not know her as a result. As for Nate and the rest of the team, they weren't in his community as grifters since they were involved in theft, whereas he was involved in straight cons.
• In "The Stork Job", the team goes to rescue an abused Serbian orphan named Luka, who Parker finds with a bunch of other orphans in the upper floor of a warehouse. So, his name is Luka, and he lives on the second floor.
• In "The Queen's Gambit Job", Olivia learned to win from her father. Once you know who he is, it becomes clear why she always wins.
• In "The Grave Danger Job", Parker asks Nate how the client knows that their father in resting in peace, and Sophie notices her "off" behavior when she and Nate return to the apartment. She's thinking about her brother, whose death we learned about in "The Future Job."
• Parker being more upset in the pilot about not being paid than an attempt on her life makes more sense if you remember that security guards would be prepared to kill her with some of the things she'd attempt to steal, which Parker would see as fair enough as they are both doing their job and it's nothing personal. But refusing to pay her is a personal thing as that insults her skills and the effort she put in. Parker isn't really seeing the difference between someone doing their job in trying to kill her and someone double-crossing her in trying to kill her like Eliot does. So she gets more angry about not getting her money.
• Over the course of the series, Sophie has been teaching Parker social skills and acting. At first, it seemed that it was because Parker has No Social Skills. Then it became clear in "The Long Good-bye Job": she's training her successor.
• Slightly more meta, but Sophie's accents run the gamut from "really good" to "atrocious." You'd think someone would wise up, but like she said, to an American, the subtleties of regional accents are lost. She's not going to authentic, she's going for what an American would expect. This also applies to Hardison.
• In The Rundown Job, Eliot, Parker, and Hardison race against the clock to stop a terrorist from releasing an outbreak of... the Flu. Another troper pointed out that, while in 1910 The Spanish Flu killed 50 million people, it wouldn't be nearly as devastating now, because we have more and better ways to treat it. But that's kind of the point. The terrorist isn't anti-American; he's a bio-engineer who thinks that we're not ready for that kind of attack. The Spanish Flu is the perfect disease. It will cause the panic of a real bio attack - note Hardison's reaction - because of its history and the fairly recent H1N1 scares. People will die because the infrastructure is not equipped to handle the sheer number of patients, which is the point. The Spanish Flu is the perfect outbreak for this attack because it will cause the panic but not body count of a real terrorist attack. The bio-engineer wants the US to prepare for a devastating attack, not actually suffer one.
  • That would apply, if it wasn't made very clear that Dr Udall is using a mutated form of the virus specifically designed to kill. Otherwise, a lot of what he did doesn't make sense - he dressed up as "Ahmed" to make his plans clear, he spent weeks working on developing the virus, which you could argue was him trying to weaponise it if he hadn't tested it on the farmer to make sure it killed, and made himself totally immune to it, a well as arranging for the deaths of hospital directors and 911 operatives to leave DC totally exposed and unprotected. His goal WAS to generate an anti-American attack, to prove to the government that he was right all along, and that a foreign terrorist, such as the Iraqis, would try to kill massive amounts of Americans with biological warfare. If the attack didn't look anti-American, it wouldn't be convincing. He thinks that if the US didn't suffer from a devastating bio attack, they won't prepare for it. He became the thing he wanted to protect against, which Eliot points out.
  • Tying in "The Rundown Job" with the episode before it, "The Frame Up Job", these are the only two episodes out of the entire series where the entire crew isn't featured together (Nate and Sophie are the only ones in "The Frame Up Job", and Parker, Hardison, and Elliot are the only ones in "The Rundown Job"). These episodes foreshadow the series finale.
    • Also, "The Rundown Job" gives Parker, Hardison, and Elliot the chance to see if they are able to run a job without Nate and Sophie watching over them. They did. Although Nate and Sophie were attempting to test them with the job they're finishing up at the start of the episode and not the terrorism thing they stumbled into.
• A lot of people give Dubenich a hard time for trying to kill the heroes when he could have just paid them. Except that wouldn't have worked. Nate would have found out that the plans weren't Dubenich's anyway. Nate, particularly at this stage, is still a hero, so will go after Dubenich for tricking him (and using his son to do it). So it's better to kill Nate than risk his revenge. Since he's killing Nate, he might as well kill everybody (because without Nate, they couldn't have stopped him anyway.)
  • We might be overlooking the most obvious answer here: Dubenich clearly didn't have the money to pay everyone.
  • It's also pointed out in "The Inside Job". A job like Dubenich's was doing only works if loose ends are tied up. Otherwise? Thieves could double-cross him for twice the money.
• Chaos has double-crossed his team before, so why wasn't Leverage worried about it in "The Last Dam Job"? There are actually several good reasons:
  • First of all, he makes it clear in his initial appearance in "The Two Live Crew Job" that he is afraid of Sophie and believes he would never be able to con her well enough to pull a successful double-cross.
  • Secondly, he has Hardison — the only man he considers a rival — asking him for help, and he doesn't want to sully this.
  • But mostly, there's no profit in it. There's no mention of any money being made from this con, so the only way Chaos gets paid is if Nate gives him his retainer once the job is done. If he betrays Nate, he doesn't get paid.
  • Word of God on the matter is that Chaos also was treating the entire thing as a tryout. He recognizes the crew as the best around and wants to become a member of the crew. He's not going to betray people he wants to impress.
  • On the betrayal, there's actually an EASY betrayal... and why he could never do it. He could just leak the plans to Dubenich. But... the group is already after him, Nate would have a back-up plan, Sophie is dangerous, Archie would kill him, Quinn scares him. And Dubenich is a double-crossing bastard like him. Chaos pulling a fake betrayal was probably Plan M or something.
• In "The Last Dam Job" when Nate explains the second team they need to run as their faces, who he looks at when he speaks reflects who the team chose as their second. He looks at Elliot and says, "Someone who isn't our friend." Quinn doesn't fall under that as he was paid to be their enemy once and did the job because it was a job. At Hardison, he says, "someone they don't trust." Chaos certainly is a person they would be wary of and not trust to be on his own after one murder attempt and later manipulating them to do a job for him. At Parker and Sophie, he says, "Someone not in the game." Archie has long since retired and hidden away from the criminal circles. Maggie is, by Sophie's words, a very honest person and would be beneath suspicion by their mark.
  • It's also a good reason to point out why in a bit more detail. Maggie is Nate's ex-wife, who only made friends with Sophie AFTER Dubenich was in jail. Furthermore, Maggie's ploy was so minimal, there wouldn't be any time to notice her. Chaos? Not only is he a hated foe who has to be manipulated, he's an expert on staying off the radar. Dubenich would have no way to find him. Archie, he didn't even know EXISTED. As for Quinn? He tried to kill Elliot, Dubenich would have no way to even find Elliot. Not only that, but Dubenich's skill is that he knows exactly, precisely how each person defaults to. He wouldn't have time to research these people.
• "The Long Goodbye Job" has an under-the-radar significance beyond just being the Series Finale. Nate won. He certainly would have won against Agent Casey, but even after Sterling comes in, Nate won. Sophie, Eliot, Parker, and Hardison made it out scot-free with their target, beaming at the Interpol agents searching the audience. Nate was planning to retire from crime anyway, whether he did so in a prison or in an apartment made little difference. Even if Sterling had pulled the plug on the rescue van, that left Eliot, Parker, and Hardison in their brewpub safehouse, all set to carry on the work.
• Why is Hardison so good at bluffing, the Bavarian Fire Drill, and the occasional disguise? Any computer security expert will tell you it's the end user that's the weakest point in any system. Passing yourself off as the IT staff, a technician, a janitor, or someone who just looks like he belongs there (especially if he has authority and belongs there) is the easiest way to get into a server room or access any computer network, no high-end computer skills required. It's called a "social engineering attack," and it's probably the most common way for an unauthorized user (such as a thief like Hardison) to steal data.
  • And even if restricted to electronic means, the most successful method of attack by hackers are phishing attacks, where users are convinced to do something they shouldn't do, either handing their passwords or control of their computer over to someone else.
  • Why does he always play stereotypes, and have trouble going overboard? Because he's usually only going for one little bit of info, and then gets out, and he needs it FAST. He's going for a short con, and he picks out the weakest link.
• In "The Three Strikes Job", Eliot mentions how he dislikes sports where you can't score on defense. If you pay attention to his fighting style (which in turn impacts his style as a grifter), a big component of it is that he often lets opponents swing at him and either catches then counters the blow, or takes the blow and then retaliates. Eliot scores on defense.
• The reason why everyone in "The Rashomon Job" views the security chief as a deadly, competent, Nate-level genius when he's actually a bumbling, nervous guy with a crush on Sophie is because to everyone but Nate, he's a threat. Everyone but Nate would automatically and instinctively elevate the perceived threat from the security chief, interpreting awkward questions as probing inquiries. Similarly, when the chief is walking down the stairs, Sophie and Hardison see him carrying a shotgun, because he's a serious threat, whereas Eliot sees him carrying a long, narrow box because he's both a professional soldier and views him as less of a threat.
  • Of course, we should bear in mind that Nate's version of events is also subjective. His perception of the chief as a simpleton is just the way Nate views anyone who is only moderately intelligent and generally competent. Also, he was interested in Sophie. Nate would want to downplay the man to her.
  • Also from "The Rashomon Job": As the Mako reminded us in a different episode, you can't con a conman. So how did Sophie, grifter extraordinaire, not spot anything amiss when she interacted with Eliot that night? Simple—he wasn't trying to con her; he really was hitting on her. (Uh, no pun intended.)
    • Except the adage that you can't con a con artist is repeatedly disproven throughout the show as many of the villains are con artists themselves who end up getting scammed by the Leverage team. The Mako himself was conned by the team. So you can con a con artist, you just have to be as good as the Leverage team to pull it off. And considering their success rate throughout the show, it isn't a surprise that Elliot would be able to con Sophie.
    • Actually, not only does the team rarely pull STRAIGHT cons on fellow "conmen proper", which is what the thing did (remember, they didn't con the Mako... they just stole his shit and let him get ahead)... Elliot is well known to genuinely like the girls, have constant friendships, and remember their names. He TOTALLY was into Sophie.
  • Why do Parker and Nate remember Hardison perfectly in their perspectives while Sophie and Elliot don't? Parker has feelings for Hardison while Nate was at the museum to look for anything fishy going on, which would mean he would pay very close attention to detail. Sophie and Eliot were just focused on getting the dagger.
• A combination of Brilliance and Horror: Nate's extremely twisted way of thinking and his machine-like ability to account for every factor is often commented on by other characters. In the third season, we meet his father, Jimmy Ford, who is cunning and clever, but nowhere near as methodical as his son... but who also has many of the markers of a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Children of narcissistic parents often learn to keep obsessive accounting of all their actions, shift their behaviors to accommodate and placate the parent, and track multiple competing factors to avoid the parent's wrath; a perfect storm of factors to turn a sensitive, intelligent child like Nate into the ultimate conman and Mastermind. No wonder Jimmy admits later that Nate is better than him: Jimmy's parenting left Nate with no other options to survive.
• Tell Me How You Grift: In each team member's respective tactics as grifters (Sophie's expertise) is a clear tell that reflects back on their normal methodology.
  • Hardison jumps in with both feet and tends to get in way over his head; as a hacker, most of his disguises are low-level employees who no one pays attention to, and he typically bluffs security by annoying them so that they quickly wave him on.
  • Parker favors the direct approach, with as little to do with the mark as possible; as a thief, she's primarily concerned with stealth and the end goal is usually something physical she can abscond with.
  • Eliot pretends to be less intelligent than he is before clinching the deal in a "moment of brilliance;" as a fighter, he knows the value of the element of surprise and, as noted above, waits for his opponent to move before turning it against them.
  • Nate is belligerent and goads the mark into making a snap decision; his Control Freak tendencies mean that he is constantly looking for a way to stay in a position of superiority over the mark, and the easiest way to do that is by pushing their buttons.^NoteIt can be assumed that this was his primary method of deduction when he worked for IYS, as rich men tend to be more prideful.
  • Even Sterling gets in on this; Nate describes his M.O. as giving the mark just enough rope to hang themselves, and throughout the series Sterling primarily sets himself up as a False Friend to whomever he is investigating.
  • Even Sophie. While grifting is her specialty, and she can do whatever is required? Her specialty is feeling the target's emotions, and finding JUST the right loophole. Or, putting her trust in Nate and letting him tell her. She trusts Nate, and wants to be ACTING, and has a passion for things. At the same time, she doesn't know who she is.
  • It's also not a coincidence that Elliot, Nate, and Sophie are the best grifters. For Sophie, it's literally her job. For Nate, he has to investigate for information, which means he doesn't know what he's doing until he gets the info. Elliot is a 'acquisitions specialist', so he has to figure out where what he wants is, and often has to acquire people, or just information. Meanwhile, Hardison and Parker are going after known quantities. At most, they need a location or a password. The grift is just a tool.
• Inspired by the above, there's a very good reason Nate picked Parker above everyone else to lead the team in his place (and good reasons for their skepticism about that decision). Major spoilers ahead, expect much white:
  • Hardison is accustomed to having privacy and prep time when hacking solo so that he can cover all contingencies, which (being computer soft- and hardware) are usually predictable or at least able to be researched. As we see in "The Gold Job," he's caught flat-footed when he needs to personally intervene against circumstances that he can't see coming. He was clearly thinking about his and the team's post-Nate prospects.
  • Sophie's job means that she needs to get inside the mark's mind and push them into making decisions that benefit her, but she's normally working hands-on with a single person for long stretches of time. The types of job the Leverage crew does means that she's forced to work at a breakneck pace compared to what she's used to, and pushing too fast results in the mark becoming unstable (see "The Twelve Days of the Hunter Job" for proof). She wanted the team to be able to function in case any one of them wasn't around.
  • While Eliot is never one to back down from a good cause or a good fight, a closer examination of the series as a whole shows him to be a very cautious man (read: not a Blood Knight). He's hesitant to risk anyone but himself in a true fight-or-flight situation and is often ready to cut his losses and live to fight another day. An appreciation for danger is a good thing for a leader to have, but not when it interferes with the objective. He was thinking about situations where each team member would need a different skill than their own.
  • Parker actually has the closest thought process to Nate out of the entire team. She's a thief first and foremost, which means her entire livelihood revolves around getting the objective and escaping unscathed. She goes for the most direct approach first when dealing with problems and is shown to be quick on her feet when things change. The only thing she's missing is Nate's monster intellect, which is covered by a rich and varied background actually walking the beat in the underworld.
    • Not only that? While relatively subtle, there is a running through-line that Parker is the only one who could actually mastermind successfully throughout the entire thing. Even in the first season, it's revealed she comes up with a caper in her spare time. In "The Hot Potato Job", she quickly comes up with the play to get through an impossible door. She knows her stuff.
• In "The Stork Job," Parker points out traits of an orphan/foster child who is used to being shuffled from place to place with little more than the clothes on his back. This includes hoarding food. Later in the same episode, Hardison reveals to Parker that he grew up in the foster care system. In "The Rashomon Job," when Parker recounts her side of the events in that episode, she describes Hardison, who said earlier that he was still living with his foster mom at the time, as hoarding the hors d'oeuvres.
  • Parker herself also has an awful lot of cereal boxes stashed around at Nate's place.
• In "The First David Job," Sophie's plan to take down Blackpool actually doesn't involve stealing the original First David. At the gala, she immediately jumps on the opportunity to take it and pressures the team into doing so, but it was objectively the best alternative they could come up with on short notice and probably the best way to keep the plan going. It is entirely possible that she was going to propose taking the First David after they had already conned Blackpool into buying the fake Second David, but the fact remains that she didn't, they had to steal it, and the team agreed with her that leaving the fake in place really would lead to even more satisfying retribution. She was telling Nate the truth when she said she had originally wanted to hurt Blackpool with no ulterior motive until it was just too close to resist the temptation.
• More of a Fridge Pun than Fridge Brilliance but Sterling Never Loses. One could say he has a Sterling Reputation.
• Having trained each other in the foundations of their respective areas of expertise, the crew has been able to mix things up on occasion. This is particularly useful either for an opening strike or at jobs where their default M.O. would not work. That includes, but is not limited to, whenever:
  • they need a male grifter or at least two at once;
  • a Honey Trap would be either useless or even counterproductive;
  • all Elliot has to do to give their position away is punch someone out;
  • they lose their expert (for the core skill) at a critical point;
  • the women come out to play and /or – continuing the above point – Eliot is trapped behind the lines.
  • Further, as the cross-training continues and "The Long Goodbye Job" nears, the rest of the team is clearly thinking not just about situations like these but about the path they're going to take right before, at, and after Nate's retirement.
• In "The Three Card Monte Job", Jimmy Ford uses Nate's assumption that he is trying to rob a bank to obscure his real objective - to break into the Boston Police Department and steal files containing evidence against the Irish Mob. In "The Boiler Room Job", the team runs a con involving cocoa beans on the Mako but it turns out to be a distraction from the fact that the team are stealing his money and sending evidence of his crimes to the FBI. Nate used beat the Mako with a plan his father would have come up with.
• In "The Van Gogh Job", the client Charlie Lawson is portrayed by Aldis Hodge (who plays Hardison) in flashback. One of the first things Charlie does in the episode is identify a goon as a fake cop by noticing his badge is fake. In "The Double Blind Job", Hardison is able to figure out a goon is posing as an FBI agent by also noticing his badge is fake.
• No wonder Hardison was so insistent on rescuing the Old Nate painting in "The First David Job" and displaying it in Nate's apartment: "The Bottle Job" reveals that he has several thousand dollars in cash stashed behind the canvas. He even lampshades it on screen:
  Hardison: What, you thought I kept Old Nate around for sentimental reasons?
• Lady Macbeth in the Pilot and Finale. Besides being a callback and showcasing Sophie's development as an actress showing how horrible she was in the pilot compared to her subtle and powerful showing as the lead actress in the finale, Lady Macbeth is a representation of what the characters were doing: Tempting an honest man to do a wrong action.
  • In the pilot, after the job is done and Nate is walking away, it is Sophie, his Lady Macbeth, who helps push him into being the leader of a group of thieves to commit honorable crimes for the weak against the powerful and corrupt. This helps him eventually slide into the role of being a Thief.
  • In the finale, Nate is the Lady Macbeth to Sterling's lawful man. He knows Sterling well and works him both emotionally and logically to allow a crime to happen and cover it up. He convinces Sterling, and the other Interpol agent interrogating Nate, to betray their duties as officers of the law and let the team not only get away with the black book of secrets of those who broke the financial system in 2008, but not alert these criminals to the fact their secrets are out.
• A quick one in "The Twelve Step Job": when Parker jumps on Eliot after leaving the rehab facility, he catches her and holds her up with only his right arm. He burned his left hand cutting open the flaming tire to get the money out.
• In "The Homecoming Job", Hardison is the only one not at all surprised that Nate donated money to charity. We later learn that some of his earliest crimes were to pay his Nana's medical bills. Hardison gets that part of Nate in a way the others don't.
• In "The White Rabbit Job," the ending walk-off shows Parker, Eliot and Hardison walking together while Nate and Sophie trail behind. It's a visual signifier that Parker, Eliot and Hardison will carry on the work while Nate and Sophie separate from the pack in the finale.

Fridge Horror:

• In "The Miracle Job," Father Paul remembers the date of Nate's last confession so precisely because it was also the day of his son's funeral. In the season finale we learn that not only does Nate feel personally responsible for his son's death, but he was also keeping IYS's involvement secret from Maggie the whole time. That's probably what he was confessing, on the day he buried his son.
• "The Order 23 Job" has Eliot knock out a mob assassin in a hospital morgue and stash him in an occupied drawer. Now, you imagine waking up in a cold, dark, confined place with a dead body.
• Watch Eliot's flashbacks very closely and consider what they imply about his pre-Leverage body count. It's... disconcerting.
  • One of his most disturbing lines comes in "The Double Blind Job" where he talks about the nine places a professional can inject someone with poison to make it look like a natural death. There is a very strong implication that he knows this because he's done this himself.
  • In "The Big Bang Job" Eliot tells the team that he did indeed work for Damien Moreau. And he tells them straight-up that he did the worst things in his career while in his employ. When Parker is about to ask what Eliot did, he warns her that if she asks... he'll tell her what he did, and his tone makes it clear that he is flat-out begging for her to not ask what he did for Moreau.
  • In "The Experimental Job" Eliot has an utterly chilling counter to the interrogator's question of whether Eliot knows how many people he's killed. Eliot says he doesn't need to count, because he can remember faces, eyes, emotions, and which of them deserved to die and which didn't.
    • Even WORSE when it's explained that his fondness for children "Is not for the fluffy reasons you might think." One of the rare examples where the fridge horror is rather canon.
• When Hardison and Nate call Eliot out in "The Big Bang Job" for not telling them about his connection to Damien Moreau, he defends his silence by saying that he was looking for a way to avoid a direct confrontation between Moreau and the team - preferably, he implies, by finding an opportunity to kill Moreau before things reach that point - in order to protect them. Now remember that the prospect of going after Moreau was first brought up to the crew in the first episode of the season, and compare Eliot's extreme tension throughout "The Big Bang Job" to his downright gleeful cheer after the plotline is resolved near the end of "The San Lorenzo Job," and consider what that says about how terrified he's been all season of what Moreau and the men working for him could do to the team.
• Despite the team's extensive efforts in "The San Lorenzo Job," Ribera still won the election. ^note  Flores tells a reporter that there was "confusion over the initial voting results" but also that "there is no question of the legitimacy of Vittori's government," indicating that Ribera did actually win the ballot count. He conceded thanks to Nate's influence, and it all (mostly) worked out in the end. But Ribera won. The whole country knew he was hopelessly corrupt, and he was accused of things that would have most likely automatically disqualified any normal candidate. But people voted for him anyway.
• In "The Long Way Down Job" it is revealed that Nate remembers little if any of stealing a mountain resort in "The Snow Job." While that was one of his drunkest episodes, this sets up the distinct possibility that Nate was too drunk to remember large portions of season one.
• "The Rundown Job" has a major case of this. What would have happened if Eliot, Parker, and Hardison hadn't been in DC at just the right time? It would have almost certainly been a repeat of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.
  • Even scarier: The normal death rate for swine flu in pigs is one to three percent. When the team finds the farm, every single pig is dead. For comparison, only three major diseases even approach a 100% fatality rate in humans: rabies, AIDS, and the Zaire strain of Ebola. Rabies is relatively rare, and rarely transmitted between humans; AIDS is endemic to most of the world, so any new strains would be a mere drop in the bucket; and Ebola Zaire has a fatality rate of 43%, as of December 2015, due to the sheer size of the 2013-2016 pandemic. ^note Prior to the 2013 pandemic, there had been less than 2,000 cases of Ebola Zaire, with a fatality rate of roughly 88%. The recent pandemic had 27,000 cases and 11,000 deaths- a fatality rate of 40%. Therefore, the overall average is 43%. (Please note that I did this math in December of 2015, and I’m a little fuzzy on the fatality rate and number of cases before 2013.) None of those diseases currently pose a threat to the world’s infrastructure. If the fatality rate in pigs demonstrated in the episode carried over to humans, the world would be facing a disease weaponized to kill almost everyone it infected. Oh, and by the way: The diseases mentioned above are transmitted through contact between bodily fluids. The Spanish Flu is airborne.
  • This Fridge Horror has become INCREDIBLY terrifying in 2020. We are now living what would happen if an untreatable Spanish Flu happened. The one in this episode is FAR more powerful than Covid-19. And, for those who need reminders. 34 million cases. 600,000 deaths. Covid has a death rate of 1%. And isn't as contagious as this version of the Spanish Flu.
• "The Frame-Up Job" is played as a light, Agatha Christie-style mystery, which obscures that the villain is one of the most cold-hearted antagonists in the entire series. He's a rich ne'er-do-well who starts out by slowly poisoning his own father. Later, when Nate, Sophie and Sterling expose his partner and she runs to him in panic, he instantly kills her as casually as if he were swatting a fly.
• The entire premise of Leverage becomes a source of Fridge Horror when you consider what would happen if the protagonists learned to work together, but were still bad guys. They'd be a con artist version of the Justice Lords. Thank God Nate made them realize that Good Feels Good...
  • As noted in "The Two Live Crew Job" and other episodes, other con artists and teams know that Team Leverage are the scariest mofos around, but they just figure that Nate Ford simply "broke bad" and they're just doing it for profit. They have no idea that this crew is out to screw over their marks for reasons other than profit.
• If the Leverage team didn't do what they do, then a lot of people would be dead if the team weren't around to save them.
  • How many similar crises are out there that the Leverage team doesn't know about?
  • ...How many are ripped from real world headlines?
    • Almost all of them.
• Chaos has almost definitely murdered people in cold blood.
• In "The Ho, Ho, Ho Job", the mark is hiring toughs and cons as mall Santas in preparation for a crime. ...what are the odds that one or more of those toughs might be a sex offender or child abuser in addition to their violent crimes?
  • Oddly enough, I think that we can thank Chaos for this one. He had a really, really good plan, and he was determined to get the job done; he would have very thoroughly checked into the background and habits of his potential minions. Given that a key part of the plan involved them working with kids for a fairly lengthy period of time, Chaos would have made certain that he wasn't hiring anyone who might blow the job due to... distractions.
• If Nate had started doing this sooner, he could have saved his son's life, and there's no way he isn't aware of that. No surprise he drinks so much.
• It's not addressed outright, but strongly hinted at in "The King George Job": Sophie's former lover William (whom she appears to have had genuine, strong feelings for) turned to drinking after she left, and it's heavily implied that it at least accelerated his death. Sophie's already lost at least one man she loved to alcoholism, and Nate's drinking probably reminds her a bit too strongly of the last time this happened.
  • This might also explain why she so adamantly pushes the Blackpoole con at the end of season 1 (apart from her own personal gain of course): she's the one to point out that Nate doesn't need rehab, he needs to get revenge on the man responsible for his son's death—she understands very well that the drinking is really just "to console him," as the Countess said of William, and if he keeps going down this road without addressing the actual reason he's an alcoholic and just making surface-level attempts to quit drinking, it's going to lead to his end too. So, she sets up a way for him to get that revenge. And it backfires horribly.
  • Made better and worse in Redemption. She verifies Nate is the only person she considers a HUSBAND... Nate died from a heart attack due to alcoholism.

Fridge Logic:

• How is it they get to the roof in the pilot episode? It was stated that the roof was their way out but it never explained how they got there in the first place. This is actually a common occurrence in several episodes that they simply appear there. Parker's Offscreen Teleportation is also used in a similar manner. Sometimes it would actually be an easier explanation if she could actually teleport.
  • Maybe they used the same trick from the last episode: zip-lining over from another nearby building's roof.
• One issue in the pilot is what happens to the overall economy when Bering Areospace tanks, especially since Hardison short sold stock against it. Similarly given that the company was under serious FBI investigation wouldn't the SEC investigate those trades heavily?
  • John Rodgers is unapologetic about this one in his blog, noting that Bering's stock was over-valued based on Dubenich's theft of Pierson's plans, and describes the results of the crew's interference as a "perfectly legitimate market correction." We also don't know all the details of how Hardison handled the short-selling of the stocks, and given the degree of truly ridiculous hacking shenanigans we see him pull off in various other episodes we may assume that he covered his tracks very thoroughly.
• Why haven't they ever ran into a facility with air ducts that Parker was too large to crawl through? In reality there is actually a DOD standard for exactly this. In "The Inside Job" the firm was smart enough to put lasers inside a ventilation duct, why didn't they simply make it too small to crawl through?
  • Larger buildings require larger air ducts in order to send more air through. Plus if there was something jammed, a blocked or broken duct they'd need to be able to have someone go in and fix it, since unlike with housing they can't just cut into the walls in order to do so.
  • Also, the vast majority of the places the team are breaking into... don't need to conform to Department of Defense standards for air ducts.
• How do their clients find them? It's not like they can take out adds saying "Leverage Consulting & Associates, extra-legal aid".
  • Actually... they probably did take out ads, at least in the first season when they had a full office. Probably didn't phase it as "extra-legal aid" but they almost certainly phrased in a way to make it clear that they could offer recourse in extraordinary situations. After that, word likely just gets around, especially after certain powerful people got crushed and certain other powerful people began making lots of money on said crushed and had a strong interest in making sure Leverage Consulting and Associates got a good client base.
  • They function almost entirely via word-of-mouth. Leverage Consulting is officially a legal consulting agency, which means people often come to them looking for one time of help and finding something completely different.
    • It's shown in one of the tie-in novels that previous clients notice other people in need and send them to the team.
  • Also, if anyone wants to search them online, they'll probably find LCA's (Read: Hardison's) finely-crafted website, complete with illustrious history of legal consultation. Also once they do an alert pops up on Hardison's computer, showing him where, how, and whether to contact whoever tripped the signal.
  • This is spelled out in the second episode, "The Homecoming Job". Hardison has back doors into every electronic banking system in the world and is constantly monitoring every online news site looking for scandals and whatnot. It's rather like an epidemiological study; they don't look for victims, they look for rich criminals, then work backwards to find people who can benefit from their comeuppance. Clients find the team mostly by word of mouth or outright accident - most of the time, they're just a team of con artists looking for marks to run cons on. They just limit themselves to Asshole Victims. It's stated at the end of the first episode;
    Sophie: ...go find some bad guys. Bad guys have money.
  • Fridge Brilliance, as well. Hardison is basically the counterpart to Aleph, from Global Frequency! Which John Rogers was in charge of bringing to the screen.
  • Explained more in Redemption. Someone posted that they were in need on TikTok, and the team showed up to say "Hi, we're some consultants..."
• In the Season Two opener:
  • How are Parker and Hardison able to open a safe deposit box when it's established that the bank will be closing at the end of the week?
  • Nate says he lives in a condo, but Hardison is able to "buy the building" and become Nate's landlord. The definition of a condo is that individual units are owned separately like houses. There's no way to buy the whole building without either negotiating with each unit's owner. One person owning every unit in a condo would defeat the point of a condo. Unless Nate is just saying "condo" instead of apartment to sound fancy...
    • Nate used the wrong term. He lives above a generational bar. No way that each of those units is owned separately. He probably just meant a very, VERY nice apartment.
• In "The Ten Li'l Grifters Job" - Beck's daughter is busy hooking up with a guard near the fuse box. It's later revealed that this is because she needed to turn the power off so no one would see who killed her father. And yet she is seen far far away from the fuse box both before and after the lights go off, and her partner was busy doing the murder.
  • We can assume the actual murder took longer then shown, considering Nate had to wander quite a bit. So she flips the fuse, and has time to wander back and have her big 'FATHER FELL' scene she planned.

---