Leverage / Tropes N to S

Leverage Trope Examples
# - D | E - I | J - M | N - S | T - Z

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• The Name Is Bond, James Bond:
  • Sterling does this in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job". He's playing hero in front of a bunch of news cameras, so it actually makes sense.
  • Eliot does it in "The Big Bang Job" to get them into the meeting with Moreau. Makes sense, since Eliot used to be a much feared employee of Moreau's.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Butcher of Kiev.
  Hardison: Have you ever been to Kiev? The Cakemaker of Kiev could whoop all our asses! This is the butcher.
• The Napoleon: The younger son in "The Snow Job" is the brains behind the operation, despite his short stature, and resents the cavalier attitude of his much taller brother and the way their father dismisses the importance of his work in favor of praising and encouraging said brother.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Sophie finds Nate's brain extremely attractive.
• Nerds Speak Klingon: In "The Nigerian Job", Eliot is posing as a geeky IT technician. When the secretary he is distracting comments on how strong he is, he says he works out because he likes to go to conventions as a Klingon. He then says something to her in Klingon, which she replies to.^note The word Eliot says is not actually Klingon, but Philipino 'Bakla', and is used to denote a particularly effeminate man who may or may not be gay.
  • Depending on how you take his offense, Hardison can be reinforcing this or denying it.
• New Old Flame: Aimee for Eliot in "The Two-Horse Job" is a complicated example. While she'd never appeared (or been mentioned by name) before in the episode, Eliot and Hardison did have a conversation in "The Wedding Job" about how Eliot had "almost" been married once before.
• Never Heard That One Before: In "The First Contact Job", Parker does an impression of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial while pointing her finger in Eliot's face. The look he gives her indicates he's already sick of that joke.
• Never Mess with Granny: Played for laughs in "The 15 Minutes Job" when Eliot and Parker are staging a purse-snatching to try and get the mark to be a hero, the mark walks by without blinking an eye but an elderly lady starts whacking Eliot over and over and over again. The hits are completely ineffective but she keeps at it until he hands Parker back her purse. Then Parker encourages her to give Eliot one more thwat.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: A few of their cons go like this. They either get conned themselves or they simply overplay their roles and panic the mark into doing the opposite of what they want him/her to do.
  • In "The Underground Job", the team tries to con a corrupt mine owner. However, their original plan backfires when the mine owner decides to pay off a corrupt attorney general by firing his workers and using their payrolls. Then he plans to destroy the mine, which would also destroy the local town's only source of employment.
  • In "The Ho Ho Ho Job", when they take down the local trunk phone line, thus stopping the internet, to foil the villain's plan electronic identity theft ring, they learn that his real plan relied on them doing just that as it also shut down the security to the Federal Depository next to the mall.
  • And, in a longer-term one, the team's takedown of Duberman in "The Reunion Job" allowed Damien Moreau and President Rivera to get Duberman's software system Manticore and use it against Rivera's political opponents in "The San Lorenzo Job".
  • In the "The Blue Line Job" they do such a good job of convincing a corrupt hockey team owner that a rival hockey league will force him out of the business that he decides to simply declare bankruptcy and run away with the money he embezzled. This means that all the team's players and staff will lose their jobs and will not receive the money they are owed.
  • In "The Low Low Price Job", the team tries to force a megastore into debt by distributing fake coupons that cut the price of their big screen TV's by 90%. However, this backfires horribly because the store ends up making record profits anyways. Nate realizes that huge amounts of customers were drawn to the store due to the sale, and ended up buying more products in addition to the TVs.
    • In Nate's defense, the customers would have to buy ridiculous amounts of additional products to make up for the loss of the TV's, far beyond any realistic expectation of a "loss leader".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Victor Dubenich, the bad guy from the first episode, he formed the team, then tried to off them when they got the job done. That gave them motive for revenge and since Good Feels Good they decided to stay at it afterwards. This set them on a path of justice and vengeance against powerful but corrupt people in power, helping protect the those the law failed to protect. Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize that compared to their lives before the pilot, they're much better off because of it.
  • This is alluded to in "The Last Dam Job" when Nate visits Dubenich in prison. Nate mentions, "my team..." and Dubenich retorts, "my team!"
  • Dubenich then waxes philosophical about how Nate brought about his father's death, accidently giving him the playbook for their final confrontation.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Parker is disguised as Lady Gaga Bjor-- "Don't say her name!" At one point she's worried that "she's not being weird enough". Needless to say, even with Nate reply, "Somehow, I doubt that.", she is.
  • A scare tactic-obsessed cable news anchor character who is definitely not Nancy Grace appears in "The Three Days of the Hunter Job".
  • "The Office Job" features documentary filmmaker "Gunter Hanzig," who is totally not Werner Herzog.
  • Word of God confirms that they work to disguise the identities of all the real people they base each episode on — mostly to avoid doing anything actionable. In the case of the villain in "The Scheherazade Job," John Rogers extended that to "Also, I did not want to get shot in the face."
• No Endor Holocaust: The show glosses over the economic chaos that would follow in the wake of most of the team's take-downs. Just because one or a few executives in a company are corrupt doesn't mean the whole enterprise is, nor is it an indictment of the investors or business associates who do business with the company on a good-faith basis. Yet the team routinely leaves vast wreckage in their wake with no concern. Most egregious in "The Big Box Job" where the team shuts down a small town's largest employer yet though some undisclosed magical means every unemployed worker finds a job with the town's remaining small businesses. Word of God says that the team shows no such concern because the writers of the show have no such concerns. If you invest in or do business with an "evil" company you get what's coming to you.
• No Honor Among Thieves: Occasionally the crew will find a group willing to betray members in the group for a better profit. They promptly exploit this for the con.
  • Notable is Chaos who back stabbed two crews he worked with against the Leverage Crew. However, when they hired him to help on a job, he did not even hint at betraying them. Though this may have been more about fear of reprisal than lack of opportunity.^note alternate theories include not wanting to spoil Hardison asking him for help, considering the job as an audition to join the crew, or else knowing that Nate's "alternate revenue stream" would earn him more than he could get by backstabbing
• No-Gear Level: In "The Cross My Heart Job", the gang were bereft of any equipment after returning back from another job when they come across the plot of someone attempting to steal a heart transplant. They were forced to steal necessary supplies in the airport to do anything.
• No Name Given:
  • Sophie, technically. By season 3, everybody but Nate (and the audience) learns her real name. Apparently, Nate learned it during their night together in "The San Lorenzo Job" but was too drunk to remember.
  • Liam's brother ("The Bottle Job") is only ever referred to as...Liam's brother.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Many times.
  • As early as "The Nigerian Job" - despite having previously been quick to declare "every man for himself" - Eliot makes sure to grab Hardison and drag him out of the warehouse before it explodes instead of leaving him behind when he trips and falls.
  • Hardison argues this in "The Stork Job" after the team, originally planning to rescue an orphan used in an adoption scam, discover the scam is also a cover up for an arms dealer with over a dozen other orphan children being held in the same place. Nate has to turn down the idea because they don't have extra resources to risk straying from their original plans.
  • In "The Boost Job", Hardison looks quietly heartbroken that Parker's previous car-thief partner would leave her to the cops and run.
  • In "The San Lorenzo Job", Eliot and Parker plan on rescuing a general being held political prisoner — only for him to decline the offer because he refuses to leave his men in prison. The general then asks Eliot whether he'd leave any of his team. Cue Eliot looking into Parker's adorable "I did good?" face.
  • This precipitates the main conflict in "The Bank Shot Job." Nate realizes the bank is about to be robbed, and he could have gotten out in time, but he waits because Sophie is still inside.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Happens in the pilot; Hardison "leaves the cupboard bare" but apparently Pierson Aviation never heard of off-site, off-line backup. Again in "The Reunion Job" when Eliot wipes the Manticore server. Anything that important in a company that big, set up by someone who "wrote the book on database security," would have a hot standby server in another location... at least.
  • To be fair, the Manticore application was running on hardware circa 1985-ish, so it was probably very difficult to acquire the necessary hardware to stand up a second Manticore on by the early 2010s.
• No "Police" Option: The show is about helping people who are normally outgunned or out financed against the bad guys.
• No Social Skills: Parker.
  "I bought a plant. What does it do?"
  • Word of God says Parker has a mild case of Asperger Syndrome.
  • When Parker was asked to be a bride's maid in the mark's daughter's wedding:
    Cindy: You don't think it makes me look fat?
    Sophie: (shakes head no) Uh-uh.
    Parker: Oh, definitely. I mean, why do you think I had to let out the waist, to make you look less skinny?
  • Hardison actually had to teach Parker the hand-quote motion in "The Beantown Bailout Job," and even then she wasn't confident she was doing it right.
  • Eliot mentions that he got over his fear of the dark and/or claustrophobia as a kid by locking himself in a shed for a few days. Parker says she did the same thing (cut to Parker locking herself in a trunk and having some other kids bury her alive):
    Eliot: That's NOT the same thing. What's wrong with you?
  • In "The Runway Job," when Sophie asks the team to give Tara a chance, Parker seems to be trying to fit in/play along, but apparently misjudges the expected response:
    Eliot: She is hot.
    Hardison: Very hot.
    Parker: Hot.
    (Everyone stares)
    Parker: Warm? Cold? Why are we staring?
  • Also, from "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job":
    Parker: So, I took your advice and did the whole touristy thing. Went to the museum, and it was amazing.
    Hardison: See?
    Parker: Yeah. They have a Guardian T-840 Security System. I've only seen those in books. And the motion detectors—ooh, gorgeous! Six digital receptors. Six!
    Hardison: What about the paintings?
    Parker: What about the paintings?
  • Also also, Parker got a hug from the client at the end of "The Future Job" and clearly had no clue how to deal with it.
  • "Juror #6 Job", where she keeps referring to her alias as a different person (and makes one of her first, non-criminal friends)
    Parker: Aww, Alice made a friend.
    Eliot: Let me tell you one more time. You made a friend. Not Alice.
    Parker: Oh cool... Think she'll want to steal a painting with me?
    Sophie: Start small, Parker. Try coffee.
  • As of "The Double Blind Job", Parker's actually getting jealous of Hardison showing some attention to the current client. She has a hard time dealing with it. It seems to give her feelings for... pretzels.
    • Gets a Continuity Nod in "The Big Bang Job", after she and Hardison destroy the Big Bad's bomb.
  • In "The Three Card Monte Job" the others are about to look up what kind of security systems three banks have when Parker casually starts talking about them (and laughing at them, of course). Cue blank stare — "Well, what do you guys do on your weekends?" She's apparently scoped out all the banks in Boston.
  • "The Rashomon Job" shows how far she's come in two years from gleefully handing a giant knife so someone can do an impromptu tracheotomy to actually feeling sorry the head guard, who isn't a hardass tactical genius but a wuss who had feelings for Sophie's "character".
  • "The Broken Wing Job" pretty much sums up the extent of Parker's Character Development, as she is now fully capable of empathy and forging social bonds with strangers without help from her teammates.
• Noodle Implements: Most of the scams mentioned by name — i.e. the Cherry Pie, the London Spank, the Genevan Paso Doble, etc. — many of which the team disagrees on the exact elements of. Only a few, based on cons with real names, are explained in detail (Kansas City Shuffle, Violin Scam, etc.).
• Noodle Incident:
  • We never find out exactly what happened to the people the team was helping at the end of "The Nigerian Job" or how the team helped them.
  • The Sapphire Monkey, which Eliot was supposed to steal in North Korea. In "The Two-Horse Job," we see that he failed to acquire the Monkey, since he was being interrogated by two North Koreans who demanded to know where the Monkey was. Later on, in "The Rashomon Job," Eliot is given the task of stealing the Dagger of Aqu'abi because he failed to get the Monkey.
  • In "The Bank Shot Job," we never find out the full details of the con at the beginning of the episode.
  • In "The Order 23 Job", what the actual Order 23 is.
  • What Nate did at the Russian border. (Word of God says that he "may have technically hijacked a train.")
  • Lots of the unexplained cons fit under this, like the "Apple Pie," which is a "Cherry Pie" but with lifeguards.
  • Sophie's "little royal scandal" in "The King George Job." Later becomes a Resolved Noodle Incident in Leverage: Redemption.
  • One of the other retrieval specialists that Eliot runs into in "The Van Gogh Job" owes him $27,000 for something that happened in Singapore. All we know is that it involved a bass guitar belonging to Paul McCartney.
  • What exactly it was the team did in Juarez.
  • The time they stole a panda, as referenced in "The Boiler Room Job." Word of God has it that the team does a lot of complicated and interesting jobs that are not included in episodes...
  • ...as we see in "The Cross My Heart Job" at the beginning, where the team is returning from a job in the Caribbean where all the earbuds and Hardison's laptop got wrecked, Hardison faked a volcanic eruption, Eliot apparently fought three combat divers with spear guns, underwater, on a shipwreck, and Sophie played a French heiress on a topless beach and getting heavily sunburnt as a result.
  • In that same episode, Hardison is working without his usual setup and complains when Nate pressures him that no one is asking Eliot to fight a guy with a Nerf sword. To which Eliot responds: "Damascus, 2002."
  • The con that the rest of the team is pulling off in Japan while Parker is laid up in "The Broken Wing Job." It apparently involved the theft of a gold monkey statue, a katana duel, Hardison dressing up as a general, Eliot pissing off the Emperor by putting the moves on his granddaughter, and a live monkey in a box.
    • Word of God is that this MAY have something to do with the aforementioned Sapphire Monkey.
  • Invoked in "The Girls' Night Out Job," which is intercut with what the boys are doing, which includes being in a Mexican gang bar and then running from guard dogs. This is then explained in the following episode "The Boys' Night Out Job".
  • How did Nate get those two thugs to knock each other out? "They had an argument" is all he will say.
• Not Actually the Ultimate Question: in "The Wedding Job":
  Nate: Soph. Where are we at?
  Sophie: Huh? I don't know, Nate. I think you need to ask yourself that question. You called me, remember? And now we're working together every day... I don't know what you want! And you ask me that, dressed as a vicar! You're a very strange man.
  Nate: No no no, I meant, where are we at, finding the money?
• "Not Illegal" Justification: One of the challenges the Leverage team frequently faces is that the things the villains of the week are guilty of are often not even crimes under the law, something Nate often lampshades in an episode's course.
  • "The Beantown Bailout Job" has Nate specifically state that the local mob taking out bad loans, then defaulting on them, with the bank getting a big bailout check from the government isn't even illegal.
  • "The Gold Job" has a Brother–Sister Team of gold buyers who tell people to send them their gold and they'll send them a check. Except that they lowball the value of the gold and send them paltry checks. For most of the people, this means they have no choice but to take the check because by the time they get it, the item they sent in has already been melted down, and so they can't get a return on the money. Nate even notes to the client that it's all technically legal.
• Not Just a Tournament: In "The Queen's Gambit Job", the team enters — and then rigs — a blitz chess tournament as a way of distracting the mark of the week during a theft.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Nate and Sterling. Nate and Rockwell in "The 15 Minutes Job."
  • Interestingly subverted in the finale. Sterling explicitly states that they are different. Nate believes in justice for bad guys no matter what the cost. Sterling believes in keeping order and trusting the system to do its job. Sterling doesn't like working outside the system. Well, except maybe once or twice.
  • Nate and his father are compared to each other a few times, notably in "The Bottle Job" where Cora notes his father was very protective of his close friends, much like Nate, and rarely allowed people who crossed him to go unpunished, such as forcing the Loan Shark of the episode either he goes home to his father in Ireland and tells him things went bust, or Nate will call the father and tell him he lost all the loan money in a poker game with cops and confessed to at least one felony and then broke the guy's finger in the same way his father was seen in a flashback. A cop who witnessed that and knew Jimmy Ford told Nate he was just like his father.
  • This trope is a common theme across the series. Nate, or one of the other members of the team, often have something in common with the mark, and the relationship is explored. There is often the implication that, if things were a bit different, Nate or his team could be the very mark they're taking apart.
• Not So Stoic: Eliot tends to be the least flappable character: the guy undergoes interrogation by a CIA professional without blinking an eye. There are two times when his self-control slips:
  • In "The 12-Step Job," Eliot has to disable a bomb that could potentially kill Hardison. As he goes to reach for the wires, his hands are shaking.
  • In "The Big Bang Job," Eliot is clearly rattled from the start of the episode, to the point that Hardison asks him if everything's okay. Later in the episode, when discussing his past with Moreau, he looks almost like he's going to cry.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Inverted in "The Rashomon Job":
  Wes: (Introducing himself) Dr. Wes Abernathy.
  Sophie: Doctor? What's your PhD in?
  Wes: I'm a surgeon.
• Not What I Signed on For: In "The Homecoming Job" when things get violent and their client had two ex-special forces assassins come after him, Hardison, Sophie, and Parker each say this because their crimes didn't get people hurt or make them come after them with weapons. Eliot, however, is used to it.
• Not With the Safety On, You Won't: Eliot and Nate to Hardison, in the pilot. Though Eliot probably didn't even care.
  Hardison pointing the gun at Eliot sideways
  Nate: Yeah, and you seem pretty relaxed for a guy with a gun pointed at him.
  Eliot: Safety's on.
  Hardison: Like I'm gonna fall for that.
  Nate: No, no, actually he's right. The safety is on.
  Hardison looks down to check, and Nate grabs the gun.
  • Sophie and Tara, when they get caught spying in the "Mark"s hotel room closet in "The Girls Night Out".
  Tara: Huh. The safety was off.
  Sophie: Not to a grifter.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Once they tried out their Swapped Roles and realized they felt more comfortable where they were before, this sets in for the team.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Invoked by Tara in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job" to con mark without saying a word. She simply sits down next to him on a park bench and, by way of a few meaningful looks and Eliot staring murder at them from the next bench over, lets him construct an explanation for himself that panics him into handing over what they need.
  Tara: What we imagine is always so much better than the reality.
• Nun Too Holy: Parker pretends to be a nun in "The Beantown Bailout Job."
  • And "Sister" Lupe in "The Boys' Night Out Job."
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Incidents across quite a few episodes indicate that, despite how often he presents himself as Dumb Muscle, Eliot is a lot smarter and has a much better understanding of people than he's usually given credit for. It's pointed out in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job" when Maggie observes that people underestimate him, to which Nate replies that that's "kinda the point."
  • Often employed by Nate or Hardison's short term grifts to get them past people by being a combination of annoying and seemingly harmless. A good example is Hardison getting past security by pretending to be a janitor who barely understand English and splash the guards with water until they told him to just go.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Eliot and Hardison try to get Maggie out of a Ukrainian prison by forging documents to have her transferred to the US Embassy. However, the police chief refuses because he knows Maggie will go the Embassy and never reappear for trial. Tara Lampshades this by telling the duo that the police chief has spent decades cheating Soviet bureaucracy and that there's no possible way to outsmart him with paperwork.
  • The main problem the team faces in "The Gimmie a K Street Job" is that all of the marks are Obstructive Bureaucrats, making them difficult to con.^note Except for Nate's mark, whom he wins over with a mere lunch.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: In "The 10 Li'l Grifters Job", the mark is killed during his own murder mystery-themed dinner party. Nate, realizing that he would be the prime suspect, tries to pretend that the really obvious corpse on the ground is a lifelike dummy, and that the whole thing is actually all part of the game, while figuring out who actually did it.
• Offhand Backhand: Parker does this at long range with a stun gun in "The Lost Heir Job."
• Off the Wagon: Oh, Nate.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In "The Carnival Job" when Parker climbs a Ferris Wheel, disables a sniper, ties him up with duct tape, and takes his gun. All in a matter of seconds, all off-screen.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Parker is good at this. Eventually Lampshaded:
  Eliot: How does she do that?
  Nate: I don't even ask any more.
  • Sterling. Seriously, "Hello, Nate." may as well be his Catchphrase.
• Oh, Crap!: Or rather, "oh, shiny tomato!"
  • The series runs on this for the bad guys. Every time they think they have team cornered, one of these is sure to follow. Notable examples include the pilot episode, the Evilutionary Biologist trying wipe out the world's food supply and getting caught on video monologuing about it, and the pharma CEO who thought everyone at his shindig was gonna drink bubbly spiked with his killer painkiller.
  • Hardison freaks out rather badly in "The Rundown Job" when he finds out that the episode's villain is attempting to weaponize The Spanish Flu and nearly backs out of the job.
  • In "The Homecoming Job", a goon gets a particularly expressive Oh, Crap! face when he realizes Nate has just pressed a defibrillator to his chest and is about to pull the trigger.
    • In the same episode corrupt US Congressman utters this when his and his accomplice's recorded confessions to their crimes were just sent to the reporters talking to them. The reporter calls her manager they would lead with "Crap."
  • When Hardison indicates that he was aiming for someone's leg rather than an engine, this is Elliot's reaction ("gimme the gun, Hardison!").
• Older Than They Look: Beth Riesgraf (the actress who plays Parker) was 30 during the first season, and 34 during the last.
• Once an Episode:
  • A caper featuring a plan that goes awry. This is never because of some outlandish reason, but either the team overplayed their hand, the villain is able to put something together to make them wary, or some other plausible snafu based on facts so far in the story.
  • "Let's go steal a..."
  • Nate saying something meaningful that's ambiguous or in code and then walking offscreen dramatically.
    • Many of these were lampshaded by Tara in "The Runway Job."
  • Earlier scenes are replayed in a Once More, with Clarity style, showing the viewer how each con was executed, sometimes in plain sight of the viewer.
  • Evil Gloating of two types:
    • At least once in the episode, and sometimes more than once if there are other antagonists, the antagonist gives a gloating speech defending their evil actions and justifying how they aren't really a bad person.
    • Nate will always take a few moments to gloat over the destruction he has wrought over the other evil people he encounters.
  • The second season opens with Nate having quit drinking. Each episode has the rest of the team comment on how dark he's gotten since he quit and also offers him a grand invitation to start drinking. Until he finally does.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • The rest of the team periodically pokes fun at Hardison for getting kidnapped by Russians in "The Ice Man Job."
  • Parker stabbing a guy she was supposed to be buttering up.
• Once More, with Clarity: A common device used to show the inner workings of the con. Usually the scene is replayed but more is shown before or after to show the deception taking place. Sometimes they even replay a scene more than once and show other sides of the same scene to show everything that happened when more than one misdirection took place.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Happens frequently. One notable example being "The Three Days of The Hunter Job": The mark for the episode, a journalist, has been steered towards a politician to ask about an alleged government project called "Destiny". The Destiny that he thinks she means is his favourite stripper.
• One Last Job:
  • The team promises that their job in "The Homecoming Job" will be the last one (this was before they were inflicted with Good Feels Good). Nate's father also says he's taking one last job in "The Three-Card Monte Job".
  • "The Radio Job" was supposed to be one last job for Jimmy Ford. As it turned out, it was, but not for the reasons he thought.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Nate and Sterling. They know each other really well. Unfortunately for Nate, Sterling. Never. Loses.
  • As of "The Queen's Gambit Job", this holds true for Sterling's daughter, especially when it comes to chess.
• Only One Name: Parker. When picking up a will call ticket at a production of The Sound Of Music (starring Sophie) in "The Beantown Bailout Job," she literally says "Only One Name".
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In the episode "The Two-Horse Job," Sophie attempts what sounds like a Dixie accent. She slips into her British accent just about every other word, however.
  • In "The Ten L'il Grifters Job," the detective calls Sophie out on this after she tells him that she works for the murder mystery company, rather than a client of the mark. She tells him she finds it's adorable that he thinks that's her real accent.
• Open Sesame: A safe in "The Homecoming Job." The team is able to get a voice-activated safe open by being able to record every possible sound from the safe's owner by getting him to say the name of a very complicated French dish, then have him drop the F-bomb when he realizes it's raw shrimp.
• Orphanage of Fear: In "The Stork Job", the Leverage team end up rescuing all the kids from one of these in Serbia (the orphanage was being used as a front from arms dealers). This wasn't the original mission, but Parker refuses to leave the kids behind.
• Orphaned Punchline: The end of the joke Hardison is telling the monkey in "The Broken Wing Job".
• Our Founder: Every time Leverage Consulting & Associates sets up a headquarters, they hang an oil painting of "Harlin Leverage III" (actually an aged-up Nathan Ford, painted by Hardison). It's stuffed with emergency money.
  Parker: *in her best crotchety old man Nate impression, holding up the painting* "Argh, I'm Old Nate and I live here, too!"
• Out of Order: According to Word of God, the order in which Season One was meant to be aired (accompanied by broadcast order number) was as follows: Nigerian (1), Homecoming (2), Wedding (7), Snow (9), Mile-High (8), Miracle (4), Two-Horse (3), Bank Shot (5), Stork (6), Juror #6 (11), 12-Step (10), First David (12), Second David (13). This leads to some... interesting jumps in continuity:
  • There are a couple references where the payoff occurs before the setup. For example, Hardison asks Eliot if he'd ever thought about getting married in "The Wedding Job," when in broadcast order Hardison had already met Eliot's ex-girlfriend Aimee in "The Two Horse Job."
  • In broadcast order, Taggart and McSweeten appear for the first time in The Stinger of "The Bank Shot Job" to take the credit for taking down the bank robber — the audience was intended to meet them in their much longer appearance in "The Wedding Job," making the bit a lot funnier.
  • Nate's alcoholism gets stronger and weaker over the course of the season, and it was meant to climax with "The 12-Step Job" just before the two-part finale; the broadcast order gives us "The Juror #6 Job" as a Breather Episode before the finale instead.
  • The level of trust the team has for each other varies considerably over the season as well — particularly noticeable in broadcast order with Nate and Hardison, who have a breakthrough moment in "The Mile-High Job" which seems out of place coming after Hardison's leadership in "The Bank Shot Job." The Season One DVD set contains the episodes in intended order.
• Outrun the Fireball:
  • The group tries to do this in "The Nigerian Job." They wake up in a hospital. Nate fares slightly better in the season 2 opener.
  • In "The Hot Potato Job", Parker out-slides one.
• Outside Ride:
  • Parker drops on to the roof of a moving armoured car as she prepares to pull a High-Speed Hijack in "The First David Job".
  • In "The Rundown Job", Parker clings to the top of a subway train so as not to lose the terrorist who is carrying a briefcase full of killer flu virus.
  • Parker and Hardison have to drop onto and run along the top of a train to get to Moreau's bomb in "The Big Bang Job".
• Overly Long Gag: In "The Tap-Out Job", Eliot explains mixed martial arts to Sophie, who doesn't believe it to be a sport, by having Parker put a submission hold on Hardison. As Nate changes the subject to discuss plans on their latest mission, Parker still hasn't stopped, and Hardison's complaints about not being able to breathe are getting weaker and more strained.
• Pair the Spares: "The Girls Night Out Job"/"The Boys Night Out Job": apart from official couples Nate/Sophie and Parker/Hardison, we also have Eliot/Not-a-Sister Lupe, Tara/Mattingly and Hurley/Peggy.
• Pants-Positive Safety:
  • Played with hilariously in "The Miracle Job" when Eliot and Hardison run into some street thugs and the leader tries to intimidate them by lifting up his shirt and revealing the gun tucked into the front of his pants. Eliot just grabs the gun and flips the safety off without ever removing it from the guy's pants. It's very effective.
    • I bet the guy didn't keep his gun there any more.
  • Present in "The Big Bang Job", where Eliot, in full Batman Grabs a Gun mode tucks a gun into the exact front of his pants and the camera spends a good ten seconds focused on it.
• Papa Wolf:
  • Sterling used the team to help save his daughter, who not only was living with a man who sells goods to terrorists but also she was spying on her step-father for Sterling.
  • In "The Radio Job" Jimmy Ford first appears to be doing the job because of the large payout. Turns out Latimer threatened to kill Nathan if Jimmy didn't do it. Later, Jimmy gives the team a slip to confront Latimer alone, to ensure his son's safety.
  • Also, Archie to an extent towards Parker. Watch the two times he confronts Chaos in "The Last Dam Job." The first time, he only looks mildly annoyed by Chaos's insults until he makes a snide comment towards Parker, and then Archie rests his cane against his neck. Later, when Archie actually does taser him, it's only after he makes yet another snide comment towards Parker.
  • Tragically, Nate was one for his son before the show started, willing to do anything he ever could for his son. It wasn't enough. He becomes one to a child he doesn't even know in the "Cross My Heart Job" because the parallels are too strong for him to do anything else.
  • The team as a whole will typically drop anything and/or go to extreme lengths to help a child, each for their own reasons. Nate of course lost his son, Parker and Hardison both went through the foster system, Eliot is strongly implied in the show to have killed children while working for Moreau and by word of god considers himself permanently damned as a result, and Sophie's just really nice like that.
• Parental Abandonment: The client Ruth Walton in "The Lost Heir Job" was an orphan who was adopted and worked with other orphaned children. Her father, a wealthy man, didn't send her pregnant mother away, his corrupt lawyer did, and upon finding her, got to know her without telling her the truth so she wouldn't hate him at first.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • Nate and Hardison are watching Parker infiltrate a government building on the office big screen...naturally, Nate brings popcorn and some beers.
  • The team is watching Eliot go on a date with Nate's ex-wife via buttoncam feed (It Makes Sense in Context). They've brought snacks.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Lampshaded in "The Bank Shot Job":
  Parker: Forty-two seconds.
  Hardison: What?
  Parker: To rob this bank. One security guard who's never fired his gun before, two closed-circuit cameras outside, one inside, and a Glenn-Reider safe built in the '50s whose default combination is the birthdate of the manager's wife! Get in, get out, forty-two seconds.
• Password Slot Machine: Hardison uses one of these to crack the ten digit code on the electronic lock to the server room in "The Nigerian Job".
• Patron Saint: Saint Nicholas' other patronage (that of thieves — more accurately, repentant thieves) is mentioned in "The Miracle Job," where Sophie tells Parker (who is only aware of the Santa Claus version) that St. Nick is also the patron saint of thieves.
  • Nate is also handed a Brigid medal in "The Beantown Bailout Job."
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The show does a very good job of justifying this; each villain gets several Kick the Dog moments and most might arguably have crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
  • In the "The Cross My Heart Job" this is taken to a level unusual for Nate when he threatens to kill the villain of the week and further terrifies him at the end of the episode, further worsening the dying man's condition.
    • Given that the dying man in question was already quite old himself, and was willing to let a young boy die just so he'd get maybe 3-5 years more, it seems fairly justified.
  • This gets drawn attention to in one episode where they feel sorry for their mark's situation. Nate points out that hating the mark "is a perk" not a requirement.
• The Perfect Crime: The team's cons get close to this at times, such as during "The Beantown Bailout Job," when Detective Bonanno comments to the mark:
  "Someone tricked you into bringing a briefcase of your own crimes straight to the police? Come on, Mr. Leary, nobody's that smart."
  • Although it's implied later that Bonanno realizes that's exactly what happened.
• Period Piece:
  • A good deal of "The Van Gogh Job" takes place in the 1940s.
  • Then there's "The D.B. Cooper Job", which flashes back to the 1970s.
  • A very minor case in "The Rashomon Job", they are using tech from ten years ago, which has an impact on how shipping is managed, and more importantly, means that Hardison had no wifi to hack.
• Pet the Dog: One of the bad guys in "The Ho Ho Ho Job" seems to be genuinely happy to be handing out toys to kids, even letting a young girl give him a cute kiss on the cheek.
• Phoney Call: Hardison does this in "The Iceman Job," telling a mark he has to call his girlfriend, then calling Sophie and managing to signal to her that he's in trouble.
  • In "The Boys Night Out Job", Nate and Hurley hide from Mooks in an addiction support group meeting. (A Call-Back to Hurley's original appearance in "The 12-Step Job.") After trying unsuccessfully to get a cellphone from various attendees so he can contact the team, Nate volunteers to talk next, laments about how he hurt his ex-wife, Maggie, and says "If I had a cellphone right now I would call her..." Naturally everyone in the crowd offers him their phones. Of course, Hilarity Ensues as he attempts to maintain his cover.
  Hardison: "Why did Nate call me 'sweetheart?'"
  (Cuts back to Nate)
  Nate: "I'm sorry about the bag of drugs''..."
  Crowd: "Ooh..."
• Phony Psychic: The crew take one down in "The Future Job".
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Parker turns out to have a lot of strength in her skinny little body when she grabs Tara by the throat with one hand, then holds her over the roof of a building.
  "Yeah. I hang from buildings with my fingertips."
  • Often times you see other people, especially other members of team Leverage, grimace and hold their shoulders when Parker pokes them. She is freakishly strong for her size and usually does not appear to be very much aware of it.
• Planning with Props: In "The Jailhouse Job", Nate plans his Great Escape using a map constructed of a checkerboard, checkers, rulers and other props he could source in prison.
• Playful Hacker: Hardison.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Parker has a habit of changing clothes whenever and wherever she needs to, regardless of who is around. Though interestingly, it's usually Hardison.
  Hardison: "Why am I looking away?"
• Plot-Powered Stamina: Eliot claims he only sleeps 90 minutes a night.
• Plot Tailored to the Party: Inverted and reconstructed In-Universe. Since Nate is setting up the plans, it always plays to their strengths. He also had them train each other in their respective areas of expertise, just in case they wound up short a skill or needed to swap tasks.
• Police Are Useless: The FBI and local cops are generally portrayed as being well-intentioned, but incapable of catching the episode's villain either due to ineptitude or legal procedure. Interpol, on the other hand, is quite capable and feared, and Detective Bonanno is always on top of his game.
  • Frequently inverted. Many episodes end with the crew maneuvering the Villain of the Week into incriminating themselves, and law enforcement responding faster than realistically possible.
• Porn Stash: The second season premiere plays with this when Sophie stays over at Nate's apartment to make sure he was ok after he was injured in a fight. She notes that she didn't look under his bed because she knows that's where guys keep all of their "weird kinky stuff." Nate, of course, denies that there's anything under his bed. (There is. Sophie actually looked.)
• Portland: The setting for season five. Also where the show had actually been filmed since season two.
• Post-Adventure Adventure: The episode "The Cross My Heart Job" takes place at an airport. The team had just returned home from a foreign job, and stumbled onto a kidnapping in progress.
• Powerful Pick: In "The Underground Job", Eliot gets in a fight with the mook who was attempting to bomb the mine where both of them are wielding picks.
• The Power of Acting: What Sophie brings to the table, despite being a terrible actress when not on a con.
• Power Trio: By the end of the series, with Nate and Sophie's departure, Parker, Eliot, and Hardison become this. Parker is the new mastermind with Eliot and Hardison following her lead.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Depending on your definition of "villain".
  • The protagonists are a team of criminals, but their crimes only hurt bad people and help good ones, so law enforcement is usually satisfied with the outcome and doesn't see any urgent need to stop them or investigate them afterwards.
  • Sterling doesn't really care if his investigations hurt innocent people. But every single thing he does is perfectly legal.
• Product Placement:
  • A certain cable sports channel in season one.
  • Hardison's use of a MacBook in season two.
  • One of the group members drinks a Jones soda in most episodes; the logo is never facing the camera, but it's a very distinctive label.
  • Not to mention the gratuitous shots of the Hyundai Genesis in both seasons.
    • Reaches an apotheosis in "The Maltese Falcon Job". While Parker and Tara are on their way to the waterfront in a Hyundai Genesis, Tara, out of the blue, asks if they're taking the fastest way to get there. Parker replies in a voiceover, "Yeah, see? There's no traffic this way", while the camera practically makes sweet love to the car in a slow pan across the car's dashboard and front console, lovingly displaying the steering wheel options and leather interior before lingering sexily for several seconds on the built-in GPS display.
  • In the later seasons (about season 4-ish), Microsoft got heavily involved. Rather than using a fictional operating system, Hardison could be seen using actual Windows 7 PCs and several monitors (oddly) have Windows logos stuck to the back of them. The bar the team sits at when doing a briefing also came equipped with a Microsoft Surface (different from the tablet computer they later marketed with the same name) touch computer and Parker name drops Microsoft's cloud storage service during "The Girls' Night Out Job" (back when it was still called "SkyDrive").
• Pretty in Mink: Furs show up when their jobs involve places in high society.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed and invoked in "The Experimental Job". Nate impersonates a college professor in the mark's psychology class and discusses the dilemma, reaching the conclusion that it's always best to betray your partner. Whether or not Nate believes this (he probably doesn't, at least with regards to the Leverage crew, given how the team would never betray each other) is irrelevant, since he was just trying to subconsciously influence the mark to betray his government backers so they'd remove their protection.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Sterling in "The Second David Job". This is what Nate was counting on.
  • Nate in "The Queen's Gambit Job". This is what Sterling was counting on.
  • Latimer (with the help of a released Dubenich) is this during "The Last Dam Job". Once again, Nate plays this to his advantage.
  • A lot of people are really cautious of the team in later seasons. No one more than Sterling, though.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Nate and company lie, cheat, steal, and inflict emotional trauma, yet they're the good guys. Somewhat justified in that (A) their marks are clearly shown to be unremitting jerkasses and (B) what they do, is on the behalf of people that their marks screwed over.
• Proud to Be a Geek: Hardison is the resident hacker and very proud of his geekery, with such lines as, "Age of the geek, baby. We rule the world." He's also a fan not only of Star Wars but also of Doctor Who.
  • In the "15 Minutes Job" he complains about the use of CGI in the Star Wars prequels.
• Pseudo-Crisis: In "The French Connection Job," Lampard realizes that the bag of truffles Nate is selling him is short-weighted. Cue dramatic music and a fade to black, as it seems the con is blown. Then fade in after the commercial and it turns out Lampard thinks it's only short by a couple of ounces, rather than the several pounds it's actually missing. The deal then concludes amicably.
• The Psycho Rangers: Starke's gang from "The Two Live Crew Job."
• Pulling Your Child Away: In "The San Lorenzo Job", Nate is questioning if Hardison suggesting that the mark, San Lorenzo's corrupt President Ribera, is for child labor is stretching credibility a bit...until he sees a young boy cry out in alarm at seeing Ribera and the boy's mother pulling him away.
• Punk in the Trunk: In "The Juror #6 Job", Eliot knocks out two mooks and locks them in the trunk of their own car.
  • In the Rashomon Job, Eliot tells Abernathy that he can spend the night locked in the trunk of his car, which he considers to be nicer than most. This is the better of the two options.
• Put Off Their Food: Parker's attempt at social skills in "The Juror #6 Job". When told to convince Eliot to eat an orange instead of an apple, she chooses this tactic.
• Put on a Bus: Done slightly differently. While Sophie couldn't do anymore cons halfway through season 2, due to Gina Bellman's pregnancy, Sophie is still in almost every episode, appearing in a different part of the world every time the team calls complete with regional get up and cheesy background. It's becoming apparent that while the character was Put on a Bus, she never really left.
  • Kind of amounts to Present Absence in a way at times, given that her absence is escalating Nate's behavior as well.
  • FBI Agent Taggart (one of the Those Two Guys) is something between this and Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. He's not appeared next to Agent McSweeten since season three; his absence is Hand Waved away in season four and five.
• Putting the Band Back Together: "The Homecoming Job", after the previous job's walkaway, "The Second David Job", after they scatter to stay off the radar, "The Beantown Bailout Job", after the previous season finale's split up.
• Rage Quit: In "The Gold Job," Hardison's ridiculously complex con falls apart as the marks get tired of all the hoops he makes them jump through and quit. Nate cites the trop verbatim as he tells Hardison the key to a good con is to keep it balanced and he just made it too much trouble for a goal. Luckily, Nate has a (much easier) backup plan to save the day.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The team. They all worked alone before this.
• "Rashomon"-Style: "The Rashomon Job". Sophie, Eliot, Hardison and Parker remember a heist that happened five years ago, when they were each independently trying to steal an ancient dagger. The details of their stories can vary greatly, like Sophie's accent.
  • Played with in "The Long Goodbye Job", when Nate is being interviewed about the heist by an Interpol agent, he tells her how the plan went awry and the entire team ended up getting killed. However, the agent finds some inconsistencies and presents her own theory about what might have happened. In the end, it turns out that neither story is true, since the real story is even more awesome.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: In interviews and episode commentary, the writers take great pains to point out how few of their villains' atrocities are NOT things that actual white-collar criminals have gotten away with.
  • At one point in 'The Runway Job', Sophie (who is in Uzbekistan) has a conversation via video conference with Tara. A fan commented that the green-screen was obviously fake, only for Word of God to say no, it's not a green-screen, they just had some problems with the monitors.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Sophie was Put on a Bus to "find herself" earlier than the showrunners had originally planned, so actress Gina Bellman could go on maternity leave.
  • The villain in "The Underground Job" has an attorney general in his pocket, since he made major campaign contributions to her. This is a direct jab at the 2010 US Supreme Court ruling rescinding campaign contribution limits for politicians.
  • At the end of "The Rashomon Job", the team decides their next target will be the British CEO of an oil company responsible for a massive oil spill. This certainly has nothing to do with the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Way back in "The Three Strikes Job" part of the plot was that the local baseball team might be moving. At the time, there was discussion in Portland (where the series is filmed and where the stadium used was located) over the future of that city's baseball team, as their field was going to become unusable after extensive renovations to make the then-PGE Park into a venue suited for a Major League Soccer team. Unlike in the show, however, the Portland Beavers later did end up moving away after plans to build a new baseball stadium fell through.
  • The series as a whole is this: it's no coincidence that the series launched very shortly after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
• Real-Person Fic: The Tie-In Novel The Con Job, set at the San Diego Comic Con, is full of references to famous comic book creators. In particular, Stan Lee and Rich Johnston appear as characters, Jim Lee is mentioned, and Eliot impersonates Warren Ellis.
• "Rear Window" Homage: "The Broken Wing Job."
• Reckless Pacifist: Eliot dishes out a lot of painful-looking beatdowns and knockouts to crowds of nameless security guards and law enforcement officers who are just trying to do their jobs. The series glosses over the serious injuries that such beatings would be likely to cause.
• Recurring Camera Shot: The team is often shown from above with them standing in a circle usually when they were about to break up into the roles of their job.
• Redemption Equals Death: Jimmy Ford
• Refuge in Audacity: Hardison any time he has to improvise in character — throwing himself a birthday party to distract everyone in the office building in "The Mile High Job" and convincing the police that bank robbers want 25 large pizzas and the equipment to hold a tail-gate party in "The Bank Shot Job", to name but a few examples.
  • This gets him in a lot of trouble in "The Iceman Job."
• Relationship Upgrade: At the end of season 3, Parker and Hardison finally upgrade following the destruction of Moreau's bomb. Also, Nate and Sophie end up in bed together. They then spend the the fourth season developing that further until it's all nice and official for the fifth season.
• Retcon: For a show that has a truly staggering amount of continuity nods, Hardison's first name being changed from Alex to Alec following the pilot (screen shot from the pilot can be seen here◊) can be kind of glaring.
  • Parkers age was possibly changed as well. The pilot implies Parker is roughly the same age as her actress, late 20's. However the season 3 episode The inside Job states she was a young teenager when she met Archie leach. 12 years earlier in 1998, which puts her in her mid 20's by season 3, a few years younger than previously suggested.
  • Hardison makes several references to his "mama" in the first couple of episodes. From "The Miracle Job" onward, he references "Nana" instead, and in "The Stork Job" it's confirmed that he has no mama, just his adopted Nana.
• Retirony: Jimmy Ford kept saying he would retire after one big score. Let's just say he bit off more than he could chew in "The Radio Job".
• Revealing Injury:
  • In "The Miracle Job," Hardison shoves a gang member, making it clear he has an injured shoulder from beating up the client.
  • In "The Rundown Job", Parker is looking for a bio-terrorist whom she knows has just inoculated himself against the flu virus she is carrying. She walks through the car, bumping each passenger on the arm, until one of them yelps.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized/Right Wing Militia Fanatics: The militiamen in "The Gone Fishin' Job".
• Ripped from the Headlines: John Rogers (aka Kung Fu Monkey) says that the show rips plots from the headlines as much as your Law & Order or CSI does, only instead of focusing on people who get sodomized with violin bows, they focus on White-Collar Crime. The Madoff scandal in particular has been a gold mine for the writers. Kung Fu Monkey often uses it and the story of a man who pretended to be a DEA Agent as an example to skeptics of how outrageous and unbelievable cons do actually happen in real life, and also how gullible people in all walks of life can be.
  • Notable examples being the use of the Supreme Court's campaign finance decision in "The Underground Job."
  • Because of some notoriety at the time, Leverage is one of several shows at the time to dedicate an episode not merely to forged wines, but to the Thomas Jefferson collection.
• Rock Beats Laser: Several times a simple physical attack beats the advanced tech.
  • In " The Homecoming Job", Hardison is about to hack a security webcam stationed near their quarry to prevent it from seeing them, but Eliot saves time by simply chucking a rock at said webcam, effectively disabling it.
  • In "The Last Dam Job"
    • First, Hardison does by using quagga mussels (an invasive species) to shut down a dam instead of a more complicated computer intrusion.
      Latimer: You made it impossible for Hardison to hack us with a computer, so he hacks us with a clam?
    • Later, Hardison and friend's plan involves a bunch of high-tech doodads to break into a vault. Parker and her ally thanks them, but notes all they need is flour, milk, eggs, and sugar. With the only advanced tech involved being Archie's tazer cane, button camera, and a bomb, it works perfectly.
    • Sometimes all the complicated technical and hacking hoops Hardison jumps through to make the team's aliases as real as possible can by blown wide open by someone simply calling up his cousin and asking a few simple questions.
• Room Full of Crazy: Hardison's room when he poses as a Conspiracy Theorist in "The Three Days of The Hunter Job."
• Running Gag:
  • Harlan Leverage III, AKA "Old Nate" is seen and frequently saved and moved when the team moves.
  • Sophie's accent in "The Rashomon Job" keeps changing depending on who is telling the story, with it changing from her natural accent, to Cockney, to Scottish, and finally gibberish (that is Parker's interpretation).
  • Hardison, in the third season, overshooting the mark on numbers whenever he is required to make them increase.
  • Most of the catchphrases count — "You're adorable," "seriously?", "Let's go steal a...", "It's a very distinctive ____," "Dammit, Hardison!"
  • "Don't stab... don't stab... don't stab..."
    • "I didn't even stab him!"
  • The destruction of Hardison's vans.
  • Hardison and Eliot have: "High Five! For morale!". Sometimes they are being serious because they did something awesome, sometimes they are just distracting the other guy so they can trick him.
  • How these hardened thieves are all disgusted by politics.
  • Eliot keeps running into other hitters he knows while hunting for the painting in "The Van Gogh Job."
  • In "The Boiler Room Job," the team keeps pretending to forget or not recognize the mark's nickname—"The Mako"— to hit his Berserk Button. Parker's character even gets his real name wrong every time she speaks to him. The end of the episode has them suggesting multiple embarrassing alternatives when somebody really does forget the mark's moniker ("The mackerel!" "The puffer!""The gefilte fish!")
  McSweeten: "What was it again?"
  Hardison: "I don't know, the Blowfish, maybe?"
  • From "The Reunion Job," Hardison and Eliot are pretending to be health inspectors to get into a Iranian secret police safehouse disguised as a restaurant. With each violation ("cockroach in the shisleek," "shwarma is only lukewarm"), they say with righteous indignation and in the exact same tone of voice each time "That's going to cost ya" and "I've gotta dock ya!" Later in the episode, one of the secret policemen breaks into a locked room and is confused to find 'health inspector' Eliot there. To which Eliot shrugs and says "I've gotta dock ya again!" And then beats him up.
  • Odds are if the team is giving a Mark a list of names the team either scammed money from, are partnered with, or plan to take on, it will be a list of the Mark's victims. And not once did any Mark realize what they were looking at.
  • On the season 4 DVD commentaries, Aldis Hodge kept bitching about always having to eat Chinese food, only to be answered with "It allows us to show passage of time without sacrificing continuity" (they always just ate out of the cartons).
  • The team arguing about the names of various cons and the Noodle Implements they require.
• Russian Roulette: Eliot has a flashback to being tied up playing this in a Season 1 episode. He was the only one playing. Apparently it was still better than going to one of Sophie's plays.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Parker. An incredibly talented thief who plans complicated robberies the same way normal people do crosswords, she nonetheless has serious problems interacting with people on an everyday basis. Because of an abusive childhood (during which she may or may not have blown up her foster parents) and later being raised/trained by a master thief, she comes across in non-heist situations as awkward, disturbing, or somewhere in between.
  • Word of God says she has Asperger's, which would explain a lot of the problems she has interacting with people and her references to having to take a lot of psych tests as a kid.
• Sadly Mythtaken: Saint Nicholas of Bari (who was part of the inspiration for Santa Claus) is the patron saint of repentant thieves (among other things). While the team isn't repentant about continuing to steal, lie, cheat, the team doesn't keep anything they steal and they are trying to be better people and help those who cannot help themselves, so they meet the spirit of the "repentant theif" even if they don't meet the letter of it.
• Sand In My Eyes: Hardison, at the end of "The Snow Job."
• Saving the Orphanage: In "The Miracle Job", the team of former crooks tries to save a church from being bought by a real estate developer. They also save actual orphans in "The Stork Job," which wasn't really an example of this trope.
• Screams Like a Little Girl:
  • A meth dealer in Juan, Texas in "The Bank Shot Job." You'd scream, too, if Eliot Spencer kicked your kneecap in.
  • Also Chaos in "The Last Dam Job" when he is thrown off of said dam.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Many of Leverage Inc.'s client base explicitly state this. For them, it's not about the money; it's about the cruelty they suffered, the loss of their good name or security, the often irreversible harm done to their family, and the fact that the people who cheated them walked away scot-free. It also sets them up in direct contrast to the people who hurt them in the first place. Team Leverage always makes sure they get what they need.
  • One episode ("The First Contact Job") has Nate misread a client's wishes and proceeds to run the con as though he's trying to get a monetary compensation from the mark. Halfway through the episode, after presenting the client with a million dollar check that they successfully swindled off the mark, the client doesn't accept it and Nate realizes what the client really wanted was the recognition and opportunity that was stolen from him, forcing him to devise a new con to make up the gulf in expectations (which goes off well, helping secure the client a lucrative R&D contract in airplane engineering).
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money! The types that the Leverage crew typically goes after, set up in direct contrast to the victims.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The judge in "The Bank Shot Job" relies on this. It's not enough to save him due to the Leverage team.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Could be the motto of Leverage Consulting. Nate even says they pick up where the law leaves off.
• Secret Test of Character: Much of the fifth season, Nate pushes the members of the Leverage team to see what they're capable of on their own, in preparation for his and Sophie's retirement.
• Security Blindspot:
  • Season 3 begins with Nate going to prison, and subsequently finding someone for his team to help. Billy Epping didn't realize that crossing state lines with beer in his trunk was illegal, and was sentenced to a disproportionate sentence by a corrupt judge taking kickbacks from the even more corrupt warden. Epping was being targeted by gangs in the prison because he was found over the dead body of one of their members. Eliot notes that the body was found in a camera blind that only the prison guards should have known about. Nate and co. later exploit those same blinds to escape and make it look like Billy Epping had as well, only for the warden to have egg on his face when Epping is found safe in the prison with the other inmates. They also make it look like the warden took a bribe from Nate to let him go.
  • "The Inside Job", when the team has to retrieve Parker from Wakefield Agriculture, a building guarded by a dreaded Steranko security system, Nate says they need to find a way to get in without tripping the alarms. Eliot suggests that corporate bigwigs might not be willing to sacrifice their privacy, and Hardison quickly discovers that he's right, and directs him to a corner office that he can enter from using the window washing apparatus.
• Seemingly Profound Fool: The Chief of Security in "The Rashomon Job." During each of the team's recollection of the event, he is seen as a quasi-Nate-Sterling-tier security guard who keeps ending up in the right place to unnerve or foil their attempts. Nate reveals while he is good at his job, that night, he was just so flustered because of his crush on Sophie's character and accidentally got in their ways.
• Self-Offense: In "The Beantown Bailout Job", Sophie drives off an attacker who was trying to kill Nate, and Nate chases the attacker out of the apartment. When she hears someone coming back, Sophie slams them in the face with a tray, only for it to turn out to be Nate.
• Sequel Hook: Even though Nate and Sophie have retired in the series finale, Parker, Hardison, and Eliot decide to continue their work. Hardison even mentions recruiting more grifters and thieves and expanding Leverage to have international reach. Plus, there's all those names in the Black Book to take care of...
• Serious Business: Eliot feels this way about MMA fighting and gets annoyed when Sophie expressed her disgust as to how something so violent can be considered a sport. He then goes to explain that MMA is more than just beating the other guy down as there are other areas to make note of, then proceeds to use Parker and Hardison as a live example with a spar (much to Hardison's pain).
• Shame If Something Happened: A man tries to intimidate Nate et al into backing off on their ploys with the threat "Too bad you won't be here next week when the [victim]'s house burns down." (Ultimately subverted in that Nathan then plays a little Xanatos Speed Chess to ensure that the man making this threat is arrested.)
• The Shameless: The mark in "The Miracle Job" is completely shameless. In fact, when Sophie says as much to him, while posing as his publicist, he embraces her delightedly, saying, "Oh, you get me so well." He had hired a group of thugs to beat up a priest whose church he was trying to buy out so he could tear it down. And when the team's efforts to fake a miracle almost have him throwing in the towel, he suddenly has a bout of inspiration, and decides to revise his shopping center into "Bibletopia" instead.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl
  • In "The Nigerian Job" Parker shows no qualms stripping topless in a elevator with Spencer and Hardison in order to change disguises. She also nonchalantly strips down naked in front of Hardison and Sophie in "The Jailhouse Job".
  • In "The Maltese Falcon Job" Tara strips down to only a Modesty Towel to convince a hotel housekeeper that she locked herself out of a room (To get him to open it for her). When he hesitates, she "accidentally" lets the towel fall to her feet giving him (and Eliot and Parker watching down the hall) quite an eyeful.
• Shaped Like Itself: In "The Carnival Job," the mark's daughter says that trying to talk to their eastern European housekeeper is "like trying to talk to an eastern European housekeeper."
• She Really Can Act: Done in-universe with Sophie. She's usually a terrible actress unless she's grifting, but her performance in "The Stork Job" amazed everyone because it was part of the job.
  Eliot: But...she can't act.
  Nate: She can act...when it's an act.
  • She does it again in "The Long Goodbye Job", to the point where she receives a standing ovation from the audience.
  • Also, in "The Long Goodbye Job", Sterling praises that Nate's picked up quite the ability to act, after seeing his performance retelling Parker, Hardison, and Eliot's deaths.
• Ship Tease: Nate/Sophie since day one. Parker/Hardison here and there. Season three ramped it up (including an absolutely adorable dance at the end of "The Reunion Job") and ended with Nate and Sophie in bed together and Parker finally admitting she wants pretzels.
  • "The Rashomon Job" had enough Sophie/Eliot Ship Teases to drive even a casual 'shipper neurotic.
  • "The Two Live Crew Job" has a fair amount of it between Eliot, Parker, and their respective counterparts from Starke's crew. Nate and Hardison.... do not.
    • Though the prospect of Hardison interacting with one of the original casting choices for Chaos — Zoe Saldaña — is intriguing.
  • The D.B. Cooper Job had the same actors playing Parker and Eliot—a popular, but not canonical, ship—play a couple in a flashback.
• Shipper on Deck: Sophie and Eliot are this for Hardison and Parker.
  • In "The Lonely Hearts Job" Eliot sends Sophie flowers and Parker a Venus flytrap, a plant that actually does something, and claims that it was from Nate and Hardison respectively. The Call Back was to season 1 in which Parker didn't understand what a plant did when Hardison said she should get one for the office.
• Shoot Out the Lock: In "The 12 Step Job", Nate shoots out the lock on the window in the rehab facility when attempting to escape from the gangsters.
• Shot in the Ass: Nate's response to Sophie's gunshot in the flashback to when they first crossed paths. She is pissed ("You wanker!").
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: Parker in "The Jailhouse Job" when she takes off her dress. Tara in "The Maltese Falcon Job" when she takes off her towel.
• Shouldn't You Stop Stealing?: Parker sometimes continues to pickpocket things from random people even after they all decide they're only going to use their illegal skills to take down marks who are cheating innocent people. When she does this, Sophie and/or Nate usually tells her to put the things back.
• Shout-Out: Practically Reference Overdosed. See the Shout Out page here.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The producers hired an actual pickpocket to advise them. Most of the villians' Evil Plans are Ripped from the Headlines. On the DVD Commentary, the creators note that every script has to be well-researched.
  • Olivia's first game in "The Queen's Gambit Job" is the Immortal Game. The move the mark predicts (White bishop to d6) is the actual eighteenth move from that game.
  • In The Gone Fishin' Job, Hardison manages to stall his and Elliot's captors by citing Article 89, Paragraph 3 of the Geneva Convention in order to get One Last Smoke— this paragraph, while lacking the Subsection K Hardison cites, discusses the importance of tobacco in the lives of Prisoners of War.
• Shrouded in Myth:
  • The Leverage team themselves, in "The Two Live Crew Job". Starke mentions some of their earlier jobs, and the audience realizes that if you don't know they're the good guys, they sound like one of the best (criminal) crews ever. Also, Starke's hacker gets so panicked at the thought of Sophie being anywhere near his upcoming double-cross he promptly tries to kill her.
  • Also, Nate is so good at keeping himself and his team under the radar that the FBI has absolutely no idea who he is.
  • We also have "The Rashomon Job", in which the main characters (with the exception of Nate) all remember the Chief of Security as being...rather different then he actually was. invoked
• Siblings in Crime: "The Gold Job" has Tommy and Barbara Madsen, the sibling owners of a cash-for-gold company called Gold To Be Sold. The Madsen siblings purchase gold from unsuspecting consumers at far-below market prices, then claim it has been melted when customers attempt to reclaim their items.
• Sidetracked by the Analogy: Mrs Cox, a victim of the mark who helps out the team in "The Boiler Room Job" is informed that they will be running the "Moonwalking Bear": namely, have the mark so focused on one particular thing that he fails to notice anything else, up to a moonwalking bear. For the rest of the episode, she is worried: Where is the bear? Is it going to eat her?
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: A Word of God variant; in answering questions from fans about why the cops and the court system is so ineffective in Leverage-land, John Rogers commented that "There are times you people's faith in law enforcement is genuinely touching." Since the whole premise of the show involves (often not very altered) fictionalized versions of real-life crimes, it's not a surprising attitude to find in the show's creators.
  • In fact the shows writers are open about most of the alterations they make being designed to make them 'less' evil and villainous than the real life crimes they are based on so as to make them more believable
  • In "The Second David Job" -
  Maggie: You can't just make somebody do what you want them to do.
  Eliot: Whoa!
  (everybody starts chuckling)
  Hardison: T-That's what we do. I mean...
  Parker: (pets Maggie's head) You're adorable.
• Similar Squad: The rival team in "The Two Live Crew Job", which is basically Leverage without Sophie. Their Parker is a tiny guy with a goatee (played by the show's pickpocketing consultant), their Eliot is a hot Israeli Action Girl, and their Hardison is white!Jerk!Hardison. In fact, you might even call him...The Wesley?
• A Simple Plan: A common theme. Of course there's a reason it takes five of the world's best thieves to pull these cons off. Even the simplest plans have potential to go all to hell for reasons as simple and unpredictable as a mook of the bad guy calling his cousin or as large as someone trying to crash land the plane they're on-board while running a con.
  • Played with in "The Gold Job" when Hardison's ridiculously complex "new style" con falls apart at the end because the marks get tired of all the hoops to jump through and just quit. Nate has a backup plan, however, that ends up taking them down. Nate tells Hardison that the problem with ultra-complex schemes is that you can never predict how a mark will behave. Thus, Nate starts with the "simple and ugly Plan G" and works his way into more complex ideas but keeps that Plan G as backup if all else fails. He openly tells Hardison that being clever is good but the simplest cons are always the best.
• Sinister Shiv: In "The Lost Heir Job", Eliot plants a shiv on a prisoner to frame him as being a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
• Sins of the Father: "The Fairy Godparents" has Widmark Fowler whose stepfather defrauded several people in a Ponzi scheme. Widmark lost all his friends and is bullied by some of the kids at school whose parents his stepfather defrauded.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • In "The Second David Job," Maggie, temporarily. And, in keeping with the trope namer, she's awesome.
  • And in "The Lost Heir Job" Tara Carlisle, the client's lawyer. Turns out it's Tara Cole, and Sophie sent her to join the team. She actually turns up from time to time as a recurring character in some Sixth Ranger capacity.
  • In "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job," Sterling was the Sixth Ranger, and he too was awesome.
  • In the Season 4 finale an entire crew of Sixth Rangers is brought in to deal with the fact that the mark in question knows all of the team's faces. They included Eliot's one time enemy, Mr. Quinn, Parker's retired mentor, Archie Leach, and Hardison's Evil Counterpart Colin "Chaos" Mason. All of them were, once again, awesome.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Between Eliot and his counterpart in "The Two Live Crew Job", not that you couldn't see it coming a mile away. It's one of the hottest scenes on the show, though it's technically more of a "Slap Slap Strip Slap Slap Strip Slap Slap Press Kiss Handcuffs".
• Sleeping Dummy: In "The Order 23 Job", the crew use a dummy in an MRI machine to stall a pair of US Marshals. However, the ruse is busted when an emergency case comes in and the hospital needs the MRI machine.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Often times critical plot points being played for laughs takes away from the sophistication of some of the cons they pull. This is made worse in the final season.
• Slow Clap: Eliot manufactures one for the mark in "The 15 Minutes Job." Hardison promptly lampshades it.
• Small Name, Big Ego: "Renowned German Filmmaker Gunter Hanzig". From "The Office Job".
• Smart People Build Robots: Resident hacker and electronic wizard Hardison builds Parker, the team's thief, a robot he names after her which can crack a safe even faster than she can. She's resistant to the gift at first, but after he explains it was inspired *by* her, she embraces it and tells him she's going to rename it "Hardy" after him.
• Smart People Play Chess:
  • Nate Ford, the brains of the outfit, frequently plays online chess.
  • And in "The Juror #6 Game", Earnshaw, the lawyer opposing them, also plays chess. Ford uses Chess Motifs to explain her tactics.
• Smokescreen Crime:
  • "The Bank Shot Job": This is wrongfully assumed to be the case. The team are trying to pull a con on the corrupt Judge Roy when the bank they are in is taken hostage by a father and son duo who need money to save the mother from drug dealers. Roy gets into a struggle with the father for the gun and accidentally shoots Nate in the shoulder, causing a panicked Sophie to cry out Nate's real name. This leads to Roy realizing that Nate and Sophie are running a con on him, but he mistakenly believes that the robbers are in on it and that the robbery is simply a cover for Nate to take his money without Roy suspecting Nate's involvement.
  • "The Three Card Monte Job": Nate's father, Jimmy Ford, triggers alarms at three different banks to make the police think that all three banks are being robbed. The Leverage team initially believes that Jimmy's intention is to spread the police thin by obscuring which bank is being hit, allowing Jimmy's team to get in and out with ease. Nate then recalls his father trying to teach him how to play Three-Card Monte, and finally realizes the trick to the game -- the Queen of Hearts card is never actually on the table. This principle is being applied to Jimmy's plan; his goal is not to rob any of the banks, but to steal a key piece of evidence in that could bring down several Irish mob families from a precinct's evidence locker, which is now vulnerable thanks to the chaos caused by the three false alarms. Nate turns Jimmy's plan on its head by allowing him to steal the evidence, but then contacts the Irish families and tells them that if Jimmy isn't paid a hefty sum, it goes right back to the evidence locker, effectively putting a death mark on his father's head. Nate does show mercy by sending his father to Ireland on a steamer under an assumed name.
  • "The Ho Ho Ho Job": The team learns that Hardison's nemesis Chaos is running an identity theft scheme at the mall from which their client was fired. The team stop him by shutting down the mall server, only to discover that this was all a smokescreen — Chaos's true target is the federal depository which Hardison also shut down when he deactivated the mall server.
• Smorgasbord Test: In a non-creature example, one episode sees Parker laid up and bored with a torn ACL. With nothing else to do, she decides to observe the patrons at the bar that the crew is using as their cover, and notices that one patron keeps ordering the same dish every day but always returning it after a single bite. Eventually, she learns that he's a widower and that the dish was something his wife used to cook for him, and he can't bear to eat it anymore because it reminds him of her. In the episode finale, she arranges for him to receive a whole bunch of new dishes so that he can find a new favorite.
• Smug Snake: Very frequently the case with the Villain Of The Week, but Ian Blackpoole (Nate's former boss) deserves special mention; his policies were a direct contributor to the death of Nate's son, but he doesn't even pretend to feel remorse or regret about it, and in fact seems almost surprised that Nate would be angry at him about such a thing.
  • The conman in "The Order 23 Job."
  • Chaos.
  • The judge in "The Bank Shot Job."
  • "The Mako," the villain of "The Boiler Room Job" who combines it with Insufferable Genius by virtue of being the son and grandson of the best con-men of their times, meaning that he knows every trick the Leverage team do, and he will not shut up about this fact. Their solution is to keep him to busy unraveling their cons that he fails to realize Hardison is robbing him blind.
  • Marcus Starke
• Snipe Hunt: A con based on this is in "The Hot Potato Job". The idea was to fake a mole in a high-security company in order to trigger a lockdown. While Sophie and Eliot focused on hunting down the fake mole and distracting company heads, Parker would steal the potato while the security is lax. Turn out, there was a mole after all - the janitor has been stealing money for years and has an account in the Cayman Islands.
• Social Services Does Not Exist: In "The Order 23 Job", Eliot meets an abused kid and tells him that with all the cops around, the kid could go tell them what was happening with his father. The kid tells him that all the cops are friends of his father. Eliot later gets a Marshal to get the kid out for him.
• So What Do We Do Now?: The second season opener reveals that the entire team has been suffering from a combination of this and Chronic Hero Syndrome brought on by Good Feels Good since they broke up at the end of the previous season. Parker even stole the Hope Diamond and then put it back because she was bored and didn't see any point to it.
• Spanner in the Works: In "The Gold Job" Hardison takes over for Nate as The Chessmaster for an episode and plans an elaborate con based on video game theory; dangling a carrot in front of the marks which he keeps pulling away at the last second to sweeten the pot as it goes on. He didn't anticipate the mark getting tired of jumping through hoops and simply quitting. In the episode's denouement Hardison receives the letter Nate sent out earlier in the episode which had three simple steps that would make a successful plan (these steps were in Hardison's plan and led to it not being a failure for the team). Nate then explained that he starts with the ugly plan and then builds it up to his elaborate plans, revealing that he anticipates Xanatos Speed Chess because he accepts that he can't plan for how the marks will react.
  • In the Tap-Out Job the plan goes completely awry when the mark's assistant has a brother living in South Dakota where Nate is claiming to be a fight promoter in, and no one knows who Nate is, leading the mark to figure out Nate is a con-artist.
• Sparing Them the Dirty Work: In season 4, Nate contemplates killing the season's Big Bad as revenge for the death of his father, Eliot warns Nate about the Moral Event Horizon of becoming a killer, but Nate continues with his preparations. A little later, Eliot has the Big Bad at gunpoint and when Sophie asks what he's doing (since he usually doesn't use guns), Eliot responds, "I'm thinking about saving my friend some trouble." After a long pause, he removes the ammunition from the gun.
• Speaking Up for Another: The Juror Number Six Job": Everyone is cross with Parker for going rogue on missions, and to teach her a lesson, Nate forces her to go on Jury Duty when one of her aliases is called up. She discovers something untoward is happening during the trial, and tries to tell Nate, who is brusque and dismissive of her. Hardison points out that his Nana, a Jehovah's Witness, would put him and a suit and tie and tell him, "Alec, you need to talk to people." He reminds Nate that Parker never had that, never learned to socialize, and that as such, she's terrified of everyday interactions with people. He asks Nate to cut Parker some slack, and Nate has Eliot tag along with Parker, where he's forced to admit she was right, and the jury is being rigged.
• Spelling Bee: In an attempt to make a student look good in "The Fairy Godparents Job," Sophie rigged a spelling bee to give him easy words and the other students impossible ones. This backfires when the student's opponent is capable of spelling everything up past Antidisestablishmentarianism, and he is unable to spell "bicycle".
• Spies In a Van: Hardison spends a lot of time in Lucille and later Lucille 2 and Lucille 3, often with Nate or whoever else isn't needed for a particular segment of the job.
  • The FBI surveillance team does this in "The Wedding Job." They're pretty noticeable.
• Spiritual Successor: The premise is a cross between Mission: Impossible and The A-Team, with a little bit of Vengeance Unlimited thrown in.
• Spit Take: The gang cons a reporter into covering a fake story about the U.S. water supply being poisoned in "The Three Days of The Hunter Job." When the reporter announces it on the air, a studio employee with a water bottle does a Spit Take.
  • Eliot has one after Parker tells him she put a razor blade in his apple during Sophie's persuasion tactics lessons in "The Juror Number Six Job."
  • Sophie does a variation when she sneaks away to an art auction only to hear Nate's voice. She chokes on her champagne.
• Spoiled Brat: The mark's daughter in "The 10 L'il Grifters Job."
• Spotting the Thread: Maggie is tipped off that Eliot is working for Nate in "The Second David Job" when she sees that he is wearing the button camera she gave Nate for his birthday.
• Spy Catsuit: Parker often wears black catsuits, fitting her role as the team's thief.
• Squee: Parker actually uses the phrase as part of her Honey Trap for the mark in "The 15 Minutes Job."
• Staged Pedestrian Accident:
  • Eliot does it in "The Juror #6 Job" to ambush two guys who are tailing the mark.
  • Parker does this in "The White Rabbit Job"; pretending to be hit by a car driven by Eliot in order to trigger a panic attack in the mark.
• Staged Shooting: Used twice in "The Beantown Bailout Job." First, "gunshots" were fired at a Corrupt Corporate Executive to convince him that he had hitmen after him, and he should go to the cops. Then, when that plan backfired spectacularly, Sophie "shoots" Eliot so that he could play dead, since the villains of the episode were actually going to shoot him.
• Stairs Are Faster: In an effort to delay Sterling, who's taking the elevator, Nate runs up the stairs and pushes all the elevator call buttons, causing Sterling's elevator to stop at every floor.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Charlie Lawson and Dorothy Parker in "The Van Gogh Job." Although they love each other, they can't be together because it's the 1940s, Charlie is black, and Dorothy is white.
• Star Trek Movie Curse: Referenced in "The Order 23 Job"; Hardison says he'll say the name of an even-numbered Star Trek movie over a hospital intercom for bad news, and an odd-numbered one for good news. Shortly after, a "Dr. Ralph O. Khan" gets paged... invoked
• Stealing from Thieves: The team justifies their many acts of theft and fraud on the grounds that the people they're ripping off have ripped off whichever client hired the Leverage team this week.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Parker is really good at vanishing at a second's notice, so much so that Hardison ends up just planting a GPS locator on her. Even Nate and Hardison manage one in "The Stork Job." It gets lampshaded in "The Mile High Job".
  Eliot: How does she do that?
  Nate: I don't even ask anymore.
  • Sophie is also pretty good at disappearing in an instant when her cover gets blown, as seen in The Gone Fishin' Job and The Underground Job.
• Stealth Insult: "I'll bet you're very good with your hands."
  • "We're moving in on someone. You see, most thieves aren't as smart or good looking as they think they are."
• Stealth Pun: Alec Hardison is a genius-level hacker who is also extremely sarcastic and snarky. He's a "Smart-Alec." (Credit for this has to go to Aldis Hodge, who actually mentions it in an interview.
• Stolen by Staying Still: "The Frame-Up Job" involves a painting owned by a reclusive millionaire that he kept in a vault that only he had access to, but upon his death is found to have been stolen. Nate eventually figures out that the man's son, a contractor, gained access to the vault and built a false wall over the painting, making it appear to be gone.
  • In "The Second David Job" they "steal" the two David's by flooding the display case with gas, so nobody can tell they haven't been removed.
• Straw Hypocrite: The episode with the anti-IRS militia (because the IRS impinges on personal freedom and STEALS our hard earned money) has the group drawn in because the militia's leader/financial backer has been scamming people with massive IRS debts by extorting them for all their credit card information and then stealing their identities.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Parker (with a Genius Bruiser thrown in) and Hardison.
• Stolen MacGuffin Reveal: In general this is a fairly common concept on the show and one of Parker's specialties, she often does this with guns. This is done in an especially awesome manner as the main con in "The Top Hat Job." As the Villain of the Week is busily erasing the incriminating files about the tainted food his company was selling, he forgot an important detail, those weren't the most important thing on the company servers. Hardison steals the company food patents, worth trillions, and downloads them to the baddie's cell phone as they captured Hardison with his hard drive. After Hardison convinces the baddie to walk outside, Parker pickpockets the phone with the information and Nate uses that to blackmail him into pulling the tainted food.
• Stop Saying That!: The word "pitchy" in "The Studio Job".
• Story Arc: Season 3 was the first to implement this, as Nate is charged with taking down Damien Moreau within 6 months or risk having the team killed. As such, the majority of the marks in the season are meant to be building blocks on the way to eliminating Moreau for good. Season 4 had a slightly more subdued arc, as the season's Big Bad was someone who had benefitted from several of Leverage's cons going far back as their first year together, while also allying himself with Victor Dubenich, the man responsible for putting the team together.
• Stuck on a Ski Lift: Invoked in "The Snow Job"; the gang intentionally stops the lift while Parker is on it in order to distract the mark.
• Students' Secret Society: One episode features a college society known as Order of the 206, aka the Dustmen, heavily inspired by the real-life Skull and Bones society at Yale.
  Nate: "I will grind your bones into dust and, with your blood and it, make a paste."
• Stylistic Suck: Sophie's stage acting.
  Parker: Is she injured? In the head?
  • The mark's over-the-top clichéd country music video in "The Studio Job".
  Sophie: I say we take him down for that alone.
  • Invoked in-universe in "The Three Days Of The Hunter Job".
  Sophie: (exasperated) Parker, we went over this. You're not supposed to take it, you're supposed to get caught with it.
  Parker: I don't know how to get caught!
  Sophie: Yeah, I know it's difficult to steal badly. Just... just try!
• Suddenly Always Knew That: Every once in a while, a character (Parker especially) will pull some hitherto unknown skill from the ether, which is usually just Handwaved as being something that they picked up over a long career of professional theft.
  • Eliot too. He's picked up a remarkable number of skills from girls he used to date once.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Actually invoked in-universe to make one of their scams more plausible. In "The Order 23 Job", Ford is pretending to be a doctor. Parker is freaked out by this, and has clearly been watching too much TV:
  Parker: What if someone asks you to deliver a baby?!?
  Ford: I'll just tell them I'm not an obstetrician.
  • In "The Tap-Out Job", Hardison fakes Nate's cover online, like usual. One of the mark's men talks to his cousin Jimmy, who knows "everyone" involved in boxing in South Dakota, but he's never heard of the cover. Hardison says "I can't hack a hick."
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Tara Cole for Sophie, as invoked by Sophie herself.
• Swapped Roles: Sometimes overlaps with Plot Tailored to the Party. The team tries this in a few episodes, most notably in "The Three Days of The Hunter Job," when Sophie masterminds, Parker and Hardison grift and Eliot hacks.
  • Also, Hardison and Nate in "The Gold Job".
  • Sophie and Eliot have to switch roles (or at least pretend to) in "The Hot Potato Job."
  • Deliberately invoked in their second encounter with Sterling. Sterling knows exactly how Sophie and Nate think, so the only way they are able to beat him is by thinking "What would Parker/Hardison (respectively) do?" ^note  Rappel off the side of a building when they were expecting her to take the stairs / play discordant frequencies so the guards are all crippled by the sudden feedback in their headsets (respectively)
• Sweet Tooth: Hardison has a particular taste for gummy frogs. Sophie had to act out as one for a con. Parker is a complete chocoholic, she even got overly hyper after attending a chocolate festival.
• Sword Sparks: Eliot and a Russian mob thug generate sparks while fighting with crowbars in "The Three Card Monte Job".
• Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Played with with Sterling. He almost never looks foolish and the protagonists never manage to humiliate him, even when they get away, because he always manages somehow to get promoted after every encounter with them. Their best encounter with Sterling was in "The Second David Job," when they specifically made helping Sterling get a promotion part of the plan.
  • Sterling is also an interesting example because he doesn't actually care all that much about capturing Team Leverage unless it somehow serves his own purposes and ambitions. Most of the time, he just leaves them alone.
  • Eliot did pummel him brutally at the beginning of one of their encounters, so he does get a little humiliation just not within his field.
    • Sophie got her chance to humiliate him in The Frame-Up Job when he insists on accompanying her while she grifts.
    • And Hardison nearly blew him up with a bomb. Really the only one he doesn't have any emotions towards is Parker.
• Team Power Walk:
  • Happens occasionally, with a nice long shot of the whole team. Most notably, in the middle of "The Carnival Job", which has the team walking out of the smoke in slow-mo. And it is awesome.
  • In a Hilarious Outtake version of "The Carnival Job", the Team Power Walk is turned into a Slow-Mo Power "Skip." It is both awesome and hilarious.

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