- Eliot: She's gonna buy the jury.Nate: Not if we…steal it first.
Three years ago, a man named Ernesto Vargas collapses and dies.
In the present, Parker is having a bit of an attitude problem when one of her aliases, Alice White, gets a jury summons. Nate and Sophie decide it would be good for her and so she’s stuck with it.
At the trial, Ernesto’s widow, Gloria, is trying to get a settlement from William Quint (Brent Spiner), the manufacturer of a supplement Ernesto was taking which she believes caused his heart attack. As Parker sits there, she notices a tiny camera in the defense lawyer’s briefcase.
When she gets back to the office, Parker tries to persuade the team to intervene, but they are disinclined to act ("Parker, listen, there is not some evil conspiracy lurking behind every routine civic activity."). Eventually, Nate sends Eliot to make she doesn’t do anything rash. They tail Quint and find an entire setup keeping tabs on the trial. The one running the show is Tobey Earnshaw, heiress to a pharmaceutical corp her father runs, but she’s doing a little extra behind his back. She’s already sunk $20 million into Quint's company, and if he loses the case, she’s out all of it. To keep that from happening, she’s rigging the trial.
Quint, however, is rapidly losing interest and seems more inclined to settle the case, but Earnshaw won’t let him. Parker and Eliot tap their feeds and Hardison is impressed with the setup. A long lingering shot highlights Earnshaw's chess board.
With the proof that there is in fact some evil conspiracy behind the curtain of every routine civic… Nate decides to take the case, stealing the jury before Earnshaw can buy it. His plan is to have Parker stall the trial, which means she needs to gain the trust of the other jurors. Easier said than done, given her lack of social skills. Hardison and Eliot dig through jurors' trash for clues on which member might be compromised. Finally, he sends Sophie (his queen) after Quint (Earnshaw's king). She presents herself as a representative from Mumbai international, a real Indian pharmaceutical company, making him a much more attractive offer. Quint is very interested.
Hardison finds evidence that Earnshaw has bought off the jury foreman. Parker lifts a bunch of stuff from the other jurors and plants it on him. When it comes up, the other jurors demand his removal. As Parker makes herself helpful, the other jurors decide to make her the new foreman.
With her pawn removed, Earnshaw calls Gloria’s lawyer and makes him a "retirement" offer to abandon the case (queen takes knight). The missing lawyer will cause a mistrial, starting the whole process from the beginning, which Gloria won't be able to afford, so Hardison comes in as her new "court-appointed" lawyer.
As Earnshaw tries to find out who this new piece is, Sophie makes Quint increasingly uneasy about his position once Earnshaw completes her buyout. He goes to talk to Sophie, but Earnshaw notices and starts investigating her. Sophie brings Quint to the “Mumbai International" offices (actually Leverage HQ) to speak to their home office (a green screen in the next room), then presses him to settle, but the next day, they find that Earnshaw bought out the real Mumbai International. Now the only option left is to win the trial.
Parker and Hardison head off to court while the rest delay Quint, take out the goons tailing him, and steal his phone by pretending to help him fix his car (which they sabotaged). Meanwhile, Hardison cross-examines Quint’s expert witness, questioning his reliability by pointing out that he’s on the no-fly list. He then gives a heartfelt closing statement, and returns to the Leverage office. This is endgame, and Parker will determine the outcome. As both sides watch the jury deliberation, Earnshaw thinks about everything that’s happened, almost as if someone else were… just then, Parker calls for a vote, and they see a result in favor of Quint. However, having discovered that Quint is trying to sell his company to a competitor, she pressures him to sell on the spot (before telling him they've won the case). Quint folds, playing it safe and taking the payout.
In court, the jury returns, and Earnshaw is stunned when the verdict comes back in Gloria’s favor to the tune of $5 million. It turns out that Hardison doctored the recording by combining Parker asking the jury for a vote in favor of Quint and a recording of the jury raising their hands when Parker asked if they wanted pizza for lunch. Earnshaw blames Quint since she tracked him visiting her competitors, but it turns out that Sophie was taking Quint’s stolen phone to various offices when she checked his GPS. As she and Quint come out of the courtroom, Quint is shocked to see Sophie, realizing he's been duped, while Nate comes up to Earnshaw and presents the king from her own chessboard to her. Checkmate.
Back at headquarters Nate congratulates Hardison for winning the trial without cheating ("I hacked a government no-fly list and used it to humiliate a witness!" "Excessively. Without excessively cheating.") while Parker gets a message from Peggy suggesting they go out for some coffee. It seems Parker has actually made a friend outside Team Leverage.
Tropes stolen in this job:
- Alice Allusion: Parker's alias Alice White debuts in this episode. While playing the role, she wears a headband that visually evokes the well-known Disney version of Lewis Carroll's Alice. The Chess Motifs throughout help too.
- Just like Alice, Parker is encountering an unfamiliar world with strange rules and people she's not sure how to deal with...
- Amoral Attorney: Two examples: Gloria's, who takes Earnshaw's bribe to leave, and Quint's, who's taking instructions from Earnshaw herself.
- Chess Motifs: Nate explains the con like a chess game and Earnshaw is seen playing with a chess board throughout. Also in keeping with the episode's subtle Alice Allusion.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: Parker's insistence that someone is using surveillance and planning to fix the trial strikes everyone else as overly paranoid, but she turns out to be right.Nate: Apparently, uh, there is an evil conspiracy lurking behind the curtain of every routine etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
- Dumpster Dive: Hardison and Eliot go searching for something to find out which juror Earnshaw bought.
- Evil Counterpart: Tobey Earnshaw is as much The Chessmaster as Nate, right down to using an actual chessboard in her HQ to track her progress. Nate admits that, were he trying to steal a trial, he'd use the same methods she's using. At one point during the con, Earnshaw almost figures it out, noting how her every move seems to have been met with a counter-move, as if she had some unseen opponent in the game, but she dismisses it as paranoia. It's only at the end, when Nate walks up to her and hands her the King from her own set, that she realizes her instincts were right.
- The comparison also reveals just how incredibly good Nate and the team are, though; Earnshaw may be smart, but her operation of larger resources and numerous employees is outdone by a team of five people, with the case being won because a man with no legal experience used unrelated information to cast doubt on a witness. It's a small wonder they quickly become The Dreaded.
- If Only You Knew: Earnshaw's tech guy finds Hardison's fake lawyer information and concludes that it's real despite the obscene price a lawyer of those qualifications would be able to demand, simply because the alternative is that "Gloria Vargas found some guy who created a CIA-level cover story and fake identity." This being Hardison, that's more or less exactly what really happened.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Nate picks Quint's pocket to get his cell phone. Pulling his hand from the pocket, he tosses the phone to Sophie, driving by with her hand sticking out the sun roof. All in one smooth motion.
- Jury and Witness Tampering: Done by both sides.
- Jury Duty: Hardison's fake identities for the team are so good that one of Parker's gets called up.
- Karma Houdini: Interestingly zigzagged. Earnshaw goes down hard but, while trying to rig the trial, she wasn't the one who marketed the dangerous drug. That was Quint, and while he is declared liable and forced out of his company, Earnshaw did give him a payoff (not as much as he wanted, but not a small amount either) in order to acquire it before the verdict, which he presumably gets to keep instead of being wiped out like he would have if he’d still had the company and a suddenly uninterested buyer.
- To be fair, Quint wanted to settle the case and pay the widow. Hardison does tell us that Earnshaw sunk millions of dollars into the development of "Fast Life", without board approval, and it's not hard to imagine that the drug's dangers are due to Earnshaw pressuring Quint to rush development and release of the supplement. Quint gets off because he's not a completely amoral monster. He was under Earnshaw's thumb, or he would have already settled.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: Quint is an unusual combination of this trope and Corrupt Corporate Executive.
- Noodle Incident: We never see the job the crew is coming back from at the beginning but given that it apparently involved an elevator nearly decapitating Eliot and Nate, it must have been utterly spectacular.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: At first, Nate is hesitant to investigate Parker's claims about the trial. Sophie has to convince him after realizing that this is the first time Parker has ever asked for help.
- Punk in the Trunk: Eliot casually takes down both of the men Earnshaw has following Quint and dumps them in their own trunk.
- Running Gag: Parker forgetting that Alice White is her alias:Parker: Who’s Alice White?
Everyone else: You are!- Comes full circle at the end when Parker proclaims that "Alice made a friend" and Eliot has to remind her that she, Parker, made a friend.
- Speaking Up for Another: 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. Sophie notes aloud that Parker has never once asked them for help. 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.
- Unconventional Courtroom Tactics: Hardison's entire plan is to stall the trial by introducing copious amounts of evidence. When he runs out of stalling tactics, he discredits an expert witness by pointing out that they're on the government no-fly list due to a list of embarrassing drunken incidents, which Hardison reads aloud to the court. Does it have anything to do with the witness's medical credentials? No. Does it work? Flawlessly.
