Nate and Sophie are talking to an elderly couple who tracked down many stolen pieces of art after World War II, but there’s one they never got: a piece that belonged to his father. He’d searched for it his entire life. It’s being held by a private collector, the head of Montgraft & Associates. They agree to take the case.
At the Montgraft office, Nate and Sophie come in as detectives as a cover so Parker, Eliot and Hardison can look for the painting. Mr. Montgraft’s office is too locked down to break into, so they’re trying to circumvent it. Parker doesn’t like it, but Hardison explains what they would have to do to take it head on, unaware that another team is doing just that even as he speaks. Eliot finishes sawing through the wall and turns around to show the painting, but it’s the wrong one! Someone got there first! As Nate and Sophie come to see what’s happened, one of the members of the other team spots her, and knows who she is.
Back at the pub, the team discusses what went wrong, but Sophie isn’t there and no one knows where she is. Eliot finally gets a hold of her, but there’s a problem. She’s currently in the apartment holding a motion-sensitive explosive device. Parker has a solution to trick the bomb, and Sophie shoos them all out while she sets it off. She raises it over her head, and drops it, an explosion decimating the apartment.
At Sophie’s…Katherine’s funeral, the members of the team say a few things about her, while Nate and Eliot keep an eye out for possible suspects. As the casket is lowered, Sophie comes up behind Nate. After the casket had been closed, she dropped into a hiding place below the display table, and an empty casket was buried.
After she walks off, the man who recognized her comes up. He and Nate exchange a few words and Nate hurries Sophie off. Back at headquarters, she identifies him as Marcus Starke, grifter and forger, a former partner of hers. His method is to put together one-shot teams for a particular job after which they scatter, but usually there’s a practice run, which is what they were doing at Montgraft’s.
She realizes that he’s about to pull one of his favorite scams, the “Mona Lisa Variant”, stealing a painting then making copies and selling all of them. She has Hardison look up all the art auctions in the area. Among the items on sale she sees a Van Gogh, a particular fondness of his. That’s what he’s after. Now they need to get to it first.
At the auction site, Nate, Eliot and Parker canvas security, while Sophie and Hardison watch from Lucille. Suddenly Hardison starts getting some interference from another set of comms, while another thief makes off with the manager’s credentials, right out of Parker’s hand! Meanwhile Eliot runs into a Hebrew speaking woman, while Starke comes up to Nate.
Sophie urges Nate not to tell Starke what they do, and just let him think they’re common criminals. The two teams start getting in each other’s way, but the manager suddenly notices he’s missing a few things and decides to close for the day. Then he calls for tightened security.
At headquarters, Nate begins going over the other members of Starke’s team: a thief named Apollo, an ex-Mossad commando named Mikel Dayan, and hacker Colin Mason, aka “Chaos”. Nate, his pride on the line, declares that they are going to get to the painting first. To do it, they need to get to it tonight, before the auction. Elsewhere, Starke gives his team the exact same objective.
That night as Nate poses as a drunk banging on the gallery doors, the others sneak in. Things go awry when one of the motion sensors goes off, but the guards find a bird loose in the building. They turn the sensors off until they can get it out. Parker is wondering how the bird got in when she runs into Apollo…with a birdcage. Eliot finds Mikel in the basement, and Hardison and Mason start a hacker war, and Starke finds Nate outside with the guards…introducing himself as Nathan Ford, which Nate can't do anything about in his guise as a drunk.
As Eliot and Mikel fight, Apollo goes for the painting, Parker arriving moments later, but she can't get to him because Mason actives the laser grid, and disables Lucille. Everything seems to be falling apart, and just then a cop car pulls up.
Sophie: Oh, I think he has one more.
Starke is astonished to see she’s not dead. Parker makes it through the lasers and grabs Apollo, and the painting, while Hardison reboots with a hand-cranked generator, and Eliot subdues Mikel. All of them, posing as cops, walk their counterparts out as if arresting them, and take the painting to “dust for prints”.
Nate and Sophie tell Starke how they initially thought he was the one who set the bomb, but after getting to know his team, they were able to find footage of Mason sneaking into her apartment. Starke isn’t too concerned about it, until his car explodes, right about when he was planning to get into it. Mason makes a run for it. Nate and Sophie arrange a trade, Starke's team for the first painting he stole. They’ll even throw in the Van Gogh. Faced with that, or losing his street cred, he agrees.
Nate brings the clients back to the pub, and Starke presents them with their painting, for which they are extremely grateful.After they leave, Starke remarks that the Sophie Devereaux he knew would never do something like that, and Sophie remarks that she died. Starke is still happy that he got what he wanted, but as he leaves it turns out they gave him one of the fakes. Apollo had taken Parker’s phone earlier and they were able to use that to locate Starke’s hideout.
Meanwhile, Mason is trying to get on a flight out of the country, but there’s an issue with his checked baggage, which turns out to be a crate with the real Van Gogh, and four copies. Mason tries to come up with an explanation as the TSA agent simply stares at him.
Sophie is in the graveyard, thinking about who she is, noting that Nate's the closest thing she's had to a real friend and he doesn't even know her real name. She needs some time to put them to rest before she can continue.
Tropes stolen in this job:
- Action Girl: Mikel.
- Actor Allusion: The "Kobayashi Maru" handle is a nod to Wil Wheaton’s work with Star Trek.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Parker and Apollo actually meet up in one.
- Almost Kiss: Between Nate and Sophie right at the end.
- Attending Your Own Funeral: Sophie does this after she survived the bomb attack.
- Badass Israeli: Mikel was part of the Mossad.
- Bilingual Bonus: A good portion of Mikel's dialogue is in Hebrew. Most of it is subtitled, but one line when Starke is briefing his team about the Leverage crew goes untranslated: "You led me right to the hands of Eliot Spencer, you son of a bitch."
- Casual Kink: Mikel doesn't seem particularly upset when she finds that Eliot's taken advantage of the chance to handcuff her to himself while they were kissing. Later on, she holds up the handcuffs suggestively.
- The Coats Are Off: Both Mikel and Eliot ditch their jackets before they throw down.
- Combat Pragmatist: Chaos knows he isn't a Hitter, so he just sends a bomb to kill Sophie.
- The Dreaded: Sophie for Chaos. The moment he hears Starke is planning on bringing her in, he moves to remove her from play.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Ironically, it's what clued Nate and the rest of the team that Starke wasn't the one to try to kill Sophie. He, and apparently the rest of the criminal underworld, believe that Leverage is just another crew of criminals and thieves. Even after returning a painting this episode's client had spent decades and seeing the joy it brings them, he still can't understand why Sophie is doing what she's doing and can only see the laws they broke in order to do it. As he puts, they're all 'still thieves.'
- Evil Counterpart: Most of Starke's crew to Nate's. Mikel to Eliot, Chaos to Hardison, and Apollo to Parker. Starke himself pulls double duty as both grifter and mastermind, but plays more of an opposite number to Nate.
- External Combustion: Chaos plans to complete his double cross by detonating a bomb in Starke's car. It goes off, but Starke's been detained by Nate and Sophie so he's not in it.
- Friendly Rivalry: With the thief business generally being Nothing Personal, the Leverage crew doesn't really hold anything against Apollo, Starke, or Mikel - after things wrap up, Mikel and Eliot are having a beer and comparing scars, and Apollo and Parker are seeing who can pick locks faster.
- Funeral Cut: After the bomb goes off, we cut to Sophie's funeral. Subverted in that she's Faking the Dead and shows up in mourning costume.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy:
- Averted with the the head guard. He immediately stops the auction early when he realizes he lacks his badge. He wants to increase the number of guards tonight, use the lasers and motion detectors, and is willing to call the police for a patrol car watching the place.
- The guard the head employs, however, are this. They just buy that the team are cops and somehow were already inside the building after lockdown without informing them, and they need to take the priceless painting for prints without any paperwork.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Starke's hideout is discovered because Apollo took Parker's phone and they didn't pull out the battery.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Eliot and Mikel go from exchanging blows to making out.
- Journey to Find Oneself: Sophie begins hers here.
- Laser Hallway: Part of where the Van Gogh is being kept.
- Mirror Character: Starke and Nate have a lot of similarities. When Sophie describes the man as a brilliant man whose pride has been hurt and personally challenged, it will lead him to do a bigger, more dangerous con, Eliot asks if she's talking about Starke or Nate. This is referenced by interspersing clips of Nate and Starke giving pretty much the same speech and even putting their suit coat on in the same fashion.
- Noodle Incident: Whatever brought both Mikel (working as a sniper) and Eliot (who was shot by a sniper) to Myanmar in 2003.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Chaos delivers one to Starke after the doublecross is revealed.Chaos: And by the way, Sophie Devereaux is the one everyone was afraid of!
- Sexy Soaked Shirt: Both Eliot and Mikel wind up mostly stripped and soaked in water.
- Sherlock Scan: Both Mikel and Eliot figure out how the fight would play out simply by looking at the other's stance and line of sight. Presumably they're very distinctive stances and lines of sight.
- Shout-Out: Government officials call Mason “Kobayashi Maru”.
- That Man Is Dead: Sophie says this of her old self.
- Trial Run Crime: Starke's M.O. is after putting a team together, he sends the team out on a practice run before going after his real target. Problem is, for the practice run, Starke's team got the painting the Leverage group was trying to recover. So they have to figure out his real target, steal it before he does, and use it to recover the first painting.
- Token Evil Teammate: Although everyone on Starke's team is the Evil Counterpart, Chaos is the worst. While the rest of the crew are pretty affable after the con, he was planning to double cross the rest of his team and kill Starke. He also tried to kill Sophie.
- Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Lampshaded and subverted. Mikel jokingly asks Eliot if he would hit a girl. He replies only if she hits him first - one brief exchange of blows later, he says that counts and the fight begins in earnest. He was only hesitant to fight her in the first place because of her reputation.
