We open with Nate in a building surrounded by law enforcement, a swarm of police and federal agents. Cut to 12 hours earlier at Latimer Diversified.
Latimer called Nate with a job at the end of The Gold Job, which Nate declined. Here, he's been given a face to face meeting with Latimer some time later, interrupting a dinner date with Sophie. After Nate declined, Latimer hired someone else to retrieve the prize. Nate knows, but we don't, who that someone is. He got in fine on Friday, then went dark. Nate thinks he's holding out for more money, but Latimer thinks he's stuck and come Monday morning he's certain to be caught and arrested, probably die in prison. "Like I said, not my problem." And Nate leaves.
Back at the loft, Sophie is upset that he missed dinner and further surprised and upset when Nate picks up a suitcase, and asks where they're going "at this time of night". Nope, it's Nate alone, because it's something personal.
Cut to the team (sans Nate) meeting at the loft. Hardison informs them that Nate is going to the US Patent Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Nate tried to cover his tracks, but we also learn that Nate's been going over the building's blueprints, which he got from one of Latimer's subsidiaries. They look at the new, automated security system and see that this is, minimum, a two man job. They get the bare bones of the plan for getting in and head to Alexandria.
Cut to Alexandria, where Nate is casing the building. The rest of the team has arrived and ignore his objections, insisting they're going with him. Nate has a... plan. Pull the fire alarm, go in as his arson inspector cover. Instead, Eliot, Hardison, and Parker go up on the roof to go through with their own plan to get to the server room. They lower Hardison down a very long fall, where he can't touch anything before he gets to the floor.
In the server room, Hardison logs into the CCTV feed. The system only has a two-hour buffer, giving them a time limit on the heist. He can only loop two hours of footage. Upstairs, Nate and Eliot approach a steel door that is unaccountably open. Nate insists on going in alone. Walking through a darkened cubicle farm, he approaches Latimer's man. His father.
It turns out that Jimmy's not so much trapped in the building so much as he's struggling to find the twenty year old patent application Latimer sent him after. They don't know what the patent is for, but they know who sent it in and when. They have to find that one application among the nearly half a million dead applications in the building.
Down in the basement, Eliot runs into a surprise — two men who immediately attack. Eliot quickly beats them, but has a harder time with a surprise third. Also, in the warehouse, Sophie finds Hardison gleefully digging through prototypes that inventors unnecessarily sent in along with their applications. She drags him back upstairs as Eliot searches his attackers for info. They're local hires, sent in to take whatever Jimmy found and leave him. Eliot thinks it's hinky: why hire three ex-cons to take something from a seventy year old man when you have your own private security force?
Sophie and Hardison go to the office where a single man was given the shit job of scanning in those 422 thousand patent applications. Hardison calls him, pretending to be with the DOD office of the Inspector General. They tell him that a patent application was flagged as top secret and claim that he's missed their meeting and they're pissed. They use this as leverage to learn about the filing protocol, narrowing their search down to a few hundred applications in a single cabinet. They're about to grab the lot of them and head back to Boston when the cops arrive. The goons set off the motion sensors when they came in, and now the team is staring at state troopers, feds, even a tank.
Eliot tosses a package out the window, it's a ringing cell phone so Nate can talk to the officer in charge, FBI Special Agent Dennis Powell. Nate identifies himself, through a voice scrambler, as "Honest American Looking for Justice". He pretends to be fed up with US government and Eliot fires a few shots randomly into the air. He claims to have hostages.
Nate demands law enforcement leave, give him $2 million, and provide him a fully fueled helicopter. The fed asks for a hostage in return. Hardison whips up a fake Patent Office ID for Sophie using an electric grill down in the invention room, promises to back up the ID with his tech skills, and Sophie heads outside wearing the pregnancy belly Hardison showed her when she first found him down there. It can even fake a heartbeat and a kick.
Outside, Sophie makes contact with the feds, filling them in on Nate's fake hostage crisis story, including some numbers. 120, 215, 322, 416. They call in a profiler. On the inside, Nate and Sophie set up a plan to escape out the south entrance, asking Hardison to run a Radio Play using the tech he can find. Nate and Jimmy argue, getting into a screaming match. Nate is silenced when Jimmy tells him he only took the job because Latimer threatened Nate's life.
Down in the basement, the toughest of the three goons wakes up and starts working to free himself from where Eliot taped him to a pipe. Outside, Sophie tells Nate the feds are planning to move in, so he has her start a turf war, telling the agent that the numbers have something to do with the Koran, that "he kept talking about jihad". Powell calls in Homeland Security. DHS Special Agent Elaine Delacourt immediately takes over the situation, leaving Powell nonplussed.
In the invention room, Hardison complains while searching through tech and Parker plays with a segway with a seat. Eliot calls Nate from the server room, saying that the motion sensors didn't get tripped. Instead, someone called the cops in. Latimer used Jimmy to force Nate into the building, then called in the feds to put more pressure on Nate... for some reason. And Eliot doesn't think Latimer's the one calling the shots on this job, that this isn't his style.
Outside, Sophie informs Nate that Homeland Security isn't buying Sophie's story and he tells her to scram. She fakes labor from her fake pregnancy. Delacourt wants to question her, but the ambulance pulls away and Powell shows that he doesn't really appreciate her style. In the basement, the goon breaks free and starts freeing the other two. Upstairs, Hardison and Parker are setting up... something using the tech he scrounged from storage and Nate sends Eliot to buy them more time.
Jimmy and Nate talk about how the world has changed, and maybe Jimmy's past his prime. Then Nate tells Sophie to make her move and she bolts from the ambulance, leaving the fake pregnancy gizmo behind. Eliot calls to the outside on a handheld radio, quoting Die Hard, pretending to be a Boston cop caught inside, telling them not to send anyone in. It's not a lone nutjob, but a large number of terrorists with an arsenal. This immediately triggers friction between Delacourt and Powell. He wants to hold off, she insists on going in.
As they start going in, Parker and Hardison set off their device. They blow out a window, the meat smoker blows out a lot of smoke, and the faulty LED lights start exploding, mimicking gunfire, so the feds pull back. Eliot mocks them ("Welcome to the party, pal!") and Delacourt chews him out, only then the three goons show up. Eliot takes advantage of this, letting the goons beat the shit out of him in the glass walkway in full view of the agents outside. They beat the shit out of him for a while, then make the mistake of pulling him down the walkway to where the cops can't see him. Delacourt now believes Eliot's story and tells everyone to stand down.
Three punches later, the goons are back on the floor and Eliot's back on the radio with Powell. That's when Jimmy finds the application they've been looking for. It's a giant water filter meant to go in a dam. Nate wonders why a finance guy would want water tech, then calls Hardison telling him to make sure the glass walkway is unlocked so they can exit by the other building and Sophie, asking if she's found them a ride. She's driving Lucille. Eliot grabbed a cell phone off one of the goons, only made one call, to Rockford, Illinois. And Hardison and Parker are ready with phase 2.
Eliot tells Powell that the terrorists are going to the west entrance, going to shoot their way out. The motion sensors to the west are going nuts, so Powell, ignoring Delacourt's orders to stay put, heads to the west entrance with his men. Armed men run into the Patent Office along the glass walkway as the team, on the next floor up, belly crawls along the floor in the other direction. The feds post up at the west entrance. And out walks the roomba butler. Thinking it must be rigged with a bomb, the feds shoot it to pieces.
Expecting an exit empty of everything but Sophie, the team instead walk out to a large crowd staring up. Jimmy called a radio station saying he was going to throw a million bucks of the roof, then used the crowd and Nate's confusion to grab the patent and disappear. Nate goes back over the clues and figures out who's behind Latimer pulling the strings; they have to find his father, fast. Inside, the feds find the three goons bound and unconscious next to Eliot's radio.
Nate then gets a phone call from Jimmy. Nate tries to warn him, but gets cut off. They know Jimmy's near the waterfront, but not exactly where. They pile in the van and head out. Jimmy meets with his contact in a very large, empty warehouse. The contact tosses him a sack. Hardison narrows down his location to one of three warehouses, and Nate demands ownership records. Jimmy opens the sack to find it's full of money, but clarifies that the deal is $2 million and his son's life. When asked where Nate is, he just says "somewhere safe". He tosses over the patent and gets a club to the back of the head from another man. The two men walk out, one making a phone call saying Nate didn't show.
When Hardison pulls up the records, Nate identifies the warehouse in question, saying it's a shell company "he" owns. Jimmy groggily gets to his feet, answering Nate's phone call and looking around at a warehouse with a lot of strategically placed barrels marked "flammable". Nate tries to get his father to get out of the building, and Jimmy spots the bundle of C4 and a timer with 24 seconds left. The van pulls up outside and Nate jumps out just as the building explodes, sending him flying.
We then get a long dolly into a man in a federal prison cell ending a cell phone call. Dubenich, the first corrupt millionaire the team ever took down.
- Back for the Dead: Jimmy may be an asshole, but he loves his son.Jimmy: This one time I actually managed to do something good. Tell them stories about me. Tell them stories about how much Jimmy Ford loves his son.
- Call-Back: Parker still believes all of the ridiculous conspiracy theories Hardison and Eliot throw at her.
- Chekhov's Gun: The various inventions Hardison shows to Sophie. Even the roomba with a butler on.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Jimmy pulls a last minute double cross. Of course. Subverted, in fact, since Jimmy knew a double cross was coming and wanted to be certain Nate wouldn't be there.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Hardison claims the government is holding on to impossibly advanced technology at the Patent Office, covered by the government secrets act. He and Eliot then start messing with Parker who, as usual, believes the wackiest of their lies.Parker: I'm gonna steal the time machine.
- Curse Cut Short:Eliot: Yippie kai yay mother-Jimmy: FOUND IT!
- Forced to Watch: Nate and the team arrive at the warehouse with roughly ten seconds left on the bomb timer, and Nate is forced to watch as the building explodes with his father still inside.
- Found Family: Nate says the job is personal. Eliot points out Latimer knows about the rest of them, so they have to participate. Hardison points out that they have to have each other's backs.
- How We Got Here: The cold open gives us Nate in an impossible situation, surrounded by cops. Then cut to 12 hours earlier.
- Ironic Echo: When DHS shows up, she takes over the situation saying, "Was I unclear?" when the FBI lead protests. He repeats it back to her when Sophie's ambulance pulls away.
- It's Personal: Nate says this word for word to Sophie as he leaves the loft with a suitcase. Latimer's second pick was Nate's father. In fact, not a second pick, just a choice to deliberately force Nate into the job.
- Jurisdiction Friction: Nate engineers this, getting the FBI to call in DHS by pretending it's Islamic terror rather than a lone nut.
- Mood Whiplash: The episode has a lot of lighthearted elements, like Eliot's John McClane impression and Hardison and Parker treating the patent office as their own personal toy store. This all comes crashing to a halt with Jimmy Ford in the warehouse at the end.
- Retirony: Nate tells Jimmy that the world's more complicated now, his old smash and grab style won't cut it any more. Jimmy muses that maybe he didn't have one last job in him after all, that the world has passed him by...
- Rule of Three: Parker's insistent belief that the Patent Office has a time machine. First at the loft, second when they head into the Patent Office, third when she claims Jimmy must have used it to escape.
- Shout-Out:
- Eliot copies Die Hard as an additional layer of distraction. He even quotes the movie! Hell, the cop he's talking to is named Powell!!
- Parker's dream sequence where Jimmy uses a time machine to escape to 1962, the year before the first episode of Doctor Who, has a soundtrack very similar to the show's theme. Then she asks Hardison why he's wearing a bow tie.Hardison: It's a bow tie. Bow ties are cool.
- Thicker Than Water:
- Despite repeatedly telling Latimer he doesn't care, Nate does end up going after his father, just as Latimer knew he would.
- Jimmy only took the job because Latimer threatened Nate's life.Jimmy: I don't care if you need me or not, you're my son. This is what I have to do.
- Wham Shot: Latimer's partner being revealed none other than Victor Dubenich, the team's first mark.
