Leverage 506
Sep. 10th, 2021 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhen Emily and I split up in mid-2017, we'd just finished watching season 4 of Leverage. (Or maybe we'd just finished watching the commentaries for season 3. Regardless.) For various reasons I never got around to watching season 5. I'd intended to, when I started a rewatch with Erin a couple of years ago, but the show turned out not to be to her taste.
Cue this summer: done with She-ra (fun!), bored with Supergirl, stalled out on Arrow until I can catch up on Flash with Erin and watch the crossover. And ready, apparently, to let go of the whole "this is the show i watched with emily" thing.
So I'm watching it. And it feels ... slight. The first four episodes just don't feel like they have the dramatic heft of the earlier seasons. The fifth episode, "The K Street Job," was great but that's at least in part because watching the team try to actually engage in the political process, in their own inimitable ways, was just hilarious. But it was promising. It felt like the show had maybe found its feet after a shaky opening.
And then came episode 6, "The D.B. Cooper Job."
This is a downright weird episode.
The client is one of the FBI agents who sporadically turn up and get credit when the Leverage team catch a bad guy. (He's aged! It's almost like it'd been five years since he turned up in his first episode.) Seems his father was the agent assigned to track down D.B. Cooper, and he'd like to find Cooper before his dad dies. So the Leverage team engages in straught-up detective work, instead of planning and running a con.
You get your "running a con" goodies this episode from the hijacking flashbacks: Nate as the FBI agent, Parker as the stewardess that Cooper communicated with on the plane, etc etc. It works, and it's neat to see the actors getting to do different things, but it's... it's hamstrung by the knowledge that they can't actually solve the mystery.
Except that they do, and it fits together fine, and it ends up in one of those "but we won't tell anyone" things that ... feel like they go against the spirit of Leverage. I don't get a sense that any wrongs were righted, or that the world's a slightly better place because of the team. Which is, I guess, part of what I'm looking for in a Leverage episode.
But: it's an interesting piece of storytelling, from a mode that the show generally doesn't operate in. I think I liked it? I will certainly remember it.
Cue this summer: done with She-ra (fun!), bored with Supergirl, stalled out on Arrow until I can catch up on Flash with Erin and watch the crossover. And ready, apparently, to let go of the whole "this is the show i watched with emily" thing.
So I'm watching it. And it feels ... slight. The first four episodes just don't feel like they have the dramatic heft of the earlier seasons. The fifth episode, "The K Street Job," was great but that's at least in part because watching the team try to actually engage in the political process, in their own inimitable ways, was just hilarious. But it was promising. It felt like the show had maybe found its feet after a shaky opening.
And then came episode 6, "The D.B. Cooper Job."
This is a downright weird episode.
The client is one of the FBI agents who sporadically turn up and get credit when the Leverage team catch a bad guy. (He's aged! It's almost like it'd been five years since he turned up in his first episode.) Seems his father was the agent assigned to track down D.B. Cooper, and he'd like to find Cooper before his dad dies. So the Leverage team engages in straught-up detective work, instead of planning and running a con.
You get your "running a con" goodies this episode from the hijacking flashbacks: Nate as the FBI agent, Parker as the stewardess that Cooper communicated with on the plane, etc etc. It works, and it's neat to see the actors getting to do different things, but it's... it's hamstrung by the knowledge that they can't actually solve the mystery.
Except that they do, and it fits together fine, and it ends up in one of those "but we won't tell anyone" things that ... feel like they go against the spirit of Leverage. I don't get a sense that any wrongs were righted, or that the world's a slightly better place because of the team. Which is, I guess, part of what I'm looking for in a Leverage episode.
But: it's an interesting piece of storytelling, from a mode that the show generally doesn't operate in. I think I liked it? I will certainly remember it.