#get him eliot!!!!

[hedgiwithapen]

And Leverage fixes the Flash canon in whatever way you choose. I’m not saying Elliot should punch Harry Wells. But I’m not NOT saying that

follows The Central City Job

While the cop—Joe, Allen had called him-- still held the forged warrant, Eliot surged forward. His first blow caught the man in the face, and Eliot knew without waiting that he’d wear a black eye for days. The second lunge gave him the force to slam Harrison Wells-- alive, breathing, standing on two legs in working condition, all things that Eliot knew shouldn't have been true—hard into the wall. He had clearly not been expecting it, and Eliot could tell from his stance and the way he shifted under the arm pressed against his throat that this stork of a nerd was no fighter. The other two, though...

The cop (detective, the way his eyes focused, the way he held the weapon, Joe had to be a detective, not just an officer) had lowered his gun temporarily, now he raised it again, the documents in his hand as forgotten as the badge Eliot had let drop when he'd seen Wells. Allen moved forward, his feet going just shy of too fast.

And Parker's voice came out of the thin air just behind him. “Wow, and I thought the security here was bad before.” She materialized, ponytail bobbing as she dropped from the airvent and turned visible.

Hardison, still very aware of the gun pointed in his general direction, kept a deathgrip on his fake badge. “ Par--”he started “--tner,” he finished, correcting himself. “Agent Hagen. Good to see you. Are you ok?”

She came up next to him, lifting her own identity badge from his pocket and getting it into her own with ease. “What? Pfft. I'm fine. The airvents here are huge, and they don't even have lasers. It's almost embarrassing? Like, really?“ she beamed. “Though it was good practice, always good to practice.  Still, that was rude of you,” she told Allen. Looking past him, she saw who Eliot was holding. “Oh, you again. Aren't you supposed to be super dead?”

Wells didn't answer. Eliot shook him a little, like a dog with a toy. “Hagen asked you a question.”

“Ok, that's really enough,” Allen said, moving forward again. Eliot was focused on his captive, that was the only way to explain why he didn't actually see the movement as Allen pulled him back. No-- it wasn't. There was one other way...

Eliot responded by half tossing Wells down the hallway. “You think?” he growled. “You're working with the dead man responsible for your mother's murder, kidnapping FBI agents, Flash. You have some damn explaining to do.”

“Oh hell,” said Hardison and Joe in near perfect unison.

[independent-fics]

Countdown to LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION Season 3 ↳ Alec Hardison Appreciation -> A Favorite Quote

S01EP01 The Too Many Rembrandts Job

Bonus Moment:

[aardvaark]

the leverage team would have had a games night… once. everyone cheated so much and in such increasingly extreme ways that all mentions of monopoly are banned in their headquarters (this makes talking about marks who monopolize the market very confusing)

[transsophiedevereaux]

been rewatching s1 of leverage and it really hammers home how down bad hardison has been from the start. and it's not even the stupid flirting and telling parker she looks good in the bridesmaid dress.

when the team first gets together they don't really get parker. eliot calls her crazy about twice per episode, sophie clearly feels bad for her, and nate barely cares for anyone at this point. hardison, by contrast, always engages with her, answers her questions, listens to her concerns about the orphanages in the stork job, explains to her that they're a little more than a team, cheekily adresses her, while in character for the juror #6 job, just to make her smile. yes we all remember how parker stabbed the guy from the stork job with a fork, but also remember that, just moments before, while talking stone-faced to this guy she clearly loathes hardison managed to make her laugh with only a stupid vampire joke mocking the mark's accent. she thinks he's funny! they're in love your honour!!

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

Leverage Redemption S02E04 The Date Night Job.

[meanderingstream]

Eliot at peace with being Damned

One of the things that makes Eliot hard to write for in-character (but also such an interesting character to explore) is that he believes he is damned to Hell and he is at peace with that. He has a lot of guilt, oceans of guilt, but it's not so much the tortured, anguished catholic guilt à la Nate or like, Daredevil. 

He has done monstrous, unforgivable things. But, on his own, he came to a realization of what he had done, and pulled away from that world. On his own, he left the worst person he ever worked for, and stopped using guns, and stopped killing. On his own, he switched from wetwork to retrievals. This all occurs before we ever meet him, so while there are many hints and inferences, the specifics of how that happened, how he came to those decisions, are left up to the audience’s imagination. 

Eliot wants to make the world a better place, and he works everyday with the team to help people, and he genuinely enjoys helping people and the work he does on the job. But he does not believe that he can be redeemed. (Not my own personal belief about him, but it is what he thinks). When he dies, he will go to Hell for his sins, and there is nothing that can possibly be done to change that. He doesn't need to angst over it, because it’s just a fact. It is what it is. There is no point agonizing over whether his soul can be saved, because he knows it cannot. This is both a keystone of his character, and also something he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about day-to-day, because it’s a settled matter. 

And as much as we love Eliot the character, he has a point that lives are not tradable for equivalent exchange. If he killed a specific family 25 years ago, that was snuffing out the light and potential and future of those particular parents and children. The surviving extended family lost those particular relatives. Saving a family now does not balance that ledger, because each person is a unique life and not interchangeable for another. While I may have different beliefs about Hell and redemption than Eliot, I still want to acknowledge that he has a point. That changing now doesn't necessarily help the people he hurt in the past, and unlike Harry, he can’t work down a list of making amends, because almost all of his victims are dead. There is no atonement to the dead. 

Eliot’s redemption is in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and helping others get to it. Particularly the team, and particularly the pair he’s going to protect until his dying day. He will stay down there in the dark forever (he believes), but getting the others out is his redemption. 

I do not believe that Eliot will actually go to Hell when he dies, but his belief that he is damned is fundamental to who he is as a character, and he is going to believe that for the rest of his life. It can be really challenging to balance that when writing his POV, particularly when delving into events that dredge this stuff up for him (which we writers love to do because it’s so delicious). Eliot doesn’t exactly have a low self-esteem. He knows he has many skills and is exceptional at them (cooking, fighting, grifting, guitar, sports, etc). He pretty much knows his teammates love him, and care about him, and want him to stay alive for them, and spend the rest of his life with them. He has professional pride, and he will argue when he wants something. He is certainly not a doormat. However, he also believes he is fundamentally and irrevocably a bad person. Balancing between him not being too self-deprecating in normal situations / about his usefulness to the team, with his inherent belief in his own moral depravity can be a thin blade to walk without falling to one side or another. But it is also one of the biggest aspects of his psyche that makes him such a fascinating and complex character to explore.

[fixated-on-something]

The Magicians but if s5 was the story of Orpheus and Eurydice specifically the Hadestown rendition with the gang saving Quentin and they encounter like Hermes or the fates on the way and they go “you already know how this story ends. It’s been told a thousand times before.” And then Eliot goes “It’s different this time” and then they all break Quentin out of the underworld

[leverage-ot3]

I’ve talked about this before but imagine what it’s like for someone in a country/place where eliot is Top Most Wanted and then your tech guy finds a breakout star baseball player on their visual scanner that looks EXACTLY like spencer. but…there’s no way that’s him, right???

and then the next year it happens again but this time it’s some one hit wonder country singer kenneth crane that has like 78 tween-run fangirl blogs dedicated to him. you see a grainy video of him being chased by a horde of screaming teenage girls and ??? no way Eliot Last Thing You’ll Ever See Spencer is a country singer star just. signing pictures of his face right…?

a few months later your intern shows you footage of an eliot lookalike who is in san lorenzo talking about how there is dog fighting in the presidential palace and you just. sigh. because of course. a scant few days later the political geography of the country changes drastically and damien moreau is imprisoned. …interesting

and then a year of silence goes by. he still shows up as blips on the radar but he must have a good hacker working for him because his tracks on the internet are expertly erased.

every time you ask through interagency channels some random interpol guy talks in (condescending?) riddles at you and it also somehow feels like he’s threatening you

and then your friend who recently got into foreign hockey teams sends you a dropyourgloves video of someone called jacques the bear. you immediately get a headache (and watch some more videos because even you can admit this guy is a good hockey player)

and you know he’s a Bad Guy but it’s been admittedly a bit entertaining seeing what claim to fame he will come upon next. and his most recent actions over the few years make you wonder.

a few months later your phone pings because multiple heads of state evacuated from DC. the reason? eliot spencer was in town. you hear two days later a bioterrorist was taken down by… the report was redacted. your hacker tells you spencer and two teammates were behind the successful operation. which, huh.

not even a full year later it is released that spencer is dead and… you don’t know how to feel.

[lindseymcdonaldseyelashes]

Leverage 2x14 - "The Three Strikes Job"

[theinfinitedivides]

did not know it was physically possible for Eliot to make himself look even smaller and non-threatening until he showed up in that gym for the con and turned up the 'well i don't know if i should say this my boss might be mad' dial to absolutely astronomical damage

[wolves-in-the-world]

the thing about eliot spencer as a character, right. the thing about him.

(and as always your mileage may vary on my analyses so if we disagree that's cool actually)

is that he is in fact a somewhat emotionally constipated idiot who is occasionally sensitive about his perceived masculinity and gets defensive about emotional intimacy around other men (largely hardison, who's much more comfortable expressing affection and embracing a softer kind of masculinity), but eliot displays enough emotional awareness and sensitivity and respect for women etc etc that anyone who's been subjected to that era of television will put on rose-tinted glasses without even looking twice.

(and he is, don't get me wrong, incredibly emotionally aware for a professionally punchy guy with enough trauma to sink the titanic. it still startles me to see.)

on top of which we have the layers and the accessories and the excellent hair with the secret braids and the way he barely has an ego and he's good with kids and protective of his team without taking it too far, and some of us never stood a fucking chance.

[trekscribbles]

Hardison shows love by giving people space. Parker shows love by taking space up.

[aardvaark]

love that parker’s slightly magical abilities have apparently progressed from the appearing/diappearing thing to reading eliot’s mind

[werewolfsmile]

Watching The Corkscrew Job and just ...

Eliot trusting Parker and Hardison enough to go into a situation where he's about to have no oxygen. He would hear over the comms that they're facing down henchmen who are trying to stop them. He doesn't know how long it'll take for them to get air flow happening again.

But there's an innocent person to protect and he has faith in his partners. Faith enough to willingly risk his life time and time again - not just in this instance, but all the others we see over the course of the show. Because Eliot knows that Parker and Hardison will do whatever it takes to protect him, just as he protects them.

There's just something so profound about not even having enough air to draw breath - but it doesn't matter, because you know your partners are out there, fighting to get that next breath to you. And it might take longer than expected. It might not go smoothly, hell, it might not even work at all. But it doesn't matter because your faith in these people is greater than the instincts screaming for oxygen.

Eliot can't breathe without them. But he's used to that - he's been living this way for years already. So he holds his breath and trusts.

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

Leverage Redemption S03E03 The Scared Stiff Job.

[meanderingstream]

Thoughts on Leverage OT3 and Canon

I think that if some of the things that the OT3 said to each other were said by a man and a woman in a TV show, the audience would clearly read it as romantic. Like if a hetero ship said:

“For better or worse, we change together,” from the Rundown Job {for better, for worse, in sickness and in health…}

and “til my dying day” from the Long Goodbye Job {to death do us part},

and (you never really need anything.) “Yeah, I did [soft, loving look], but thanks to you I don’t have to search anymore,” from the Long Goodbye Job

and Hardison’s “for tonight, [name] has perfect pitch. You ever wonder how Britney Spears sounds so good on her tracks? Well, this is it, except mine's is in real time, Baby.” From the Studio Job,

and Parker’s [I’ll] “be here for you forever and we’ll always be together” from the Harry Wilson Job,

and Hardison’s “I’m here if you need me. Anytime,” from the Fractured Job

and the Hurricane Job with Parker and Eliot’s “I can’t do this without you.” “Well, that’s never gonna happen, [name].” “The arm around me was a nice touch,”

and “I’m making a four-course meal for them” from the Date Night Job

and “maybe I don’t like watching someone I care about take punches meant for me. You know, maybe I don’t wanna do a job that involves me watching you get hurt all the time.” From the Weekend in Paris Job

and “I mean, I’m in a great relationship, but would I even be in it if it were up to those swiping machines?” “We are in trouble.” “Nah, I mean, [me and you]? That’s fine. That’s working.”

If all those things had been said between one male and one female character, I feel like the audience would pretty clearly read it as romantic. I mean, my mom insists that Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes got together romantically at the end of Elementary because of the hug and the line, “I’m staying. Of course I’m staying,” even though it did not read it that way to me. General audiences will read a lot of things as confirming a m/f couple because they see that kind of story so often that it’s what they expect.

Now granted, TV shows do like their slow burns because it provides tension without having to create problems in an established relationship, so fans of straight ships often do have a long wait for canonization. However, people didn’t question whether Josh and Donna from The West Wing or Tony and Ziva from NCIS were romantically interested in each other. It was clearly canon that they had those type of feelings or that type of interest for each other, there were just other things getting in the way of them actually starting to date. If a hetero ship said all those quotes listed above to each other, their romantic interest would absolutely be read as canon by the audience, even if they had not yet been shown on a date or kissing in the show. But because this is between 3 people, the OT3 is a somewhat niche ship in the general audience of Leverage outside of tumblr and AO3.

Like many of us here, I also felt let down when the Maria plotline happened in season 1 of L:R, especially after John Roger’s tweet that they’d canonized the OT3 after the Long Goodbye Job and his tweet that “your OT3 is safe” about the reboot. He specifically called it the OT3 in both cases, which pretty clearly refers to polyamory. If he meant that the characters that make up the OT3 (Hardison, Parker, and Eliot) are safe as in alive and healthy, then he should have said that. If he meant their friendship was safe, then he should have said that. If he meant they are in an open relationship or that Eliot is in a queer  emotional relationship with the other two but is not romantically and/or se✖ually involved with them, that should have been made clearer in the show. Instead, by the end of season 1, we got Eliot looking for fulfillment in life by trying to find a girlfriend to settle down with, and Parker qualifying her statement that they'd be together forever with “I know it's not the same [as a romantic relationship].”

Parker and Hardison’s romance is clearly stated and shown in the series (as it should be because they are awesome <3), but Eliot is not included in this unambiguously romantic relationship. While I am loving the partnership between the 3 of them and all of the OT3 nods so far in the 3rd season, I am also a little frustrated that they are just nods.

The burden of proof for a queer and/or poly ship is higher than a m/f pair. There is enough canon evidence to make a compelling argument that Eliot is the life partner of Hardison and Parker. However, the burden of proof for this type of relationship is higher because it is not what audiences are trained to expect. I adore the 3 of them together, and whether the series would show them all kissing or give us open, explicit discussion of their relationship as something like a queer-platonic partnership (probably not using that term, but that kind of relationship), I would love it either way. As it is now though, we get hints and nods that make OT3 shippers freak out, but that can be easily overlooked by general audiences as just good friends. If they are meant to be read as just really good friends, I wish John Rogers would not have used the term OT3, the definition of which includes the word “polyamory.” If they are meant to be polyamorous, I wish the show would make it unambiguous that’s what is going on, meeting that higher burden of proof for queer relationships.

On the other hand, I don’t want to complain about queer-baiting, because I feel like it’s not allowed to confirm your main characters are in a polyamorous relationship in a procedural like this that doesn’t center relationship drama. That seems like it’s just not possible yet. They are allowed to have a canon lesbian main character now- unlike in the original series- but I feel like maybe polyamory is still not an option. So the only other option than what the writers are currently doing is to totally disavow the OT3, which I obviously don’t want to happen. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong by the end of L:R season 3. I would absolutely love that to happen (dear God, please make that happen). But I’m not holding my breath.

I do still really appreciate John Rogers for the way he runs the show (both in the original and for season 3 of L:R) and for openly acknowledging and even supporting polyamorous ships, which is rare to find. I am aware that they fought for more queer representation in the original series but were only allowed that one cop lady from the Experiment Job in a single episode. Maybe this is the most they can get away with now, or maybe they are choosing to walk the line between hinting for the shippers while maintaining plausible deniability for everyone else. An intentional position of strategic ambiguity.

My point is that even if you don't account for the OT3 tweets, the canon status of the relationship between Hardison, Eliot, and Parker is complicated. It has enough textual evidence that if it were about a m/f pairing, then at minimum their interest/intent would be considered obviously canon. However, it does not meet the higher burden of proof that general audiences need in order to clearly realize when a queer relationship is happening. So it's left in this limbo between fully canon supported and totally unnoticed.