#leverage s3e7

[reinanova]

eliot: all right, go down

hardison: why you always—

eliot: twist it—not like That man

hardison: rephrase that man!

eliot: go under

hardison: why you always telling me to go down eliot?

[grayrro]

It's kind of interesting to see how Jesse changes, adapts, and learns through the seasons. It also looks a lot more dramatic since we see him come from nothing--a junkie with nothing to his name, no rep, no considerable skills or talent (at least, in the meth business), not even his house (at least, in the first season). You see him cooking mediocre meth with his secret ingredient, Chilli P, then he learns from cooking with Walt so his product improves by leaps and bounds

Ofc, according to Walt, it's an absolute disgrace and nowhere near close to what he makes, but how much of that is true or not since it's blatant that it's his own insulted pride talking. According to others at least, it's more or less the same, so while it may not be as perfect, it's getting there. And that's a loonngg way from the first batches Jesse made with Badger

Then S3E7 comes and confined to the hospital bed, you can see that Jesse realizes his position on the board. He learns from his mistakes and especially the legal fiasco with Badger, and seething with anger, he finally finds something he can use as leverage to have some power. He's got something over the DEA and even if he gets caught, he has something that the DEA wants--information on the identity of Heisenburg. And now that he's been cut loose by Walter himself, well, then snitching on Walt is of no loss to him. It's a far-cry from the beginning where he was blackmailed to cooking meth with his chemistry teacher and was beat up and jerked around by Tuco with nothing to back him up

[katiecomma]

How did I JUST notice that when they’re playing the fishing game at the end of the Gone Fishin’ Job... Hardison FULLY dressed up in fishing gear... including the knee-high rubber boots!!! EPIC! And I hugely headcanon that he was wearing the hat, but gave it to Eliot so he’d be “geared up” too.

[renew-leverage]

It’s Sunday, Leverage Marathon folks, time for another episode!   This week we’re watching the 7th episode of season 3, The Gone Fishin’ Job - in which the plot hits a little too close to home, Hardison is introduced to the scent of fresh air, the crew steals a train in vain, and Eliot get dragged into doing the right thing.  Watch the episode with us on our Sunday Leverage Marathon discord server and post all about your feelings, thoughts, comments, anything &  everything.

Come  on in, say hi to your fellow fans, get comfortable.  We’ll be starting  in about an hour at 3:30 PM Eastern U.S. Time

[goodplace-janet]

Leverage s3e7, the Gone Fishin’ Job

a 10 day job in juarez in which eliot got hurt (WHERE is my WHUMP) and parker bought so many piñatas? i would like to see the episode, please

“what’s that smell?” “it’s fresh air.” “i don’t like it >:(”

thought hardison and eliot were holding hands in this hostage situation, v disappointed to discover i forgot they were handcuffed together

PARKER DELETING DEBTS

the rock-paper-scissors for which direction they’re going to run for their lives, i’m

eliot knows hardison’s tells <3

a lot is happening in this episode, and it’s not bad! but i don’t have a lot to comment on

i still don’t understand how they detonated the bomb? like. how did they get the cigarette on the tank. how did they get it to light. what

the fishing video game

[officialbabayaga]

leverage s3e7 gone fishin’ job my beloved

[ganymedesclock]

Since you've gone in depth in the past as to your reads of both Lotor and Zarkon's personalities and characteristics and how they differ from one another in both strategy and general outlook, I'm curious to hear what you think some of their big similarities might be? Lotor consistently feels the need to insist that he's not his father, and yet Haggar (who would arguably know the most about the two) said they're similar. Thoughts?

I would really hesitate to say that Haggar claiming Lotor is like Zarkon is actual evidence of their similarity.

You have to understand Haggar is a very manipulative person.

Remember this? Virtually all of Haggar’s tactics during s1e11 are not about using her incredible magical might to subdue or destroy Shiro immediately, or even quickly. There is nothing efficient about her fighting style.

What Haggar is doing here is an extensive, morbid psychological attack. She confronts Shiro with an image of himself, in prisoner’s rags, trying to kill him. She gets him at her mercy, several times, and uses it to pressure him to further stew in his discomfort and fear. She circles, she taunts. None of this indirection is actually necessary. We see Haggar immobilize Allura- a capable frontline fighter just like Shiro- effortlessly. If Haggar wanted to just overpower Shiro and be done with it, she could.

But there’s also what Haggar says to Shiro.

The way Haggar talks about it, you would think that she gave Shiro a gift out of the goodness of her heart and he spurned her benevolence and went on to hurt her.

That is not what happened. Shiro was her prisoner. She tortured him and experimented on him to the point of hacking off one of his limbs. And this is not Haggar being oblivious, either. Again- look at the expression on her face when she stabs Shiro.

Look at her expression- wide eyes, toothy grin. She loves this. This scene, how it’s framed, what it looks like- this doesn’t feel like a battle. Again- Haggar has been holding back and toying with him. She’s been doing unnecessary things to scare Shiro, make him feel powerless and isolated.

Haggar willfully and consciously is framing what happened between her and Shiro as his fault. She talks about it as if she did nothing wrong, and that he’s the one creating a problem here. This is a textbook abuse tactic.

So what does this have to do with Lotor?

I think Haggar’s relationship to Lotor is a lot like her relationship to Shiro.

Look at the specific context around which Haggar says that Lotor is like Zarkon. This talk happened because Haggar assigned Raht, a full-grown, physically powerful and armed (he has a weaponized prosthetic) military commander, to stalk Lotor and report on his behavior.

Haggar is violating Lotor’s privacy and boundaries, without any reason whatsoever to be concerned or suspicious of him. She is telling- again, a powerful, dangerous older man- to stalk her adolescent son and tell her where he’s going.

Lotor captures Raht, kills him, and in a manner far more aggressive than he normally is, confronts Haggar about it.

And, just like in Shiro’s confrontation, Haggar’s immediate response is to talk about it in a way that sounds like it’s Lotor’s fault. Without addressing or even acknowledging that she’s making people follow Lotor, the first thing out of her mouth boils down to “you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to.”

The clear implication is that Lotor brought this on himself. That people dogging his tracks, not knowing when he is or is not being observed, and not being able to go where he wants to, are just natural consequences for not obeying mommy dearest.

Or: According to Haggar, Lotor’s privacy and autonomy is entirely contingent on whether or not he’s obedient. If he isn’t, he loses these things.

Haggar is using the same tactics she has used on her literal prisoners.

Lotor goes into this conversation practically snarling because this is what he’s used to. His hackles are already up because he anticipates her abuse before she even starts talking. And we see this color a lot of their interactions. In s4e3, Haggar greets Lotor neutrally and calmly, and asks that he follow her.

Lotor balks as soon as he sees her, and stares long and hard after her retreating back before he actually makes any move to follow. This is the behavior of someone who is scared, and went on high alert. Hell- the fact that he accurately predicted exactly what Zarkon wanted with him, but still didn’t want to go anywhere near his parents without backup should tell us something.

So- let’s get back to s3e5.

(First, with as much as there is to compare about Haggar’s treatment of Shiro vs. Haggar’s treatment of Lotor, I don’t think it’s a coincidence we see this first telling interaction between Lotor and one of his parents in the episode where Shiro is desperate, repeatedly hurt, and trying to crawl his way from the empire after they did something harmful to him)

“I know many ideas float through your head, just like your father.”

But everything Haggar is saying and suggesting here doesn’t back this up.

Zarkon doesn’t really get a lot of ideas. He’s pretty traditionalist- the person really scheming up new ways to do things is Haggar, and Zarkon’s more her patron than he is her peer scientifically. All he really cares about is results, and he’s content to repeatedly sledgehammer things until he gets his way.

And that’s the other thing: Haggar is comparing Lotor to Zarkon, at a point where she is functionally telling him to shut up and be a good little cog in the machine. She wants him to abandon what he wants, what he’s working on, and obediently maintain Zarkon’s status quo until Zarkon returns to the throne and Lotor can be put right back in his box where he belongs.

Haggar repeatedly changes tactics around Zarkon to carefully work around him because she knows, full well, that once Zarkon wants something he will never let it go. Zarkon hates being contradicted, challenged or anything like that.

Haggar saying Lotor is like Zarkon is facetious, because she claims they’re both thoughtful people when they aren’t, and she compares Lotor to Zarkon while demanding that Lotor behave like a subordinate- when Zarkon, given that same demand, would sooner kill the person asking it of him than even consider the idea.

It’s a shutdown. And I’d guess, it’s probably Haggar deliberately making Lotor uncomfortable so he won’t hold his ground in this argument. Because Lotor hates Zarkon, he hates being compared to Zarkon. He explodes immediately and then recoils and leaves. Which is probably just about what Haggar wanted him to do. She’s said her piece, so, now she wants him to shoo.

So I suppose at a glance you could say that Zarkon and Lotor are alike in that they’re both incredibly driven, but, even then, I would argue their contexts make that irreconcilable.

Because Zarkon’s drive boils down to entitlement. He is obscenely, egregiously entitled. Zarkon thinks the universe, the fabric of reality itself, owes him. That there is a massive debt that everything and everyone is constantly paying off to him. He has more than what he needs, he has everything he wants except Voltron, but he demands more, more, more, because none of it is never as much as what he thinks he deserves. If it exists, it is his, and he wants to take it.

Lotor’s drive is pretty simply because if he doesn’t succeed he’s going to die. Again, his parents are leveraging tactics against him similar to those used on Shiro- who Haggar considered a slave and an experiment. Lotor is viewed as a possession by these people, and if they want him at all, they want him to live in a little glass box and never do anything they don’t demand of him.

So yeah- both Zarkon and Lotor are very aggressive and focused on getting what they want. But Zarkon’s ambitions are grandiose to a hubristic degree.

Lotor’s ambitions are basically his own freedom and safety. It’s getting away from his abusers- and if he acts on a grandiose scale, it is because the sheer scope of Zarkon’s power forces him into a position where the only way Zarkon will ever hear him saying “no” is if Lotor becomes, or commands, a monster even Zarkon is afraid of.

He has to be bigger, he has to be tougher, he has to become something Zarkon can’t destroy because that’s the only way he’s ever going to survive.

Even when we see Lotor and Zarkon put in comparable situations, their responses just further emphasize the divide. Consider s3e7 vs. s4e3. Lotor and Zarkon, both have their teams, led by their “right hand”, turn on them.

Zarkon responded by denying any and all culpability, massacring his team, burning Altea to the ground and plunging the universe into ten thousand years of darkness.

Lotor, when hearing his team was literally going to turn him over to his abusers, responded that he understood, told them to do what they needed to, and then fled the situation in a manner where he could’ve probably injured Acxa and Ezor, and absolutely could’ve killed Zethrid, but didn’t fire a single shot after them. The only person he attacked, Narti, he perceived as endangering all of them, not just himself, and had no idea why, which is why it clearly unsettled him as much as he did- he didn’t offer any explanation because he had no explanation for what had just happened.

Someone like Zarkon would never have been at a loss for that. It would’ve been, and it was- very easy for him to immediately put the blame for the loss of Daibazaal on Alfor- when he himself was the one who left the rift open, destabilizing the planet and endangering everyone, and then forcing it even wider, until the only way it could be closed was by shattering the planet itself.

Lotor is silent on the matter of Narti, and when talking to Zethrid about the rest of the team leaving him, his dialogue tells us that he sees this as the generals just doing what they have to. 

TL;DR:

Haggar is an unreliable narrator on purpose when talking to certain people. She said that to Lotor most likely because she knew it would hurt him to hear it.

I talk a lot about Lotor and Zarkon’s differences because their similarities as I see them are ultimately fairly superficial and driven by radically different undercurrents. They exist, but only to further characterize how massively different they are.

[renew-leverage]

It’s Sunday, Leverage Marathon folks, time for another episode! This week we’re watching the 7th episode of season 3, The Gone Fishin’ Job - in which Hardison is introduced to the scent of fresh air, the crew steals a train in vain, and Eliot get dragged into doing the right thing.  Watch the episode anytime this week and then come back to tumblr and post all about your feelings, thoughts, comments, anything & everything (make sure to include #leverage marathon in the first five tags on your post).

Livestream is now open at https://www.rabb.it/s/o6s3pn Come on in, say hi to your fellow fans, get comfortable.  We’ll be starting in about half an hour at 3:30 PM Eastern Time.

[renew-leverage]

The saga of the piñata, starring Eliot & Parker.

[ganymedesclock]

I'm fine with Shiro not piloting Black for a while (Clone or not something is wrong with him) but do you worry that there's a chance that the writers are going to set Zarkon up to be Keith's arch-nemesis for control for the Black Lion? With all these homages to the original the fear that fans have with Keith up-staging everyone because he's "The true Black Paladin and Hero of the story" is understandable.

Then why was every significant conflict with Zarkon in seasons 1 and 2 handled by Shiro, and often in a context where Shiro was completely alone, and Keith was utterly out of the picture?

Where was Keith when this happened? He was at the mall, knife-fighting the shamwow guy. (that’s a sentence I didn’t expect to type out on this fine wednesday morning)

And that was a major victory and a major interpersonal moment for the team.

If Keith was destined to go to Black all along, why would Red choose him? Why would there be so much emphasis placed on Keith’s relationship with Red?

Why is it that Keith took to Red with perfect, natural ease, but Keith flying Black is almost painful to witness because they’re so jerky and clunky together, and we’re used to watching Black in Shiro’s hands- where they dance and flow perfectly together?

I’m not raising these questions to be coy or rhetorical here- the truth is, whatever the writers want to end up with, they had that in mind from the start. These are the guys that had Coran make an offhand reference to scaultrite before we even knew it was on the castle much less that it was important or that anyone was going to find a “giant weblum”, much less the exact person Coran was talking to.

If Shiro’s ultimately a phase and Keith’s the real Black Paladin, why didn’t Black take him from the start? Why is it that all of the really significant hard-won victories with Black are Shiro’s, and often only his, done in isolation?

Why make such a powerful thematic implication between the way Zarkon in s2e7 talks about Black as a mere tool and weapon to be forced to heel and controlled in a way that- they can’t possibly have had it be an accident that this is the exact sparknotes version of how Shiro was handled by the empire- every bit as invasive, every bit as dehumanizing, every bit as cruel.

Because- if where we’re ultimately going is not that Shiro and the Black Lion have a meaningful interpersonal bond and are ultimately meant for each other in a big way- all of that looks really pointless. Space Mall really can’t be picked up and leveraged by anybody else because only Shiro and Zarkon were there.

(also, Shiro and Zarkon’s departure from the cast, and return to the cast, were synced up- Shiro came back earlier but only two episodes before s3e7 had Zarkon awaken.)

...And besides like... now that we’ve seen their predecessors, even though they’re very not the same people in many regards, Shiro aligns with past Zarkon way more than Alfor, and the inverse is true of Keith.