Leverage 2x07: The Two Live Crew Job

[eruthros]

I can post episode reviews! So I am.

The good:

1. Oh my god, Hardison and Kaos had a quickdraw keyboard battle with gunfight music and stances and I loved it times a million.

2. Oh my god, Parker and ... Apollo? Had a stealing-things-fight, and it was awesome. Oh Parker.

3. Oh my god, Eliot and Raquel not-fighting but both being so good at reading body language that they were flashing into how the fight was going to go? AWESOME.

4. Parker thought Sophie was really dead and kept poking her!

5. The bit with the bomb in the vase was really well done, actually; Parker and the pudding, Sophie insisting they all leave. I could've done without Nate being an idiot, there, but I still loved it a lot. (Although, seriously, who do they think they're fooling when they come back from a commercial break to a graveyard?

6. "I would have gone with a scarlet tanager." "That was my second choice."

7. Parker admitting to getting the Kobayashi Maru reference, and reluctantly fist-bumping! I now imagine Hardison sitting Parker and Elliot down for a Star Trek Marathon/Education Session after Eliot nearly missed the Wrath of Khan reference a few episodes back. Parker likes Data best. Or, wait, Q. She likes Q best of all.

8. They trust Sophie to make sure they're all okay.

The bad:

1. The pacing. The jokes were awesome, the genre play was awesome, the team fights were awesome. But the twist and the end felt underplayed; there was too much setup here and not enough time spent on the payoff.

2. As thingswithwings and I were watching the opening set-up with the initial attempt to steal the Klimt we started out really pleased -- the uniforms! Hardison's little "talk to the boss!" And then almost immediately went "what? no." Here is the thing: Sophie and Nate's attempt to distract the receptionist had nothing to do with the rest of the plot. They could have distracted her with anything; embezzlement plots or corporate espionage or, well, anything. And instead they went with implied sexual assault ("you're his type") and murder; they went with foot fetishes ("has he ever expressed interest in your toenail polish"); they went with sexualized threats. In the context of American crime shows, those questions pretty strongly imply sexual assault; they imply sexualized power dynamics, if not actual rape. It was really startling, and offputting, and suddenly unpleasant -- especially in context of the awesome shakesville article (trigger warning) on rape culture that I read not long before watching the episode. Way to argue that threatening sexual violence and making women afraid is a legitimate way to get what you want, show.

3. Did we really, seriously have to rip off Raquel Diane's shirt off? The fight was amazing and hot and I loved it, until the exact moment when they started doing strip-fighting, until they started trying to make it hot. And then, suddenly, ugh. I'm sure they would say it was supposed to be ironic, that it was supposed to be a humorous use of the cliche like the keyboard-fight. But there's a difference between playing genre games with a gunfight, and playing genre games with stripping a fighting woman down to her bra before getting her wet and making out with her. They might argue that it's ironic, but we still see a woman wearing only a bra mashed up against Eliot. (I was trying to think of ways that this could have worked, and thingswithwings suggested that it might've read better if Eliot had been stripped topless, really topless, first, and then she'd stripped down to an undershirt or something instead of a bra.)

I really would have loved this episode; I would have ranked it pretty high in my list of Leverage episodes, despite the pacing problem, just for the genre-play and the Hardison/Chaos keyboard battle and Parker being Parker. But when I think back on it, I get distracted by points two and three; they overwhelm my love for Hardison and Elliot and Parker.



Why do I still not have a Leverage icon? I'll have to go with Star Trek in honor of Hardison.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

Bad #2 made me angry too. They keep saying they're the "good guys," yet they basically assaulted that poor secretary just to distract her. She has to spend the rest of her day at that desk and face her boss when he comes back and she'll never be able to feel safe there again.

Also the shirt-ripping-off prompted a big eye-roll from me. I thought maybe Elliot should have lost his pants instead. Heh, that would have been difficult to explain.

[eruthros]

Yeah, exactly. Like, I notice that the "evil" team just stole the painting; they went in as messengers or whatever and didn't fall back on threatening assault as a distraction. You make a good point about her experience of it; the show abandons her, but basically they have pushed her into having to quit, or having to feel each day as assault.

[darkrose]

Of course the show abandons her, just like it abandons the headmaster who gets sent halfway around the world only to find that no one knows why he's there. Or, for that matter, the boss in this scenario, who'd probably going to come back and have his receptionist call the police the minute he walks in the door. Or the flight attendant in Mile-High Job, or the guy whose ID Parker lifts in Homecoming Job to get onto the floor of Congress. Or the cops in the pilot who got conned into releasing four known criminals--how are they going to explain that to their superiors? The Leverage team is all about the ends justifying the means.

[eruthros]

I'm not arguing that the show shouldn't have abandoned her; she is obviously not the plot of the episode.

I'm saying, because the show abandoned her this is what I imagine the results of their con.

I know that the ends justify the means for the Leverage team; that's the Watsonian explanation. But again, for me, on the Doylesian front, there is a difference between the writers having the team use sexual assault and the writers having the team use a beloved pet. And the reason is that nobody is trying to use my love for my pets to keep me in line, but people are always trying to use my fear of sexual assault to keep me in line: don't walk alone at night, don't get a cheap apartment because there's nobody there to check on you, don't take courses after a certain hour, don't go to bars alone. This plays into rape culture, into rape-is-funny, and into threatening-rape-is-a-fine-way-to-keep-women-in-line.

Again, I know there are Watsonian explanations. I know the team is filled with jerks. I am not looking for Watsonian explanations; I am thinking about the Doylesian consequences and the writer's meeting.

[darkrose]

This plays into rape culture, into rape-is-funny, and into threatening-rape-is-a-fine-way-to-keep-women-in-line.

I'm not saying that you're wrong for your read; I'm just saying that I didn't read it that way. I honestly didn't see it as threatening rape, or saying that rape is funny.

I am thinking about the Doylesian consequences and the writer's meeting.

I guess that's part of why I'm not seeing it, because I'd be very surprised if Amy Berg thought that it would be funny to have Nate and Sophie threaten a woman with rape.

[eruthros]

I felt that way about Amy Berg, too, and that's part of why it hurt and was startling: I expected better from this show, and from this episode. It was exactly the problem that I'd just read about at Shakesville, the small thing from someone I had trusted. But when they're talking about her toenail polish, it's hard for me to read it as threatening her with anything else. (And even if it's supposed to be read as murder, it's still murder related to women's bodies and women's choices.) Basically, I wanted better and I wanted more from this show, and I wish they'd thought through the implications here.

[darkrose]

Bad #2 made me angry too. They keep saying they're the "good guys," yet they basically assaulted that poor secretary just to distract her.

But again, that's part of the point--they're the good guys, but they're also really fucking ruthless, and have no problem screwing innocent bystanders in the execution of a con.