Leverage Timetravel, Pre Pilot/child Ot3 Meet Their Redemption Era Selves

god. it’s eliot fucking spencer.

because it always has been eliot spencer.

eliot, who let himself be tortured, who resisted torture, in a situation he could get himself out of in five minutes, because they were torturing homeless veterans.

eliot, who only counts himself as saving someone’s life two and a half times because that half time he was the one sent to kill him.

eliot, who was willing to take down a billion dollar corporation, who begged nate to do everything he could, because of one guy with a hardware store and one near-closing grocery store.

eliot, who offered to kill a man for parker in less than a breath because she asked, who broke his rule on killing because nate could take down his biggest demon, who ran toward a bullet because he knew parker could take care of a city-killing virus.

eliot spencer, who started this season stabbed and bleeding, who was told someone didn’t want him to keep taking hits meant for him.

eliot, who was tired and just wanted his own bed.

he wakes up every day and acknowledges that he still has work to do.

and he never, ever, needed convincing to take down a corrupt mayor who was running drugs in his town. he knew that it needed to be fixed, what needed to be done to save the town, that this is the worst of it. he wanted more time. to do it right. so the surprises wouldn’t happen.

and if you’re looking at it, really looking, i think, parker doesn’t try to convince him to stay.

she knows he’s in.

because it’s who he’s always been.

not only did the three “die” holding hands, the two of them that were in a romantic relationship didn’t. eliot was in the middle. he held both their hands. you would think a show would put their long-time building romantic relationship together and have them hold hands as they died, right? nope. not leverage. most shows wouldn’t even consider having their two male characters hold hands. especially in such an intimate, emotional scene. most shows wouldn’t have one of their male characters hold hands with his friend’s girlfriend as they were dying. leverage showed us how important their relationship was by eliot’s placement. eliot meant so much to both hardison and parker and they meant so much to him. and this was nate’s story. nate came up with this, told people how the three thieves died together, holding hands. he had to make sure people knew that eliot spencer , alec hardison , and parker loved one another so so so so so much

leverage has always been pretty obvious with it's messaging, but redemption season 3 starts off with a generic american white guy who sells hot wings stealing water from american towns and then selling it to the highest bidder on an international auction from his private villa in paris that is attended by government official and terrorists both.

this is as subtle as a cannon shot.

polyamory W from walmart??

it’s criminal eliot and peggy never got to hang out and be food nerds together. bring peggy back in redemption 2k25

Leverage 1x8 - "The Bank Shot Job"

Leverage 3x16 - "The San Lorenzo Job"

Leverage: Redemption 1x2 - "The Panamanian Monkeys Job"

Leverage: Redemption 3x7 - "The Shakedown in Clone-Town Job"

What are some of your favourite Parker and Eliot moments from the og series?

i have the same favourites as everyone else, i'm sorry to say! top three have to be ice cave (duh), parking lot (duh x2) and then my wildcard bonus pick is spy truck.

ice cave is... it's the ice cave. it's THE parker and eliot scene, it's the one everyone keeps calling back to, it's the one that defines parker's arc for a whole two seasons and begins to properly wrap up eliot's. there's a lot you can say about how it affects parker, how eliot kindly guides her away from straying off-track. but it affects eliot, too, or at least reveals stuff; it's so raw for him in large part because it takes place not four weeks after the warehouse. he's still reeling and eliot's whole arc in s4 is basically Processing™️what happened, which starts here. so it's rough and it's raw and it's powerful, plus absolutely INCREDIBLE acting from both beth and christian. everyone's said their peice on this one, and for good reason.

parking lot is obviously an eliot and team scene rather than eliot and parker specifically. she's only got one line during the eliot part of it all, but it prompts the most important exchange of the whole scene.

P: "What did you d-" E: "Don't ask me that, Parker. Because if you ask me, I'm going to tell you. So please... don't ask me."

and yeah yeah yeah everyone's analysed this part in regards to eliot but what we don't talk about enough is how important it is that it's parker who asked and parker who he said that to. because there will always be an innocence about her - yes she's the one who's the most like him, yes she's the other one who'll do the things the rest of them won't, but there will always be an innocence about her. the woman who says she never hurt anyone but is proveably a crack shot with a pistol, the girl who loves christmas and still believes in santa, the thief who thinks jimmy choos refers to a person instead of shoes. she's not a child and the show does an excellent job of not infantilising her, but there's a vunerability to parker that's unique to her. eliot's not begging to not tell her. he's begging for her not to ask. as we see later in the ice cave scene, the two of them are all too often mirrors of one another's pain, and that's seen really clearly here. he doesn't even look at her until telling her to not ask, and then that explanation has him almost breaking down. he'd tell her. he trusts her, and the team, enough to tell. and that's why he can't bear them asking, can't bear her asking. because he cannot let parker of all people see the rivers of blood on his hands.

bonus pick! there's a lot i could have taken as a third option, especially given as you haven't restricted me to three and i've already gotten the two heavy hitters out of the way. but i'm going to say parker convincing eliot to stay in the spy truck in rundown.

P: We agreed we all change. Better or worse, we change together.

it's pretty much the only moment in the original show where eliot and parker's power dynamic is, however breify, reversed. for the most part she's very much someone who he strives to protect, and unlike eliot and hardison you rarely get the sense that they're equals in the relationship (one of the things i really love about redemption is that it remembers to change this about a lot more, and you get parker supporting eliot as a more common occurence). but here, parker's voice is clear and commanding - she knows the right thing to say and for a minute she's the one with the power here, she's the one with the wisdom that he needs to hear. i just love it as both a self-contained moment and a harbinger of what's to come.

Headcanon: Eliot can ballroom dance as well as any professional. Better, in some instances. And no one knows this until they have to work a con at a dance studio that's a front for trafficking. He has to compete, which adds another pseudo-celebrity persona to his identities.

Of course this naturally also results in him acquiring a ton more fangirls - and fanboys! - because a) hyper competent dancing is HAWT and b) he's going to be in a male ballroom dance competition outfit which... well, I'll leave y'all to try Googling that and picture Eliot in something like it. #AHEM

So poor Hardison is on full time social media/attempting to control the hype duty while also trying to do the digital stuff for the actual job AND making sure to needle/mock/jab at Eliot at every possible opportunity... until the team actually sees their hitter, their punchy grump-up artist, dancing in one of the competitions and. Well. It's basically a Scheherazade moment that nearly blows the con because hey, this grade of dance is supposed to be emotive, right, and they're all gawking so hard they nearly miss their marks.

The fact Eliot refuses to actually acknowledge how good he is, just growling and stomping off when someone tries to actually compliment him, only adds to the effect.

Nate meanwhile is in Actual Hell because let's set this theoretical episode in early to mid S5 as, of course, Sophie just LOVES the idea of "going dancing" and is thoroughly miffed that her newly sort-of s/o can barely do a basic waltz. Bonus points if she suggests, in either or both of their hearing, that Eliot could maybe teach Nate some moves to help.

Only later it turns out the only person who Elio has actually volunteered to teach some steps to is Parker, firstly because she's competent enough to actually follow along, and secondly because that way she can take Hardison dancing on one of their date nights, which of course leaves Alec melted into an absolute puddle because he's essentially just an enormous ball of squish in the shape of a boy.

And we fade out the episode as Parker and Hardison head for their night out while Sophie is trying to teach a purposefully-failing Nate some basic steps, seeing Eliot in the kitchen of the brew pub humming to himself and, secure in the moment of being entirely unobserved, execute an absolutely perfect reverse fleckerl with a bowl and whisk as his only partner.

It's so over (got stranded on Mars) we're so back (I can grow food here) it's so over (we left a guy on Mars) we're so back (we've established communication) it's so over (the airlock exploded and the crops froze) we're so back (we've cut down the launch window for a resupply) it's so over (the probe exploded) we're so back (the space program in China has been working on their own probe that can launch in the correct window to get him supplies) it's so over (we didn't tell the hermes crew about a separate possible mission) we're so back (the hermes crew committed mutiny and are now on the way to save Watney) it's so over (we have to remove the front of his spacecraft to get him into space) we're so back (we can cover the hole with a tarp) it's so over (the tarp ripped off during launch and the distance between the hermes and the mav is too wide) we're so back (we can use remaining thruster fuel to course correct) it's so over (if we do this we'll be going too fast) we're so back (we can build a bomb and blow up part of the station to slow us down) it's so over (there's still too much distance between the Hermes and Watney) we're so back (he poked a hole in his suit and flew to us like iron man)

we gotta talk about eliot looking back at his early relationships in the car with parker. the intimacy and detail there between both stories, putting them on the same level as if we should recognize them. there's mention of a rescue mission, without pronouns, and we know of at least one guy who saved eliot after he was shot in the army. what im saying is aimee is obviously story one, and paul orozco is story two. there was a way eliot stumbled over himself, like this is the first time he's saying out loud that paul counts, even if it was purely emotional. and then bi panic. im all for bi the whole time eliot, obviously, but this is my acceptance of him finally opening up.