Leverage: Redemption (2021-present) The One Man’s Trash Job (S02E02)

There's so many characters that I'd love to make an appearance, but for this question I'm going to have to go with Dr. Hannity from The Inside Job.

Her whole thing is that she sees a potential catastrophe that no one else is prepared for, but instead of saving lives, she focuses on manufacturing said catastrophe to make money.

Imagine what she could do if she used her skills for good! She just needs a little more exposure to ethics and caring about other people, which she could totally get during her stint in prison, and then she could reappear as the Harry Wilson of agriculture development.

Who would be the most interesting Leverage villain to have gone away to prison for 10 years and reformed before making a guest appearance in Redemption?

guess who ended up drawing a comic of an entire scene from Artificial Condition

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

I can't stop thinking about this rabbit hole I went down a few weeks ago when I was procrastinating on my Iliad paper.

So basically. In the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (the one we read in class), he has Helen call herself a slut.

"That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, widely powerful,  at the same time a good king and a strong spearfighter,  once my kinsman, slut that I am. Did this ever happen?” (Lattimore 3.178-180)

Naturally I'm like yikes. Then I started wondering whether this was actually what it said in the Greek, and whether other translators disagreed.

(This is not a new thing to wonder about; people talked about this quite a bit after Emily Wilson discussed it.)

To summarize: the Greek word used here is kunops, which literally translates to dog-face or dog-eyed. This word is used precisely two other times in the Iliad: once in book one when Achilles is insulting Agamemnon and once in book eighteen when Hephaestus is talking about how his mother (Hera) threw him out. Surprise surprise, the male translators usually don't use the same word in those two places.

I could have stopped here, but naturally at this point I was like, obviously the best possible use of my time would be to go down into the depths of the library and see what word is used in these three places in every single translation of the Iliad that we have.

Too much time later, I ended up with this:

I think this table kind of speaks for itself.

Just. The way that the male translators all decide that when a woman is called "dog-face," that must mean that she's a shameless bitch, but when a man is called "dog-face," he can just be a dog-face. The bias is REALLY showing through here. I can understand shameless, but where are they getting slut bitch whore?

Lattimore is supposed to be the most literal translation! But then he just has to go and call Helen a slut for no apparent reason! Why would he do this where did it come from I want to scream. why do they assume that a woman criticizing herself has to be about sexual condemnation??

Some things that are worth noting!

As I mentioned, people have talked about this a lot in regards to Emily Wilson's translation! She gave a couple great interviews about her translation of this word (here and here). What many people forget is that she wasn't actually the first woman to translate the Iliad into English, nor was she the first person to translate the word as "dog-face." That was Caroline Alexander, eight years earlier. I love Wilson as much as the next person but let's not forget Alexander.

Yes dog-face is an insult! And yes it arguably is associated with shamelessness! There's a lot to unpack about why Helen was talking about herself this way. But it's really hard to analyze that when the bias of the male translators is bleeding through so much. I appreciate the decision to translate it literally and let readers decide for ourselves what she meant.

I love Eliot’s hair so much, because it’s so unpractical for his line of work. A buzz cut would be so much better, no hair in your face, nothing for an opponent to grab onto. I strongly believe that Moreau had rules around hair, much like the military and that it was one of the first choices Eliot made after breaking free. That it means a lot to him. Like the first time his hair has grown too long after he leaves, he goes to cut it again and he’s standing in front of the mirror and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t want to, then that he doesn’t have to. Maybe standing in front of that mirror happens earlier and makes him realize he doesn’t want to do any of this anymore.

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

Rewatching the pilot and watching how, when he sees how much that score made him, Eliot's tucking his head and just staring at that number and laughing - not throw his head back, but like the kind where you're almost fighting it but not quite not really, tight but wide grin that's not really open but still splits your face and makes your cheeks hurt, and almost manic about it, and thinking bout someone kiss this man so I don't have to, and like

I know metatextually they hadn't even STARTED working on that plot yet but like

Knowing what we know later, i can't help but think back to that moment and Eliot staring at that number and thinking holy shit. this is it. this is as free as I'm gonna get.

Because shit was getting tight, as a freelance retrieval specialist I think. Eliot's name was... starting to collect black marks. Failures.

He couldn't retrieve the monkey. He couldn't retrieve the dagger of Aku Abi. The community talks. Who knows what else had gone wrong in the year between the Rashomon flashback and the Nigerian Job? Nate said he chased them all, at one point or another. For Eliot, since Nate didn't know about the Moreau connection, that would've been in his freelance retrieval phase.

And Nate's good.

How many jobs did Eliot lose to him? How did his reputation fare, after those last couple failures? Did some of the higher ups know about his connection to Moreau? Did Damien have him blacklisted from certain circles, keeping him from taking more lucrative jobs with people who knew his full skillset, leaving him with the penny-ante players paying him well below what he should be getting ("why are you sending second-rate thugs after me?" perhaps because that's the price range you have to work in now, that's the only tax bracket that will hire you, the kind that hires second-rate)?

Had Eliot been considering it, until that moment? The possibility that Damien was right? That he would, inevitably, come crawling back after failing on his own? Maybe he could make it another couple months... a year or two even, if this success could bolster his flagging rep -

(there's a moment in the hospital, when all seems lost. they've been busted. the job that was supposed to save him doomed him. he'd find his way out, but after this colossal failure who's gonna hire him? he resigns himself to it happening sooner rather than later, now. then Parker gets Nate a phone, and he watches the man work a miracle)

- but he could see it looming on the horizon. The encroaching fear of knowing what was at the end of the road for him, the inevitable return to...

Then he opens that envelope. Sees that payout. The Score.

And in one singular fucking moment, one fell swoop, it comes crashing in on him that he'll never have to work for Moreau again.

Hell, he'll never have to take a single job he doesn't want to again. He can pick and choose his clients. Pick and choose his methods. The non-lethality that he was fearing was becoming a liability, just like Damien had said it would, suddenly no longer an issue. He could choose jobs he knew he could handle, instead of jumping at whatever was offered to him and hoping it worked out.

All because of this job. The one he'd hoped would get him by just a little longer. The one that for a moment he feared had ruined him.

Because of this team. This ragtag little group of people he was trying so hard not to enjoy the company of. Not to get attached to, even after such a short amount of time.

Because of Nate Ford.

So when Hardison calls him up later, with a story about another job and vet who needs their help, there's no hesitation in the "yeah, I'll be there."

Eliot had already decided the moment he saw the caller ID.

i am occasionally reminded that parker knows how to shoot/handle a gun competently in redemption s1e3 and it's like, eliot, mr. "i dont like guns", why are you teaching people this.

(i am aware parker has a handgun in s1e1 but i dont think the skills are transferable to shotguns and its never really established if she can actually hit anything and also i doubt archie would train her in it bc its not a gentleman thief skill and by the same logic i doubt parker would teach herself bc its not particularly thief-y)

anon, this ask was like an early christmas present for me. i love when people are "wrong" in interesting ways, or if not wrong then... take a different view to what i do. so, parker and guns. i can't believe i've never made a post about this.

(heads up, i've stolen vast swathes of this post from conversations i've had with both @ghostlyarchaeologist and @aardvaark. words are all mine but ideas are mutually borne, so thank you both for being sounding boards at various points in the past. everyone go follow heather and adrian cos they're better at this than i am.)

right, let's talk about the pilot, becuase parker can absolutely hit things with that. both eliot and nate know immediately that hardison isn't a real danger, but the second nate hears the safety beng turned off there he whirls around and matches her threat; that's what you do when you know someone's not making pointless bluffs.

also, boiling this back to it's utter basics, what's the main skillset you use in order to handle a pistol competently? hand-eye coordination. which is something we know for sure parker has in spades; she's a master pickpocket and she learns fast.

we need to remember, also, that parker's initial sense of morality is completely fucked. or... not morality, exactly, but sense of what does and doesn't count as wrong, what does or doesn't count as harm? because there's that scene in homecoming, right, where everyone's protesting the concept of eliot having to do the thing they hired him for, and parker weighs in with "i never hurt anyone." except... like, the FIRST thing we know about parker is that she blew up a house as a child. it's canonical that the parents survived, but parker also spent six months in juvie and has broken out of prison multiple times and lived on the street for god knows how long and stork job shows she can fight pretty well pre-leverage, too. i'll come back to all this in a minute.

her being a crack shot with a gun is... not really incongrous with who she was pre-leverage. archie describes her when he found her as "a danger to herself and to others" and like YEAH no i buy that. i buy that completely.

next up, what about things that aren't pistols? well.

that's a fucking sniper rifle.

that's a fucking sniper rifle.

that is, and i cannot stress this enough, a fucking sniper rifle.

so yeah, i'd say that those skills are transferrable. she can take out an armed gunman and tie him up with duct tape, without causing a scuffle, and re-aim the gun. with enough consistency that nate knows for sure she'll manage it in less than three seconds. sure, we can chalk some of that up to parker at this point having had four seasons of eliot here's-how-you-take-out-thugs-with-guns fight training, but... i think at this point it's pretty fair to say that (regardless of the provinance of her skills) parker's kinda a good shot, actually.

okay, let's revisit that point about morality, because there are kinda a bunch of really important touchstones here.

so, john rogers once said that "parker is the second most dangerous person on the team, and eliot would argue first most dangerous." she's the team member with the least qualms about hurting people, always, and that's a detail that tends to get brushed over.

she would have killed tara here. she makes that extremely clear. i can't listen to that "Bye, now." and not get shivers.

talking of shivers.... "I want to do the right thing."

because, look, parker's not eliot. she's not thawing ice all the way through, and yet we're shown again and again that, despite that, "She has the nuclear winter inside her." there will always be a part of her who's first instinct is to jump, to hide, to run, to kill, to not care because caring hurts. but there's also a part of her that is softer than any of the team, that is a child who'll never grow up and yet grew up too fast. she grew up beaten, bruised, neglected and starved yet she's something wonderful - but she knows she's broken, she knows they all call her crazy, and it hurts. she wants to do the right thing, make the right choice, but she hates that it'll never be her first instinct. and the thing is? that's okay. she went through hell and back and turned out someone strange and weird and at times unkind, but... the team like how she turned out. hardison likes how she turned out. and that's worth the world - she just needs to remember it and believe it and use HER skills instead of trying to be something she's not. that is what parker and eliot's conversation in the ice cave is about, if you strip it back to it's bare essentials. parker doesn't want to be normal, she just wants to be normal enough for her friends.

has parker ever killed someone? i don't know. i don't know if she even thinks like that, in such clear terms - as i already talked about, parker's definition of 'hurt' is not the same as anyone else's.

so let's talk about broken wing job for a second, because absolutely everyone overlooks the reason why parker does the job in the first place - "You brought a gun? To my bar?"

because. yeah.

"Those guys are gonna rob this store, right? Which is fine. I don’t mind robbers who aren’t robbing me, or my friends, or kids or… But they brought a gun to the party, and that changes all the rules."

this is season five. she investigates the theives because she's bored - but she only decides to stop them because they brought a gun. that's the kind of very specific morality you only get after being the good guy for a very long time, and i do think that hanging around eliot probably helped affect that a bit.

actually, fuck it, look at what else she says about this whole thing in the broken wing job.

"No cops. No cops. That will actually increase the chances of people getting hurt. [...] Seeing a uniform in the middle of stealing something could cause you to panic, make bad decisions..."

"These guys aren’t that good, which is actually another reason why we should do this, ‘cause sooner or later, they’re gonna make a mistake. Someone’s gonna get hurt."

so. yeah. on the one hand, this is weapons safety 101, for someone in parker's position. "[The Leverage crew] don't use guns because - when guns come out, people die. This attitude very much comes out from traditional American crime literature, and also from talking to our professional criminal friends. Guns are messy, when they show up things escalate, you take a longer, harder fall when doing a crime with a gun - professional criminals are pathologically averse to carrying weapons." i'm quoting john rogers here, because i can, but you'll hear similar in any training manual, and it's especially relevant to parker's actions both here and elsewhere in the show.

on the other hand, mix up all those statements and it definitely implies parker has fucked up badly in the past. again, i don't know if she's ever killed someone. but.

well, for funsies, let's look at the rest of JR's above statement about gun safety (i'm quoting from his blog on the gone fishin' job, in case you wanted to find the source): "You do not point a gun at anything or anyone you are not willing to kill. [...] I had that drilled into my head at an early age. A gun has two settings - holstered and murderous. 'Wounded' is an accidental condition. Eliot in particular is aware of this, and one of the many reasons he does not use a gun is because he is trying to, well, not kill people anymore. Hardison is magnificently awful with weaponry. Although Parker is probably a fine shot, she's trying to play nice by the new rules, and only brought a weapon to the meet in the pilot because she wanted to get paid."

and all that is, more than anything else, the core and crux of everything i'm saying here. factor in how broken parker is, how we know she's made mistakes in the past, throw in archie's "a danger - to herself and to others" line, think about the tara rooftop incident... there's a picture emerging here. it's not a nice one, but it's unpleasantly clear.

so. where does that leave us?

well, it at least leaves me extremely certain for a vast number of reasons that eliot didn't need to teach parker how to shoot a rigged game.

Leverage Redemption Season 3 First Look Photos

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John Rogers, co-creator + executive producer: "Look, if we told you Eliot's entire timeline or Nate's entire timeline, you wouldn’t be able to have then have enough flexibility to fold that timeline in with Supernatural in your fanfics because they'd be no space for that. The space we leave is the space for you to write your slash! That's super important for us to do! We do that for you, people! The fans appreciate the empty space we leave so you can write your Buffy, Supernatural, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Leverage crossovers."

Geoffrey Thorne, co-producer + writer of this episode: "But don't do any Doctor Who ones because…"

John: "You're writing those."

Geoffrey: "Just don't do it."

Chris Downey, co-creator + executive producer: "You've staked those out?"

John: "He's staked those out."

— Leverage 10 Podcast: 512 The White Rabbit Job

*Kung Fu Monkey blog: LEVERAGE #205 "The Three Days of the Hunter Job" Post-game (August 24, 2009) for the original "I think fanfic is the sign of a healthy show" short essay