“No matter how hard you work on story in TV, ultimately story will not save you. Character in TV is ALL. Truly good stories, of course, come OUT of character, they don’t happen TO characters. Good story always comes out of character choice. This doesn’t mean that you can slack off and write bad stories, or you shouldn’t bust your ass to write great stories, which is what all those writers hammering away in writer’s rooms right now are doing. It’s just that you can not help be cognizant of the irony that you are working hardest at the part of the show the audience cares least about….What good story does is provide the most interesting or intriguing framework for the characters. Great story supercharges a show.”
I suddenly woke up stupid early on my day off with multiple weird random aches and pains and a revelation about the Leverage chess metaphors.
They’re all wrong.
Look, I obviously adore the white knight/black king motif, and it works really well for that very specific discussion of Nate’s shift in morality and position at the opening of the series. But the show as well as I and other fans have then tried to take that equation and apply it to other jobs and to the crew as a whole. This is fun and awesome, but I believe you’re going to get it wrong every time if you start from the white knight/black king line.
Because in all other situations, Nate is not the king.
Couple important things about kings in chess: 1. They don’t move much. They can only move one space at a time, and for most of the game they stay in their own little box, well guarded by other pieces. This is because 2. When the king is checkmated (threatened with capture and no possible escape), it’s game over. There is no more hope. This is the sole requirement for losing the game. No matter who else is in play, if the king is down, you lose.
This is NOT how Nate operates. Yeah, he makes the plans, but he doesn’t just hide in the office while everybody else carries them out. He’s almost always right up in there playing the most obnoxious guy you’ve ever met or smashing windows or something. And if Nate gets captured, it’s not game over, in fact, it often isn’t even a PROBLEM. Let’s look at a few times that happens, just for fun: - In The King George Job, Nate’s getting beat up and Eliot slightly panics and is about to run to help, when Sophie says “NOPE, don’t do that, I can fix this without blowing our cover” and saunters in at her leisure. The jig isn’t up and she’s not even particularly concerned about him getting punched. I love it. - In the Maltese Falcon Job, Nate sacrifices himself to save the team. This is a classic thing to do in chess and chess metaphors, but, I cannot stress this enough, you cannot sacrifice your king. That’s just called LOSING. -In The Long Goodbye Job of course the whole con is structured around Nate getting caught. I guess this one kind of makes sense because the whole point is to look like they HAVE completely lost, but then at the end it appears that Nate’s going to secret prison and everyone else is escaping WITH the black book, so they STILL would be losing Nate but winning the job.
So if Nate isn’t the king, who is?
Hardison.
Let’s look at our points about kings again:
1. Doesn’t move as far or as quickly: Yes, Hardison ALSO gets out there and participates in the cons, everybody does. But Hardison does stay in the background more often, because that’s where his power is. He does the behind the scenes tech stuff and the remote stuff, he can wreck your shop without showing up through the power of the internet. He also does the forgeries of identities and objects, which are also done in his own space. At the same time, he has less physical power and less range – you don’t want him in a fistfight, or a gunfight, and his grifts are notorious for being a little… uh… interesting. So he has limited physical range and power but at the same time… .
2. The game is over if you lose him. That far-reaching behind the scenes power is absolutelyvital for 90% of the jobs. He does the massive amounts of research and hacking legwork needed just to START a job, even before you get to actually completing the job. You are pretty much dead in the water without Hardison. But that’s just from a practical standpoint. Losing Hardison is also a crisis from an emotional standpoint. He’s our moral compass and our sweet baby brother and when Hardison gets in trouble there is no “well he’ll be fine for a few minutes” and no “well he kinda had it coming.” No, when Hardison is in trouble everything else grinds to a halt and everyone comes running. (See: The Experimental Job, The Grave Danger Job, The Long Goodbye Job.)
So like, yes Nate is in charge. But the king isn’t in charge on a chessboard, the king is just a piece with a very unique role, which Hardison fills much better than Nate does. So, now that we have our real king, who are our other pieces?
Queen: Parker. This has nothing to do with her dating Hardison. The thing about the queen is she can do a little bit of everything – she can move in any direction, making her the most dangerous piece on the board. Parker’s whole character arc is about learning all the different roles and how to access the whole playing field. She’s the only one who plans and executes an entire episode-length job by herself (okay, with a little help from her girlfriend). Plus, the other cool thing about a queen is she has a built-in transformation story – a pawn that crosses the board can become a queen, which Parker mimics by initially being dismissed as “the crazy one” and ultimately becoming the mastermind.
Knight: Sophie. I know, I wanted Eliot to be the horsie too, but this makes more sense. The knight’s deal is that it’s sneaky – it’s the only piece that can turn corners – and it can jump over obstacles. Sophie’s whole philosophy of grifting is that she shouldn’t need to know about safes or security systems, she should be able to bypass (jump over) all that by insinuating herself with the mark (being sneaky by playing a character to get behind enemy lines)
Rook: Eliot. This is the straightforward one – it goes in a straight line. It also literally represents the castle walls. It’s also so, so fucking helpful to have around, I fucking hate losing my rooks. It’s your solid right hand man, basically. Is this a little reductive of Eliot? Absolutely, but I’m jamming five complex characters into five predetermined boxes, it’s not all gonna be nuanced. And I think Mr. Punchy would like being seen as the fortress that everybody depends on, and to let all the nuance go under the radar. That’s where he likes it.
Bishop: Finally, here’s where Nate is hiding. While the rook can only go straight (lol), the bishop can only go diagonally. Nothing can be straightforward for the bishop, he always has to come at things from an angle. Like, you know, constantly looking at all the different angles of a situation and finding the right angle to come at a mark from. Also, the bishops sit right in the middle right next to the king and queen. I don’t know that this is historically accurate, but when my dad taught me to play he told me that was because the bishops were important councilors to the rulers, they were the ones who had important wisdom that would tell them the best plan of attack. So the king here isn’t necessarily the one making the plans – that’s the bishop. And finally, apparently the bishop is called lots of different things in other languages, but we’re operating in English, which means it makes Nate a priest, and that makes me happy.
“This is a big ass speech. This is a big ass stop the show, this is the moral framework of the entire five years you’ve seen. Nate Ford justifies 77 episodes of Leverage in this speech, cause you know what? It is the last goddamn episode, you’re gonna know why we made the show. We didn’t make the show cause we thought it was clever or cute or fun. I always say this, no show succeeds unless somebody loves it and you know what, everybody loves this show and to me, what Nate’s saying here is important enough to say out loud. No one should be allowed to cheat and get away with it.” - John Rogers, The Long Goodbye Job DVD Commentary
Anyway I’ve been rewatching Leverage and I think the most fun thing about Nate Ford is that he really is that goddamn good at what he does, and he’s also absolutely that fucked up. Like. It’s one thing if the alcoholic ex?Catholic with a tragic backstory and a chip on his shoulder thinks he’s that good. That’s dangerous, but like, mundane dangerous. That’s messy, but beatable. That’s every villain and half the heros. The problem is this fucking disaster of a man IS exactly as good as he thinks he is at getting into people’s heads and looking at the world like a game of 3D chess. And that’s a whole different kind of dangerous, and also the only thing that keeps him from being an absolute flop of a character. There’s a show where he’s the incompitent one of the crew, and there’s a show where he’s the only compitent one of the crew, and both of those shows would have sucked. But instead it’s just ‘Surprise! this one’s also terrifying!’
I also love that he’s the only one of the team that has a Supervillain Origin Story ™. Everyone else is a thief who steals because
- it’s fun
- it’s pretty and shiny and I want it
- eat the rich
and they decided to help put worse people in their place out of a blend of genuine ethics and also it’s still fun/making them rich.
But Nate is in this for Reasons, and those reasons are heartbreaking.
sophie: no! don’t say that, she’s so sweet! we’ve been working hard on grifting skills and she’s really improving! no more stabbing - well, knock on wood - and the other day she even offered to throw me off a building. i think we’re really making progress.
tara: are you hearing yourself
sophie: wait wait wait, just look at this photo! here she is dressed up for a grift - i picked the costume out for her - isn’t she just adorable? <3
tara: …alright. next time maybe just adopt a cat instead of, you know, the world’s greatest thief.
——
sophie, circa 2023: my stepdaughter, astrid, who i [presumably] never told you about came back into my life recently.
tara: i - okay. sure.
sophie: she’s an interpol agent working for sterling and she’s doing such a great job hunting people down. she even found out multiple aliases of mine! i’m so proud! i initially thought she’d want to toss me in prison or get revenge on me because her father sort of died of a broken heart when i left, but she’s actually very kind and just as adorable as ever! we’re getting tea next monday :)
tara:
tara: where are you finding these people. do you have some kind of magnet
“Are you trying to start a collection?” cannot be left in the tags
Dean Devlin has said he is looking for a new home for the show. You can help by showing that Leverage has a strong, loyal fanbase and anyone who rescues it would have an instant audience. One way is to sign up here, numbers count. Share the petition, make some noise on socials and keep watching. Get those viewer figures off the charts!
in it’s honour please witness the best fmv ever made for leverage and for the ot3 and for maybe any ot3 ever which i just learned can also be found on ao3
Leverage is on Prime. I cannot recommend highly enough.
leverage is also on youtube, fully legally and therefore unlikely to go away!
Full disclosure the playlists put together by ElectricNOWTV (which is Dean Devlin’s company Electric Entertainment) are out of order, like the season 1 playlist goes ep 10, ep 12, ep 2 or something like that, but if you sort them out by episode number…
They’re in the Intended Viewing Order, rather than by broadcast order. Which, to those who are aware, is a Big Deal™ because due to network fuckery a bunch of episodes in season 1 were broadcast out of order which means the character development and rate at which we learn information is all fucked up, and Prime has them in broadcast order (as well as having an absolute ASS layout and UI) which has always rubbed me wrong.
REJOICE OH FANS OF LEVERAGE WE ARE FUCKIN WINNING!
obvious take but one of the many many things that makes leverage so enjoyable is that they lean in to the silly heist/action tropes with unapologetic glee. hedonistic even. like yes thanks i will clap and cackle with delight while eliot uses two (2) handguns to defeat like thirty bad guys with machine guns by doing a prolonged knee slide across a warehouse floor while somehow dodging all return fire, 10/10 no notes, two thousand more episodes please!
a song in the spirit of “my favorite things” but it’s all the things eliot spencer has ever described as distinctive
Haircuts on bad guys and satellite static gunshots that “crack” and sound full automatic knife-fighting styles that say “former Marines” these are some very distinctive things.
M16 search patterns, CIA stances unexplained hitmen with Korean accents sounds of small drones with mechanical springs these are some very distinctive things.
When the blonde bites when our Bre sings when I’m always mad I identify some distinctive things, and then I don’t feel so bad.
