I always love that Eliot is like, “Listen Nate, this is a shit idea. It’s going to go horribly wrong. We’re all going to end up in jail or dead. But if you’re really set on doing this then I’ve got your back because that’s my job.”
it just gives me warm fuzzy feelings whenever Eliot is protective of his crew, even when they’re making potentially shit decisions (which is usually just Nate tbh)
After quite a bit of thought, I believe I’ve finally put my finger on what it is I love about Eliot’s running “it’s a very distinctive ____” gag, and I think it’s largely down to how Christian Kane delivers the line every time. It’s a potentially ambiguous line, by which I mean that it has the potential to work equally well in two opposite ways. The first–and the one that you’d be most likely to expect out of this sort of character archetype–is a sort of smug superiority. “It’s a very distinctive haircut. If you’d bothered to pay attention,” the line would seem to say, “you would understand that.” The sort of line that says one thing but means another, says “this difference is easy to spot and understand” but means “of course you didn’t recognize the difference, only I, with my superior experience, intellect, and understanding, could do so.” False modesty at its peak.
But instead, the line always comes off as almost … defensive? “It’s a very distinctive watch,” said with a snap and a scowl. It isn’t weird that he knows this. Everybody knows this, he is just like everybody else, why are you still looking at him like that this is COMMON KNOWLEDGE IT’S NOT WEIRD, OKAY? It’s dismissive–not of the person he’s speaking to, but of the idea that he’s just done anything remarkable.
Because that’s Eliot Spencer’s self-image in a nutshell, isn’t it? He doesn’t have any skills that couldn’t be achieved by hard work and a refusal to give up. “I can take the punishment; it’s what I do,” he says, and if you watch him fight, it’s true; he’s not always the best, he doesn’t necessarily dodge every hit or land every one of his perfectly, but he doesn’t. Fucking. Go down. (”Anybody wanna do what I do? I get punched and kicked.” Self-describing his place on the team, it’s still about taking punishment rather than doling it out, despite the opportunity to accentuate the unique skill-set he brings to the team.) “Sometimes I crush it, sometimes it’s crap,” he tells Parker about his cooking, because it’s a skill he’s still honing, one he’s still adjusting as he goes.
I just love that the show had this opportunity to give us a running gag about a character with a stunning amount of practical knowledge, and chose to use it to create a more sympathetic character.
Sometimes I think about poor Dr. Abernathy, who once spent an uncomfortable evening stuck in the truck of his own car and probably still gets fraud alerts all the time because that maniac is still going around using his name.
I made a post about this earlier but at the end of the San Lorenzo Job, look at Eliot’s face and imagine how he must be feeling at this moment. Damien Moreau, the man who made Eliot do terrible terrible things, is GONE. He can’t hurt Eliot or anyone else anymore. Eliot is free. This huge weight has been lifted off of Eliot’s shoulders and you can see that here in his posture and expression. He’s smiling and so much more relaxed than he has been the last two episodes. He can now breathe easier knowing he helped take down the man responsible for so much pain.
And his team knows. Knows enough to ask questions if they wanted to, but they haven’t. They essentially know the worst and as Sophie said, they care about the man he is -now-. They care what -that- man does. (I also think picking up those guns in the warehouse and not backsliding into who he used to be was important for Eliot as well. I think part of him, perhaps just subconsciously, thought that might happen.)
In the course of my rewatch-all-5-seasons-of-Leverage binge over the past few months, I’ve realized that my favorite long-running gag is Eliot choosing the wrong thing to get mad about.
Sophie accuses him of sleeping around with waitresses and stewardesses? “FIRST OF ALL, THEY’RE CALLED FLIGHT ATTENDANTS”
Hardison denies stealing Eliot’s sandwich and says “you probably ate it yourself and forgot about it?” “OH, MY SANDWICH IS FORGETTABLE????“ [launches into insanely detailed cooking techniques of what, to be fair, does sound like a bonkers delicious sandwich]
Hardison announces that he’s bought a brewery in Portland where they can hide out slash take cases slash brew their own beer? Everyone else is like “why the eff did we have to move to this new town with no warning” and Eliot is LIVID that Hardison is underestimating how hard food and beer pairings are. “THE BREWPUB MENU IS THE HARDEST KIND OF MENU TO DESIGN!”
I literally never get tired of it. I could watch Christian Kane get offended at implausibly bizarre perceived insults ALL DAY.
You know what though, like, to me what’s glorious about Elliot is that, to me, he’s always choosing the RIGHT thing to get mad about.
1) ignoring the sex shaming because he’s not gonna dignify that with a response but standing up for how the women choose to identify themselves.
2) attacking the most obvious lie because it has been established that Hardison appreciates the Elliot!food (a squeeze of lemon) and how dare Hardison not only lie so obviously but also choose to call into question all of Hardison’s appreciation of what Elliot had made in the past. I mean he might as well have called Elliot himself forgettable, which is a LOW BLOW, especially for a man who recognizes and makes an attempt to remember what makes things distinct.
3) Everyone else is being upset that the team is together (in a new location) but Elliot has already accepted that the team is together. And is going to be in it, for better or worse.
In sickness and in health; and through bad beer and difficult to pair foods.
‘Til his dying day.
(But that doesn’t mean he’d not gonna have old-married-couple fights about the details.)
The Deserter’s Song (Radical Face) :: Man Burning (Josh Ritter) :: Hail St. Sebastian (The Mountain Goats) :: Hebrews 11:40 (The Mountain Goats) :: This Losing Fight (Sons of Bill) :: When The Pin Hits The Shell (The Drive-By Truckers) :: Hurt (Quiet) (Nine Inch Nails) :: All Is Well (It’s Only Blood (Radical Face) :: Good Man (Josh Ritter) :: Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1 (The Mountain Goats)
