Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

liberteaandjusticeforall:

Honestly the scene at the end of The Homecoming Job where the doctor says “that’s not the way the world works,” and Nate replies “so change the world” fucks me up so bad because that’s it, that’s the show, that’s the premise of the entire damn show

these thieves and criminals changing the world the only way they know how, with the skillsets they have, and sure, maybe they are criminals but they’re doing what they can, how they can to change the world.

(via ailleee)

orion-rising:

So I’m watching Leverage for the umpteenth time and the thing that had struck me this time through is Eliot and his weirdly specific knowledge about things he learned from former girlfriends.

Like, he kind of gets slotted into the ladies man sort of role, but he’s so much kinder about it than any other character on tv.

And having in-depth knowledge about stuff because of old girlfriends means that he has pretty clearly spent a looooot of time talking, and actually listening, to the women he was dating. Like enough that he knows specific stuff about the regulations for flight attendants, or MRI technology, or horse stuff.

I think this is a pretty solid embodiment of everything I love about this show. That even years and repeated viewings later I can still find something new that casts a slightly different light on the characters.

(via renew-leverage)

hazelhills:

shazampanic:

leverage season 1: let’s help a hardworking, honest young patriotic veteran w/ a disability who just wants to get back to the workforce

leverage season 3: let’s steal a federal witness and set him up for murder, fuck the courts. let’s steal the department of defense it’s not treason as long as we give it back probably. 

leverage finale: lets fucking find out every company who got a government bailout they didn’t earn after the crash and DESTROY THEM. destroy the us banking system destroy the companies let’s take on interpol to do it goddammit 

leverage if they’d gotten another season, presumably: lets travel back in time and kidnap george washington and then steal the declaration of independence and erase all eagles from existence by stealing the first ever eagle

leverage the movie:  Donald Trump is president.  Let’s go steal America.

(via letsgostealafandom)

hungrylikethewolfie:

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.

(via renew-leverage)

aegialia:

reasons to watch leverage:

• every ep is a heist ep
• it’s hilarious
• it’s also gonna rip your heart out
• the cast and crew do the best commentary tracks
• aldis hodge is a beautiful god and you get to look at his face a lot
• beth riesgraf and christian kane aren’t exactly bad looking either
• it’s basically all one enormous shout-out to every other show/book/movie ever made
• canon ot3!!!!!
• you get to see rich people who hurt the poor get taken down in the most humiliating way possible every ep
• there are a whole bunch of tropes, but the characters never become stereotypes
• 5 awesome season that are on netflix
• they might make a movie!!!
• awesome little fandom
• ???
• ????
• go watch it now

(via fyeahleverage)

fireandwonder:

lizznotliz:

Whatever you do, don’t think about the Leverage OT3 dressing up as the new Star Wars OT3 for Halloween or a con or something. DON’T DO IT. IT WILL CONSUME YOU.

seriously my favorite part about this post is that is it a con or a con? or a con AT a con? the team has to take down some corporate exec who is also a huge nerd, but like, one of those gatekeeping “real” geek boy types, and so they target him at a con. Hardison convinces the others that they have to go in cosplay or else they’ll stand out too much, which is the only reason Eliot reluctantly agrees to go along with it, but when they get to the con and he sees all the laypeople in street clothes, he’s like “dammit, Hardison!”

Hardison has of course made sure they all had a crash course/refresher on the movies, but he’s still prompting Eliot on the comms when Eliot has to prove his nerd cred to the Big Bad, but then the Big Bad asks something Hardison doesn’t know, and while he’s like “hold on just stall until I can look up the answer,” Eliot pulls the “excuse me but your question shows that you’re the one that doesn’t know what he’s talking about” because Eliot is secretly a huge nerd.

and of course their props are actually disguised hacking/thieving equipment, and Hardison has a model BB8 that he programs to follow Eliot around, and when Eliot is finally like “ok so what’s the robot for?” Hardison’s like “lol I didn’t put anything in the robot, it’s just there because it’s cool.” “Dammit, Hardison!”

also they get periodically mobbed by fangirl shippers who keep requesting photos of the trio in various combinations and with varying levels of shippiness. Eliot doesn’t catch on until one snaps a photo of Hardison smooching his cheek (”Dammit, Hardison!” They know he’s only pretending to be annoyed though.)

a smol child dressed as Poe Dameron is too shy to ask Eliot for a picture, so Eliot asks him for one, and when some older kids try harassing the little one about his obviously low-budget homemade cosplay, Eliot shuts them down.

the Big Bad is dressed as Kylo Ren (Parker can’t remember his name and just calls him “Baby Darth”) and at the climax of the episode, he figures out that he’s being conned and goes after Parker, and they end up fighting with found objects that bear a suspicious resemblance to light sabers. Parker manages to get away by luring him over to where Eliot and Hardison’s fangirls are, who have of course recorded the entire fight on their phones, and thus have also recorded his confession to skimming money from the con or paying off lawyers to dismiss misconduct charges or copyright infringement or whatever.

(via princehal9000)

lazy-queer:

Nate: i have made Leverage

Hardison: you fucked up perfectly good criminals is what you did. look at them. they’ve got morals.

(via renew-leverage)