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)
