I Watch TV: Leverage Redemption

 

Leverage: Redemption (Season 3)

The revival of Leverage (in which five thieves with various skills and personalities, used fun heists and cons in a Robin Hood manner to expose and ruin criminals) explicitly put redemption in the title and on the themes board. In season one the major emphasis was on Harry Wilson, a new character, who had been an evil lawyer and wanted to do better. Season two focussed on Sophie Devereaux, the grifter, who had harmed various people in her past and had to come to terms with that. This continues in this season, with Harry briefly reconciling with his daughter and mother, and also occasionally encountering people who knew him as a corporate lawyer. Sophie meanwhile meets her step-daughter again. Still, this is the long tail of their redemption arcs (redemption, as the show has noted, is a process not a singular event). Who’s fully in the spotlight?

Eliot’s come to terms with his past, re-connecting with an army buddy and his family. Briana’s the youngest member of the team, without a huge body of badness to deal with. Her story is penduluming between enthusiastic use of technology and raining horrific consequences and being horrified at the state of the world and how things end up. She has a couple of episodes here where she has to come to terms with how her generation, and her field, is just people. They can’t save the world any better than older generations – all good themes but not quite redemption.

So who’s left? Hardison of course, whose character arc has been to turn up, have some doubts, and vanish to do super-hacking things due to actor Aldis Hodge being very busy. He’s thinking about his future. Or the recurring* characters – Hurley, played by Drew Powell, finds himself caught in the fallout of a con the team have pulled. He went from being addict screw-up to being redeemed by the Leverage crew, and sees some of that in the guy they’ve just screwed with. Still, he’s only in one episode.

Which of course turns us to Parker, Hardison’s girlfriend, the amoral thief who has learned… something over the course of the show. At the start of the season Hardison and she decide to think about what they’re going to do, if they want to continue this. And that’s a minor theme, right up until the last episode where it pays off**. For a short season of ten episodes there are several where redemption is a theme.

Am I harping on too much about this? Perhaps! The criminals seem very timely, up-to-date. One who uses dating apps, an effective altruism tech start-up polycule, phone-scamming, a fake digital start-up bribery plot, the selling off of national resources in a secret international meeting. And using genre-savviness against the criminals, the crew and also us the audience. The pick-pocketing and vault cracking are minor bits now, not really obstacles. And some real legal bits – the difficulty in proving bribery rather than just happening to give lavish gifts to a judge – come to the fore. Harry as lawyer creating and solving problems. So how to sum up? More Leverage, with a couple of stand out clever crimes, and a high-concept finale that goes darker and deeper than we might expect.

Watch This: Clever crime revenge against horribly realistic villains
Don’t Watch This: Light-hearted fantasy bumps up against terrible events

* Another recurring character makes an appearance but it turns out they’re not looking for any kind of redemption, just there to be cool as hell. Repeating a trick from when Mark Shepard made a surprise appearance, they generously allow their credit to appear at the end rather than the start of the episode.

** Spoilers! At one point Eliot confronts Parker about possibly killing someone. She asks if he’s there to stop her, noting that he previously stopped Nate from killing the man who killed his father. Eliot responds by saying Nate was an alcoholic Catholic consumed by guilt, he wouldn’t have survived a week after taking revenge. But he and Parker, they’re not like that. They can survive killing people. But, he asks, does she want to be that person.