The Experimental Job - Episode Reaction and Meta
Okay, I’m going to start off saying that I LOVED this episode. It feels like it was one of the episodes that I’ve just been waiting for and the themes that were explored were things that I’ve wanted to see for ages. I'm sure there'll be bits I forget to mention so feel free to discuss in the comments :)
The opening was very dramatic - for some reason it felt quite dark to me compared to usual Leverage openers but it worked. I really liked the way it was Eliot at the start, talking to the client, with Nate - it seemed to fit in with the episode very well.
I love the fact that the show managed to show us what Eliot is like in situations where there’s torture, when people are trying to break him, without having him being captured or showing it through flashbacks or something - I think it maybe made it all the more effective because the knowledge that people knew where he was, that he was in control and that, although it was a dangerous situation, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been allowed us, as the audience, to maybe pay more attention to subtle things. Like Eliot’s face when the guy shoved him into the cell, the way he allowed himself to be tasered for the con because that sort of thing is, as he put it, what he does. He just doesn’t break at all and he goes further, he actually uses the bad things about his past against the people trying to break him and that’s what makes him so unmovable.
The other thing I found really interesting about the situation they put Eliot in was just how easily it could have been true. If other things had happened, if he’d made a different decision at some point in his life he could have really been in a homeless shelter, really signed up for a scheme like this.
The whole scene with the ‘how many people have you killed’ and the ‘do you really want to know…’ speech was just amazing - it’s so easy to watch Eliot’s fight scenes and the jokes with Hardison and forget that Christian Kane can also do scenes like that - where it’s heart-breaking and believable and it really affects you. And then you get scenes like this and the one in the first episode of this season and it hits you. And this line:
‘There’s nothing you can do, no punishment you can hand out, that’s worse than what I deal with every day’
It revealed so much because this is what Eliot is about. He knows what he’s done and he feels guilty as hell and he hates himself for it but he can’t take it back so he punishes himself, he does his job and gets beat up and puts himself on the line for his team because it’s all he can actually do to deal with it.
Protecting the team, protecting other people is another Eliot trait that came through big time in this episode. There was the comradeship that he built up with the marine, the way he stepped in to protect him even though it meant getting hurt. And then there was his reaction when Hardison was caught. He beat up that guy and didn’t even hesitate because he’ll do whatever it takes to protect his people and it’s pretty damn scary how far he’ll go because this? Was nothing on the scale of what he’ll do for them. It makes me wonder whether all this is building up to something, Eliot making some sort of sacrifice or maybe killing someone to protect them.
There was another character who, I think, got lots of development in this episode too, although perhaps more subtly. Hardison’s undercover role as a student at the college did several things: it highlighted the fact that, of them all, he’s perhaps the one who could live the most normal life if they stopped all the cons now. But the way he kind of settled into the role, even seemed to enjoy it sometimes, also showed that maybe he sometimes yearns for that normal.
We also got to look at his insecurities. Hardison can often come across as being very confident, sometimes a little over-confident but this episode displayed the worries he has about his own abilities.
There were, of course, lighter parts to the episode. My favourite lines include:
-‘I, however, am not most people’/ ‘do you want to skip the behold my genius part…?’
-Eliot’s correction about the video game quail hunting (fits in so well with their previous exchanges and it was also a nice shout-out to The Gone Fishin’ Job)
-‘What kind of wumpa wumpa, how many kinds are there?’ ‘ There’s 7 of them’ (Anyone, “they’re very distinctive sounds…?)
-‘Stereotypes…British people, no offence’ (was sheer genius)
-‘Should I tell him it’s the age of the geek?’ ‘He’ll figure it out eventually’
I also very much liked Eliot’s haircut, Hardison trying to explain how his friends weren’t ‘pretend’, the Black Ops reference, how casually Parker just kissed Hardison on the cheek and the whole Eliot and Sophie scene in the police station.
Okay, so a couple of other things:
There wasn’t much Nate in this episode and there wasn’t actually a lot of Sophie either but I don’t think it really mattered. All of the episodes usually have a different balance of characters and I think this one needed the focus on Eliot and Hardison for it to work as effectively as it did. It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if we hadn’t have seen as much of Eliot.
The scenes that Nate WAS in were great. I loved the few little scenes we got of Nate and Eliot - at the start with the client, trying to work stuff out for the con, the scene at the end with the shots. I think they showed such a great contrast to the earlier episode where there was conflict; in this episode, Nate really trusted Eliot, believed that Eliot knew what he was doing.
The opening was very dramatic - for some reason it felt quite dark to me compared to usual Leverage openers but it worked. I really liked the way it was Eliot at the start, talking to the client, with Nate - it seemed to fit in with the episode very well.
I love the fact that the show managed to show us what Eliot is like in situations where there’s torture, when people are trying to break him, without having him being captured or showing it through flashbacks or something - I think it maybe made it all the more effective because the knowledge that people knew where he was, that he was in control and that, although it was a dangerous situation, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been allowed us, as the audience, to maybe pay more attention to subtle things. Like Eliot’s face when the guy shoved him into the cell, the way he allowed himself to be tasered for the con because that sort of thing is, as he put it, what he does. He just doesn’t break at all and he goes further, he actually uses the bad things about his past against the people trying to break him and that’s what makes him so unmovable.
The other thing I found really interesting about the situation they put Eliot in was just how easily it could have been true. If other things had happened, if he’d made a different decision at some point in his life he could have really been in a homeless shelter, really signed up for a scheme like this.
The whole scene with the ‘how many people have you killed’ and the ‘do you really want to know…’ speech was just amazing - it’s so easy to watch Eliot’s fight scenes and the jokes with Hardison and forget that Christian Kane can also do scenes like that - where it’s heart-breaking and believable and it really affects you. And then you get scenes like this and the one in the first episode of this season and it hits you. And this line:
‘There’s nothing you can do, no punishment you can hand out, that’s worse than what I deal with every day’
It revealed so much because this is what Eliot is about. He knows what he’s done and he feels guilty as hell and he hates himself for it but he can’t take it back so he punishes himself, he does his job and gets beat up and puts himself on the line for his team because it’s all he can actually do to deal with it.
Protecting the team, protecting other people is another Eliot trait that came through big time in this episode. There was the comradeship that he built up with the marine, the way he stepped in to protect him even though it meant getting hurt. And then there was his reaction when Hardison was caught. He beat up that guy and didn’t even hesitate because he’ll do whatever it takes to protect his people and it’s pretty damn scary how far he’ll go because this? Was nothing on the scale of what he’ll do for them. It makes me wonder whether all this is building up to something, Eliot making some sort of sacrifice or maybe killing someone to protect them.
There was another character who, I think, got lots of development in this episode too, although perhaps more subtly. Hardison’s undercover role as a student at the college did several things: it highlighted the fact that, of them all, he’s perhaps the one who could live the most normal life if they stopped all the cons now. But the way he kind of settled into the role, even seemed to enjoy it sometimes, also showed that maybe he sometimes yearns for that normal.
We also got to look at his insecurities. Hardison can often come across as being very confident, sometimes a little over-confident but this episode displayed the worries he has about his own abilities.
There were, of course, lighter parts to the episode. My favourite lines include:
-‘I, however, am not most people’/ ‘do you want to skip the behold my genius part…?’
-Eliot’s correction about the video game quail hunting (fits in so well with their previous exchanges and it was also a nice shout-out to The Gone Fishin’ Job)
-‘What kind of wumpa wumpa, how many kinds are there?’ ‘ There’s 7 of them’ (Anyone, “they’re very distinctive sounds…?)
-‘Stereotypes…British people, no offence’ (was sheer genius)
-‘Should I tell him it’s the age of the geek?’ ‘He’ll figure it out eventually’
I also very much liked Eliot’s haircut, Hardison trying to explain how his friends weren’t ‘pretend’, the Black Ops reference, how casually Parker just kissed Hardison on the cheek and the whole Eliot and Sophie scene in the police station.
Okay, so a couple of other things:
There wasn’t much Nate in this episode and there wasn’t actually a lot of Sophie either but I don’t think it really mattered. All of the episodes usually have a different balance of characters and I think this one needed the focus on Eliot and Hardison for it to work as effectively as it did. It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if we hadn’t have seen as much of Eliot.
The scenes that Nate WAS in were great. I loved the few little scenes we got of Nate and Eliot - at the start with the client, trying to work stuff out for the con, the scene at the end with the shots. I think they showed such a great contrast to the earlier episode where there was conflict; in this episode, Nate really trusted Eliot, believed that Eliot knew what he was doing.