Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Leverage - Recap & Review - The Stork Job

Leverage
The Stork Job

Original Air Date: 6 Jan 2008

Brittany W – TwoCents Reviewer
brittanyw@twocentscorp.com

When everything else is lapsing into reruns or specials, TNT has given me the utter coolness of Timothy Hutton saving the world, one bad guy at a time. How cool is that?

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[photo: TNT.com]

4 comments:

  1. When everything else is lapsing into reruns or specials, TNT has given me the utter coolness of Timothy Hutton saving the world, one bad guy at a time. How cool is that?

    This week, the team is trying to help a couple who are caught up in an illegal child adoption scam recover the young boy that they thought they were adopting. A change of pace from the usual scheming people out of large sums of money that populated the first few episodes; you can see in Nate’s face the empathy of a father as he listens to the woman’s sob story. But how do they find one orphan in a huge foreign country? Yep, we’re going international: to Belgrade, where as it turns out Sophie can’t get into the embassy because she once defrauded the government out of a ton of money pretending to be a princess. Oops.

    But at the embassy is the spoiled ex-model and ex-actress named Irina who’s responsible for all this child brokering. As it turns out, the guy she’s canoodling with is also a known arms dealer. Double the trouble. As Eliot tries to connive information out of the woman – being sweet-talked into it by Sophie, who imparts tricks of her female wiles that she may or may not have used on Nate, much to the latter’s chagrin – Parker unwillingly gets the attention of the arms dealer. Her response? Stab him with a fork and cause a huge scene. Obviously the case is a lot more personal to her than she let on at the briefing.

    The only thing that saves the day is that Eliot’s cover story gives them a brand new in. They tell Irina about their new movie he’s producing…which means they need to go steal a movie. Thankfully, this is easy to do in a foreign country, and once they distract the producer and director with shiny objects, the team is in. Everyone has way too much fun with this: Nate is playing with the director’s crane, Hardison’s messing with the prop truck, and Sophie is writing the script…which now apparently includes a dying nun in a werewolf movie, and guess who she wants to play the nun? This all goes about as well as you’d expect, and they manage to convince Irina to bring the missing boy to the set so they can use him as an extra…I mean borrow him. And not give him back.

    Things get even more complicated, though, when Parker realizes the orphanage is being used as cover for the arms dealers. This incenses Hardison, who wants to save all the kids. Parker warns him to walk away because it’s just not plausible for a couple of thieves with a prop truck. Nate reaffirms this at the team meeting. All they can do is drop the one kid off, come up with a new plan, and come back for the rest. Except when they go to do so, Parker’s missing…again.

    Hardison’s newly installed ParkerTracker locates her at the orphanage, where she’s trying to rescue all the orphans. They don’t speak English, and she doesn’t speak anything that’s not English, leading to a hilarious miscommunication about a “shiny tomato” and the realization that all they understand is “Haagen-Dazs.” Thankfully, she’s rescued just in the nick of time by the team. Sophie is able to communicate with the kids and herd them into the prop truck, Eliot handles the bad guys and Hardison wires a very large explosion. Not to mention that we find out the team switched the dealers’ real guns with the prop guns, meaning when they try to fight back nothing happens…and that there’s some very ticked off buyers.

    And because this is Leverage everything ends on a moment of levity: Sophie, incensed that nobody taped her great movie death scene, demands that they stop in Paris on the way home. And Parker tells Nate that now they have to stop for ice cream, since they’ve got a truck full of orphans who now want some.

    After having episodes about Eliot’s (“The Two-Horse Job”) and Nate’s (“The Miracle Job”) backstories, it’s great to see more about Parker. Obviously after her little house-blowing stunt she had an unfortunate existence in the system that still bothers her, and she was able to bond with Hardison, who was a foster child. I see a cute little friendship developing between them. Not to mention the always engaging banter between Nate and Sophie. This is one of those shows that has a little bit of everything and it’s never too much. Easily my favorite new show of the season.

    What do you think? Let me hear it.

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  2. I love, love, LOVE this show, I've been hooked since the pilot was leaked. The cast are excellent, the stories engaging and, apart from the ending of the second ep which veered horribly into mushiness, it's been pretty good stuff.

    Parker is my fave character so I was full of squee over this ep. I thought Beth Riesgraf played this to perfection, not overdoing the emotion, but conveying the conflict beautifully. Her sparkiness with Hardison is a treat too.

    (BTW, the show's producer has a blog and he's revealed that the house Parker blew up wasn't her parents....)

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  3. It wasn't? Oooh. I must read this.

    I love everyone on the show. It's a real treat when you love the whole cast. Usually on most shows there's at least one character I can't stand, but with Leverage? I love everyone equally and I love how the show is devoting time to developing each of them. Makes me feel like we're really getting to know all of them.

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  4. His blog is at http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/ - it's not solely dedicated to Leverage but he does one open post a week where you can ask questions about that week's episode :) So far as I can see, he faithfully answers then in the following week's blog. Great stuff! The TNT website has loads of cool things too, although the forums are bit...crazy :)

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