Series / Leverage: Redemption

Let's go steal a revival series.

"I think I've deduced that you are a group of thieves who help people...let me be your inside man."

— Harry Wilson

Leverage: Redemption is American action crime drama streaming television series, a revival and continuation of TNT's Leverage. The second Freevee original series, the first season began on July 8th, 2021^note a day ahead of schedule with 8 episodes, with an additional 8 premiering on October 7th of the same year^note also a day ahead of schedule.

Years ago, the rich and powerful took what they wanted until a band of the best thieves in the world came together to steal it back. Years later the three remaining members of Team Leverage are still hard at work righting wrongs, but times have been tough.

The rich and powerful are still finding ways to make money off of those beneath them, and now are finding new ways to do it. With help of an old friend and some new ones, these modern-day Robin Hoods will do what they do best: find those being crushed under the weight of corruption and greed, and provide them with some Leverage.

Returning as regulars are Gina Bellman as Sophie Devereaux, Christian Kane as Eliot Spencer, and Beth Riesgraf as Parker. Aldis Hodge, meanwhile, is reprising his role as Alec Hardison on a recurring basis. Rounding out the crew is Noah Wyle as Harry Wilson, a lawyer who after spending a career helping the rich stay rich realizes he's on the wrong side of the law and joins the crew in search of redemption, as well as Aleyse Shannon as Breanna Casey, Hardison's foster sister, a Gadgeteer Genius and "Maker".

The first teaser for the series can be watched here with the full trailer released a few weeks later. Another teaser was released for the second half of the season a month ahead of its premiere date.

A second season premiered on November 15, 2022.

---

"Let's go steal some tropes":

• Abhorrent Admirer: The mark from "The Great Train Job", with his neo-Nazi ties and ideologies, is very clearly enamored with Sophie's character, a German aristocrat. Sophie takes every opportunity to deny his advances and is quite visibly disgusted when she has to let him go in for a kiss.
• Aborted Arc: The fifth season had Sophie discover her calling in directing and teaching acting and Parker trying to expand in interests outside of thieving. Neither case gets referenced in the new series though Parker is apparently seeing a therapist.
  • Unaborted in Episode 9. Running the cons IS how Sophie directs. It's also noted that Parker has a more healthy life, works as the roper, and has friends. Episode 15 also has Sophie offered a directing job in London.
• Actor Allusion: In the Season 2 finale, Hardison complains that he's missed three DC movies since he's been up in space and doesn't know 'who's fighting who'. Creates an interesting Celebrity Paradox as Aldis Hodge, Hardison's actor, played Hawkman in Black Adam (2022).
• All According to Plan: Just like the original, if it looks like everything is going wrong and the scam is ruined...that's exactly what the team wants the mark to think.
• Almighty Janitor: The University of Louisiana New Orleans has a secret society of custodial staff (complete with a fez-wearing poobah) that works to keep things running while making life miserable for those who cross its members.
• Amoral Attorney: Harry Wilson, prior to joining the Leverage crew. He made a point of being on nobody's side, protecting the rich and powerful while staying fine with his conscience by getting those affected payouts.
• Artistic License – Sports: In "The Fractured Job" Elliot's father mentions that Elliot was an outstanding athlete who could have played in the NFL had he not joined the military. At 5'10" and 160 pounds, this is extremely unlikely as less than 18% of all NFL players are under 6' tall and weigh less than 200 pounds.
• Asshole Victim: Naturally.
  • Fletcher Maxwell, from the two-part introductory episode "The Too Many Rembrandts Job" and "The Panamanian Monkey Job", sold a very addictive pain medication (specifically to Returning War Vets) despite numerous warnings. When he's caught, all he cares about is his reputation as an art patron (not as a businessman); rather than fairly compensate his victims, he tries to "grind them down" through pointless litigation.
  • "The Rollin' On the River Job": The owner of a riverboat casino forces out almost an entire neighborhood just so he can buy up the land cheap and expand his operations into a gambling empire, while also using his operations to launder money for the Russian Mob.
  • "The Card Game Job" deals with the owner of a Big Pharma company who raises the price of the life-saving treatment for a rare disease, not caring that the majority of its sufferers are children. On top of that, the end of the episode reveals that he's been accepting government funding to find a cure for said disease when he already has one and has kept it a secret simply because treating the disease is more profitable than the cure.
  • The mark from "The Jackal Job" makes his living by getting a corrupt judge to sign over elderly citizens who can't take care of themselves over to him as their Elder Guardian, selling all their stuff, and dumping them in a retirement home within the week.
  • The mark in "The Great Train Job", who is an Elon Musk Expy with Nazi leanings and ties to hate groups.
• The Atoner: Harry Wilson is this, after spending years as a high-priced lawyer helping the rich and powerful keep their ill-gotten gains.
• Audience Surrogate: The Leverage team can be broken down into three groups of these with the original members representing long-time fans who know the Continuity Nods and feel the absence of Nate not being part of the show. Harry represents someone completely new to the series and reacts appropriately such as confusion to the team's "Let's go steal a..." catchphrase. Breanna represents the third group who are those in the in-between: someone who knows all about the team, but from being told rather than experiencing events of the original series.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are just as polite as one would assume of a stereotypical Canadian...and they are the one law enforcement unit the team absolutely refuse to even risk running into.
• The Big Easy: New Orleans is where the crew set up shop this time around, marking their fourth major office in the series' runtime.^note Following Los Angeles in Season 1, Boston from Seasons 2 through 4, and Portland in Season 5.
• Bigger on the Inside: The crew's food trucks somehow fit a working kitchen compartment that can pass close scrutiny plus an entire mobile command post where five adults can stand up straight and move around without too much trouble.
• The Bore: Fake Nate from "The Mastermind Job" is astoundingly boring, regularly putting people to sleep with his long-winded conversations on bureaucratic regulation (which is, unfortunately, the only thing he can talk about with any real detail). To hammer the point home, he knows he's boring and resorted to pretending to be Nate because he got tired of it. By the end of the episode, he finds fulfillment knowing this is his superpower and has even been recruited to Leverage International, where his skill can find use in infiltration.
• The Bus Came Back: The original series ended with Sophie retiring with Nate from crime to settle down with Redemption seeing the crew recruit her years later. Subverted for Nate, who died exactly a year before the beginning of this show.
• Bus Crash: Nate died in the intervening years between the original series and this one, with the first episode taking place on the anniversary of when it happened.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: When questioned about it by a former associate, Harry laughs at the idea that he's given up a life of being a high-priced attorney fixer for the rich and powerful to become a Classy Cat-Burglar. The building's receptionist notes that it sounds cool, to which Harry agrees.
• Butt-Monkey: Harry, in spades. In the first episode alone, he screws up his own theft, gets knocked out by Eliot, and gets brought back to Sophie's house where the team constantly talks about conking him over the head while he's in the exact same room as them.
• Call-Back: Plenty of them.
  • In the final episode of the original series, the remaining members of the team are considering expanding their operations to become "Leverage International". The revival series confirms they did just that and now have 12 active teams across the globe.
  • When the team reunites in "The Too Many Rembrandts Job", we see an aerial shot of them standing in a circle before walking off, as in "The Nigerian Job", "The Second David Job", and "The Long Goodbye Job" in the original series.
  • When deciding Sophie to the museum to rob, Parker mentions it just installed a new Glenn-Reider system, a common security system the team encountered.^note Glenn and Reider were the names of the show's story editors.
  • Parker's nametag at the auction in "The Too Many Rembrandts Job" says "Alice White", a recurring alias of hers from the original series.
  • At the end of "The Too Many Rembrandts Job", Eliot admits they might need a Plan M, which Hardison angrily vetoes because Hardison dies in Plan M.
  • When Hardison and Parker argue that Breanna is too out of her depth being on the field, Sophie counters them by pointing out that neither of them started out very well when put on the spot for the first time in a con, specifically bringing up Parker's issues with the Serbian mob in "The Stork Job" and Hardison's master thief persona in "The Ice Man Job."
  • Sophie uses both "Katherine Clive" and "Charlotte Prentiss" as aliases.
  • "Fake Nate" in "The Mastermind Job" recites the original series' opening monologue nearly word-for-word in his interview and references many of the team's old cases.
  • All the old Catch Phrases are back ("Dammit, Hardison!", "It's a very distinctive [X]", "Age of the geek!"), although Sophie's teammates have to goad her into reviving Nate's "Let's go steal [X]".
  • When Maxwell is arrested, the new team does its first gloat as he's taken away. Harry, who wasn't sold on the idea, admits it's pretty cathartic.
  • While breaking into the office of Harry's old boss, Parker is quite visibly upset by the horse painting in his office, showing she still hasn't fully gotten over her fear of horses first introduced in "The Two Horse Job".
  • If you listen to the bar music in the flashback from "The Jackal Job", you can hear it's the D.B. Cooper song from "The D.B. Cooper Job".
  • At the end of "The Golf Job", Hurley cries out "Sister Lupe! Sister Lupe!" while holding a cross like a trophy, in reference to the fake nun he got roped into helping from "The Boys' Night Out Job".
  • Halfway through "The Grand Train Job", Parker admits she's wanted in Canada for stealing the Stanley Cup, prompting Sophie to remark she stole the Cup (but forgot where she put it) as mentioned in "The Thin Blue Line Job".
• Canon Welding: A brief comment by Hurley during "The Golf Job" links the Korean adaptation to the mainline series.
• Caper Crew: Naturally Team Leverage, a Just Like Robin Hood team who uses their not-inconsiderable skills to get justice for those used and abused by the rich and powerful. Along with The Hacker (Hardison), The Thief (Parker), The Hitter (Eliot), and The Grifter (Sophie), the team sees the new addition of Breanna Casey and Harry Wilson.
  • Breanna is referred to as the Maker, and notes that she's more a physical tech-girl compared to Hardison, whose skills are mainly hacking and computer code.
  • Harry sells himself to the team as The Inside Man using his former profession as a lawyer for the rich to help the crew infiltrate their inner circles.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Star Trek gets multiple mentions, but "The Bucket Job" features LeVar Burton in a guest role and his character confesses to not knowing what TNG is.
  • The pilot episode of the original series had a scene where an advertisement for The Librarian was prominently displayed. Noah Wyle, who played the title character in the Librarian franchise, is now part of the regular cast.
• Character Name Alias: In "The Panamanian Monkey Job", Sophie and Hardison introduce themselves as Jo Grant and Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Breanna later uses Billie Potts (bonus points: Billie Potts is also black and gay). In "The Double-Edged Sword Job", Eliot is given the alias Emmett Milbarge, and the alias Armus Vagra in "The Muddy Waters Job", doubling as a Stealth Pun given his cover as an oil well worker.
• Christmas Episode: "The Bucket Job" takes a break from the formula to instead have the team craft an elaborate spy thriller adventure as a gift for a dying librarian at the request of his young friend.
• Combat Cue Stick: The Villain of the Week in "The Hurricane Job" tries to attack Eliot with a pool cue. This being Eliot, he simply breaks the cue and knocks the guy out with ease.
• Commuting on a Bus: Hardison leaves the team to attend to Leverage International's operations around the world. As such, Breanna takes over his role as Leverage's resident tech person. In Season 2, however, he appears more regularly, having two in-person appearances before being sent to space to work on a Leverage International satellite and spending the rest of the season making brief appearances by way of teleconferencing.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The crew recruits Sophie for a job with her stating she's retired much like how they, led by Nate, did so in the first episode of the original series.
  • In "The Hurricane Job", McSweeteen and Taggart are namedropped by Maria Shipp. They've moved up in the FBI (no doubt with a little help from the Leverage crew), with McSweeten as the head of the Counterterrorism Task Force and Taggart as Deputy Director.
  • In "The Date Night Job", it's revealed that the crew's actions during "The Card Game Job" in Season 1 led to a massive Newbie Boom for Spirit's Ruse, resulting in the release of a Pokémon GO-like video game based on the property.
  • In "The Crowning Achievement Job" Astrid reveals that she's been offered a promotion for her work from Section Chief James Sterling. Not five minutes after searching Sophie's name in Interpol's database, coincidentally.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character:
  • Breanna is one to Tara Cole from the original series. Both of them were brought onto the team as a replacement for one of the others when they departed for their own reasons, both initially struggled to gel with the rest of the team, and both were heading down a path toward being just another criminal before joining Leverage. But Tara was an experienced grifter whose struggle for rapport stemmed from an unfamiliarity with how Leverage operates and her status as a Consummate Professional, whereas Breanna is an admittedly skilled but still inexperienced hacker and Gadgeteer Genius whose issue is that she's trying to fill her brother Hardison's shoes and impress her idol Parker at the same time.
  • Harry Wilson to Nate Ford. Nate was the Mastermind and leader of the group while Harry is new to the group. Both men are driven to help people but while Nate was fueled partly by a need for vengeance as well as justice, Harry is legitimately The Atoner. This is actually related to the key difference: both men are fathers but while Nate's son died before the series, Harry's daughter is very much alive.
• The Corrupter: Humorously, Hardison, Eliot, and (especially) Parker are this to Sophie when they reunite, wanting her to come back to the team despite being retired for years.
• Didn't Think This Through: "Fake Nate" from "The Mastermind Job". Using bits and pieces of stories that he learned from Nate and from his years following the team for IYS, he writes a memoir about the team's exploits with himself as the Mastermind. Ignoring the fact that he's endangering both the team and their clients, he's basically admitting to hundreds of crimes, making him a target for both those the team took down and criminals who'd want to use his supposed skills.
• The Dreaded: There is one law enforcement agency in the world the team members are scared of and refuse to go against: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They all refuse to step foot anywhere near the RCMP, if they can help it.
  Eliot: They are not just cops on horses. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police department is the most feared law enforcement in the entire world.
  Parker: They are fast. They are ruthless. They will put you down politely and they will put you down forever.
  Eliot: They are Mounties. They never forget a face.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The Spirits Ruse game has such an elemental hierarchy - water beats fire, fire beats earth and earth beats water. Lampshaded by Eliot who compares it to rock, paper, scissors.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: As in the original series, the downfall of so many marks is that they can't understand why a pack of people they've never met are going after them for their misdeeds to help the people their actions hurt. Sophie lampshades it, telling Breanna that "people who are greedy and use people, they have a blind spot: They can't imagine anyone who's not like them."
• Fake Identity Baggage: This trope is invoked and played straight in "The Mastermind Job". A man named Milton writes a book based on the Leverage Team's accomplishments and casts himself as Nate Ford, taking credit for his role as the mastermind. The Leverage Team tries to convince him not to publish it by making him think he is being targeted by some of the people they took down. Unfortunately, Milton's false claims have drawn the attention of a man who wants him to steal a scarab from his ex-wife, a feat Milton is incapable of performing. Thus, the team's goal changes to saving Milton's life.
• The Fixer: Harry Wilson's main job before his Heel Realization. He joins the team as their "inside man" to help them take down his former clients.
• Flanderization: An in-universe example occurs in "The Mastermind Job"; in Fake Nate's book, Eliot is described purely as the team's muscle and nothing else, much to Eliot's frustration.
• Foil: Both Harry and Breanna, as the "kids" of the team, serve as this to Parker, Hardison, and Eliot, who filled that role when the more experienced Nate and Sophie were in charge. Their reasons for joining are also different. Besides Harry's motivation, as mentioned above, Breanna tells Harry right off the bat that the reason she wants to join is because "the world sucks" and she wants to "make it suck less." Contrast the trio in the original series, who initially joined for money/revenge and then learned that Good Feels Good.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During his rant at his boss, Harry mentions a client who cut corners that caused a building collapse and killed his construction crew. Said client ends up becoming the mark for "The Tower Job".
  • In "The Mastermind Job," Fake Nate claims the events of "The Rashomon Job" (namely, rescuing the Dagger of Aqu'abi) as his own in a flashback. That episode ended with the revelation that the dagger was fake; similarly, the Zafir Scarab is revealed as a phony at the end of this episode.
  • And, of course, the season's final villain... see From Bad to Worse below.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Downplayed. The first eight episodes of season 1 were released a day early, announced by a post from the official Twitter account asking where Hardison was.
• From Bad to Worse: According to Eliot, things have gotten worse over the years for the innocent: the rich and powerful are still exploiting them and are now finding new creative ways to work within the system. Doubles as Foreshadowing.
• The Ghost: Nate Ford gets this to the point of literally being a ghost having died before the series began, being mentioned in every episode and his absence is felt. There's also Harry's unnamed daughter, whom he mentions repeatedly but is never seen... until the first half of the finale.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: As much as the series delves into the opposite trope, "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job" shows the reverse is also true: honest, good people have a hard time believing someone would take advantage of and hurt others for simple greed. The client of the episode actually finds it easier to believe that she's being haunted by her great aunt’s ghost than two men are Gaslighting her as part of a real estate scam.
• Greenwashed Villainy:
  • "The Great Train Job": Blake Whitcomb, a green energy innovator who has been in the news for his intentions to create a plane that runs entirely on electric energy. However, the Leverage team discovers that Whitcomb has been carelessly and illegally disposing of the batteries for his electric cars, resulting in a couple of farmers becoming sick and their crops dying. Whitcomb is also willing to hire Neo-Nazis to intimidate the victims of his crimes into staying silent.
  • "The Muddy Waters Job": GulfPetrol, an oil company which had recently gotten into trouble due to oil spills. Their new CEO Ethan Bradford was brought in to take care of any leaks and received great praise for pushing the company in a green energy direction. However, it is ultimately revealed that this is all just media spin; Gulf Petrol's new oil platform Hyperion has been leaking after being damaged by a mud slide and Gulf Petrol will do anything to cover it up, even going as far as destroying their own oil rig to hide evidence of the leaks, killing their own employees in the process.
  • "The Fractured Job": Eliot's hometown has been hit by earthquakes and illness from tainted water ever GreenSlate Energy set up a fracking operation in the town. The team's investigation shows that GreenSlate has been doing everything they can to hide evidence that their operation is causing harm. This includes attacking Eliot's father to silence him, paying off the environmental company hired to report on GreenSlate's environmental impact and getting the Attorney General who has invested money in them to help cover up their malpractices.
• Halloween Episode: "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job" takes place during the leadup to Halloween, and the case of the week is a woman being made to believe her apartment is haunted.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: While Fake Nate from "The Mastermind Job" isn't able to hold a candle to Nate Ford's ability to plan heists, he does have the ability to recite bureaucratic regulation in such excruciating detail that anyone listing to it will fall asleep. This proves incredibly useful to the team and at the end of the episode lands him a position helping out the sub-teams mentioned in the first episode.
• Heel Realization: Somewhat like the Team in the original series, Harry Wilson joins the team when an incident causes him to realize he's been helping the wrong people all these years. Similarly, Breanna's own is similar to her brother Hardison's: a career criminal hacker who got direction when she joined Leverage.
• Heist Clash: The first episode has Eliot, Parker, and Hardison trying to cheer up Sophie, who is feeling depressed on the anniversary of Nate's death by planning a heist from an art museum. While there, they come across Harry Wilson trying to steal a painting donated by his corrupt client. When Harry trips the alarm, the team has to decide if they should help him or not. They choose to help him, and he becomes a new teammate.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Dennis, Eliot's coworker from "The Rollin' on the River Job", is a gullible security guard with dreams of action movie heroism, but he has a good heart and also makes a damn fine carrot cake.
  • In order to slow down the mark in "The Double-Edged Sword Job", a programmer and former game designer, Harry pretends to be a fan of one of his games, Dozer Duels, and asks for help with a level he's stuck on. At the end of the episode, Breanna points out the stuff he was referencing got patched out of Dozer Duels a long time ago and realizes Harry really is a fan of the game.
  • "The Double-Edged Sword Job" reveals that in the time gap between the two series, Parker and Eliot have learned Klingon. Parker (presumably) because she was dating Hardison, and Eliot because Hardison bet him that he couldn't. Breanna isn't fully sure if Hardison really "lost" that bet.
  • "The Bucket Job" shows Breanna is a much bigger fan of antique computers and technology than one would expect of a young hacker, geeking out at the sight of an old school big block PC and happily receiving a vintage Nintendo 64 for Christmas.
  • "The Unwellness Job" reveals Harry has a surprisingly thorough understanding of cryptocurrency.
  • "The Grand Train Job" reveals Harry keeps a lot of chemical testing equipment on hand, having grown suspicious of what ends up in food after his firm took a case involving cobalt-tainted beer. He also has a bailout bag with duct tape and plastic tarp, which causes Eliot to wonder if he might be a serial killer.
• Hollywood Density: In "The Panamanian Monkey Job," Harry has a pallet full of boxes of gold bars. He mentions it's "100 kilos of gold". In reality, each individual box would weigh at least that much. (Played with: The gold bars are fake, but the security guys who are moving them really ought to notice that they weigh significantly less than real gold!)
• Hollywood Game Design: A variation with regards to a tabletop game instead of a video game; Spirit's Ruse from "The Card Game Job" seems to be fairly simplistic in terms of design, with cards no space for rules text and the only rules of the game seeming to be a variant of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. This may actually be an Enforced Trope, as it was reported that staff had to prevent people in the writer's room from creating an overly-complex rule set for the game.
• How We Got Here: The first episode has a brief rundown of Harry's current predicament before flashing back to "three days earlier" and then "six months earlier".
• Hypocrite: The mark in "The Rollin' On the River Job" complains that the rich and powerful stole his parents' life, even while he is trying to do the same to an entire neighborhood of people.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Fake Nate from "The Mastermind Job" is revealed to be this. In the past, he was a forensic accountant for IYS and idolized Nate, who in turn promised him and his fellow accountants that everyone has their own little "superpower" and that they would find their own someday. But Nate left IYS before Milton discovered his, so he just resorted to copying Nate due to his incredibly boring personality.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: In "The Double-Edged Sword Job", Breanna reveals the guy Eliot bumped into earlier in the episode was their mark, then pulls up a series of photos and asks him to pick out the guy's face. Eliot starts to say that he only saw him for a few seconds, only to then cut himself off by saying, "It's the third guy on the left, bottom row."
• Killed Off for Real: In the years since his and Sophie's retirement, Nate died of heart failure with the first episode taking place on the anniversary.
• Lampshade Hanging: The first two episodes make light of this show acting as the original Leverage Team's "reunion tour".
• The Mentor: Sophie and Parker act as this for Breanna who is new to both the team and their methods.
  • Played for Laughs when it's revealed that Parker was this to her when Breanna was a kid and apparently is this to any kids she meets.
    Parker: I teach every kid I meet how to do crime. Crime is fun!
• A Million Is a Statistic: Harry's tipping point. He was fine with his job when it was at a distance, but for Maxwell's case, he personally visited every one of Maxwell's victims and convinced them to take the settlement. And then Maxwell reneged.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot:
  • "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job": The team helps a woman who is the victim of a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax by a pair of con men. It turns out the con men are working for an assassin who is trying to kill a politician and needs the con men to scare tenants out of their houses for his hits.
  • "The Golf Job" sees Harry, Eliot, and Hurley run into a guy at the golf club running a scam on one of the other members, the former of which turns out to be trafficking undocumented Vietnamese immigrants through a nail salon.
  • "The Great Train Job": The team helps out a gay couple who are the victim of a hate crime. It turns out they are being targeted by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who is trying to run them out of town before they reveal he is poisoning their farm through illegal dumping.
• Mission Control: Hardison is in charge of coordinating all the different crews around the world. Hardison eventually leaves the team in order to run various charities and resistance movements around the world.
• My God, What Have I Done?: You can see some pretty good examples on Harry's face during the flashbacks where he realizes exactly how ruthless and amoral Maxwell actually is — and that he's handed Maxwell everything he needs to silence his victims permanently.
• Naïve Newcomer: Breanna and (especially) Harry, who has to get used to the original members' catchphrases, in-jokes, and rituals. Ultimately, they fulfill a similar role to who Hardison, Eliot, and Parker used to be: relatively new to being a part of a team and inexperienced in their roles, but over time grow into them to become equals to the rest of the crew.
• Nerds Speak Klingon: Parker says a proverb in Klingon, which Eliot translates.
  Parker: It's like the Klingon metaphor goes: [speaks a Klingon phrase]
  Eliot: "Even a fool buys stone for his house." [Breanna looks at him; he rushes out an explanation] Hardison bet me that I couldn't learn the language. He lost.
  Breanna: Did he?
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In addition to the examples listed under Ripped from the Headlines below, there are a couple of references to real-life people:
  • COM4R4T from "The Panamanian Monkey Job" is a clear reference to Deadmau5, the real-world rodent-themed DJ.
  • Christina Killian Santoro from "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job", a young, progressive politician from an Eastern seaboard state with a strong fandom among left-leaning youth, calls to mind New York State representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC).
• No Hero to His Valet: Inverted. While the team respects Nate, they remember him as filled with rage and condescension, with a habit of talking to people slowly like they're stupid and making pep talks that made people cry. Milton, on the other hand, remembers him as supportive, kind, and the only field agent that ever saw the forensic accountants as people. Of course, when you take into account that this is Nate as he was prior to his son's death...
• Non-Action Guy: In contrast to Eliot, Parker, and even Sophie on occasion, neither Breanna nor Harry do very much fighting. Justified; Harry's just an ex-lawyer who probably doesn't even know some basic self-defense techniques while Breanna's young with a non-physical specialty and doesn't have the physical capabilities to do any real damage even when she does try.
  • Harry gets involved in his first fight helping Eliot in "The Great Train Job", then promptly staggers off-camera to throw up from the adrenaline rush. This is not a problem he suffers from at the end of "The Harry Wilson Job".
• Noodle Incident:
  • The series freely acknowledges the long time gap between the two series with countless references to jobs we didn't see; for instance, one involving a child therapist with a case involving abused kids who pays them back with free sessions for Parker.
  • At the end of "The Double-Edged Sword Job", Breanna presents a full list of all the crimes she's wanted for. The only one we get any real details of was the one involving Breanna stealing three thousand gallons of maple syrup.
• The Nose Knows: Parker can apparently smell lasers (it's a mixture of ozone and cinnamon if you're curious). And whether or not glass is bulletproof (no clue what that smells like).
• Nostalgia Filter: A meta version. Harry says the bad guys aren't cheating anymore, they've rewritten the rules. Many of the Villain Of The Weeks of the original series were technically not doing anything illegal. The original characters repeatedly say that the world has gotten worse, Breanna lists all the disasters that happened in her lifetime and says that the "worse world is the only one she's ever known". Apparently, the characters remember (and expect the audience to remember with them) a time when terrorism, bigotry, greed, inequality, and corruption weren't major problems.
• "Not Illegal" Justification: Almost a Central Theme; in the time since the original series ended, the rich and powerful have twisted the legal system into a shield to protect themselves from any meaningful consequences, and as such, several of the cons the team runs now focus on ruining their marks financially or destroying their reputations, with the idea of them facing legal consequences now a secondary concern.
• Once More, with Clarity: As with the original series, the final act will feature flashbacks to how some seemingly random moment earlier in the episode was actually a key part of the team's con.
• The Order: Orpheus Grove from "The Walk In The Woods Job" presents themselves as a quasi-Illuminati but they're really just a bunch of rich, old, largely white men who get together to get drunk and act like idiots.
• Posthumous Character: The show opens with Nate having died. His absence is felt throughout the series.
• Pragmatic Villainy: This was Harry's approach to his role as a lawyer for rich criminals. He would help his clients avoid responsibility by offering the victims settlements that would allow them to move on with their lives. It would not be justice but would fix some of the damage and Harry could live with himself. Then he starts working for Marshall, who rejects the pragmatic approach and simply decides to use his money to grind the victims down even more, causing Harry to snap.
• Present Absence: Nate passed away prior to the first episode and Hardison goes off on his own adventures at the end of the second episode. Their absences are felt throughout the entire show, with the two being referenced at least Once an Episode.
• Private Military Contractor: RIZ Security is a secretive, amoral organization that provides security for dictators, mobsters, and corrupt corporate executives — and the people who run it have sinister plans of their own. They're recurring villains throughout the season. And the final bad guy, plotting a terrorist attack as a proof of concept.
• Professional Killer: The conmen in "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job" are revealed to be buying up houses for one, who's been hired to take out a prominent young politician by the crime families she's cracking down on.
• Replaced with Replica: The first episode has the team framing The Mark for insurance fraud. This plan involves swapping out nine pieces of art he had donated with fakes and then destroying one of them.
• Retired Badass: The librarian from "The Bucket Job" is revealed to be an ex-spy who disappeared after getting his hands on a dossier full of dirt on basically everybody in power.
• Ripped from the Headlines: As with the original series, many cases are inspired by real-world events, and likely wouldn't be believable if they didn't actually happen.
  • "The Too Many Rembrandts Job" is based on the Sackler family, who founded and control Purdue Pharma, and were sued for their involvement with the American opioid crisis after covering up how addictive Oxycontin could be. Multiple museum galleries had their names attached, notably in the Guggenheim.
  • "The Card Game Job" is inspired by Martin Shkreli. Shkreli was a hedge fund manager who bought out a pharma company and raised the cost of an antiparasitic drug used by HIV+ and AIDS patients (that only they had the rights to manufacture) by a factor of 56 and was later convicted of securities fraud. He also purchased the sole rights to listen to a Wu-Tang Clan album; even this is alluded to in the episode, as one of the Plot Points is the Shkreli expy's possession of the only copy of a valuable pop-cultural artifact.
  • "The Double-Edged Sword Job" is inspired by Clearview AI, an incredibly secretive facial recognition company that scrapes social media for photos to improve its software without the knowledge or consent of the posters or the hosting websites. The team poses as social consultants, something Mark Zuckerberg actually hired to come across as more likable during his testimony in front of Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
  • "The Unwellness Job" is pretty clearly based on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, a health and lifestyle brand started by a B-list actress that comes under fire due to heavy use of products based on pseudoscience.
  • RIZ is inspired by real organizations such as Blackwater.
  • One storyline was not ripped from the headlines, as it aired far too soon after the event in question for it to have been intentional. "The Tower Job" was not taken from the collapse of the condo in Miami, Florida.
  • Orpheus Grove is based off of the Bohemian Grove, the meeting place of the Bohemian Club, a fraternal club whose membership includes presidents such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan.
  • The Good Stewart Trucking company from "The Big Rig Job" bears more than a passing resemblance to the saga of Arrow Trucking, a real-life trucking company founded by a man who treated his employees like family, before his son inherited the company, defrauded it, and eventually drove it into bankruptcy.
  • Magiq Baby from "The Pyramid Job" could be based off of any number of Multi-Level Marketing entities, but bears the closest resemblance to LuLaRoe, being that it's led by a husband and wife team, sells clothing, and hosts frequent live-streams.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The villains of "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job" use this as their MO to buy houses for cheap and sell them at a profit. Then it turns out they're also obtaining the houses so an assassin can use them as a base. The team turns it right back on them in order to take the conmen down and deal with the assassin by exploiting his fear of ghosts.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: As Harry puts it, the rich and powerful no longer just cheat the system, they've rewritten the rules so it doesn't even count as "cheating".
• Ship Tease: Two: Eliot and Maria Shipp, Harry and Sophie.
  • Immediately between Eliot and Maria Shipp, thanks to the Interplay of Sex and Violence. It's teased for several episodes that Eliot is seeing someone, as if we're supposed to be surprised that it's Maria.
  • Frequently between Sophie and Harry, as when he asks her out for coffee at the end of an episode that made a big point of the client getting coffee and a big clue being that she loved to get coffee with her wife. The first season ends with her thanking him for seeing her differently than the team, giving him a kiss on the cheek, calling him by his first name, and taking off her engagement and wedding rings as she heads back to the team.
• Shout-Out:
  • Hardison refers to the team's re-recruitment of Sophie as "Getting the gang back together, like Star Trek," while giving Mariner's backward Vulcan salutes. Eliot joins in by referencing the Star Trek Movie Curse:
    Eliot: Even numbers only, baby... I can't believe I know that.
  • Sophie and Hardison introduce themselves as "Jo Grant" and "Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart".
  • Sophie's alias in "The Paranormal Hacktivity Job" is "Estella Havisham". The episode title is a play on Paranormal Activity.
  • "The Card Game Job" has its creator loosely based on Richard Garfield, with a hilarious reference to George R. R. Martin in the middle of the episode. There's also a moment when Breanna is playing said card game with the Villain of the Week, and he throws down a Blue-Eyed Dragon. Extra points for him also being a ruthless CEO who only cares about winning and has a penchant for a mystical card game.
  • According to Parker in the first episode, Hardison says they are living in the darkest timeline.
  • We retroactively learn the name of Nate and Sophie's go-to characterization for cons (loudly arguing husband/wife team to distract the mark from anything else going on): "The Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".
  • When Sophie runs into a rather unsavory mark in one episode that touches on her sensitivities, she declares "She tasks me...she tasks me and I shall have her." Followed not too long after by a "Clever girl" when said mark manages to wiggle her way out of a sticky situation.
  • There is a reference to Lee Tae-Joon–who leads the team in the Korean adaptation of the original series–and Roy Ryu–that show's equivalent of Eliot.
  • "The Tournament Job" in Season 2 is full of references to video game culture; at one point, background characters are said to be Ninja Running, while Sophie says that the game they're basing their grift on needs its own "EVO Moment 37" to make it big. Also, their client's name is Tam, and they use the handle River in the game they're playing.
• The Sociopath: The mark from "The Card Game Job" is a textbook example. Carries himself with an unbearably smug aura? Check. Desperate hunger to be the best at anything he's a part of but an utter disinterest in putting in any work on his part? Check. Blatant inability to give a damn about anyone whether they're his own employees or children at risk of death because they can't afford the medicine he owns? Check.
• Sonic Stunner: One of Breanna's inventions is a "subsonic projector" which can give a target vertigo by interfering with the ear's inner fluid.
• Spanner in the Works: Just as in the original, no matter how well the team plans, there's always an unexpected wrinkle that throws things off. Without Nate, they don't have the Xanatos Speed Chess skills to handle as well.
  • "The Tower Job" sees the whole thing nearly ruined when one of the marks walks right into the room the team was using as a base as she was hoping for a hookup with her assistant.
  • "The Card Game Job" gets more complicated when the reclusive CEO who hasn't been seen in years suddenly appears after receiving word someone wants to buy his company and he's become disillusioned with the business.
  • "The Bucket Job" has the team doing a good deed by making a dying librarian think he's living out a spy adventure. What could go wrong? Well, first, a batch of real spies get mixed up in this...because it turns out the "librarian" is a retired spy himself who doesn't know what's part of the game and what's real.
  • "The Harry Wilson Job" has the team's plans ruined by not knowing Hardison had his team running a con on the same mark with the two teams' plans clashing too much so they both have to start all over.
• Squee:
  • Parker just about has a heart attack at the end of "The Too Many Rembrandts Job" when the team comes up with the plan of breaking into eight different museums and replacing the mark's donated artworks with obvious forgeries.
    Parker: SO! MANY! VENTS!!
  • Breanna has a moment like this in "The Tower Job" when she realizes she's witnessing an Eliot Spencer smackdown for real.
  • Breanna gets another fangirl moment in "The Bucket Job" after she finds an old computer, geeking out at the sight of one of the original personal computers.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Harry is introduced trying to steal his client's painting as retribution; despite what seems to be a clever plan he's not an experienced thief and thus makes an easy mistake.
  • After Parker comes across an invisible laser grid in one episode, Hardison helps walk her through it via an infrared camera. At one point, Parker has to bend over backwards one of the lasers. Hardison bends backwards to follow her movements as best as he can, but a) he's nowhere near as flexible as Parker, and b) he forgot to stretch beforehand, so after a few seconds of holding the pose, there's a loud 'SNAP" and Hardison spends the rest of the episode moving with an obvious limp.
  • Hardison created a program that wipes any trace of the team from the Internet and then gives them perfect cover identities. Eliot's cover is blown because a security consultant saw a picture of Eliot from his mercenary days and remembered his face. As good as he is, Hardison cannot hack people's memories.
  • Nate never fully kicked his alcoholism (only managed it) and spent years holding onto his anger until he retired. Stress and drinking over a long period of time is never good for one's health. This plus his age and it's really not surprising to learn that in the intervening years Nate has died.
  • Harry worked for a law firm of Amoral Attorneys who cover their bases: even though the accusation was made by a man who has been accused of fraud, the firm fires Harry and his boss immediately confiscates all of his client files.
  • During a fight, Breanna attempts to help by smacking Eliot's opponent in the back of the head with a wooden pole. Of course, with her being a young hacker with the physical prowess that implies, the pole just bounces off the guy's back without so much as a crack, only serving to make her a target.
  • Harry tries to help Eliot in a fight in one episode by hitting a guy with his car. Unfortunately, it's a modern car with anti-collision sensors and automatic braking, so Harry skids to a stop inches from actually hitting the guy.
  • In The Belly Of The Beast Job, the team's use of Themed Aliases based on Doctor Who bites them in the ass when the mark's assistant recognizes the regularly used 'Lethbridge-Stewart' alias as a reference. Someone was bound to recognize it eventually, given that it has a fandom millions strong, even outside of the UK.
• Take That!: Two of the biggest Asshole Victims in the show are the corrupt owners of pharmaceutical companies. Fletcher Maxwell (from "The Too Many Rembrandts Job" and "The Panamanian Monkey Job") sells an opioid that he knows is addictive. Jim Cordozar (from "The Card Game Job") raises the price of a life-saving treatment for a rare disease and then keeps the cure a secret simply to make more profits. It's played straight twice: Maxwell is easily framed for insurance fraud and art forgery because everyone thinks he's not above it, while Cordozar both has the cure lost to all his competitors (since he didn't patent it) and is facing jail time for accepting funds to research a cure he already had.
• Technology Marches On: Played for Laughs In-Universe. Breanna finds Hardison's hacker skills as a hacker a bit too dated and finds her Gadgeteer Genius skills as a "maker" are more relevant.
  • Subverted in the show proper, where she basically serves as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute in skills to Hardison, though not in narrative, where she and Harry essentially serve as "The Kids".
  • Hardison previously needed an entire van (Lucille and, later, Lucille 2.0) to house the team's field equipment. Since the original team parted ways, computer technology has advanced to the point that Hardison was able to turn every one of Eliot's food trucks into a "Lucille" (thanks to a hideaway compartment in the back), allowing the team to work internationally.
  • In "The Walk In The Woods Job", Breanna manages to drum up massive support for an endangered species of frog in the space of a single afternoon by simply creating a website for it, something which the woman championing the cause had failed to do. This actually helps get Orpheus Grove shut down because it's revealed that one massive reason the frog was endangered was the fact that members of the Grove were urinating into their spawning grounds.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: In-Universe. In "The Tower Job", Breanna creates an abstract painting supposedly depicting Eliot.
  Sophie: You really captured Eliot's soul, his inner conflicts laid bare.
  Eliot: WHERE?!
• Two Girls to a Team: Originally played straight and then inverted. The first two episodes have the show's original cast with Harry in place of Nate. After Hardison takes a leave of absence, his foster sister Breanna takes his place and the team is comprised of three females and two males.
• Un-person: Hardison has written an algorithm capable of erasing all photos and evidence of a person from the Internet. The team uses this to protect their identities and The Double-Edge Sword Job reveals it allows them to run their own version of Witness Security. The same episode has the team deal with a tech genius who created an algorithm that can find people in photographs that are so blurry that Hardison's program can't recognize them and so doesn't delete them.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: As with the original series, it turns out much of the team's plans were kept hidden until the con is finished. Notably, Harry more than once thinks the con is ruined until the team reveals the real con's backup plan is in place.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: A sweet grown-up, anyway. Before his son died, it turns out that Nate was thoughtful and caring, that he used to delve into the bowels of IYS to show appreciation to the unsung heroes moving paper behind the scenes, that he remembered their names and birthdays, and that he promised to always help them find their superpowers (and apparently did so for a lot of them). Sophie, Eliot, and Parker are fairly shocked to learn that their bitter, angry, vengeful drunk used to be an All-Loving Hero.
• Villain Protagonist: In "The Tower Job", Sophie explicitly tells Breanna that they are not heroes. They're villains who focus on worse villains.
  Breanna: Hey, look. We're gonna mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?
  Sophie: Oh, yeah. Never forget that, Breanna. We're not heroes. We're just necessary.
  • In the first season finale, Maria Shipp wrestles with her love of Eliot, her knowledge that he is a deeply good man, and her new realization that he does good as a career criminal. She ultimately decides that she can't accept his job.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": Roy from the Korean team apparently named his dog after Eliot. It bites just about everybody according to Hurley.
• Wham Episode: Episode 15. Harry's daughter appears, it's revealed his wife remarried a HIDEOUSLY corrupt CEO, then the CEO blows up an oil platform to cover the evidence...and Harry rejoins the dark side. End episode. However, at least Harry turns out to be a Fake Defector.
• Wham Line: From "The Bucket Job, "Holy cow. The librarian's actually a spy?"
• What You Are in the Dark: Milton Friedlander (AKA "the Mastermind") may have caused a lot of trouble by writing a book about Leverage Consulting's cons and passing himself as Nate Ford, but the moment he realizes his actions have put Harry in danger he begs the villain to let Harry go, arguing that Harry makes a poor hostage and that Milton doesn't even know him.
• Worse with Context:
  • When Parker confides in Sophie that she hasn't stabbed somebody in almost a month, Sophie correctly points out that isn't a very long time. Parker then responds, "It is when you're not the one doing the stabbing."
  • While hacking the casino in "The Rollin' on the River Job", Breanna assures Parker she has things under control.
    Breanna: I read the manual.^note Hardison left behind a series of manuals for Breanna so she could do his job (Beat) I-I skimmed. Volumes one to three.
    Parker: There are fifteen.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Parker's reaction when entering a vault with lasers in it is to exasperatedly ask who uses lasers as a security measure anymore.

---