Coming off of a few weeks of dealing with Nate’s drinking, this episode put much of the focus on the rest of the team. I liked Nate’s role this week. The writers had him in control of the situation, without pushing him out there, taking all the spotlight. In fact, Parker and Hardison assumed a fair bit of the responsibility for this episode.
This case came to Team Leverage in a fairly unusual way. Parker’s fake identity received jury duty and she had to do it. Nate wouldn’t let Hardison get her out of it. All of this stemmed from some sort of incident that Parker was responsible for during a job that wasn’t shown.
During her time in the court room, Parker realized something was afoot. There was a hidden camera in the defendant’s lawyer’s briefcase and the lawyer also had an earpiece, receiving instructions from people in a warehouse.
Aldis Hodge as Alec Hardison
Nate and the rest of the team were reluctant to help, thinking Parker was imagining things, but it didn’t take long for them to turn up evidence that Parker was right. It was a wrongful death suit. A woman’s husband died after taking an energy pill and now the company who sold the pill is being sold to another company. Or so it seems.
Lauren Holly was very good in her role. I wasn’t expecting her to play the bad guy, but she did a convincing job of it.
It’s hard to watch this episode and not think of the 2003 film Runaway Jury, especially after seeing all of the research on the members of the jury. That was a pretty high-tech film and there’s no doubt some things were borrowed from it for this episode.
I really enjoyed Parker as a character. She’s beginning to grow, even if it’s very slow. She was put in an awkward position where she had to form a bond with people and try to get them to trust her. When she became the jury’s foreman, she was in a powerful position, but it was awkward too. She’s not very good with the power of persuasion. She has a definite lack of social skills and it showed early on. But if you’ve been watching Leverage, you’re already accustomed to this.
While Parker was stuck in jury duty, Sophie was busy trying to buy the company who was selling the energy pills and Hardison was doing the impossible: he was the widow’s lawyer. Thankfully, much of the delay tactics weren’t shown, just enough to string us along. Hardison truly shined when it mattered most… they had to win the case when all of their tricks had failed. And it worked beautifully. I kind of felt bad for that doctor who really got abused on the stand. Sure, he deserved it, but afterwords, all I could think of was “wow.”
With only two episodes left, I like how things have gone this week. We’re off the annoying behavior from Parker and Nate. I’m very much looking forward to the remaining two episodes, which will be connected, story-wise. It’ll be a big two-parter that will delve deeply into Nate’s history.
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