TV-Reviewed

I’m admittedly really busy with all sorts of television this summer and frankly haven’t been as hooked on Leverage as I was for the outstanding first season. That doesn’t mean Leverage is something I wouldn’t recommend, however. It’s still a terrific show.

In fact, I would have to say that Leverage continues to impress me with the complexity of some of the cons. The crew is having to think on their feet a bit more this year as the situations they find themselves in are always changing on them. It makes for exciting stuff to watch.

Timothy Hutton, Beth Riesgraf and Gina Bellman

In “The Order 23 Job,” the Leverage team works on getting money from a Bernie Madoff-type of a scam artist. The group knew that the guy was likely holding on to some of the money that he claimed had vanished so they decided to con him into giving it up.

Their only way in was to prey on his weakness and that happened to be germs. He was a germophobe. He was terrified of germs and even carried around a little bottle of hand sanitizer to kill off any germs on his hands.

It took some maneauvering, but the team managed to use an empty floor of a hospital as their own hospital and keep this Madoff wannabe there. Thanks to Hardison, Nate, Sophie, and Parker ran a wicked scam on him to make him sick, all by affecting the way his brain worked. This manipulation was clever, if not downright cruel.

While all of this was going on, Hardison and Eliot were responsible for playing security guards. They had to deal with the Marshals who were supposed to be looking over Nate’s new patient.

Eliot, however, got a little distracted in a touching side story. Eliot kind of took in a young boy who was being abused by his father… not sexually, thankfully, but he was being beaten. The father blamed it on his son simply being accident prone, but that wasn’t going to cut it with Eliot. I felt sorry for the boy because he couldn’t go to the police since his father was friends with many of them and he felt they wouldn’t have done anything about it. It’s scary to think that, frankly. Eliot ended up having the last laugh when he had a U.S. Marshal deal with the situation.

I frankly liked Eliot’s side story more than the primary plot of the episode. It really pulled at your heart. With so much going on in this episode, Nate was forced (once again!) to take everyone aside and tell them all about the tricks, cons, etc that went down. The first season’s reveals were much slicker in my opinion.

Rating: 7.2