The cops find out that Nate actually used the warden’s car as a getaway vehicle, hiding it in while he went to the bank, and making him look really guilty. Not only that but he stole the warden’s dry cleaning too. The cops prove that Billy is still in prison, and that they saw the warden clearing out his campaign bank account, not to mention he’s got a list of state judges in his car. The warden gets arrested, and everybody cheers.
Everything would be okay if the crazy French witch didn’t show up on Nate’s doorstep with a bunch of her hired goons with guns. He correctly guesses she was involved in the plan all along, and she got him landed in that prison on purpose. She has a job for him: to take down someone named Damian Moreau, whom apparently everyone else is afraid of touching. They’re being blackmailed. And Nate’s started drinking again, leading to Sophie telling him he can save himself this time…while he still tries to figure out what her actual name is, to no avail.
In the second hour, I feel like I was still watching Sleeper Cell by mistake, as a foreign hacker gets beaten up and left for dead in his apartment. And look, it’s yet another new title sequence! After which, the hacker comes to Nate and Hardison to ask for their help. Seems he was trying to protest an Iranian program that targets dissidents and gets them killed. He needs the team to finish the job for him.
It starts with Sophie, Eliot and Hardison staking out the local secret police safehouse, which is in the back of some restaurant. While they do that, Parker breaks into the secret room in the back and copies data off the computers. Cut to Hardison’s obligatory exposition scene, where he talks about how the group is connected to big computer guru Larry Duberman. They have to go through the computer guru here to shut down the secret police there. The team goes to infiltrate his HQ, complete with stealing his keycard and fingerprint. Hardison weeps when he finds out the big evil program is run from the CEO’s high school computer that still uses floppy disks. No joke. Apparently this guy is way stuck in his past.
Also: Hardison is a Green Lantern fan. From one GL fan to another, total win. He’s also hacked into Nate’s Netflix queue, which involves The Rockford Files, Sex and the City and Psych.)
Nate’s genius idea is to go back to Duberman’s high school and see what the deal is. They just have to push the high school reunion up by eight months and stage the whole thing. I wonder if this will be as good as Chuck‘s high school reunion episode. We see some fun high school flashbacks: Hardison looks like a reject from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, quarterback Eliot only took home ec to hit on girls, and Parker apparently never even went. Sophie and Nate, meanwhile, infiltrate said reunion with the latter pretending to be some guy Duberman really hated. He looks ridiculous, but that’s the point.
While he continues to look ridiculous, Sophie tries to bring Duberman back to the appropriate place so they can get him to give up the password they need. Nate decides to just needle him mercilessly instead and ends up being molested by a cheerleader, then locked in a storage closet. This leaves Eliot, where he sees the Iranians have turned up at Duberman’s office, and Hardison finds out they have a hired assassin in said cheerleader. Just as she’s about to shoot, it’s Sophie to the rescue. The fight sequence is no Yvonne Strahovski-Nicole Richie showdown, but it’s pretty cool. Parker ends up tasering the assassin while Nate distracts her. But all of this blows their cover to Duberman. While Nate explains he’s been had, Eliot pulls the plug on the program, and Team Leverage wins once again while Larry has a meltdown and the FBI jumps him for having a gun at his high school reunion.
It’s a pretty good double season opener for Leverage. I have only two minor complaints: that in the first episode, we needed some scenes between Aldis Hodge and his brother Edwin — how can you have brothers on a show and not find an excuse to give them at least one scene together? — and the second episode didn’t include anything nearly as funny as Adam Baldwin DJ’ing on Chuck. But otherwise, I found the evening to be an enjoyable pair of episodes, and a fine return to form for Leverage, which is always a dose of good, funny, action-packed entertainment — a rarity in television these days which a lot of shows wish they were. Leverage got there first and it continues to be the best of them.
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