Leverage – Recap & Review – The Order 23 Job

photo: tnt

Leverage
The Order 23 Job

Original Air Date: July 29, 2009

Brittany Frederick – Associate Staff Writer
brittanyw@thetwocentscorp.com

This would be the latest show to take a spin on the Bernie Madoff scandal, as we open at the sentencing of a hedge fund manager. Bruce McGill plays a guy who’s royally pissed and wants to shoot the dude, except for Nate takes the gun from him first. See, Nate thinks they can recover the missing money and get it back to the victims.

His plan? First he gets Eddie the Hedge Fund Manager sent to the hospital by spiking his orange drink, then it’s time to go steal a hospital. Therein, Eddie should tell them where the money is and they can go recover it. Hey, I’d play doctor with Timothy Hutton any day, and it’s hilarious to see Parker trying to play the cheerful nurse when…well, it’s Parker. Meanwhile, we learn Eliot doesn’t have a TV, hasn’t seen the Star Trek movies (can we really blame him?), and doesn’t like abusive parents.

Nate and Co. are doing everything they can to scare the daylights out of Eddie, including making him believe he’s got some rare infectious disease. This only gets weirder when Eddie gets an actual nosebleed. Oops.

Now their illusion spreads to hospital security and half the building, and they have to keep it going if they have any hope of finding where the money is. Things unravel when Eliot’s cover gets blown and he brawls it out in a hospital morgue with one of the U.S. Marshals, who is…not a real U.S. Marshal. Double oops. Anyway, he gets left in the morgue, and wisely the team all realize that they’re really losing control of their own game.

However, all this drama does freak out Eddie enough to get him to say he’ll tell them where the money is. Which is only true long enough for him to grab a security guy’s taser, use it on Parker and make a run for it. Except for, as we find out, she was wearing a vest. She only faked her injury to get it on tape for more incriminating evidence. The team hunts him down, which makes him run smack into the cops. Eddie’s bright idea is that he’ll squeal on all of them and take them down. Of course, the cops don’t believe a word that he says and arrest him.

There’s even a cute little coda where Eliot gets the U.S. Marshal to go and rescue the abused child from his pain in the neck father. We all knew from the moment we laid eyes on that guy that Eliot was going to make sure he got his, didn’t we?

That sums up most of my feelings with this episode. It’s a piece where you can guess well in advance the beats that will be hit – the bad guy is going to crack, and spill everything, and the cops are going to not believe a word he says – but that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable to get there. It’s always interesting to find out how the Leverage team is going to get from Point A to Point B – for example, I really thought Parker had been hurt until we saw the flashback proving she was wearing a vest to protect against it. And the cast continues to turn in great performances; I always enjoy the riffing between Aldis Hodge and Christian Kane, the latter of whom also delivered a great understated turn with his subplot.

And on an aside: does anyone actually get previews for Leverage at the end of the show, or just yet another commercial for Dark Blue? I think this is the second week they’ve announced “scenes from next week’s episode” and I get another commercial. Sigh.

Sound off below – what did you think?