Leverage: Redemption
Jul. 11th, 2021 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brainwaneI have seen all of Leverage: Redemption and would enjoy talking about it with y'all! Am also talking with MetaFilter folks on FanFare. Eight episodes are out now and 8 more episodes are expected later this year, says English Wikipedia.
Breanna's speech to the inventor of the card game (Mystic's Ruse?) was such a love letter to fandom. And Breanna's speeches, about wanting the world to suck less, and about how the awful 21st century is the only world she's ever known, really got to me.
That pharma investor - Martin Shkreli with a single serial number filed off!
I was thinking about how Nate got introduced with an origin story where he had been doing a good job, doing good things in the world, and then his employers betrayed him in a really bureaucratic way, to save money the way institutions always want to. And in contrast, Harry Wilson had been very competently doing bad things, and then tried to do something only moderately evil, and then his client personally broke faith with him, and broke promises Wilson had already made to other people, on the way to doing something cartoonishly evil.
The Wraith caused me to quote that old Batman line: "criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot."
That cop software. Oooooof. I'm glad the writers had that line about the importance of being able to not just be frozen in time as the self you were on your worst day.
In a few scenes in this season, we see the old-timer Leverage crew dealing with the newcomers' misgivings about the meaner things they do. OK, yeah. But then Ms. "St. Claire" was willing to make racist implications how she dismissed Bobby Jindal, I mean, Chaudhry. That jarred me. Maybe we are sort of supposed to read Chaudhry as among the more sympathetic villains -- he gets in over his head with the organized crime folks and ends up running from them -- which would be congruent with the sympathetic line he gets about how his family actually worked to gain wealth, didn't just inherit it.
I'm thinking about what villains or issues to expect in the second chunk of 8 episodes. With New Orleans as their base, I think the crew is likely to see post-Katrina environmental stuff around levees and pollution, and I predict a food-centric episode that takes advantage of New Orleans culinary stuff, and something where jazz plays a big role. And, based on John Rogers's Twitter feed, maybe something about ag/farmers, and something about predatory higher education.
Breanna's speech to the inventor of the card game (Mystic's Ruse?) was such a love letter to fandom. And Breanna's speeches, about wanting the world to suck less, and about how the awful 21st century is the only world she's ever known, really got to me.
That pharma investor - Martin Shkreli with a single serial number filed off!
I was thinking about how Nate got introduced with an origin story where he had been doing a good job, doing good things in the world, and then his employers betrayed him in a really bureaucratic way, to save money the way institutions always want to. And in contrast, Harry Wilson had been very competently doing bad things, and then tried to do something only moderately evil, and then his client personally broke faith with him, and broke promises Wilson had already made to other people, on the way to doing something cartoonishly evil.
The Wraith caused me to quote that old Batman line: "criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot."
That cop software. Oooooof. I'm glad the writers had that line about the importance of being able to not just be frozen in time as the self you were on your worst day.
In a few scenes in this season, we see the old-timer Leverage crew dealing with the newcomers' misgivings about the meaner things they do. OK, yeah. But then Ms. "St. Claire" was willing to make racist implications how she dismissed Bobby Jindal, I mean, Chaudhry. That jarred me. Maybe we are sort of supposed to read Chaudhry as among the more sympathetic villains -- he gets in over his head with the organized crime folks and ends up running from them -- which would be congruent with the sympathetic line he gets about how his family actually worked to gain wealth, didn't just inherit it.
I'm thinking about what villains or issues to expect in the second chunk of 8 episodes. With New Orleans as their base, I think the crew is likely to see post-Katrina environmental stuff around levees and pollution, and I predict a food-centric episode that takes advantage of New Orleans culinary stuff, and something where jazz plays a big role. And, based on John Rogers's Twitter feed, maybe something about ag/farmers, and something about predatory higher education.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 12:39 am (UTC)Enjoy!
Date: 2021-07-12 12:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 01:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 04:09 am (UTC)I found the particularly ripped-from-the-headlines episodes- the Martin Shkreli one in particular- a little hard to swallow because of how they simplified the realities. Which, obviously they need to do to tell the story in 40 minutes, but when it's something where I know the real facts better it's harder for me to deal with the glossing than generic real estate scammer. "Oh, yeah, Shkreli had the cure all along and it can be given to people immediately without any FDA investigation" makes for an easy happy ending but it misses that what let Shkreli do what he did is that the FDA does have lots of red tape, and, you know, some of it exists for a reason. Maybe the barriers to making generic versions of out-of-patent drugs don't need to be as high and anti-competitive as they are right now, but there do need to be some barriers. But Shkreli is exploiting that regulation to do vulture capitalism- he's not creating economic value, he's making money off of a mistake in the government regulation. So that resolution ticked me off, though I do think they did a reasonable job of capturing Shkreli's motivations as I understand them.
A related thing that bugged me about the Shkreli plot is that... Shkreli went to jail! He's still in jail! Like, the show paints it as serials-filed-off Shkreli did stuff that was legal but evil and so the Leverage team had to take him down because the government couldn't, and yes, some of the stuff Shkreli did was legal and evil, but the kind of sociopath who could do the legal evil stuff Shkreli did is also going to do probably do a bunch of fraud, too, and attract lots of attention doing it, and go to jail for real. But daraprim prices are still high, because the regulatory barriers to competing directly are still there.
That's sort of how Nate gets introduced, but I feel like over time it becomes clearer and clearer that Nate did a lot of bad stuff at the insurance company, because good company men at insurance companies do a lot of bad stuff, and Nate's outrage that the company betrayed him when he had been a good company man all along starts to sour- this is a big part of why a lot of the fandom hated Nate. I've been slowly rewatching the original show over the last few months and Nate's season 2 finale thing, the "I am a thief", only makes sense to me if that's part of the equation. Not "I am a thief" now because I am accepting that as part of Leverage Inc I am doing good and I should stop hating myself for the way I'm doing it, but "I am a thief" because I was always a thief, it's fundamental to who I am but I was in denial until now.
Yeah, I don't know that it's entirely clear what moral event horizon Wilson threatened to cross that pulled him back, given that it's clear he's done lots of morally bankrupt lawyering before, but I really loved his arc over this, framed as teshuvah, the Jewish process of repentance that involves steps that let you make progress in improving how you stand to yourself without erasing the past. And I loved how that echoed back to Eliot and Parker and Sophie still constantly working to continue their own process of repentance and redemption, even though it's been years for them.
For me the big difference between Nate and Harry is that Harry always knew he was a thief. He's not good at the technical mechanics of crime, he's not a hands-on crook the way Parker, Hardison, and Eliot are, but when he was an evil lawyer he knew he was being an evil lawyer so when he turns he's never in denial about what he's doing or what lines he is or isn't willing to cross.
*Insert musings here about how original Leverage was super-Catholic because of Nate and getting rid of Nate lets the show be Jewish instead.
I didn't know what to do with that storyline! Like, yes, super-powerful surveillance software is dangerous but when Breanna tried to say that because the program is more powerful than Hardison's so therefore it was bad, I kinda choked on that. The present day super powerful surveillance is already dangerous and I'm not convinced that making the software more powerful makes it that much more dangerous, especially since as the episode demonstrates repeatedly, that kind of software is still jammable in some pretty low tech ways. Frankly the level of AI we see in the episode makes me continue to worry more not about surveillance software being really good at knowing who people are, but about surveillance software being really bad at knowing who people are, but being treated as being really good by law enforcement.
And anyway any attempt to grapple with not being you on your worst day that skates over the fact that most of the stuff that's up on the 'net is stuff we voluntarily put there is not thoughtful enough for me. Have you read Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface yet? It's so good at struggling with the cost-benefits of being Extremely Online that it makes everything else recent on the topic that I've seen look simplistic in comparison. Well, except for The Unraveling, nothing make The Unraveling look simplistic.
Yeah, Breanna was such a delightfully Gen Z presence on the show, I loved her. Though I wished desperately that there could have been more Breanna/Hardison interplay.
I dunno, reading this back I feel like I've complained a lot but I loved almost all of Redemption a huge amount, it was so much fun to watch, and I particularly liked Gina Bellman, Beth Riesgraf, and Christian Kane playing older and wiser versions of their characters.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 04:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 04:30 am (UTC)Well, take Parker. There's a throughline through a lot of the later seasons of the original with Sophie coaching Parker on how to interact with people in ways that get her what she wants, by treating people as people. The Parker we see is convincingly much further down that path, it's clear that she's spent the past five years working on building emotional connections both with the people she loves, and with people she doesn't care about but needs to interact with... But it's not like she's become magically more empathic. She has scripts, she has strategies, and she has mechanisms for pulling herself outside of her comfort zone. And she doesn't need Sophie's coaching anymore, she can keep doing the work on her own, and she does it because she finds value in understanding emotions, both hers and other people. I feel like in the surveillance episode the moment when she has to impersonate the physical and emotional affect of the evil programmer to trick his AI is an apotheosis where she's synthesized everything that she's become, to the point where she is literally able to put herself in someone else's shoes, and that person is himself a person who lacks empathy. And we see multiple times- the victim in the haunted house episode, the victim in the evil surveillance episode- Parker seizing the initiative to protect the people around her because she cares about them and now has tools for relating to people she cares about safely without risking emotions she can't control.
And it's after midnight so I'm not going to do it but I could do similar analysis of Eliot and Sophie. The way they have developed those characters so they're flawed in the same ways as they were before, but they've sort of grown into their flaws more, was so brilliant and delicious and satisfying to watch.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-12 07:00 am (UTC)It’sa slightly wobbly start but it firmed up. I watched the original recently and they had some meh episodes too. This felt like an opening arc and a careful goodbye to Nate who was the center for the major arcs and where they can’t have the actor come back.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-13 01:35 pm (UTC)