Leverage: The Stork Job (Episode 106)

Ask me about my issues!

We start off this week in Belgrade, Serbia, where a woman and two cranky-looking men are walking through a parking garage.  An American couple approach them, yelling about how they’d already given them the money and asking where Luca is.  The cranky men, who are perhaps cranky because they are really freaking cold, proceed to beat the shit out of the man.  They leave him unconscious, and the woman screams for help.  Cut over to Leverage Headquarters, where the woman, Dana Morton, meets with Nate. Her husband Joe is still in physical therapy after spending two weeks in a Serbian hospital.  Okay, it didn’t look like he got beat up that badly.  This guy must be made of glass if a few punches and a knee to the stomach can cause that much damage.  Anyway, she tells Nate that she and Joe were trying to adopt in Serbia, as many other countries wouldn’t let them because of a small pot charge Joe got in college.  Irina, the woman we saw in the parking garage, charged them “administrative fees” for months.  When the couple got suspicious and flew to Serbia, she introduced them to a little boy named Luca.  She took about $120,000 from them, but they don’t want it back; all they want is Luca.

When Nate brings the case to the team, he informs us that Luca stayed with the Morton’s for only one week before a car came and took him away.  They watch a video of him and Parker confirms that he’s an orphan by observing his behavior, including the way he hoards essentials like food and flinches away from physical contact.  Oh, looks like this episode is going to be about Parker, then.  Hardison briefs the team on Irina Larenko, who was a successful model in the 80s and a B-movie actress after that.  Eliot and Nate geek out over a movie she was in, and for some reason I assumed it was a porno.  Clearly I have been in fandom far too long.  After a while Irina fell in with some Russian gangsters and ended up “grifting her way through Europe.”  The adoption scam is a fairly recent development.  She closed down operation after the incident with the Morton’s, but Hardison found out that she’s been invited to a party at the American Embassy next week.  Off they go!

At the party, Parker is posing as a waitress and Eliot poses as a guest.  YES.  Tuxedoed Eliot is very, very relevant to my interests.  Nate and Sophie have to stay away from the party with Hardison, since Sophie once posed as a Slovenian princess and therefore cannot be seen by the Ambassador.  Of course she did.  Hardison, who continues to be a racial stereotype, drinks orange soda while identifying the man Irina is talking to at the party.  He’s Nicolas Obrovic, and he’s the guy that took Luca away from the Morton’s.  It will be Eliot’s job to charm her, though Sophie is worried that she’ll see through his act.  Honey, I haven’t seen anything from the past five minutes except for Eliot in a tux, so I think he’ll be fine.  Turns out that he does need a little bit of help, though, because Irina immediately insults his bowtie and hair.  Oh, this shit just got personal.  You do NOT insult the hair, lady.  Upon Sophie’s insistence, Eliot shifts gears and plays the ruggedly handsome cowboy card, and in about two seconds Irina is melting before him.  That’s more like it. He keeps playing her with Sophie’s coaching, and the more he learns the more Nate questions how much of his past relationship with Sophie was genuine.

Meanwhile, Nicolas is hitting on Parker like it’s his job.  Being the socially awkward darling that she is, Parker doesn’t really know how to handle the situation.  Hardison is also having a hard time, but that’s because he’s blatantly jealous.  Parker accidentally tells Nicolas that her name is Hardison when she yells at her friend over their earpieces.  And that’s not even the worst of it.  She can’t even tell him where she’s from, and when Nate lists several options she can use she just repeats the entire list to Nicolas.  Hee!  During the course of this conversation, Hardison discovers that Nicolas is a former mobster that went legit and now runs a government organization that takes in orphaned children.  This explains how Irina has been getting the children she uses in her adoption scam.  Nate tells Parker to bring up the orphans the war left behind, and when she does she has flashes of the video of Luca with the Mortons and of her own childhood.  Nicolas’ apathy towards the children makes her so angry that she abandons the plan by stabbing him with a fork and jumping out of the window.  Go on, girl!

Naturally, the rest of the team is none too pleased by Parker’s actions.  Nate thinks quickly and has Eliot tell Irina that he’s producing a movie in Serbia and that he still has some parts available.  Irina jumps at the chance to act again, and gives Eliot her information.  When Eliot meets with the rest of the team he finds out that they still have no idea where Parker is.  Hardison says she slipped past security at the Embassy and is probably halfway across Europe by now, but Parker surprises everyone by showing up in the room with them.  With that problem solved, they concentrate on another pressing issue; they now have to steal a movie.

Luckily, Serbia is a hot spot for making U.S. films with cheap labor, and one of the films currently shooting is independent.  The crew doesn’t really care who they take orders from, so all they have to do is get rid of the director and the producer and they’ll be golden.  Earlier in the day Hardison had stolen all the money from the film’s budget, which sends the producer back to L.A. in hopes of solving the problem.  He also sent the director a text saying that he’s been offered the directing job for The Hills Have Eyes Six, so he books it to Vancouver.  Wow, if The Hills Have Eyes Six is a better option than this film, this movie must really suck.  They’ve replaced the director with Nate, who’s sporting messy hair, glasses, and a manic disposition.  He seriously gets the best roles on this show, and Timothy Hutton does a fabulous job with all of them.

Eliot brings Irina to the set and he and Nate give her the role of “the mother.”  Parker pretending to be a PA at the moment, and she’s not exactly thrilled about that.  She complains to Hardison, who is marking prop guns with white Xs.  He tells her that she has to remember that she doesn’t work alone anymore, and that they’re “more than a team.”  I’d tell him to just throw her down and get it over with, but there is something really sweet and innocent about the dynamic between these two that even I don’t want to ruin.  It’s like they’re seventh graders trying to ask each other to their first dance.  Eliot walks by looking for the script Sophie wrote, and they find that Sophie went way over the top with it.  It was supposed to be just a simple scene between Irina and a boy, but now it includes stunts, special effects, and a nun.  Parker wonders who the nun is, and Sophie rolls out, dressed in full nun regalia, as angelic music plays.  Awesome.  Nate’s just as shocked by this turn of events, but Sophie insists that her script provides emotional payoff.  “This is a movie about NATO troops being attacked by werewolves,” Nate says.  “There is no emotional payoff.”  Ha!  Sophie insists that she knows what she’s doing, and Nate is about a split second away from telling her that she’s a shit actress before he remembers that she’ll never have sex with him if he insults her skills.  A wise move, my friend.

They set up Sophie’s scene, and she starts with the acting.  She runs through snowy woods as soldiers chase her until she finally ends up in a barn.  She stands with her back to the door and prays as the soldiers fire at her, one of the shots hits her.  “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil,” she says, and she falls to the ground dead.  Everyone is impressed by her performance, and Nate reminds them that they are in the middle of a con, and Sophie is a great actress as long as she’s working a con.  Right afterwards they prepare to shoot Irina’s scene, but they tell her that the boy who was supposed to play her son never showed up.  Eliot says that they’ll just have to cut the scene, but Irina says that she’ll get them a boy.  Nate gives Luca’s physical description to make sure that they get the right kid, and she agrees to come back again tomorrow with the child.

Parker follows Sophie back to a warehouse, sporting a headset that allows Hardison to see everything that she sees.  Once inside Parker sees a bunch of men with guns, but she continues her investigation.  She enters a room and finds it filled with dozens and dozens of young children.  Some are laying two to a bit and some are in sleeping bags on the floor.  “My God,” Hardison says when he sees them all, and that really sums it up.  Parker looks like she’s about to pass out when she hears someone coming.  She quickly hides under one of the beds and the children don’t tell on her when Irina and several men enter the room.  Irina goes straight for Luca and takes him away with her.  She follows the men when they leave the room and sees an arms deal go down.  She and Hardison realize that the orphanage is just a cover for arms dealing.  She gets out and meets Hardison at his van, where she insists that they have to bail on the whole job without saving any of the kids.  “This is a crappy orphanage in a country full of orphans,” she says.  “We can’t save them all.”  Hardison tries to get through to her, saying that he understands that it was hard for her to grow up in the system, but that not all foster parents are bad.  He admits that the grandmother he talked about in “The Miracle Job” was actually his foster mother, and that she took good care of him and his foster siblings.  His argument doesn’t go over big, though.  “We put these kids in the system,” she says as she starts to cry, “and odds are…they’re going to turn out like me.”  “I like the way you turned out,” Hardison tells her.  Altogether now: aww!

When they get back to the now-deserted movie set, the team discusses this new information.  Since they’re going to get Luca on the set tomorrow, everyone thinks it’ll be too dangerous to try and save all of the orphans.  Nate thinks they should go home, work on a strategy and come back.  No one seems happy about the situation, but Hardison is the only one who openly objects.  The next day, Irina brings Luca to the set as promised.  The start shooting the scene.  Irina and Luca run into the same barn we saw earlier and Irina puts Luca in a wooden enclose.  She goes back over to the barn door just in time to get mauled by a werewolf.  I don’t know about you guys, but I kind of want to see this movie.  It looks like it’s so bad that it would be awesome.  Irina sits up and says she wants to try the scene again, but the Leverage team has suddenly disappeared.  She goes to get Luca and finds that he’s missing too.

Cut to a parking lot, where the team minus Parker delivers Luca to the Mortons.  They’re thrilled to see him, and Luca looks pretty happy to see them as well.  After momentarily enjoying their accomplishment the team realizes that Parker is missing.  She’s not wearing her earpiece, put Hardison put a GPS tracker in her shoes after the party.  He finds out that she’s heading back towards the orphanage, and the team rushes after her.  We find out that an arms deal is going on, but Parker sneaks past these men and makes her way to the children.  She tries to tell them to follow her in their language, but she ends up saying ridiculous things like “I will make your tomato shiny” and “Men will sadden you.”  Finally she just says “Haagen-Dazs,” and the kids immediately get excited and follow her.  Hee.    Just as they’re about to leave the room, though, Nicolas comes to the door.  Parker pushes her way past him and they fight outside of the room.  And damn, Parker’s got skills.  She’s probably 100 pounds soaking wet but she kicks this guy’s ass.  She gets the kids out of the room before she realizes that she doesn’t have an exit strategy, but Sophie shows up and helps her get them out.  One of the kids coughs and the arms dealer see them getting away.  They grab the guns but a magnified voice starts shouting “we have you surrounded!”  This distracts them long enough for Parker and the kids to get out of the building, where they see that Eliot has taken down the guards with his transgenic abilities.  They all jump on the prop bus but stop in the middle of the parking lot.  Nicolas and his men open fire on Parker, but she is mysteriously unharmed.  They flip the guns over notice that they all have white Xs on them, and a flashback shows Nate and Eliot switching the real guns with props.  Hardison appears and blows up the orphanage with the push of a button before hopping on the bus and driving away.  The men buying the guns are pissed that Nicolas apparently tried to sell them fakes.  They demand their money back, but it’s all been destroyed by the explosion.  Suck on that, Nicolas!

The team gathers in another warehouse and chat while the children sleep.  They’ve called the World Health Organization and have made plans to drop the kids off with them once they cross the border.  Parker asks what happened to Irina and Nate explains that they transferred the movie funds to her bank account.  We see a flash of her momentarily overjoyed by her sudden fortune before she’s arrested.  Awesome.  Sophie asks if they got a copy of her death scene, but unfortunately they didn’t.  It seems that they just forgot about it, but Eliot tells her that there was no film in the camera.  When she gets back on the bus, demanding that the stop in Paris on the way home, Parker asks Nate how they knew where she was.  He tells her that Hardison was the one who knew, and he leaves them to have poignant moment.  He’s upset that she went in alone, and reminds her that they’re a team now.  “We’re a little more than a team,” she tells him, and he looks like she just said she’d go to prom with him or something.  They get on the bus, and Parker tells Nate that they have to stop at Haagen-Dazs somewhere along the way.  Take my advice guys; take the kids to Ben & Jerry’s.  You haven’t lived until you try their cinnamon bun ice cream, and these kids definitely deserve it.

Next week: ELIOT IN A BANDANA!  And some other stuff, but I didn’t really comprehend anything beyond Eliot in a bandana.  I don’t think anyone can blame me for that.