We start off this week at one of my favorite types of places in the world, an Italian restaurant.  The owner, Ray Palermo, closes up, though two men remain at their table and show no signs of leaving.  His wife Teresa doesn’t like that one of the men, Mickey Mosconi, always brings his business to the restaurant, and is hesitant to leave her husband alone with the pair.  He assures her that everything will be fine, and the second she leaves Mickey shoots his dinner date dead.  Gotta love that female intuition.  Ray freaks out, asking Mickey what he did, but Mickey shoves the gun into his hand and tells him to take the fall for the murder.  Since Ray paid for the restaurant with his money, Mickey figures that he owes him, and he promises that his people will take care of Ray’s family.  Ray doesn’t have time to think about the situation, since the local police have the fastest response time EVER, so he takes the gun and lets Mickey leave through the back door.

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.

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope you’re all having a great holiday.  Anyone have any resolutions?  I have a few, including 1) learning an instrument, 2) participating in some sort of underground revolution, and 3) never, EVER agreeing to recap a midseason show again.  Because while every other recapper’s shows are on hiatus, allowing them to have a lovely break for the holidays, Leverage never fails to keep me busy.  Show, I love you dearly, but I think we need a trial separation.  You’re all up in my personal space.

The Patron Saint of thieves.First and foremost, Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Yule/random day in December!  I hope everyone had a great day!

This week’s episode is brought to you buy the Catholic Church.  Here there be shameless commercialism, gang violence, and false miracles, but the real tragedy is that we have an entire episode about a church and somehow none of our boys dress up like priests.  WTF, show?  Wasted opportunity much?

What, your friends don't stand single-file when they chat?

Dear Show,

The next time you plan on having this much hotness in one episode, please include a warning.  I only have two ovaries, and I don’t want them both to explode in the face of Christian Kane’s hotness before I have kids.

Infertilely yours,
Gemma

SEXASSWe start off with a home movie of several soldiers just outside Najaf, Iraq.  The soldier taking the video is a young man, and the movie is for his fiancée, Jenny.  He and fellow soldier crack some adorable jokes about a scorned camel before they point up some private contractors that make 100 times the money they do.  Almost as soon as they indicate the contractors’ bullets tears through the cameraman’s friend, and soon he and the camera are also shot to the ground.  The video stops playing and we see that Nate has been watching it with the cameraman, Corporal Perry.  He’s in a wheelchair and his fiancée left him, but he’s got a ridiculously good attitude.  Since the contracting company (Castleman Enterprises) was responsible for the shooting, he just wants them to pay for his rehab so he can get back out in the work force.  The company is currently facing no ramifications because they refused to cooperate in the shooting investigations, so Perry is out of luck.

It's hard out here for a pimp.Hi, shiny new show!  It’s good to meet you.  This is a tough one to recap, because a lot of the awesomeness comes from stylistic camera angles and other such things that I can’t fit in here, but I’ll try to do it justice.

Right away we learn that the first rule of Leverage is you do not talk about Leverage that this show does not fuck around.  We jump right into the story, no fancy-pants introductions needed.  A man is sitting in a ritzy airport bar, getting his drink on.  An invisible typewriter gives us his id, reading “Nathan Ford: Ex-Insurance Investigator.”  Another man comes over and sits next to him, saying that he knows who he is and recapping some of Nate’s accomplishments with the insurance company he worked for.  WAY later in the episode they reveal that he is Victor Dubenich of Bering Aerospace, but I’m going to cheat and tell you now so I don’t have to keep typing “that guy.”  Victor alludes to the company letting Nate’s family down somehow, but we don’t hear more about that because Nate tells him that they’re almost at “the point in the conversation where I punch you nine or ten times in the neck.”  Heh.  Victor also says that someone stole his airplane designs and that he wants Nate to steal them back.