- Title: Leverage: Redemption – The Debutante Job
- IMDb: link
Leverage: Redemption returns for a Second Season with an episode that returns Hardison (Aldis Hodge) to the team, offering some friction between the Leverage hackers, and pulling Harry Wilson (Noah Wyle) back into a con involving the corrupt president of a foreign country (Dikran Tulaine) in London to squash a journalist’s story about his black market thieving and introduce his reluctant daughter (Iliana Raykovski) into high society.
The episode’s best moments involve the president’s neighbor which turns out to reveal another nugget from Sophie‘s (Gina Bellman) past, much to the delight of Eliot (Christian Kane), and a hilarious impromptu plan at the airport involving Hardison and Parker (Beth Riesgraf) chasing a pilot around with a bag of sugar and knife respectively.
With an entire off-season it doesn’t appear that the show has been retooled in any way. Even with the return of Hardison, the rebranded Leverage: Redemption still struggles a bit with characters in less-defined roles than the original and still misses the team’s mastermind, a role Hardison could have filled and Parker was being groomed for at the end of the original series’ run. While it plays into the story, Sophie as both mastermind and grifter continues to leave the show a bit unbalanced. Hodge’s schedule may limit his availability again, but he could have easily slid into this role for a least a few episodes allowing Breanna (Aleyse Shannon) to take over hacking duties solo. Instead we get some dueling hackers bits which offer a nice reconciliation between the pair, but I think the amount of time on that subplot could have been better used.
