LEVERAGE #509 "The Rundown Job" Post-Game

I promised, and I'll do my best.  I'll get to the finale write-up soon enough, in case you'd like to move on and not read the archival stuff.  But this is the other big write-up of the season so I'll clean it out.  A quick reminder that many of your questions may already be answered on the Leverage10 podcast.

This was the big episode for the year.  As giant as "The (Very) Big Bird Job" was, this topped it by a wide margin.  Bigger budget, longer shoot, more FX shots.  Why? Well, beacause we'd finally resolved ourselves to the cable hell that is the split season.

Nobody -- not even the network who invented it -- likes the Cable Summer/Winter split anymore.  It continues because of inertia and uncertainty.  Can you let a show disappear for 8 months?  The answer used to be "No" until The Walking Dead pulled it off.  Sure, it's better to have new episodes so your viewers don't get out of the habit of tuning into your network, but do you then split your promotional budget and undersell your summer shows?  And if you do that is the winter dropoff in ratings, which happens to every show, justifiable in the drag it puts on the overall year-long ratings?  TV is in flux, and TV is run by corporations.  Who do not care much for "flux".

Nobody wants to live during the revolution.  Before and after the revolution, fine.  But not during.

So our decision was: "The Summer Finale is the one most people are going to see, so we'll make that the giant budget blowout." I mean, we've been soft-scheduling them that way anyway, but why the hell were we doing two-parter season finales only half our usual audience sees in first run?  It's artistically satisfying to close out the season that way, yes, but as I've mentioned before we make Leverage for about 2/3 the budget of comparable cable shows. We need to allocate our resources more aggressively.  So this year's summer finale took the weight and the S5 season ender (and ultimate series finale) was one of our smallest season finales, both in scheduling and budget.

There were a couple highlights to shooting the episode.  First, of course, was the chance to work with Adam Baldwin.  He and Dean are old friends -- they met on My Bodyguard, which Dean's father produced.  We suspected we'd want a Fed to bring Eliot into the fold for the midseason, so he was kind enough to do the cameo in the season opener.  That was one bit I didn't shoot:

ME: "So the scene starring your oldest friend in an action sequence set under a real, actual goddam Titan missile?  You got that for me?"
DEAN: "Oh $%#@ yes."

As noted in another write-up, the plot combined elements of an episode Downey had wanted to do for a long time -- the 24 homage -- and an idea Dean and Kane had come up with while shooting the Season 4 finale.  The room pulled together its usual batch of eclectic knowledge along with some new beats. Although we contact a lot of people for research, this was the first time one of our writers said "I'll call the FBI Agent I did counter-terrorism consulting with." That quote "He doesn't need a lab.  He needs pigs," came directly from a dude with some dead scary security clearance.

The subway location was in the script from the start.  Much like the Evergreen Aviation Museum, Dean and Downey had visited the one, single subway stop on the Portland MAX line on the annual scouting trip (in case you're wondering, that's out at the zoo).  The scout photos went into our location database, then up on the wall as we broke the story.  One odd thing we ran into while trying to duplicate the Washington Metro: copyright issues.  Oh, we certainly knew the logos and signage of certain subway lines were often owned by the city or controlling body, but we were surprised to be dealing with such issues concerning the actual MAPS OF THE SUBWAY LINES.  Although it wasn't as clear-cut a case as the London tube map copyright, we found it best to just fudge the lines a bit.

The subway car was a mix.  For the tunnel shots we brought the extras down to the Zoo Station once the line closed at midnight and shot until the line re-opened at 4am.  Amazing how motivated a film crew can be when you know there'll be a train hurtling at you if you don't make your deadline.  The interiors and close-ups of Beth on the train were done in the MAX line repair bay, on a real MAX car, with greenscreen wrapping the entire car.  That great tracking shot for Christian, Beth and Aldis's arrival on the platform was done by our A Operator Gary Camp while driving a cut-down Segway with his knees while operating a Steadicam with his hands.  I's note that we did not control those trains at this point, and the near-simultaneous arrivals were due completely to Dean's utter commitment to pulling off the fucking impossible on a regular basis.  We just kept shooting, over and over again, until Dean got the take with that train timing.

The explosion, well ... Dean does love to blow shit up.  Kudos to our stunties and Adam Baldwin, who was precisely as close to that blow as he appears to be.  Although we were quite a ways off, that was the first time, in five season, where I felt the explosion like a punch in the chest.  The warehouse explosion in "The Stork Job" may have been bigger, but for some reason this one had more force.

As I noted in a previous post I did some clean-up rewrites based on location, but there are only two scenes I personally take any credit for in this episode.  First, the hidden lab.  It's the most Global Frequency vibe of the whole five seasons, and its based on a weird little foyer in the medical building at McGill University, where I did my Physics degree.  McGill's an old university, and there's plenty of weird memorabilia stacked up in its nooks and crannies.  For example, the original physics building had all its piping pulled out, because they'd been pouring radioactive shit down the sinks back in the 20's before they knew the ramifications.  Those (glow in the dark) pipes and tabletops were still in a basement somewhere, back when I was there.  Or so we were told.  For Chrissake, we had a rickety old cyclotron there.

Anyway, I have no idea if it still exists but deep in the bowels of the Medical school, if you took three wrong turns in a row,  you might stroll into a dimly lit room lined with shelves.

On on those shelves there were endless rows of jars.

Of fetuses.  And other ... things.  From 100 years of research.  WALLS of them.

Fuuuuuccckkk.

Hardison's reaction is drawn from a BBC documentary about the Spanish flu -- I can't seem to find it online -- where they were digging up sailors who'd died of the flu then buried in the Alaskan permafrost.  These scientists were about halfway down, working in shirtsleeves, when one asked "Hey, if we're digging here because we'll get the most perfectly preserved version of history's most murderous pandemic, aren't we in fact exposing ourselves to the most perfectly preserved sample of the world's most murderous pandemic?"  One perfect pause later, they were all in hazmat suits, sweating.

The bit about the missing plutonium is real.  As is the missing hydrogen bomb sitting off the coast of Georgia.  Sleep tight.

The second scene was the one immediately following, where Eliot talks Hardison down.  The scene had some serious emotional context for the show sure, as it was nice to finally say in text what we felt that relationship had become -- brothers.  But it had a second layer.  A very dear friend of mine was in Air Force Combat Search and Rescue right out of high school.  When we were younger, and I was freaking out or insecure or nervous about something, he'd pep talk me.  He'd do that neck grab and tuck my head in, because touching helmets like that, that's as close as you can get in a combat situation.  "Fucking relax.  Smartest guy I know," he'd say, often impatiently.

Well, that friend passed, not long before I wrote that scene.  So I was writing him in that scene. Writing one of the four or so guys who became my brothers, who lived in my house, ate at my mom's table, sat around bullshitting in the Burger King parking lot for hours every night, who kept me from being a nervous, shy physics geek who never wrote, never performed, never joked.

When I explained that context to Christian and Aldis and Beth, I have to admit I teared up.  And then -- and this is why I love them -- they dug in on that scene.  They'd already rehearsed and committed to it, but then they really brought something extra.  Kane in particular, knew he was playing my brother, and ran over after every take to make sure he was landing it.  So know that for every time I say "Fucking Oklahoma..." because of some bone-headed stunt bullshit he did, understand I'll always love him, and Aldis and Beth, for how they acted that day.

Okay, enough maudlin bullshit.  Onto your questions:

@Anonymous: Just curious over Kane's wardrobe - does he have say over what he wears? Asking because the t-shirt he was wearing said "Wolf" in Japanese, and wolf is a recurring theme with him...?

We were looking at a costume redesign for this episode -- Nadine Haders wanted to go very high-style, almost anime, and when we startred talking "Icons" Kane suggested "Wolf."  It's his good-luck animal.

@Gina: 1.) At the sight of Eliot's hair, I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of fangirls cried out and were suddenly silenced.
2.) Wow. Parker's method of saving Hardison is the sexiest thing I've seen in ages.

1.) I think it was actually a relief for him.  He;d actually thought about cutting it before, but always wound up with guest-star and movie roles in between season which required him to keep it long. 
2.) What's crazy is that she did the stunt, and we didn't even realize it until the upside-down flip.  We were out of direct sightline because of the geography of that apartment, and we're watching the monitor, and I think "Hey, that stuntwoman really is a good match for -- holy shit, THAT'S BETH!"

Dan: 1)Was the "Casey Farm" name an intentional nod to Baldwin's most recent role, or just a nice coincidence?
2) Was the fact that Nate and Sophie didn't show up for so long a deliberate choice, or were Tim Hutton and Gina Bellman busy with other projects at the time? I mean, I'm certainly not complaining about some good Hacker/Hitter/Thief action, but it's interesting, especially after last week's Parker-heavy episode.

1.) Coincidence, but fortuitous.

2.) Considering the episodes were meant to air in a slightly different order, they just appeared to be absent.  It was more about spreading the actors out over several very difficult schedules in the best possible way htn any character-based decisions.

@allyone: Totally only goes to support my theory that the team is breaking up. I see some foreshadowing here, my friend. And I don't care how good on single individual episode is with Nate/Sophie and Parker/Hardison/Eliot. In the long term, they're still all better together. 

As we all know how this ends, I can finally say that no, we were never going to break them up permanently if there'd been a Season 6.  I think, though that coincidentally these two episodes kind of softened the blow for the fans.  Like "Oh, we know how this works out.  it works out fine."  

@PurpleOps: 1.)  I like Eliot's short hair - in fact it could be just a tad shorter - but was disappointed that it wasn't explained in the show. I was expecting such a monumental event to have relevance to the plot! What was the reason, anyway?

2. Was "Charles Scalzi" a tribute to John Scalzi, super SF author and subject of Wil Wheaton's audiobook readings? (Check out "Redshirts", everyone!)
3. Loved the love from Eliot of his team throughout, but was a bit surprised at his calling Hardison "The smartest guy I know." From a hacker standpoint, sure, but Nate is the brains. Would that have ever entered into Eliot's equation? Or is Eliot just not that impressed with Nate's smarts?
4. Was Monte Markham's subway disguise supposed to remind us of Nate? It did for me.
5. There was some MAD visual style in this ep, particularly at the safe opening in the beginning. On the other hand, not thrilled with the slo-mo, but I'll forgive it because of how good the rest of the direction was. Yay, Dean! What inspired the rather different and delightful style?
6. Wasn't Markham's final speech just a bit too melodramatic?
7. Eliot walks (or runs) into a bullet? TWICE? And his HIT is a cutaway? To quote from Harry Potter, you "have got to sort out [your] priorities!"

8.) Was there any intention to finger the congressman as a red herring? I really thought he might be involved in the plot, but that dropped off after the blow-up.

1.) Kind of a fresh start for the back of the season.  And I don't think you actually do want to discuss that stuff.  Seems to self-aware.  Which is funny, considering how self-reflexive the show is.

2.) It was a combo of two of my favorite authors, Charles Stross and John Scalzi.

3.) Eliot considers Nate more cunning than smart.

4.) No, but I'll take it.

5.) I think both directors just enjoyed the freedom of high-concept epiisodes that weren't in our usual structure or tone, and matched them visually.  We make a LOT of Leverages every year, and things can get a little stale creatively on a 7 day shoot.  Oh, and personal note -- I hate slo-mo.  I don't mind using it in variable speed ramping, but rarely.  Rare. Ly.  It is indeed a matter of taste.

6.) Eh.

7.) We actually filmed the hit.  it was too brutal.  First screening, we said "Damn, Kane just KILLED that dude." Mad props to Monte Markham, by the way, doing his own fight scenes with Christian. 

8.) We just wanted to keep a bunch of balls in the air.  It was meant to be a mislead, but hey, 42 minutes.

@Codger: Tell me you're kidding. When they first steal the NSA van, Elliot says the sniper was a SEAL, but when they call up a picture from his file, he's not in a Navy uniform. You've got him in an ARMY uniform? There's a big difference between NAVY and ARMY!

Sometimes we fuck up.  I sleep okay at night.

@IMForeman: 

1.) Vance talking about the terrorist teams being lean and tight is them getting inside the government's Ooda loop, yes?
2.) The NSA having no file on Parker. Was she really that far off the grid? How did Nate, Sterling and Dubenich have info on her?
3.) The missing uranium and hydrogen bomb... do I want to know if that's ledger or black box? The Spanish Flu... that I know is real.
3.) How is it that Eliot faced down a room full of heavily armed pro hitters and never got shot once, but facing a crazy science guy he gets shot twice. I guess the difference between a warehouse and a train car is the thing. 

1.) OODA, correct.

2.) She had a shit-ton of aliases, Parker being her "work" name.  Assume Hardison's actually cleaned up the databases quite a bit since they all started working together.

3.) Addressed.

4.) Luck and tight quarters, yes.  And Dean wanted him shot.  So shoot him we shall.

@Anonymous: 1)There's some epic in-verse reason for Eliot cutting his hair, right? It got singed when he was fighting mooks in a burning building or something, a la the Butcher of Kiev. Or wrestling bad guys near the lip of an active volcano.
2) Not actually a question, just thanks for all the competence porn and team love between E/P/H.
3) Hardison was filing away ideas for Lucille, wasn't he? (After he was in the NSA van.)
4)Re: Hardison being the smartest guy they all know, and the Hardison vs Nate debate, I view Nate being the best at predicting people/manipulating them, as well as Xanatos Gambits, but I view that as much to do with his years of experience as his intelligence, whereas in terms of sheer IQ and general and technical knowledge, Hardison outclasses them all, but due to his age lacks Nate's ... lets call them street smarts. Would this generally be correct?
5)Do the kids often handle cons on their own, or is this another Secret Nate Training Plot?
6) How does Nate react when his hitter walks in with two bullet holes?
7) Was Eliot even a little bit scared? Or has he always known how dangerous and terrifyingly effective those three could be together? 

1.) Miranda Zero told him she liked it better short.

2.) You're welcome.

3.) Yep. We were thinking of adding the voice to Lucille in S6.

4.) Nice Xanatos reference.

5.) The diamonds were the tail end of a con -- so easy that it was basically clean-up.

6.) Sighs heavily.

7.)  Eliot doesn't know fear.  Fear knows him. 

Oona:  Strong summer finale for the show ... Parker playing jungle gym on Hardison was cute and all but totally offended my understanding of explosives. (Of course , my understanding is based entirely on what I've seen in movies, so I could be wrong.)

Claymores work on a trigger.  Those wires go right where they were.  They're not usually wired to a pressure plate, granted, but it wouldn't be hard to do.

@Carl: How will hardison ever be able to run his own team one day if he always seems to be freaking out when he faces lots of pressure?

Hardison can handle pressure.  The frikkin' APOCALYPSE is another thing.  All joking aside, I think we've established he doesn't handle being responsible for innocent peoples welfare particularly well.  More afraid of fucking up and letting innocent people be hurt than personal peril.

@allison:  a question/DC nitpick I wasn't fast enough to post to The 'Gimme a K' Street Job. Nothing in the Capitol complex is ever labelled "Congress Hearing Room". From the bit where Eliot tried to convince the Congressman to run for Senate, we were definitely in the House (where, yes, the Reps are frequently called "Congressman" even though technically the term would be equally applicable to a senator). But the House and Senate do not share meeting space ever. In reality that room would have been labelled something like "United States House of Representatives Committee on x" (because the committees don't share space, either). It made it seem as if the show had fallen into the trap of thinking Congress is the other body from the Senate, instead of the aggregate body that includes the House and the Senate. I don't for a second believe any of the Leverage humans actually made this mistake, so my question is - was there some reason legal didn't want you to call the House the House? Someone was afraid of impugning the reputation of the actual chairman of the (I'm guessing) Committee on Education and the Workforce?

   BTW for what it's worth I've worked on the Hill for years and I TOTALLY bought that there would be a Federal High School Sports Commission or whatever it was. We do indeed have commissions out the hoo-ha and many of them are for way weirder things.

It was more for the audience to understand the context than for accuracy.  We often take into account what information we think the audience needs to understand the location, rather than being strictly accurate.

@Sabine: 1. When Parker reminds Eliot that they had all agreed to change together, what change is she talking about? Change from running cons to something else? Change their value systems? Change their hairstyles? Who's in that agreement - these three or Sophie and Nate too?

2. Was Eliot referring to his disturbing career path from enlisted soldier to assassin when he told Vance that obsession makes you into what you chase? Or did he mean he'd been pondering his current career, where he brings down manipulative, dishonest people using manipulative, dishonest methods? Thus leading to the change Parker mentions?
3. (Maybe this is the same question as #2, which is maybe the same a #1) In the flashback from the Big Bird Job, Eliot looked pretty happy to be working with Vance. Now he makes it clear that he's not interested in any more jobs. When did this change of heart kick in?

1.) Change to good guys.  I'd say it's not an explicit statement in S1, but definitely something most of the cast has discussed on-camera in various contexts over the 5 seasons.
2.) He was discussing Vance's similarity to Udall, and roping in Nate's issues at the same time.  Eliot is very aware that Nate walks the line all the time.
3.) Oh, he'll take more work.  Just not on a regular basis.

@aurora: 1.) Why did that fellow try to hire Eliot (other than the obvious of getting the team into the plot) when the baddie clearly already had the sniper as muscle 45 days earlier?
2.) Why was Hardison explaining so much to Eliot & Parker about the Spanish flu? (Really, why do people not take the flu seriously?)
3.) I know you've mentioned her before, but can you remind us who Beth's gymnast stunt-double is and her background? She's really good.
4.) Oh, back when Baldwin did his cameo in the premiere, wasn't that supposed to be something he and Eliot did over the summer? Why then did Vance seem so surprised/Eliot was so insistent that Eliot didn't do that kind of work anymore? They haven't been in Portland that long, have they?

1.) That shooter was supposed to be busy doing another part of the plot -- we lost that in the edit.
2.) Because most people don't take the flu seriously.  Including our audience.
3.) It changes from show to show, actually.
4.) A one-off is one thing, dragging his team and friends into a terror hunt is entirely another.

@Nav: 1). Elliot’s “employer” – one to watch, or just a one-off appearance? Why the sudden call after so long, or are we to assume Elliot’s turned down tons of calls while working with the team?
2.). That dead-piggy scene - did you guys just happen to find a ton of pigs sleeping around or did you fire some birds at them? Damn well shot scene – creeped me out a lot more than I expected, and I have a pretty morbid, disturbing mind. Great work!!

1.) Eliot put out the word a long time ago he wasn't doing that anymore.  The guy took a flier.  BTW, that character was supposed to be rumpled, ex-military.  It was Dean's inspired casting choice to make him prim.
2.) Four butchered pigs from a food supply company, four wooden ones -- those were for the foreground shots --  and a shit-ton of CG. For what it's worth, this episode was when I stopped eating pork.  Not because the dead pigs disturbed me, but because I finally saw first-hand how smart they are.  They crossed the "I can't eat anything smart enough to play fetch" threshold for me.

@medrawt: When Eliot does national security type things on "vacation" for his old buddies, does he use firearms? I guess the end of the episode sort of gives an answer, but I'm curious about the contextual flexibility of Eliot's desire to not use guns / kill people (which we've already seen him do in an incredibly desperate situation, of course). Is it like "not unless the lives of people I love absolutely require it," or is it "nothing I'm doing for Nate justifies that level of violence, but things I'm doing for Uncle Sam still may"?

Eliot prefers knives.  You've seen him in a knife harness in both "Rashamon" and "The (Very) Big Bird" flashback.

@deanangst: We know that Eliot takes his Oath to the Government very seriously. So when Vance tried to use that to get Eliot to help and Eliot resisted. Was Eliot resisting because Vance was trying to force him to do something or was it because he didn't want to involve Alec and Parker.

That expression on his face was more "Shit. you got me." The resistance was very much because he wanted Hardison and Parker clear.

@Kate:  I love the spotlight on how each of our Crew in the Rundown Job handles serious 'life-or-death' pressure. There's the completely panicked look in Hardison's eyes (a la Mile High Job), the almost instinctive-seeming leanings toward Self-Sacrifice for Eliot (Big Bang Job), and Parker... Well, I'm reminded of a dancer who takes a deep breath before breezing onto a stage (...Too many episodes to count, oh leaping off buildings and handling bombs). Is there any post-its for keeping track of that kind of stuff or is it just naturally intrinsic to writing the characters?

Combo, with the actors being the ones who make sure it stays consistent. But after 70-odd, you know what rings true.

@MacSTL: 1) regarding editing down to tv air time. Does one editor have to make these decisions or are options given to a small group (Dean, Editor etc)
2)I love the competence porn with the laser dance.. and I know that you have to leave Parker's hair long to help disguise Beth from her stuntie...but there has to be some way to do that differently because the hair would have hit the lasers...
3) How much time elapsed from when Eliot got the call from Riley to when the team showed up at Riley's work place? Doesn't seem like there would have been enough time for Riley to get the alternate shooter in place.
4) At the trailer in the field... When Eliot called Vance, the phone showed 'Blocked' caller ID. If the Caller ID was blocked, how did Vance know that it was Eliot calling earlier?
5) Just how much of the stunt driving of the 'Vette did Kane really get to do? We know from BTS pics that Kane/Hodge did some of the green screen...
6) On the MAX car... where did Eliot's coat go? (At least on the iTunes version...) Now its there and then it isn't. Not complaining about the gun show mind you... and I know it was a necessary production need...just unexplained.

1.) Dean make sthe call between the longer iTunes version and the broadcast version.
2.) She's just that damn good -- no,we got jammed up on stunt-doubling there.  No way around it.
3.) About a half-hour. When Riley couldn't get Eliot, the hitter became the default.
4.) Who else would be calling?  No, actually, good question.  Got us.
5.) Too much.  Fucking Oklahoma.
6.) Tossed behind him.  You can see him take it off, I think, in the long version.

@the_eye: finally realized what it was that kept bugging me about this episode (namely the rundown job) as well as the love people show for it, saying they'd watch the hell out of a spin-off and so forth:

The military guy we see at the beginning in the congressional committee who is some old mate of Elliots, and who they end up working for during this episode?

He is essentially Oliver North. This is the thing that during that whole episode kept nagging at the back of my head that THEY SHOULD NOT BE WORKING FOR THIS GUY, THEY SHOULD PUT HIM DOWN. I mean apart from the fact that (conscious choice or not) he has an extremely oily, smarmy, self-confident look to himself that makes you wanna punch him, he is the embodiment of oversightless black project things. Which are bad.

Have Mr Rogers politics done a 180 degree reversal? Have I completely misunderstood them? I admit I might, after all I'm looking at all this from a European perspective, i.e. far away, but from everything that I know about how you think, this guy should be a bad guy. So either there is something waiting in a later episode this season where he gets his comeuppance or I'm very confused.

And people on here? THIS IS A BAD GUY. Why do you not see this? I mean seriously?

Well that's a good question/point.  He's I guess comparable to Ollie North in some superficial ways.  But there's certainly a fictional convention in Western spy tropes that you need the lean team moving faster than bureaucracy to fight lean terrorists, and I'm personally very sympathetic to the idea that big governmental responses to crises tend to be ... unwieldy.  I spend a lot of my writing headspace on Leverage getting inside big corporations and governments' OODA loops.

On the other hand, I think (and some Commenters pointed out) that we made sure that both sides were presented fairly.  That tension, between roles, order and action, is a legitimate tension in our society now.  I was the one who pointed out, during the first cut, that the Senator actually SAVES Vance, by insisting on a search warrant.  That delay kept them from opening the door too early.

@oppyu: 1) Is there a reason that Elliot didn't go to the hospital after being shot twice?
2) How much of this episode is based on real people? Namely, are there really politicians who go out of their way to shut down an army officer who (I'm guessing) has a record of actually stopping in-universe life-threatening terrorist acts? Speaking of which, don't insane people who think that America is on the brink of terrorist attack, realise that committing a terrorist attack against America to get America prepared is kind of... stupid? self-defeating?
3) How much of past episodes? Some of the villains just seem pointlessly, illogically evil. The guy who tried to kill a plane full of people to silence an accountant and a hitman? A CEO paying craploads of money to release a drug that kills people, when they could make as much money releasing a drug that... didn't kill people? There's greed, and then there's going out of your way to find puppies and kick them while laughing maniacally and twirling your moustache.
4) Are you bringing back Bonnano or not?
5) How would the series have gone if, by some bizarre happen-stance, Nate stayed in prison and Eliot took over the team? Dude has serious leadership chops; I don't know if Nate could talk Hardison into going up against bio-chemical terrorism.
6) Did anyone ever talk about the fact that a gunman tried to murder a crippled, isolated Parker back when everyone was in Japan? 

1.) Hospitals spend an annoying amount of time filling out paperwork, when he could just be applying ancient healing poultices he learned from geisha assassins.
2.) Rules are rules, and there are plenty of people who believe 9/11 was a false flag operation.
3.) Every villain is thisclose to a real guy.  The pharmaceutical one in particular -- real guy.  I am always frustrated at you people's faith in your fellow man.
4.) If think he's in the novels.
5.) That would have been  ... interesting. I don't think Eliot wants that job though.  he likes being the Outside man.
6.) Sure, they chatted about it.  She was annoyed that they condescended to worry about her.

@Natalie Clemanets: 1) Not that I want to get off the fun train, and I'm normally pretty good at coming up with explanations, but what triggered the trailer bomb? I can't accept it was timed to go off just after everyone runs away after the extremely cool car SOS. Didn't see any kind of pressure plate near the door set off by Vance. Perimeter sensor? Hidden in the grass to account for the 'getting the warrant we weren't going to bother with' delay, then timed to account for getting to the trailer and then the 'what's that car doing?' delay.
2) I loved Eliot's reaction when he found out the warning was in time. How much of that was scripted/improv/brilliant Kane acting?
3) In ep #505 (why not sneak another in?) how much of the Himalayan tree frog was scripted? Hilarious! Especially the sucker feet part. I'd happily have that on loop all day, and it still makes me laugh...

1.) Perimeter sensor with a timer to make sure you got the maximum number of victims.
2.) Simple reaction written, Kane improv on the enthusiasm.  I loved it too.
3.) All improv-ed.  Talented little bastards, aren't they?

@Anonymous: Fot four seasons, we've watched Eliot Spencer take the gun away from a bad guy and immediately empty the chamber to take the weapon out of the equation, including the weapons he used himself at the end of the fight in The Big Bang Job. And we're supposed to believe that this particular time, he completely neglects to disable Dr. Udall's gun? Not only that, he throws the loaded firearm across the subway car AND ends up taking a second bullet because he pays so little attention that the bad guy gets his hands on the loaded gun again?

Actually, that was Hardison's screw-up.  Eliot took the bullet, which distracted him from disabling the gun, and then Hardison kicked it away.  Eliot should've chased it bit hey, bomb.

We actually went back and forth on shooting him the second time.  Dean wanted to make sure there was no way Eliot could catch up with Parker.  Given the geography of the train and tunnel we may not have needed it, in retrospect, but we shot it as scripted.

@Maite: I was wondering who came up with the idea of having the audience "see" Hardison at work, like with the schematics of the vault and Vance's car. It kinda reminded me of Sherlock's mind palace in "The Hounds of Baskerville." Slick and stylish.

Dean, based on a shot he really liked from Sherlock.  We'd been struggling with a new way to open Hardison up visually, and as I've noted before Dean's a giant Moffat fan.

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Bloody hell.  All right, see you in a few days for the next one.  I'll keep doing these until you can finally, gently wean yourself off the show.  Promise.