Oh hell, you give me Dan Lauria ((Interesting – to me and no one else – sidenote: Dan Lauria went to college and played football with my high school coach. Coach was the class advisor for my girlfriend’s class and got Kevin Arnold’s dad as their graduation speaker. He gave a fantastic speech that managed to incorporate Bruce Willis and Ed O’Neill. Afterwards? The girlfriend told me Lauria was a hottie. That was weird.)) and Nicole Sullivan as comedy standins for James Gandolfini and Edie Falco? Point Leverage. Add to that a script from Chris Downey loaded with subtle character humor and a slick turn behind the camera from Jonathan Frakes ((Number 1 calls the shots on *this* enterprise, bub.)) and you’ve got another solid hour from the gang.

Considering this episode was the third one shot, I was pretty pleased with the smoothness that ended up on screen.

Diving undercover as Sophie’s wedding tiger team, everyone but Nate gets (a little too) into the spirit. Obviously Eliot’s kitchen antics are the biggest and most entertaining, but even Parker and Hardison take some glee in their assignments. Parker’s tact-free dress fitting was hilarious, particularly her “how much you weigh, anyway? About a buck fifty?” line to end the act. When the creators decide to have an act out on a joke and not a moment of ratcheting tension, you know they’re playing this one for laughs.

So we get Eliot’s ode to the complexity of knives and people, immediately followed by him wanting to shove that santoku into Heather Moscone for criticizing his stuffed mushrooms. The man takes his cooking seriously. ((I understand. I’ve on occasion felt the desire to get all stabby-stabby with a critic in my kitchen.)) Even during Nate’s extended ceremony, where he is stalling for time and telling Sophie that he really does care about her, we get the big laughs about contracts and lawyers, explaining baseball to a dog, and much, much more.

This was a fun one for me. I hope y’all enjoyed it, too.

Some other thoughts:

• Special Agents Thomas and Hagen. Appropriate for a mob undertaking.
• “In my day, no one would do business at their daughter’s wedding.” That one had me rolling.
• Go watch Eliot’s knife speech again with the volume turned up. There was some really cute foley work during this bit, as each time Eliot flips the knife there’s a little sound flourish.
• Since this was the third episode shot, we hear about Aimee from “The Two-Horse Job” as if we hadn’t already met her.
• But there was still orange soda in the conference room!
• Eliot: “What is it? I’ve got bacon on.”
  Parker: “The Butcher is here.”
  Eliot: “Does he have the baby lamb chops?”
  Hardison: “No, the Butcher of Kiev.”
• “Have you ever been to Kiev? The Cakemaker of Kiev can whoop *all* our asses. This is the Butcher.”
• Eliot’s little “Bam!”
• Killing the Butcher with stuffed mushrooms of doom. The man killed with hors d’oeuvres.

What did everyone else think?