His cover’s blown. Faces of his people have been sent to every law enforcement agency in the state. We’ve taken their money, their base of operations, and now Nate Ford will never, ever, get his revenge. They will do the only smart thing to do. They’ll scatter.

Leverage rarely plays around much with time, generally running straight through from beginning to end with only occasional detours for con explication or character asides. Tonight is a little different. We open in the present with a completely blitzed Nathan crashing a party dedicating a new museum wing to his old boss at IYS, Ian Blackpool. Offering to sell Blackpool something, we finally realize this is a con when he calls over Sophie, posing as Portia, a representative from the Vatican. We also realize Nate is not as drunk as he appears, at least not as incapacitated.

Jumping back to two weeks earlier, we get the setup – an intervention for Nate, who wants them “not to get hung up on the alcoholic” part of him being a functioning alcoholic. But since this is a Leverage-style intervention, the team just wants to help Nate get revenge. ((Good for Nate. He didn’t have to say, “no, no, no.”))

Watch the opening closely and remember it for next week’s finale, particularly this exchange:

Blackpool: Are you here to kill me, Nate?
Nate: Not tonight.
Blackpool: Well in that case, come in. There are shrimp.
Nate: I do love shrimp.

There will be a test on that later.

Eliot’s in a tux, but for once he’s not stuck playing a waiter. He’s playing the Vatican art expert, Adam Sinclair. And making time with a lovely blond at the—uh-oh, it’s Nate’s ex-wife Maggie!

There’s a lot of interesting interplay between Nate of the past and Nate of the present as he tries to talk with Maggie and not appear as desperate as the con requires him to be, at the same time being unable to tell her what he’s really doing. All of that is compounded by Maggie’s interest in in-character Eliot, and Sophie’s obvious jealousy of Nate and Maggie. But there’s something else, as well.

As Nate is fond of telling us, he’s a functional alcoholic. We’ve really only seen his drinking be a problem one time, back in “The Snow Job”, and even then it didn’t have a true negative impact on the job. But as Sophie points out late in tonight’s episode, “we’re all addicts. We’re all addicted to our pasts.” In the conference room after the party, when discussing the best way to move forward with the 1st David, Sophie practically twitches like a junkie looking for a fix. Her eyes glaze over with zeal and hunger as she tries to convince the team to keep the maquette.

Her addiction to stealing costs the team everything.

Nate’s addiction to revenge costs the team everything.

Because as sure as we know Sophie wants to steal and keep the 1st David because she’s the one who took the 2nd David from the Vatican, and as sure as we know Nate eventually had to go after Blackpool, Jim Sterling knows as well. Sterling uses his knowledge of Sophie and Nate – they’re open books when it comes to these things, so it’s no great leap – to exact some revenge of his own for some perceived slight Nate committed in their past. Perhaps it was his spurned desire to be Nate’s friend that did it, but regardless of the cause, Sterling is in this for more than a corner office.

He sends a thug to take out Eliot, goons – under the leadership of Alex Carter’s Geary ((This is the second time in the past five days that Alex Carter and Mark Sheppard have shared screen time, though here Carter doesn’t get to have nearly as much fun as the snarky, feisty Jason Bly on Burn Notice.)) – to take Hardison and Leverage HQ. He takes Parker himself, sitting in wait in the back of the armored car transporting the 1st David (the supposed 2nd David) back to the museum. Not being an honorable bad guy, his promise to trade Parker and Hardison for the 2nd David (the one Sophie stole lo those many years ago, not the one that’s really the 1st masquerading as the 2nd) is not one he intends to keep. However being so obviously dishonorable, Nate and Sophie know that ahead of time.

“…and then I asked myself, what would Parker do?”

“…but then I thought, what would Hardison do?”

And so, the team gets away but at great cost. What will the season finale bring?

Some other thoughts:

• “We can’t let your ex-wife anywhere near our little naked man!”
• I quite liked Hardison averting the maquette’s eyes when Parker stripped.
• There were some great jokes around Parker and Hardison kissing, both Hardison’s excitement/confusion by it and Eliot and Nate enjoying listening in.
• Sophie on the comms, listening to Nate and Maggie was also a hoot.
• Very glad Hardison made sure to save the portrait of Nate before blowing the office up.
• “Hey Sterling, get out of my house!”

What did everyone else think?