We had the perfect con. A Christmas spy caper. And then the mark had to ruin it by being a real spy.
”
— Parker
The Leverage team’s holiday good deed goes awry when their attempt to give a small-town librarian the spy-thriller adventure of a lifetime is interrupted by a shadowy spy organization.
Robert Blanche, a librarian dying of cancer. The team is convinced to set up a con to allow him to live out a fantasy from the books he loves to read. When the team sets up a spy-oriented story for him to live out, things go awry when a shadowy organization intervenes and Blanche turns out not to be who they thought he was.
Summary[]
In Keener, Louisiana, a librarian, Robert Blanche, has a heart attack. Maurice tells the Leverage team how Robert has cancer and isn’t accepting treatment. He asks the team to give Robert a memory he won’t forget as he wants to pay back Robert back for all the kind things he did for him and the community. The team finds out that Robert has been a librarian for the last 30 years, never leaving town. They decide to create him a spy thriller.
While running their con on Robert, things go sideways, and Eliot gets captured by RIZ. RIZ has been tracking Eliot since they first came across each other, and when they saw Eliot with Robert, they assumed Eliot was after The Ledger. Robert is revealed to have been a spy who went by the codename Copperhead. Copperhead was the last person known to have the ledger. He says that the ledger was on a floppy disk that got destroyed, which is why he went into hiding.
The head of RIZ, Alexandra Bligh, injects Eliot with a red serum to break him. She uses a memory of his, Operation Kansas, believing it to be his most traumatic experience. Eliot doesn’t break, though, and Copperhead breaks him free.
The team leads RIZ back to the library, where they stage a standoff and let RIZ take a fake copy of the ledger. Harry reveals that he figured out that Robert had hidden the real ledger in a book. Parker gets a text from Hardison telling her that he sent Maurice, the library kid.
Encouraged by his conversations with Robert, Eliot intends to visit his dad for Christmas, seeing him again for the first time since he was eighteen. When Eliot gets a text saying his dad was a no-show, he goes off in the opposite direction.
Locations[]
Keener, Louisiana
Guest Cast[]
LeVar Burton as Robert Blanche
C.J. LeBlanc as Maurice
Lucy Taylor as Alexandra Bligh
Episode Notes[]
LeVar Burton's character, Robert Blanche, is named for a long-time recurring cast member on Leverage.
Robert Blanche
Blanche first appeared in the season two premiere, The Beantown Bailout Job as Massachusetts State Police Lt. Patrick Bonanno. Popular with fans, Bonanno's planned single appearance turned into a recurring role as Bonanno became the cop the team could turn to when they needed assistance from the police. Blanche appeared in six episodes and Bonanno figured in several more in dialogue. In the first part of the second-season finale, The Three Strikes Job, Bonanno is shot and hovers near death; a major plot line in the two-part finale is finding who is responsible for his shooting. At a fan screening of the third season premiere, the audience broke into cheers when Bonanno appears on screen, alive and promoted to Captain. Blanche died of complications following surgery on January 3, 2020.
Operation Kansas happened at Christmas time
Eliot’s dad’s friend from Vietnam invited him to join them for Christmas.
Harry says his choices lost him his marriage and daughter
Eliot’s dad was stubborn
Eliot is shown to be texting J
Trivia[]
When Elliot and Breanna arrive at the library to surveil Mr. Blanche, Mr. Blanche is at the checkout desk reading a book. At approximately 7 min 50 seconds into the episode, you can see that the book he is reading was written by "Patrick Bonanno" (who was played by Robert Blanche in original Leverage). There is a picture of the real Robert Blanche on the back of the book, and the title of of the book is Motion to Strike. It's another lovely homage to a fine actor and great character in this episode.
The fact that the main character is a librarian with an apparently secret life is a nice nod to Noah Wyle and Christian Kane's stint on Dean Devlin's "The Librarians" series. LeVar Burton playing a librarian is also a sweet tip of the hat to LeVar Burton's stint as the host of the children's series "Reading Rainbow".
When Parker is in her role as a hacker, she is drinking Hardison's favorite hacking fuel, orange soda. Then, she invites Elliot and Mr. Blanche to hang out next time and they can all watch some "TNG"; As they walk away, Mr. Blanche asks, "What's 'TNG'?", apparently ignorant of the abbreviation for the series "Star Trek: The Next Generation", in which LeVar Burton played "Geordie LaForge".
During the fight in the restaurant, Mr. Blanche pulls one of Elliot' signature moves: beckoning the bad guy to throw the first punch by repeatedly curling the fingers of his cupped hand in a "come on over here" gesture.
Hardison is noted to be absent because he is working on strengthening everyone's firewalls. Parker is especially miffed about this as it is Christmas.
This episode reveals that Elliot never went back to speak with his father, despite returning to his old home in the original series.
When Eliot and Breanna are discussing the kinds of stories Mr Blanche likes and what might work as the plot of their con, Eliot says Blanche preferred a hero in the wrong place at the wrong time, going up against impossible odds, and Breanna replies, "So going on a starship with a plucky sidekick ain't gonna work." This is an inside joke to LeVar Burton's character on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the long-held debate of whether Burton's character Geordi La Forge was a 'sidekick' to some of the other characters, in particular Data Brent Spiner and William Riker Jonathan Frakes.
LeVar Burton makes the fourth main actor from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) to appear in Leverage. Brent Spiner played a mark in The Juror #6 Job. Jonathan Frakes cameoed as a hospital patient in a waiting room with Nate Ford in The Snow Job, and had another cameo in the toy safety office in The Toy Job. Frakes also directed 13 episodes of the original series, and one episode of Leverage: Redemption . Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) had a recurring role as Hardison's "archnemesis", black hat hacker Colin "Chaos" Mason.
Breanna and Sophie's banter about Sophie needing Breanna to actually be the hacker is a nod back to The Nigerian Job when Hardison asked Nate why Eliot was playing the IT guy at Dubenich's office.
Parker is dressed as an elf for much of this episode. In The Ho Ho Ho Job in season 3 of the original series she worked undercover as an elf assisting Eliot as a mall Santa.
Parker's hacker persona is inspired by Hardison. A love of Star Trek, large bottle of orange soda next to the keyboard, aggravating Eliot to the point he mutters "Dammit". She even offers Hot Pockets, a food Hardison was trying to enjoy in The Mile High Job.
The episode's plot closely resembles "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick, the book that inspired the movie "Total Recall", in which a bland character turns out to be a super-spy.
Eliot refers to the drug Bligh uses on him as truth serum. This is a common trope, but it's depiction here is actually plausible. Drugs characterized as truth serums do exist and were widely used for interrogation in the past. A few countries still use them today. They don't actually force someone to tell the truth, but instead lower inhibitions or cause cognitive impairment that makes it more difficult to formulate a lie. They're largely considered unreliable, which is one reason they're not used as much now, though some of them are used for other medicinal purposes. However, research continues to find drugs that would aid in interrogation, and it includes alternative methods.
