Leverage: Redemption - The Fractured Job

Eliot (Christian Kane) returns home... again. For those who don't remember, one of earliest episodes of Leverage focused on Eliot, with his Leverage pals in tow, returning to Kentucky to help out his high school sweetheart. 14 years later, Leverage: Redemption sends Eliot back home to Oklahoma (not Kentucky) and a small town (rather than a ranch or farm) in attempts to make up with his estranged father. While in town, he uncovers a fracking conspiracy and cover-up that brings in the rest of the team to save the small town.

Aside from the awkwardness of the two backstories not fitting together (having Eliot not grow up even in the same state - and you can't say his father moved as the episode states his father has lived in this town his entire adult life removing the possibility of a move explaining the inconsistency), there is an emotional element at play. Since it doesn't work as well as "The Two-Horse Job," and the inconsistencies between the episodes can't really be solved, you really just have to ignore one or the other to make the continuity still work. Sadly, that means this is the one I'm going to have to forget.

"The Fractured Job" is notable for introducing Keith David as Eliot's father, much to the surprise and delight of the rest of the team, offering a cameo of Hardison (Aldis Hodge), and involves a subplot of Sophie (Gina Bellman) dealing with a confidence problem that feels added only to explain how she gets fooled by a local mark. "The Fractured Job" isn't a bad episode of Leverage: Redemption, but it's not a great one either. Even without the continuity problems by retconning aspects of Eliot's past unnecessarily (they couldn't put this town in Kentucky and move his dead slightly out of town?), Sophie's convenient confidence problem, and twist that doesn't really offer much pop (other than an explosion that makes one of the team happy), all undercut what otherwise could have been an emotional homecoming for Eliot.

• Title: Leverage: Redemption - The Fractured Job
• IMDb: link