“Oh I’m just remote accessing a plane’s electrical systems from 3,000 miles away. You know what, if you were a geek you would be really turned on right now. I’m just saying.”
- Hardison
As usual we begin our episode with the team meeting the client. It’s a couple who lost their daughter because a chemical company released an unsafe fertilizer. Nate gloms onto the case because he has an angry spot for dead kids. While Sophie distracts the security guards in the lobby, Nate, Eliot and Parker bust in to Genogrow Industries to try and find a paper trial of wrongdoing. They’re all pretty pissed that Hardison isn’t there (they have to climb 30 flights of stairs). He’s back at HQ making a hot pocket and chilling. He gets on the coms as soon as the company CEO, Allen Haldeman shows up. The gang manages to duck out without being seen and get some Intel that a flight is leaving in an hour with the assets on it. It sounds like he’s going to bankrupt an entire division of the company which would in effect kill any chance their clients have of winning their civil case. So they’re going to nab the assets on the flight and get it to their client.
Everyone sans Hardison heads to LAX. Eliot’s got an Air Marshal badge and Parker poses as a flight attendant to get on the plane. Nate and Sophie end up being Tom and Sarah Jane Baker. Nate also had Sylvester McCoy as an alias. I hadn’t realized until just now that it was big fat Doctor Who reference. Thank you Leverage writers for being huge geeks. We get a rather amusing scene when Sophie and Nate are going through security. Sophie picked up a bag at lost and found and it’s got all kinds of kinky sex toys in it. Hardison is tasked with going back to Genogrow to find the smoking gun that’s going to bring down the company.
Once the plane takes off, the crew searches everyone they think might be there on behalf of Genogrow. While they find a lot of shiny stuff worth stealing, none of it is property of the company. And Sophie and Nate start a little tiff. Sophie wants to build their backstory on the date they first met. She says it was ten years ago and Nate says eight. And then when she is searching a guy’s briefcase, she remarks it reminded her of Tuscany but Nate thought it was Paris. Back in coach, Parker is dealing with a needy passenger who keeps asking for ginger ale to calm her stomach. At first Parker is kind of annoyed by the woman. I can understand why.
Back at Genogrow, Hardison works his magic by getting himself into the building as a maintenance guy and then changing into a suit. He gabs with a “co-worker” about World of Warcraft (which is the reason he missed the mission the day before) and then gets the idea to call a meeting, including Haldeman, and then faking food poisoning to get into the guy’s office. Once there, he feeds some very interesting Intel to the rest of the team. The assets they’re looking for are people, not money or other tangibles. The needy woman is coach is a low level employee and the guy in first class is head of security. Hardison checks out the woman’s office to find people shredding stuff. She clearly knows more than she should.
After a brief discussion, the team decides that the accountant in coach needs to know the truth. So Eliot and his Air Marshal badge escort her up to first class and she explains that she found some accounting issues in regards to the fertilizer. Money was paid but there was no confirmation safety studies were completed. They now know that it’s going to be a hit and we get a rather awesome airplane bathroom fight between Eliot and the security guy. Back at Genogrow, Hardison is mediating between two co-workers who probably have some unresolved sexual tension. But he needs to think on his feet because Nate wants him to snag Haldeman’s hard drive and beat a hasty retreat. So he announces that it’s his birthday and everyone throws him a party. He finds some emails and payments to people in the Caimans. It would seem that both the security guy and the accountant will wind up dead before the plane lands. And if you believe Eliot, it would be a bomb on the plane. So Parker gets to squeeze down into the luggage compartment. I have to say the flight attendant onboard has some great skeptical expressions.
Once Parker determines that the bomb isn’t in either the accountant or the security’s guys’ bags, Hardison has her look at the flight system. It becomes evident fairly quickly that they’ve actually tapped into the plane’s black box and are feeding a computer virus into it that is going to make them crash and spoof the data so it won’t be detectable as sabotage. Hardison gets a little pep talk from Nate and actually manages to beat the code and make the plane land safely. Everyone on board is cheering. It was a pretty awesome sequence and a definite ‘age of the geek” moment. Hardison makes his exit by faking the fact that he’s quitting. It’s kind of amazing what some people will believe. The two co-workers he was mediating between act like they’ve actually known him. I suppose in a big company like that, you don’t know everyone. The accountant agrees to testify and Haldeman is hauled in on 12 counts of attempted murder among other things. The episode ends with Nate clearly up the discrepancy over when he and Sophie met. They saw each other for the first time a decade ago but it was 8 years ago that they actually first met. It was rather sweet actually. It’s going to take a long time for these two to get together. I forgot how playful they were in the beginning.
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