‘Leverage: Redemption’ Boss on Potential Season 3 Episode: ‘Let’s Go Steal a Hardison’
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Leverage: Redemption Season 2.]
Did the Leverage: Redemption Season 2 finale, in its last moments, set up the next job we’ll see the crew pulling off?
Hardison (Aldis Hodge) videos in from the space station where he’s been for most of the season to reveal that the guys who sent him up there forgot about him and can’t launch a rocket for a rendezvous for two months. But he has a solution: The others can come get him! Sophie (Gina Bellman), Parker (Beth Riesgraf), Eliot (Christian Kane), Harry (Noah Wyle), and Breanna (Aleyse Shannon) make excuses and walk out… leaving Hardison to call after them. He can’t take another freeze-dried meal, he insists, plus he’s missed three DC movies (a nice nod to Hodge’s role as Hawkman in Black Adam) and doesn’t even know who’s fighting whom. Everyone, of course, comes back, eager to start planning to break into NASA.
But is that something we would see, instead of just hearing about, in a potential third season premiere? (Amazon Freevee has yet to renew the very fun heist drama.) It would likely depend on Hodge’s availability.
“Aldis Hodge is probably the hardest working person in the show business right now, and yet, when he has like four days off, he gives it to us. It’s so generous of him that he comes back even while he’s making these $300 million movies,” executive producer Dean Devlin tells TV Insider. “So, a lot of it will literally just depend on the timing because his attitude is he’ll do as much of the show as he can physically and he’s just been so spectacular about that. But it’s tricky to write because you don’t know if you’re gonna get him or for how many days you’re gonna get him.”
That being said, it is very possible that could kick off a new season. “Yeah, I’d love to do the whole bringing him down from outer space episode,” the EP continues. “‘Let’s go steal a Hardison!'”
Also depending on his availability is whether we could see anything similar to “The Rundown Job” from Season 5 of the original series, which just featured Hardison, Parker, and Eliot. We did hear about them working together in the time that passed between Leverage and Redemption; they continued the work and expanded it to Leverage: International after Sophie stepped away with Nate (who died a year before the revival picked up).
“We’d love to. The more [Aldis] we get, the more we’ll do with him. Because [Hardison’s] kind of the glue in a strange way that we didn’t realize until we were shooting the first episode of Leverage: Redemption Season 1,” Devlin explains. “There’s something about him that literally glues all the other players together, and when we don’t have him, it’s like it’s missing.”
Eliot Brasseaux/Amazon Freevee
The good news was that in Season 2, we did get date night for Hardison and Parker, which, of course, ended up including a con.
“That was such a special episode and one we’d wanted to do forever because a lot of the fans always said, ‘I wonder what it’s like when these two go out on a date.’ It was real kind of like fan fulfillment,” the EP shares. “It was such a special script because on one hand we wanted to have an issue between them that had to get dealt with, but on the other hand, everyone loves this couple, so the issue can’t be too big of an issue or you don’t buy it because they’re kind of like the couple we all want, right?”
Let’s just hope we get to see that rescue because wouldn’t it be cool to see Parker break into NASA and Eliot fight — you know something would happen to require it — in zero gravity?
Leverage: Redemption, Seasons 1 and 2, Streaming Now, Amazon Freevee
