‘Leverage: Redemption’ Boss Reveals the Question That Will Never Be Answered About Eliot

Meredith Jacobs June 8, 2025, 11:00 am

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Christian Kane as Eliot Spencer — 'Leverage' Season 3 Episode 15 'The Big Bang Job' — TNT

Back during Leverage‘s original run on TNT, its third season villain was financial mastermind Damien Moreau (Goran Visnjic). What the others didn’t know until they’d actually encountered him was that their hitter, Eliot Spencer (Christian Kane), once worked for him.

In “The Big Bang Job,” which aired in 2010, Eliot explained to the others — mastermind Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton), grifter Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman), thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf), and hacker Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge) — that he’d been trying to protect them, which he saw as his job. Though Nate thought they could handle Moreau, Eliot disagreed.

“We’re out of our league, Nate. Every one of Moreau’s men has innocent blood on their hands. Every one of them. Every one of them are worse than me. You think you know what I’ve done? The worst thing I ever did in my entire life, I did for Damien Moreau. And I’ll never be clean of that,” Eliot said, and when Parker asked what he did, he told her, “Don’t ask me that, Parker. Because if you ask me, I’m going to tell you. So, please, don’t ask me.”

Leverage: Redemption showrunner John Rogers (who co-created the original series) told TV Insider while discussing the Season 3 finale that we’ll “never” hear what the worst thing Eliot did was. (There’s no word yet about a Season 4.)

“It’s interesting because Christian has said, ‘I know what it is,’ and I said, ‘Don’t tell me. Whatever you’re going to have, whatever I’m going to have, whatever Chris Downey or Dean [Devlin] has in their head is all going to be different,'” Rogers shared. “‘It doesn’t matter. What you believe is the worst thing he’s ever did is what will give you the performance.'”

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Both Christian Kane and executive producer Dean Devlin have told us that Eliot would say he could never be redeemed because of all the things he’s done.

“Eliot’s a serial killer. He’s killed a lot of people — sometimes for money, sometimes because they deserved it, but he’s killed a lot of people — and there’s no way that he’s ever going to be able to redeem himself for that,” Kane told TV Insider in July 2023 and added that Eliot telling Parker not to ask what he did was “basically taking care of our fans so that they don’t absolutely hate Eliot, but at the same time, letting them know we were all bad guys, but he might have been one of the worst. So there is no redemption for him.”

So now, the only path for redemption for Eliot is guiding others there.

“There’s a line that a lot of people found shattering in the second season in the finale where he says, ‘I appreciate the opportunity to be useful,'” Rogers said. “And that’s just a guy who’s like, ‘Look, I’ll never see the promised land.’ This is the tragedy of the show. There’s no greater hero than a man who believes he will never see the promised land and spends his entire life trying to get other people there. And that’s Eliot. It’s funny, he’s much harsher on Eliot than I am. I’m like, ‘He could be redeemed,’ and both of those guys are like, ‘No, he’s going to hell.'”

Do you think Eliot can be redeemed? Do you have a theory about the worst thing he ever did for Damien Moreau? Let us know in the comments section below.

Leverage: Redemption, Seasons 1-3, Streaming Now, Prime Video