Back to school

In its fourth season, “Leverage” has come comfortably into its own.

The five-member team takes on injustice, stands up for the little guy, and does so with such skill the big guy they take down rarely sees them coming.

Recent capers included bringing down a financial scam artist on behalf of his wronged victims, infiltrating an international chess match to avert a nuclear meltdown, and trying to track down a donated human heart that had been diverted from its proper recipient.

A show like this is always in danger of getting lost in its own formula: A sympathetic client is wronged, he or she comes somehow to the attention of the team – incidentally, I’ve never been entirely clear on how this happens. I have no idea how they’d advertise their services, which to start with could only be presented in the vaguest of terms.

Anyway, they take on the client, they outline their target and the situation, they employ a dizzying array of wacky accents and disguises, cyber wizardry and sleight-of-had to bamboozle and discombobulate their target.

Oftentimes one of the team members ends up in a pretty significant jam -- which it generally turns out was part of the plan all along -- and they skip merrily away as the police cart off the bad guy, who is often completely in the dark as to what just happened.

And if we’re being perfectly honest, that is what happens something like 98 percent of the time.

Keeping it fresh

The writers manage to keep the show fresh, however, by sparking new elements between the characters.

Heading into the fourth season break, team leader Nathan Ford, played by Timothy Hutton, and grifter Sophie Devereaux, played by Gina Bellman, were linked romantically.

Now, while that state of affairs had been percolating since the fourth season premiere, it became fresh all over again when the relationship was revealed to the rest of the team.

While this was largely played for laughs, a darker element was introduced when the light-hearted discussion shifted towards under which scenarios and various plans of Ford’s that all the various team members survived all the missions.

Again, played completely for laughs, but absolutely a little bit of mistrust has been sown among the team members.

Also heading into the break, hacker Alec Hardison, played by Aldis Hodge, had kissed Parker, the thief, played by Beth Riesgraf.

As their relationship progressed he crafted a mobile device to assist her in the commission of their capers. She was incensed that he was trying to replace her, until he explained in detail how down to the color he chose for the exterior was all completely inspired by her. And how it wasn’t meant to replace her so much as it was meant to help her.

The relationship moved to a new level entirely when Parker was forced to confront her feelings for him. Parker is socially awkward. She can play a role when the team takes on a mission, but generally she is not in touch with her feelings. So when Hardison’s life was in danger and she had to rescue him, she was entirely unable to express herself verbally, but every aspect of her physical presentation was a woman desperately wanting to express her affection for him and wholly unable to. It was a very intense performance.

The wild card in the team is Christian Kane as Eliot Spencer. Eliot is the team’s enforcer and is used generally whenever they need a blue collar worker-type to get in somewhere and present as a member of a work crew or a security guard, or to convey some object here or there unobtrusively.

Which is a bit of a stretch given how physically imposing he is. Eliot is compact but powerful and not the kind of person who would go unnoticed. The fact that he can speaks to the quality of ... well, the camerawork and edit- ing, obviously, but also Kane’s presentation of the character.

Season resume

As the season resumed, Travis Zilgram is a wealthy psychology student who was torturing homeless people for a science lab. The subjects were offered what seemed to them like great sums of money to be sleep deprived and subjected to psychological torments in the guise of interrogations. And it seems that at least three of them turned up dead.

As the team took on their investigation, a number of side plots explored the effectiveness of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stanley Milgram’s peer-shocking experiment (which Parker seemed to enjoy, even being able to see the effects of her administering the shocks firsthand). It was revealed that she was actively trying to get kicked out of the study, but ... she was disturbingly OK with her actions.

Storytelling

The storyline explored other elements of psychological duress as well, including a mild representation of hazing at Zilgram’s fraternity.

The storyline also touched on the infamous Stanford Prisoner Experiment, where students in the role of guards become disproportionately aggressive in their roles and torment their prisoners, despite the fact that they were all chosen at random and no one is actually a guard or a prisoner. Hardison received a beatdown by a team of “guards,”?who were in fact fellow students.

Eliot was selected to infiltrate the target’s experiment, and he and Parker were able to collect evidence of torture and abuse of his subjects, which they then turned on Zilgram in bringing him to justice.

I recognized and appreciated most of the psychological experiments touched on in the episode, which I felt was unusually well written. Indeed, the scenarios the team has been facing lately -- including the team’s attempt to thwart a scam with no access to its usual array of planning and resources -- has called for some very good improvisation on the part of the writers. Which, taken together with a surpassingly capable cast, makes for some superior storytelling, which I for one am enjoying.

Carry on “Leverage.” Carry on.

“Leverage”?airs at 9/8c Sundays on TNT.