When planning a heist or a con with a group of people, there are a lot of different personalities that have to learn to work together. When that group is part of a fictional television series, their positive traits are perceived as strengths and their flaws as weaknesses. In reality, the two sides to their personality humanize the characters, making them feel more realistic for the audience. In Leverage, the team of thieves takes on seemingly impossible tasks, but thanks to their characterization, the audience believes they can achieve them.
Parker is one of those thieves. Really, Parker is the thief in a team that consists of a hacker, grifter, hitter, and a mastermind to oversee it all. Parker, like everyone else on the team, is used to working alone when the series begins. She grows a lot over her time with the team, even eventually becoming the leader of the group.
Best: She's An Adrenaline Junkie
In other circumstances, this trait might not be seen as a positive one. Parker's love for heights, dangerous stunts, zip lines, and free climbing the sides of buildings, however, comes in handy in her profession.
Parker is the kind of person who loves the rush of jumping off a roof. She even does it before her teammates have secured her line on occasion. That might seem impulsive, but Parker does know her limits, and she knows how important being able to escape is in her line of work. She even shares her expertise with Sophie and Hardison, though they don't exactly love it the way she does.
Worst: Parker Doesn't Respect Boundaries
When it comes to her new teammates, Parker doesn't understand the concept of giving people their own space. She'll purposely invade their space, sitting right up against them during team meetings, whether they want her to or not, especially Eliot, laughing off his annoyance. She even wanders around Nate's apartment, watching him sleep, when he doesn't want the team there. Parker also pries into topics the team members don't want to talk about, not understanding when they try to brush her off.
While all of these things create a learning curve for Parker as the show continues, it's interesting to see the other side of this in her character as well. Though she might act this way with her team - even in the very first season while they're still getting to know one another - she doesn't act this way with strangers. She stabs a man with a fork when she thinks he's getting too close to her.
Best: She Strives To Be A Better Person
Parker knows that she's the kind of person, originally, who would take the money and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. She also recognizes that she's the kind of person who is going to put her own survival first, not the wishes of the client by the time the fourth season rolls around.
Parker knows all of this about herself, and she wants to do better. She wants to put other people first, to help people. That's part of the reason she spends so much time working with Sophie; she's not just learning how to con people, but how to actively think about what people want. Her relationships with every member of the team helps her strive to be her idea of better.
Worst: Parker Is Blunt
Parker doesn't always have much of a filter in conversations. While that makes her honest, that also makes her a liability to her team in the field.
Being blunt with your friends and saying things they don't want to hear is one thing. If Parker is blunt with a mark during the course of a con, it can cost the team ground in their work. There are times when her knee-jerk reactions to a question don't work, making the mark suspicious.
Best: She Sees The Big Picture
Though she begins her time with the Leverage team as their thief, Parker has played a lot of roles on the wrong side of the law. When she was just a kid, she helped boost cars, and before that, she was a getaway driver. Because of things like that, she is able to see other aspects of the job and how they play out that aren't just about the theft itself. That gives her a bit of an edge over the rest of her teammates.
In fact, her ability to analyze other aspects of the con, and her work with Sophie, is what gets Nate to start working more closely with her in the final stretch of episodes. He picks her to replace him as the mastermind for the group because of her ability to play the long game and see the big picture.
Worst: She's A Loner
It's great to be independent and accomplished. When someone's a member of a team like Parker is, however, taking on jobs alone or going rogue during a con is not the way to go.
When Parker first starts working with the team, she tends to start performing her tasks without waiting for everyone else to be ready. She also tends to be willing to take on jobs for herself without telling anyone about them, like when she thinks she can go into a building and beat a state of the art security system alone, and the team has to rescue her.
Best: Parker Thinks Outside Of The Box
There might not be a more creative thinker in Leverage than Parker. Even if Nate is the one who runs the jobs on a regular basis, he couldn't do that without Parker's brilliant thinking.
When Parker needs to get into a secure vault suddenly, for example, she does so with the help of eyeshadow from Sophie, a roll of tin foil off of the buffet table, and a little assist from Hardison. She can see ways of using objects that other people can't, and that helps her pull off some amazing jobs.
Worst: She's Easily Jealous
Parker doesn't like to admit it, but she gets jealous easily. She doesn't like the idea that she's replaceable, which is fair, because no one likes to think that about themselves. The difference is that Parker can be a bit destructive when she gets jealous.
When Hardison makes a robot and names it after her, his intention is to help make her job cracking safes a little easier. It's a device he thinks she can take with her. Parker rejects it, constantly challenging what Hardison has programmed into it, even considering just breaking the thing altogether. When she becomes jealous of a client that gets close to Hardison as well, she treats the client poorly and breaks a bottle with her bare hands, not wanting to admit her jealousy.
Best: Parker Adapts Quickly
The nature of their jobs means that the Leverage team all have to be quick on their feet. That means changing a plan in the middle of a con or coming up with a backstory on the fly.
While Parker isn't great at developing undercover personas, she is great at adapting to changing situations. If a plan is interrupted by unforeseen circumstances, Parker almost always has an exit strategy. She's quick to pick up on Nate's train of thought when he changes his tactics in the middle of their work, adapting to his plans almost as fast as he voices them.
Worst: Parker Is Secretive
Parker is an open book about some aspects of her life. She's more than willing to tell the team about her experiences as a thief. When it comes to more personal stories, Parker is less likely to open up.
The best example of that is Parker deciding to take on a job to save her mentor Archie. She cares about Archie so much that she calls him her father, but she never talks about him. Parker doesn't tell the team about the job, confident she can take it on and keep everyone out of it. She even has a storage space she uses to plan out the job herself, which also seems to double as a secret "apartment" for her.