OK, turns out I'm not done way overanalyzing the hospital scene from "The Nigerian Job." But in the interests of not continuing to spam the poor stranger who touched off that conversation, I'll dump the new overanalysis into its own post. @trivalentlinks @wolves-in-the-world

As I've been thinking about this, I'm just fascinated by what the setup seems to imply about their choices here:

1. Nate and Hardison are both handcuffed to hospital beds--Nate unconscious, Hardison apparently only still on the bed because he doesn't know how get himself out of handcuffs.

2. Parker is free of her cuffs and pacing. (She gets handcuffed to the bed after feigning nausea to lure the doctors in.) Her dialog implies she has already formulated a plan for getting at least herself out (that will be ruined if Eliot kills someone).

3. Eliot is sitting in a chair, handcuffed to the arm. Going off of other Hollywood hospital scenes, I assume Eliot being in a chair reflects both being very minimally injured and some off-screen grifting on his part. He'd want to be cuffed to the relatively light-and-compact chair instead of a bed, since he could maneuver and fight without necessarily having to get the cuffs off first, which would be consistent with his assertion that "I can take these cops"--he's got an escape plan, too.

The dialog also indicates that 1) they have been in the hospital with Nate unconscious for at least 20 minutes (because that's how long ago they were fingerprinted) and 2) everyone else has been conscious since before getting brought to the hospital (Parker: "Cops and firemen got there just as we were waking up.").

So, all three of them sat there for at least 20 minutes waiting for Nate to wake up, knowing their time before their identities were uncovered was ticking away, and none of them just ditched the others and left.

<3 to clarify (since I don't think you quite said what this implies about the sarcasm/sincerity of 'honest man'), have you come around to thinking it's sincere, at the same time that I came around to your pov of thinking it's at least partially sarcastic (sarcastic on Eliot's part, sincere on Parker's)? That's pretty funny if true.

Also, another point in favour of at least Parker and Hardison believing that Nate is an honest man is that at the reveal at the end of The Scheherazade Job, both of them, at least to my reading, seem genuinely shocked that Nate would non-consensually hypnotise Hardison, in a way that nobody was shocked when Sterling drugged Eliot in Queen's Gambit, or even when Sophie did that NLP thing on Eliot in the Reunion Job.

Of course this is more than two seasons later, when their perspectives have probably changed, but I do think that at the beginning, Parker and Hardison believe, if only because they have to reason to believe otherwise, that Nate is honest*.

*side note, it's not entirely clear what 'honest' even means in this show; I understand honest not to mean 'tells the truth', and it certainly doesn't mean 'on the right/good side'--more like a sense of generally believing in justice even when it's not in their own personal best interests, and not willing to completely screw over someone innocent?

After all, I would expect that the team believes Bonanno and the blonde detective from the Experimental job to be honest even though they are cops (not generally the good guys in Leverage universe!) and also are clearly willing to bend the truth on occasion.

Similarly for Steve Reynolds (the guy played by Christian Kane in the D.B. Cooper job) and Agent McSweeten's dad, assuming he knew who Reynolds actually was, since that is left unclear. Both cops who have jobs maintaining order, both willing not to be entirely truthful, but both would probably be perceived as honest.

Similarly, while the vast majority of wealthy executives throughout the show are depicted as definitely not honest, Pierson (Dubenich's rival at Pierson Aviation, also presumably a wealthy executive) is someone I expect the characters to perceive as honest, at least based on his on-screen actions?

Also Mr. Price, CEO of Lillian Foods (The Top Hat Job), is kind of a comedy character (knocked around in the magic box) and a bit of an asshole boss who doesn't know his employees at all ("he likes coffee"// "that's all you have? coffee?"), but seems to at least be honest in that the client was correct in her prediction that he would support pulling the entire frozen foods line and firing Erik Casten upon finding out that the frozen foods were causing people to get very sick.

On the criminal side, I expect probably everyone on the team would consider pre-canon Hardison to be honest, except maybe early season 1 Nate (who is still adjusting from being the bad guy himself). I think Josie (the car thief girl from the Boost Job) would probably be considered 'honest', even though she was an aspiring car thief and also kinda sold Parker out, though not quite intentionally

oops, this footnote is way longer than my post and also i'm not sure i quite have a point here, just there are layers to this question

@wolves-in-the-world in case you are still following this discussion

Ah, yes, the "Wow, the writers went out of their way to have these supposed loners wait for Nate" was an overanalysis tangent unrelated to the question of honesty. 😉 I do still believe that Eliot's "Of course. You're an honest man" was thoroughly sarcastic, but you raise a very relevant point about what constitutes "honest" here.

In this episode, I think "honest man" is being used to mean "not a 'real' criminal" or more precisely "working for (supposed) 'noble' motives unlike common criminals out for their own gain," and I think that may be exactly what Eliot was being sarcastic about.

That meaning was how Dubenich uses it--he wants an "honest man" to oversee the crime he's arranging to make sure those unscrupulous "real" criminals don't screw him over. He makes himself out to be the innocent victim of theft and sells Nate on the job by framing it as justice against both Pierson and IYS rather than "real" crime. That's also how Nate uses his insistence that he's "not a thief" up until The Maltese Falcon Job despite committing crimes (including theft) right and left. It's not about being truthful or trustworthy (and definitely not about being law-abiding), but about an "honest man" being nebulously "better" than people like Parker, Eliot, Hardison, and Sophie who are assumed to have gotten into crime for profit and/or glory.

Oh, that is a very interesting point. It had not occurred to me that the team is using Dubenich's definition of honesty here. In that sense, yeah, I can see Eliot as being entirely sarcastic here, and he probably thinks Parker wouldn't genuinely believe Nate to be 'honest' (in Dubenich's sense) either.

(I was understanding 'honest' completely differently: Dubenich's definition would probably consider pre-canon, still-working-for-IYS Nate to be 'honest', even though he obviously wasn't being honest, at least to himself, when he was working for an evil corporation and forcing himself not to ask too many questions/think too hard about the victims. So that kinda flips my argument in the other post on its head.)

Interestingly, I like how Eliot forces Nate to be honest about not being 'honest' before he agrees to work with him:

Eliot: What’s in it for you?

Nate: He used my son.

There, I believe Nate is being totally honest (truthful) about the fact that he's doing this primarily for selfish motives and not any 'noble' reasons, i.e. he's not any more 'honest' than the rest of them, and this is the point where Eliot's actually on board.

oh now that's a cool point - I like the idea that as parker was hired as a Thief, as hardison was hired as a Hacker, nate was explicitly hired as an Honest Man (tm) to keep the others in line. to prevent any crime that wasn't specifically ordered by dubenich. eliot's sarcasm almost suggests that he knows or has guessed that, and yeah, is a very appropriate response to nate's initial "no, see, my crimes are justified and thus not actual crimes" attitude.

snipping out for emphatic agreement:

I like that he had to be sure of nate's motives before committing to working with him again, too. how else can you trust an Honest Man to lead a group of criminals without turning them in?