Summary
Episode 2 of High Potential improves on the premiere by fleshing out key relationships and delivering some welcome emotion.
The premiere of High Potential had everything a show like this needs, but if it was missing anything, one might suggest it was a streak of genuine emotional sentiment. Luckily, Episode 2, “Dancers in the Dark”, addresses that, with some genuinely affecting stakes in both the case of the week and Morgan’s overarching story.
Let’s start, sensibly, with the case.
Dancing Kills
As with the first episode, the case doesn’t strictly matter that much as it’s mostly just an excuse to flesh out Morgan’s skills and develop her relationship with the other cops, especially Karadec, but it’s quite a nice little story either way.
The inciting incident is a tap dancer falling from the top of a building onto the roof of a very extravagantly customized car. A suicide attempt? An accident? Or something more sinister?
It’s obviously something more sinister, which it takes Morgan all of five seconds to work out when she sees the rooftop crime scene. She also deduces that the victim, Damien, was up there with one of his friends, who turns out to be a colleague at an auto body shop named Roland.
Roland doesn’t remain a suspect for long. As it turns out he was somewhat indebted to Damien, who had helped him get his life back together through the medium of dance, so the idea of hurting him was out of the question. He does, though, point the finger at a third person who was also on the roof. Morgan quickly deduces that this potential perpetrator must have hitched a ride in the customized trunk of Damien’s car, meaning that he, too, must be an employee at the body shop.
High Moon
Morgan’s ability to deduce all this stuff continues to strike a very fine balance between just clever enough to be fun but not so clever that it seems preposterous. Yes, I’m happy to concede that now and again the balance does tip ever so slightly into the realms of preposterousness, but never so much that it actually undermines the fun of the case. And this remains important.
But I liked Episode 2 of High Potential more than the premiere because it does a better job of folding Morgan’s personal life into the case. As we learned at the end of the pilot, Ava’s father, Roman, disappeared without a trace when she was a baby. Morgan is adamant that something happened to him, but Ava is harbouring a great deal of resentment for the man that she believes walked out of her life.
But Roman was also an artist, and it’s in showing Ava some of his graffiti that Morgan turns a corner in the case. Thinking about light, she realizes that on the night Damien fell, the moon was behind him, obscuring the vision of whoever pushed him. Damien wasn’t the target – Roland was.
When Two Become One
Unfortunately – and this is another important lesson for Morgan – the police aren’t able to get to Roland in time, and he’s shot to death. The muzzle flash from the murder weapon connects his killer to the perpetrator of a robbery that Lieutenant Melon is investigating.
This crossover detail mostly exists to give Melon some screentime. Since everyone else in the LAPD has gotten on board with Morgan consulting rather quickly, there needs to be an in-office antagonist, and Melon’s it. Garrett Dillahunt plays him with enough contempt to be irritating – he keeps referring to Morgan as “the cleaning lady” and getting annoyed when she amends his case board – but not so much that he seems outright villainous.
Morgan figures out that Roland was the getaway driver for the robber, and when he tried to clean up his act with Damien, the robber considered him a loose end. She sets up a sting to catch the perpetrator, who turns out to be Griff, another of the boys’ colleagues, as Morgan suspected.
The Emotional Angle
The visible satisfaction Morgan gets from solving the crime and seeing Damien wake up with a hopeful prognosis is what sets her apart from similar high-performing protagonists. She’s a genuinely good person. When she gets her first pay check, she gets her car out of lockup just to see the joy on her kids’ faces.
This is turned up a notch when Selena arrives on Morgan’s doorstep at the end of High Potential Episode 2. She reveals that the police found a record of Roman’s car three days after he went missing. There were diapers inside, which implies that he didn’t abandon the family at all, but was intending to return. Something untoward happened to him, and Selena is determined to help Morgan find out what.
Kaitlin Olson’s reaction shot when she realizes Selena believes her genuinely put a lump in my throat, and it’s amplified by a great turn from Amirah J. as Ava, who overhears the conversation and realizes, suddenly, that everything she has ever suspected about her father might have been wrong.
It’s easy to dismiss High Potential as a silly network procedural, but there’s a lot more going on underneath the hood here than first appearances suggest.
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