Summary
High Potential shows some worrying signs in Episode 3, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrel”. Morgan could stand to be challenged in more interesting ways.
A classic locked-room mystery is at the heart of High Potential Episode 3, and it’s a good fit. I continue to – like most, it seems – enjoy this show a great deal, even if I think it could stand to challenge Morgan a little bit more. Her crime-solving skills are useful here as they were in an effectively emotional Episode 2, but she keeps coming out on the right side of professional disputes too often for my liking.
Drama is born from conflict, and Morgan being right all the time doesn’t create enough of it. But it’s early days. I’ll point out some specific examples later, though, because I’m a professional nitpicker.
Open and Shut
The case in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrel” finds a very handsome man being drowned in the bathtub of a luxury hotel suite. Morgan deduces immediately that he was murdered since there’s evidence to support that his assailant hastily covered their tracks afterward. And we saw it in the cold open.
The victim is Earnest Lozano, from Mexico City. The prime suspect in his death out of the gate is his mistress, a doctor named Iris Bowman who, we learn, has been meeting him for “no strings attached fun” on a semi-regular basis after the death of her husband. She was the only person seen entering or indeed leaving the suite on the CCTV footage, so Karadec thinks this will be an open and shut case.
Not if Morgan has anything to say about it, obviously, but this is where I have a bit of a nitpick. Morgan hits on a sudden deduction while Iris is being interrogated and realizes she can’t be the killer based on the candles around the hotel’s bath. This requires Morgan to have intimate knowledge of precise candle-burning times and to have intuited a scenario in which one of those candles was extinguished during the struggle. Based on how much the candle had burned when it went out, Iris is exonerated immediately.
Morgan Needs More Resistance
My issue here isn’t with Morgan’s deductions – they’re ridiculously farfetched, but they all are – but with the fact that Karadec just takes her word for it. Iris could still be dangerous! And in actual fact it’s later revealed that she was indeed complicit in the crime. But at no point does anyone really reprimand Morgan for being so adamant about her theory or Karadec for just buying it wholesale without due diligence.
A similar thing happens later when Morgan takes a random work-from-home day and takes all the case evidence with her. Karadec turns up to tell her off, which is fair enough, but again, there are no repercussions. Even when Karadec points out that mishandling evidence can make it inadmissible in court, Morgan just brushes it off.
This reaches a crucial turning point when Morgan makes another crucial deduction in the case, doesn’t explain it to Karadec, and almost gets him killed. Again, Karadec goes crazy, and Morgan storms off in a huff claiming to have quit, but she flounces back to the office without a further mention of it.
Part of what worked about the second episode was that Morgan was genuinely emotionally challenged. High Potential Episode 3 doesn’t tax her in the same way, and I think she’s being let off easy for the sake of entertainment. But we don’t just want entertainment. Let’s have some proper drama!
Lozano Was A Con Man
As it turns out, Lozano had many victims – all vulnerable women whom he had seduced and fleeced under the guise of paying for a vacation home in Mexico City. Iris was one of them, which is why she was willing to team up with Lozano’s real killer, Kyle, the son of a woman with dementia who Lozano had conned out of two hundred grand.
Kyle, an accomplished climber, got into the hotel suite by scaling the outside of the building and drowned him. Iris had drugged him in the hotel bar and lured him to the bath, also unlatching the window so Kyle could get in.
Lozano deserved it, but that’s not a legal defense. In the only lightly emotional note of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrel”, Kyle says goodbye to his oblivious mother before being carted off to prison.
While there’s a bit of progress made in the working relationship between Morgan and Karadec and the case is fun to follow, I can’t help being a bit disappointed with High Potential Episode 3, or at least to have some reservations about things moving forward. Hopefully, subsequent episodes will come up with more interesting ways to challenge Morgan and make her and Karadec more even partners.
RELATED:
