Summary
High Potential once again fails to really challenge Morgan in Episode 4, “Survival Mode”, but it’s a better case than the previous episode’s with a more emotional payoff.
I’m mixed on Episode 4 of High Potential, “Survival Mode”. On the one hand, I think it’s a much more interesting case than the hotel murder in Episode 3, and it has an emotional quality to it that was sorely lacking there. But on the other hand, it does continue to indulge what I considered to be the biggest flaw of that episode – the idea of Morgan never, ever being wrong.
I’ll discuss this in more depth later, but the tl;dr version is that while it makes complete sense for Morgan to be almost supernaturally gifted at dispensing obscure facts and noticing subtle clues, since that’s what the show is built around, it doesn’t make sense for her to be consistently proved right in her approach and her feelings. That was a problem for me in the previous episode and it remains a problem here.
But, as I said, we’ll get to that.
Off The Grid (And Under It)
The hook of “Survival Mode” is pretty engaging. The cold open reveals two young girls being held captive in the trunk of a car, and we quickly come to find out that they have been kidnapped, presumably by the same assailant who murdered their environmentalist father, Wendell.
We first hear about Wendell from the perspective of his ex-wife, Mia, and her extremely wealthy hospitality mogul father, John, so we have certain preconceived ideas. He became gradually more obsessed with the idea of living off the grid with the girls, leading to a damning Child Protective Services report. While he’s initially the prime suspect in the kidnapping of his kids, Morgan’s knowledge of how to grow cucumbers and tomatoes leads her to discover his corpse buried in his greenhouse.
So, the question then becomes who murdered Wendell, since it’s likely to be the same person who took the girls. Suspicion quickly falls on John, who is revealed to have paid off a social worker to falsify the damning CPS report, and also seems to have hired a fixer to clean things up. But then attention turns to Mia, and this is where things start to get a little weird.
Morgan Is Never Wrong
Morgan spends the entirety of High Potential Episode 4 exhausted from insomnia and highly stressed about the personal nature of the case and the idea of a single mother being implicated in the kidnapping of her own children. Before Mia was even interviewed by the police, Morgan ran into her in the bathroom and promised her that she would be helped.
When Mia becomes a suspect – and, let’s be clear, the evidence absolutely points to her – she flips her lid and starts going nuts, insisting that a mother couldn’t have possibly done this. She’s clearly letting her personal feelings and her lack of professional experience get in the way. “Survival Mode” had a clear opportunity here to highlight the flaws in Morgan’s character; the parts of policework that don’t just involve deductive reasoning and esoteric knowledge.
But, as ever, Morgan is proved correct. Mia is innocent; she’s behaving suspiciously because she’s being held to ransom. What’s more is that Morgan goes entirely off-books to help Mia out, roping Karadec into the scheme too, and because Morgan’s right – as usual – none of this results in any pushback whatsoever.
It might just be me, but I really hate how often this is happening. At this point, you can basically solve any of the cases by assuming that whatever Morgan thinks is right. I get that in a premiere or even in the follow-up, but we’re four episodes in now and it’s still happening all the time.
Driving Miss Mia
The culprit turns out to be Curtis, John’s driver, who was motivated by his unrequited love for Mia. I don’t think killing a woman’s ex-husband and kidnapping her children is an especially smart seduction tactic, but different strokes for different folks.
If nothing else, Morgan and Karadec finding the kids in the woods, where their dad’s lessons had helped them survive, is really quite touching, and it’s a worthwhile emotional payoff for the case. High Potential Episode 4 also does a good job of continuing the good work done in the previous episode on Morgan and Karadec’s professional relationship. So, on that level, it’s a successful installment, and Morgan finally getting to sleep at the end is a nice closer.
Nothing about Roman, though, and I am getting genuinely sick of Morgan being right about everything all the time. But mileage may vary, and I suspect many who enjoy the show won’t care about this at all. Still, though – it’s something to keep an eye on.
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