Summary
High Potential feels inconsequential and silly in Episode 10, leaning too heavily into comedy and abandoning any wider plotting or deeper characterization.
High Potential has always had a comedic streak, but Episode 10, “Chutes and Murders”, takes it too far. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the idea of finding a murdered woman on a playground slide was perceived to be a little too sinister if it wasn’t treated as eccentrically as possible, so the whole thing is stuffed with outlandish caricatures and slapstick cutaways. It’s a weird vibe.
The murdered woman is Tara Foley, a nanny who was smashed on the back of the head with a blunt object and crawled in the playground slide to hide – and, it turns out, to die. Initial leads take Morgan and Karadec to Tara’s clients, Brett and Jeff, then to a mysterious stalker who walks with a limp and always carries a French magazine, then to an executive named Carina who got Tara’s predecessor fired with acerbic social media posts, and finally to an exclusive clique of fellow nannies.
None of this is as silly on paper as it ends up being on-screen. The “stalker”, for instance, turns out to be Charles Lavoie, aka Chuck the Canuck, played by a guest-starring Ken Marino as a bumbling former traffic cop who was forced to take early retirement after shooting himself in the foot. He fancies himself as a Columbo type but is mostly just delusional.
Carina, too, is a caricature of an office Karen who gets herself involved in other people’s business for no reason at all. As the investigation progresses, it leads to someone named “Little Sketchy”, who turns out to be a wannabe poet introduced reciting a truly terrible verse about Tara’s death at a slam. Morgan and Karadec listen in disbelief, but by this point in High Potential Episode 10, it’s like the fourth weirdest thing they’ve seen that day.
Even the other nannies, one of whom is eventually revealed to be Tara’s killer, strike a ridiculous image of a Mean Girls-style clique, each with a picture of a Spice Girl on their lunchbox. The scene where they all try to give the killer, Oksana, an alibi and crumble under the slightest bit of pressure is explicitly played for laughs.
Daniel Sunjata and Kaitlin Olson in High Potential | Image via ABC
Oksana killed Tara because the latter threatened her with deportation since she was responsible for bullying Tara after she replaced the beloved Rosa and worked for lower pay, making the others look bad. Oksana would prefer prison in America to life back in Russia, and that’s exactly what she’s going to get.
“Chutes and Murders” doesn’t even offer Morgan many opportunities for her trademark deductive reasoning, and the clues she does put together are a bit of a stretch. She has one long expositional rant on the Great Schism – the 1054 separation of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox camps of Christianity – triggered by incredibly flimsy evidence, including the accusatory Facebook messages having been written by a Russian speaker because the days of the week weren’t capitalized. Trust me, as someone with a Facebook account, let me tell you – most native English speakers don’t use proper capitalization either.
Without Tom or anything to do with Roman, High Potential Episode 10 feels worryingly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The focus on parenthood and how working parents miss so much time with their children should matter to Mama Bear Morgan, and there’s a bit of lip service paid in this regard, but it’s light. A subplot about Elliot not fitting in with his classmates and Ava being glued to her phone has a nice payoff in the final scenes, though, but it feels like too little too late after such an aggravatingly daft installment.
