Summary
High Potential gets a bit carried away in Episode 11, with a central mystery that is contained and complex to a fault.
It’s hard to tell when High Potential is deliberately shaking things up and when it’s running out of ideas. Episode 11, “The Sauna at the End of the Stairs”, could go either way. It isn’t like the previous episode, which just seemed to pivot to a different genre entirely, but it has a similar try-hard quality that I found off-putting.
I do like the setup, conceptually. The episode doesn’t just revolve around a deathbed confession that closes a cold case but feels integral to the backstory of Selena, who has spent most of the season languishing as a support act. It justifies her coming to the forefront, and that’s good.
Since it also deals with the upper echelons of the department to some extent – the original crime stretches back years when the higher-ups weren’t quite as high – it feels like there are genuine consequences. Selena reopening a case that was supposed to be buried, looking for justice where it had supposedly already been achieved, potentially makes the LAPD look bad, leading to a very welcome guest star in Keith David, who plays Captain Pacheco.
It’s the staging of the case itself that irks me, I think. High Potential Episode 11 has a two-pronged narrative structure, with Morgan, Selena, and Karadec interrogating the family of an elderly man who has just confessed to murdering his son-in-law on his deathbed, while someone involved in the family, Neda, presents her own version of events to Oz and Daphne in the form of a totally “legit” documentary production. The perspective switches back and forth, sometimes overlapping, as Morgan – always Morgan – uncovers new clues and pieces together each step of the crime with alarming accuracy while Oz and Daphne work through the details with Neda.
This approach becomes too much very quickly. The whole thing’s dense with revelations that the audience doesn’t have time to sit with, so Morgan’s trademark deductive reasoning feels even more farfetched than usual. The scenes with Oz and Daphne just feel reiterative, since there’s never any doubt that Morgan will singlehandedly solve the case as she always does.
“The Sauna at the End of the Stairs” wears its Agatha Christie locked-room mystery influences more openly than usual, being set mostly in a single location and featuring all the eccentric members of an entire family crammed inside. Everyone’s a suspect, and the predictable dysfunction that is revealed as the case progresses gives everyone a motive for murder.
Perhaps true to form, the real culprit becomes obvious as soon as a particular detail about his intelligence is established. If it wasn’t clear by now, High Potential will take any opportunity it can to lionize intellect above any other quality. Of course, the smartest person in the room – well, second smartest, if Morgan’s there – is the most dangerous. But the family history justifies the actions of a young boy trying to prevent his mother from being abused. On the subject of Christie, the ending evokes Murder on the Orient Express, with an outcome that challenges the detectives’ notions of right and wrong in a crime that mostly feels justified and forgivable.
Equally predictable is the fact that Selena’s career, despite being threatened, doesn’t encounter any major roadblocks as a result of her going off-books, and her respect for Morgan increases tenfold. Interestingly, Captain Pacheco suggests ending the cleaning lady experiment as a way to punish Selena but ultimately drops that angle entirely when Morgan is proved to be right. I did welcome this reminder that Morgan is technically a consultant, not an official detective, but she’s so deeply entrenched in the Major Crimes Unit by now that I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference.
Ultimately High Potential Episode 11 feels like another episode of the show that is getting a bit carried away with itself, delighting in making Morgan’s deductions even more complex and nested but keeping the audience at arm’s length instead of letting them follow along for the ride. By the end, I was mostly exhausted. But it’s always nice to see Keith David in things.
