Summary
High Potential Season 2 feels a bit deflated in Episode 3 after wrapping up the Game Maker plot, but there’s an intriguing case of the week and some good character drama stemming from the latest in Roman’s mysterious disappearance.
As predicted, High Potential Season 2 is losing a bit of steam after wrapping up the Game Maker storyline so quickly. Episode 3 definitely feels deflated, which is weird since it has an interesting enough case full of twists, turns, and weird highlights. But I definitely appreciated the vibe of Morgan feeling intellectually matched and personally imperilled, and we also felt closer to the truth about Roman, which is also very much kept at arm’s-length here in “Eleven Minutes”.
One thing that I do like about that latter storyline, though, is that we have time to see how it affects Ava, who has been pretty underused, dramatically speaking. Morgan’s kids have put up with all kinds of madness up to this point, and it only feels right that it would eventually impact them in some way, especially Ava, who is old enough for her dad’s fate to really matter to her. This more affecting emotional sentiment feels like a fair trade for the less engaging mystery.
Anyway, the case of the week finds a man named Nathan Gould being strangled to death in very precisely arranged circumstances, with the curious details of suspicious injuries and having been discovered by a restaurant host after she followed the sound of a duck down an alley. It doesn’t take Morgan and Karadec long to find out that Nathan was a gambler who was in deep with a loan shark named Ray, but it wasn’t Ray who killed him – he turned up to do so and found him dead already, his life insurance policy having been tweaked to settle the debt posthumously.
The life insurance money was originally going to Nathan’s semi-estranged daughter, Jessica. After disappearing from her life when she was a kid, Nathan had recently been reconnecting with Jessica after getting back in touch because he was “going away soon”, implying he had advance knowledge of his own demise. His plan, it turns out, was to settle the loan shark debt with his own life to protect Jessica, who was pregnant, and he had also been attending a lot of appointments with a cardiologist, even though outwardly he seemed fine. Hmm.
Nathan’s heart turns out to be the key to everything in High Potential Season 2, Episode 3. He was killed for it, and the scene was engineered in such a way that he would be discovered quickly enough that the heart would still be viable and he’d be able to donate it to a willing recipient. The prime suspect initially seems like a billionaire, Carson Wood, who’s running out of time and has enough sway over the hospital to pull some strings, but Nathan’s heart wasn’t a match for him. The real intended recipient turns out to have been an older woman, Rosemary, who happens to be the mother of one of the EMTs, Christopher, who treated Nathan after run-ins with Ray.
Ray had promised Christopher’s mother his heart when he took his own life to settle his debt. However, the news about Jessica’s pregnancy compelled him to reconsider, since he wanted to be a grandfather, but that wasn’t acceptable for Christopher, who killed him to steal his heart. If nothing else, it’s a novel motive for murder. High Potential has historically been pretty good in that regard.
Like I said, though, it’s the Ava stuff I like most of all. I sometimes forget she’s a teenager, so it’s nice to see her actually act like one, lashing out after Morgan finally reveals the truth to her about Roman’s recent whereabouts. Think of the emotional whiplash she’s undergoing here – she has at various points believed her father was dead, then alive, then that he abandoned her willingly. That’s not something that your average teenage girl takes in stride, and her vandalising one of Roman’s murals – leading to both her and Morgan getting arrested, and both having to be sprung from custody by Karadec – is a fitting way to act out and get her point across.
It leads to a breakthrough in her relationship with Morgan, too, who is still adamant that Roman had a good reason for disappearing in the first place, and a similarly good one for remaining on the run. But she, like the rest of us, is still no closer to knowing the real truth. As usual, we’re going to have to keep watching.
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