Summary
High Potential Season 2 delivers its obligatory Halloween installment in “Chasing Ghosts”. It works just fine, but the ongoing storylines remain more interesting than the weekly cases and deserve a bit more focus.
Just in case you needed a reminder that we were firmly in Spooky Season, High Potential Season 2 delivers its obligatory Halloween episode. And it’s… fine! There’s a potentially haunted house and a ghost, and Morgan keeps candy in her bag. Karadec says “Happy Halloween” before arresting the culprit, who turns out not to be a ghost, as first suspected, but a charlatan spiritualist. That’s very on-brand for a logic-driven procedural like this one, and as it happens, “on-brand” is how I’d describe Episode 6 overall. It’s very much what you’d expect, delivered in the manner you’d expect it.
Is that enough, almost halfway through a second season? Maybe. Depends on what you’re into. But I’m increasingly finding myself much more interested in the ongoing stories, particularly Morgan’s oddly flirtatious relationship with a newly clean-shaven Wagner and how her search for Roman is informing her relationship with Ava. But that’s the stuff that only develops in small increments, in the margins afforded by each case of the week. I’m starting to think the serialisation of the season premiere might have given me unrealistic expectations.
The Halloween-themed case is fun, though. A wealthy loner named Danny Sternblatt is found dead after being spotted by some costumed neighbourhood kids being chased around by what seems very much like a ghost. With some investigation, Morgan and Karadec settle on the theory that Sternblatt was deliberately scared to death. He was already terrified of the house being haunted by the spectre of Maddie St. Croix, a famous actress who had lived and died in the house 80 years prior. His fears were preyed upon by Calliope, a “spiritual advisor” he hired to cleanse the property and keep him insulated from its lingering evil, and his estranged wife, Lorraine, who hired a woman named Shauna to cosplay as the ghoul and “haunt” him over a period of months.
You’d think this would leave Lorraine on the hook for murder, but not quite. As it turns out, Danny wasn’t scared to death at all – he was deliberately poisoned for typically mundane reasons. There’s a secret room in his house hiding a priceless necklace once belonging to Maddie St. Croix, so Calliope dosed him to pilfer it for herself. Luckily, she isn’t half as clever as she thinks she is, so the LAPD is easily able to lure her out and catch her in the act. I mean, the professional charlatan? I can’t say I’m surprised.
Anyway, it’s outside and around the case that High Potential Season 2, Episode 6 gets more interesting, at least to me. Morgan and Ava still aren’t on speaking terms, but their temporary estrangement leads to a sweet payoff when both take the time to actually explain their viewpoints to each other. This is all in service of getting us to the contents of Roman’s backpack, but I do think the relationship between Ava and Morgan is really strong and is a highlight of this show that it should capitalize on more.
Anyway, the backpack. It contains some stuff that Selena needs to take a look at, which might become more important down the line, but it also contains a drawing of Ava’s first-grade dance recital that proves Roman was there, lurking. It’s a nice revelation for her because it proves that her dad didn’t just abandon her entirely, but it raises some less-than-ideal questions about how someone as observant as Morgan never spotted him.
The other burgeoning subplot is Morgan’s developing relationship with Wagner. I like this because I’m still not entirely sure what it’s building to. There’s obvious romantic chemistry here, but is it genuine, or is Wagner sneakily looking for a way to force Morgan out of the department? There’s a bit of effort expended here in “Chasing Ghosts” to establish that Wagner is quite the match for Morgan in terms of deductive reasoning, which makes him both a more viable romantic partner and also potentially more sinister. Both angles work, and both actors are selling it, so this is becoming one of my favourite throughlines of High Potential Season 2.
Will Morgan finally fall for someone, only to later be blindsided by the revelation that they mean to do her harm? Is Wagner opening up about his dead wife in such vague terms a bit of depth that makes him open to a relationship, or a clue that there’s something sinister lurking in his background? Either way, I’m interested in finding out. I just hope that the show doesn’t beat around the bush for so long that the angle loses its mystery.
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