Summary
High Potential Season 2 delivers a strong mid-season finale in “The One That Got Away”, properly challenging Morgan in multiple ways and leaving things on a fun cliffhanger.
I’ve always maintained that High Potential works better when it legitimately challenges Morgan. This was why the Season 2 premiere worked really well. There are multiple forms this can take, and Episode 7, “The One That Got Away”, comes up with several at once. The fact that the mid-season finale is about an art theft and not a murder challenges Morgan’s attention span. The fact that Wagner won’t tolerate her going rogue challenges the dynamics of the Major Crimes Unit. And the fact that her new romantic interest may well be the bad guy in a story that we won’t see concluded until Spring 2026 challenges the patience of all of us.
There’s also a bit of development in the Roman subplot, which will, inevitably, challenge Morgan’s personal life. In other words, there’s a good amount going on here that makes for an engaging mid-season finale. It says a lot that High Potential can still manage to pull this kind of shake-up off, so deep into its run. There’s a reason this show is so popular.
To start with, we’re on Morgan’s side. It isn’t immediately clear how the theft of a painting – even a Rembrandt worth 22 million dollars – is of any real interest, especially when it seems that the priorities of the Major Crimes Unit revolve around protecting an insurance company from having to pay out for a couple, Linda and Greg Foster, who could probably stand to lose the money anyway. The missing painting was ostensibly theirs, loaned to a museum to increase its exposure and value, and to help recover it, the insurance company has dispatched an art recovery specialist named Rhys Eastman to help the LAPD.
Morgan becomes a bit more invested when it turns out there might be a moral contour, since a man named Ari Weisman sued for the painting on the grounds that his grandmother, Miriam, was its original owner, and it had been stolen from the family after they were killed in the Holocaust. Morgan latches onto this because it makes the case about something other than money, so when Karadec reiterates that the LAPD doesn’t have jurisdiction to solve a case dating back decades, it pushes her to, as usual, take matters into her own hands.
In Rhys, she finds a semi-willing conspirator. Morgan accompanies him back to a crime scene where he’s supposed to meet someone who claims to have the painting, and while this does indeed yield the next clue – a meeting location, time, and request for payment – it also causes Wagner to go postal at Morgan for breaking protocol and not letting anyone know what she was doing. Now, granted, Morgan has gotten a bit too used to just doing whatever she wants on the police department’s dime, but Wagner’s outsized reaction speaks to ulterior motives. Later, when he and Karadec go to the ransom location, he also tells Karadec to fill him in about the search for Roman, which, again, is a bit suspicious, even if Wagner claims that he only got mad at Morgan because he trusts her.
I still really like what High Potential Season 2 is doing with Wagner, especially here in Episode 7. If you put a gun to my head, I genuinely couldn’t tell you what his real intentions are, and that’s a good thing. For now, I’m leaning more towards the idea that we’re supposed to not trust him, and to dislike him on account of his ego, which comes to the fore when he botches the chase that he and Karadec get involved in, but that ultimately he’ll turn out okay and perhaps become a more viable romantic option for Morgan, which is definitely what’s being teased. But that might just be wishful thinking.
In the meantime, Morgan continues to be pretty unlucky on the romantic front. There’s a definite flirtatious spark between her and Rhys, and when they skulk off for drinks after Wagner throws them off the case, they end up in a bit of a liaison. However, when Rhys removes his shirt, the scars on his back identify him as the very art thief they’re looking for, and the fact that Karadec finds a dead body in a trunk at the end of the episode means that Morgan may be in immediate danger.
And then there’s the Roman thing, which seems to have finally put a face to whatever nebulous villain he’s hiding from. After getting a call from Arthur explaining that he has been followed ever since he handed over Roman’s backpack, Morgan passes it on to Selena, who enlists the help of Daphne and Oz to figure out its contents. The most notable is a photo of a man who turns up again at the end of the episode, in the back of Arthur’s car. And he’s looking for the backpack.
I do worry that Arthur, who has a nice conversation with Ava when she calls him after finding his card while trying on Morgan’s clothes, might be sacrificed on the stake-raising altar in the mid-season premiere. But we’ll have to wait a while to find out, since High Potential won’t be returning for a few months yet. Either way, this is a great place for the show to leave things until it gets back.
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