‘High Potential’ Season 2, Episode 9 Recap – A So-So Return to Formula

As predicted, High Potential Season 2 has returned to its standard case-of-the-week procedural format, with most of Episode 9, “Under the Rug”, proceeding as if the events of the solid second half of the art thief two-parter never happened. That’s fine – even as its most baseline level of quality, this is a good, personable procedural – but also a little disappointing given how little progress it makes in the overarching plot, and how comparatively slight the stakes feel.

To be fair, there is a built-in excuse why nothing can be done about Arthur’s disappearance, since Major Crimes can’t interfere until 24 hours have elapsed, so this is basically just an excuse to focus on the case and – welcomely – Morgan’s personal life. This also has a bit of a connection to the previous episode, and Karadec’s FBI agent ex-partner gets a name-check, so there’s just enough continuity to be getting on with.

There’s a neat twist with the victim this week. A contract killer who’s surveilling his target from afar, it quickly becomes apparent that his brakes have been tampered with, meaning that, yes, someone has assassinated an assassin. Nice. His target was wealthy inventor Douglas Newmeyer (a guest-starring Keith Carradine in turbo-charged “smug rich guy” mode), who has faced recent public scrutiny for selling faulty vacuum cleaners that cause fires. Morgan and the rest of the team – though especially Morgan – can’t stand him out of the gate, and he doesn’t do anything to dissuade her of that opinion.

In another reveal, it turns out that the dead hitman was really an undercover FBI agent named Curtis Bellinger, making this case suddenly personal for the department. Wagner used to work undercover for the Feds, and his old friend and colleague, Mira (Rebeka Montoya), and her boss Wayne Vincent (Peter Jacobson), are working the case. And as usual, High Potential can’t quite decide what it wants to do with Wagner as a character. After the climax of the previous case, he’s suspicious of Morgan again, despite their one-to-one at the bar, and his undercover past provides a pretty direct way for the writers to tie him into Roman’s disappearance.

As you can probably guess, with a case involving an undercover FBI agent, there’s a mole at play. And since we don’t know any characters who work for the FBI, it has to be one of the two that have been introduced here in “Under the Rug”. And it is indeed Vincent, who was taking bribes from Newmeyer to bury the investigation into the faulty vacuum cleaners, which Bellinger found out about. It’s a weird case since the premise is pretty interesting, but after it progresses a bit, it kind of railroads itself into only one possible conclusion, which doesn’t require a lot of outside-the-box thinking from Morgan.

Then again, Morgan has other things on her mind in High Potential Season 2, Episode 9. At the start of the episode, she receives a bouquet of flowers from Rhys, which she receives rather gratefully in front of Ludo and Elliot. This doesn’t seem like much of a big deal, but Elliot mistakenly assumes the flowers are from Ludo, and throughout the episode tries to coach him in winning Morgan back. He eventually realises that Elliot is under the misapprehension that his parents are going to get back together, which Ludo calls Morgan to tell her about. He offers to talk him through the situation, which he does, pretty effectively, and it’s a nice moment of platonic co-parenting of a kind that is rarely seen on TV, now that I think about it.

The only downside is that the show continues to treat Ludo as a kind of perennially available and unproblematic babysitter, which makes it feel odd to us, the audience, that Elliot would even feel this way. I think the key thing is making sure that Ludo never really looks like a romantic option for Morgan, because there’s clearly something still bubbling between her and Karadec, and she also has to be believable in her tetchy flirtations with Wagner. Karadec and Morgan even have one of their best-ever scenes here, when Karadec consoles her about a nasty berating that Newmeyer gave her, which reminded Morgan of her father, who has the same condition.

Speaking of which, are we due to meet Morgan’s father? That’s a couple of times he has been mentioned now. Probably not a coincidence.