Summary
High Potential feels a bit disconnected from the rest of Season 2 in “NPC”, but it does provide a great twist and some development in the relationship between Morgan and Karadec.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I do wonder sometimes if High Potential is filmed out of order and assembled into a loose chronological order after the fact. This would explain why Season 2 sometimes feels like it’s telling a bigger, coherent story and sometimes why, as in the case of Episode 11, “NPC”, it seems to entirely forget about events that immediately preceded it. There’s nothing here, for instance, about Morgan being fired and reinstated thanks to Selena blackmailing Internal Affairs. Wagner is nowhere to be seen either. And there’s nothing about Arthur and Roman.
This is… fine, and largely inevitable, but it can feel a little weird. The compromise that “NPC” makes is that it uses the space to work on the evolving relationship between Morgan and Karadec, which is complicated by the sudden reappearance of Karadec’s ex, Lucia. This is clearly bubbling away in the margins, though admittedly the bulk of the focus is on the case of the week, the poisoning of a professional gamer.
I typically hate it when mainstream shows with little knowledge about video games decide to hone in on games as a subject, and there is, admittedly, a bit of that here. I could do without discussions about whether e-sports constitute real sports, or whether video game addiction is a real thing, but at least it isn’t any ponderous lecturing about how fictional violence can bleed into the real world. In fact, the video game element of it all isn’t especially focused on.
Declan Harper is the victim, a professional gamer of some renown, who is killed by a speeding car when, hallucinating, he staggers out into the middle of the road. He’s hallucinating because he has been poisoned, which Morgan quickly deduces from a pool of black vomit nearby – black, because he ingested charcoal to try to purge his system. To make matters more complex, his computer is missing, the glass wall at his home is broken, and his ex, Aditi, shows up in suspicious circumstances after receiving a voicemail from Declan claiming he was killing the same person over and over again, and that person had come for their revenge.
The fictional game here – and there’s always a fictional game – is called Battle Dynasty, a Warcraft-esque action-RPG thing with orcs and knights. Declan was a top player, but he had stepped back from the game thanks to a burgeoning addiction. When he was playing, he was killing the same orc avatar over and over again, to the extent that the player behind it had threatened to kill him in real life.
Thanks to more Holmesian deductive reasoning from Morgan, it turns out that Declan was poisoned by pufferfish toxin. The pufferfish is a Japanese delicacy, but it can kill the person eating it if it’s improperly prepared, meaning only a small handful of chefs are legally able to serve it. This leads Morgan and Karadec to a sushi chef. His son, Jin, works in the restaurant, but his other son, Ryo, is a layabout video game addict. It eventually transpires that Ryo’s father hired Declan to repeatedly kill his in-game avatar in the hopes of preventing him from playing all the time. But it had the unintended effect of depriving him of the only space in which he felt he could truly be himself.
To be fair, Episode 11 has the best twist of High Potential Season 2 thus far. Morgan eventually realises, thanks to a 90% DNA match on some blood found at Declan’s house, but also a few other details, that Jin and Ryo are the same person. The explanation is chimerism, a rare phenomenon where, during a pregnancy of twins, one twin absorbs the other, subsequently carrying both sets of DNA. For his entire life, Ryo’s father has been forcing him to cosplay as his dead brother, Jin, and this is continuing even now, since he’s trying to pin his and Ryo’s complicity in Declan’s death on this fictional sibling. It’s a genuinely good development.
Outside of the main case, we also have Karadec to consider. On his way to work, he runs into his ex, Lucia, and rather uncharacteristically allows himself to be late for work so he can have coffee with her. We already know that these two broke up because Karadec kept putting work ahead of her, and we also already know that he still has some lingering regret about that decision, so it’s clear he’s trying to do things differently this time.
But what about Morgan? For most of the episode, like Selena, she expresses nothing but support and enthusiasm for the idea of Karadec having a life outside of his job. She actively convinces Karadec to pursue a relationship, even. And when she meets Lucia at the end of the episode, she’s lovely and warm and cordial.
But as Karadec and Lucia walk away, there are tears in Morgan’s eyes. She’s clearly harbouring developing feelings for Karadec that extend beyond their professional relationship. Will she tell him? Just as his love life is on the mend? We’ll have to wait and see.
