Critic’s Rating: 3.7 / 5.0
3.7
Is it just me, or was this one just a bit underwhelming?
Essentially, the highlight of High Potential Season 2 Episode 11 was what the network highlighted in its promotion: Karadec bumping into his ex.
Otherwise, it was a mostly case-centric hour in which the case tried too hard to be twisty, and nothing else really moved forward.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
It was one of those installments where you forget about everything that happened within it moments after the credits roll.
That’s not to say there weren’t personal elements to it, intended to draw out some of our characters a bit more and set up future things.
We opened with Karadec bumping into his ex-fiancée, Lucia, and it was nice to see his face light up a bit when they came into contact.
Whose face wouldn’t light up at the mere sight of Susan Kelechi Watson? She’s like sunshine.
But she also has this way of charming us for moments only for us not to get to keep her, which has been how things have played out for her presence onscreen since This Is Us.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
Personally, I’m still reeling over what could have been between her character and Will Trent, but I digress.
We don’t know too much about Lucia, and despite scoring Watson for this hour, she was terribly underused within it. It would’ve been nice to actually see the time she spent with Karadec onscreen, whether itwas the coffee date or the dinner later.
Our investment could increase exponentially if her introduction into the series were framed through Karadec’s eyes and we truly got to see her as he does, rather than something left for Morgan and Soto to observe throughout the investigation.
What we figure out about Karadec and Lucia’s relationship comes through exposition involving Morgan and mostly Soto.
And it is nice to see how close Soto and Karadec are, and to see that dynamic play out onscreen a bit more. High Potential is character-rich.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
It has an entire team of characters who are interesting in their own right and relationships that they could easily tap into and unpack a bit more, but it frequently falters by not taking full advantage.
Yes, Morgan is at the center of the show, but a dynamic or a scene does not suffer in the least if Olson isn’t at the center physically or by mention.
Soto and Karadec’s little moments, where they unpack their personal lives just a bit more, and we get these glimpses at who they are beyond just the badge, are little pearls of goodness within this hour.
Karadec worked too much, and it’s ultimately what drove him and Lucia apart, but the love they have for each other is still there. We sense that with their chemistry.
So it made sense that both Soto and Morgan could see the good that Lucia does for Karadec. He was a man willing to be late to work for her.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
He seemed genuinely happy whenever he brought her up, even though he wanted to keep some guards up because, in his head, nothing had changed enough to justify them getting back together.
Except things have changed. They subtly establish how both Lucia and Morgan are women whom Karadec is willing and able to bend and change for. Morgan could see that, regarding how Lucia made him late, he didn’t mind it.
And with time spent with Lucia, she’ll be able to see how much Morgan’s influence on Karadec has changed him, made him lighten up, too.
What will be interesting is how she perceives it and what she attributes it to, which can make for a decent conflict without it being the messy, catty type that most shows resort to for these kinds of things.
For now, it’s clear that Morgan wants to see Karadec happy, and she’s encouraging that, and any lingering conflicts or whatever else lie deeply buried.
And Soto, well, she’s emerging as one of my favorite characters.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
She’s definitely having a strong season where they’re not afraid to dig into who she is beyond the leader of this team. A part of the focus and emphasis scares me — am I a pessimist for fearing it could put her in peril?
Nevertheless, I love her focus.
High Potential often has a problem with letting its secondary characters take up space for longer than a few moments, and I’m glad that we’ve made headway with Soto, even if Daphne and Oz remain criminally underutilized and developed.
The series has also sprinkled in all of these bits about Morgan beyond her initial exterior. We’ve dug into things like her insecurity, and this sophomore season has really outlined what her HPI actually looks like, not just glamorizing her skills.
This time, she was fixated on the video game aspect and expressed genuine concern about Elliott using it to unwind before bed. I loved that little nugget of her reminding him how those types of things work differently for their minds.
The case all but confirmed so much of that, and they have to be more mindful because they’re far more susceptible to an addiction in that capacity.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
I like that Morgan guides Elliott through the good, bad, and ugly of their neurodivergence, and you can tell that she wants to prepare him for this world in a way that her own father never did.
Ava was nowhere to be found, and the Roman plot wasn’t so much as mentioned.
But Morgan working on this case, which centered on a young man who couldn’t make his father proud, was heartbreaking in its own right.
We’ve been seeing how these cases affect her a bit more. She’s taking them in, and they’re becoming more personal the longer that she works on them.
Her warnings to Elliott were crystallized within this case, where a young man got so pulled into his video game world that he ultimately killed another person because of it.
We had a father who grieved the loss of one son in the womb while projecting the ideals of what he assumed Jin would be onto his other son. And then he spent so much time trying to make the son he had into Jin.
(Disney/Mitch Haaseth)
The biggest twist in all of this was that Jin didn’t physically exist; instead, it was Ryo. He was a twin who experienced chimerism when he absorbed his twin in the womb, and it seems he’s been paying for that ever since.
Declan, a reformed gaming addict who technically relapsed, died because a man was trying to get his son out of gaming. Paying Declan to harass his own son has resulted in Declan’s death and Ryo going away for poisoning a man with blowfish toxins.
Ryo’s father has officially lost both sons anyway, despite his attempts to prevent that in the first place.
Kota Horiuchi gave a strong performance as Ryo/Jin, and I really did feel horrible for a guy who could never live up to his father’s expectations and paid the price for it.
And their apologies to each other at the end, the bowing, the kiss on top of the head, made me emotional. But with the season winding down and so many unanswered questions, the quietness of an hour like this left me more anxious than compelled.
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