We knew that High Potential season 2, episode 4 was going to be an intriguing episode, but we didn’t expect it to be as sensitive or sad as it was. When a woman witnesses a murder but there’s no sign of that murder happening, there is a lot of confusion.
Caution: This post contains SPOILERS from High Potential season 2, episode 4.
The episode opens with a woman making a 911 call. She’s terrified, sharing that there is someone coming for her. She’s witnessing a murder, but she hangs up before she can give any details.
Well, the call is traced to the house of a woman called Raina, but she is adamant that she didn’t call 911. Her phone doesn’t have a call log to 911—although I do have to question why nobody thinks that she couldn’t just have deleted that call log from her phone—and there is no sign of something happening in the house. All the police can do is put surveillance on the house.
Raina did witness a murder, but not right then in High Potential season 2, episode 4
When the cops are called back to Raina’s house and find her dead, they realize that something bigger is going on. The first place to start is at one of the neighbor’s houses, who did know Raina. It turns out that he is a local drug dealer, but not your usual kind. He gets prescription medication for people who can’t afford to get it the legitimate way, and he was getting medication for Raina to help with her early on-set dementia.
Yes, Raina did witness a murder, but it wasn’t one that happened in that moment in time. It just felt like it for her when she was in the basement of her house. So, she wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t call the police; she just didn’t remember doing it, because she was remembering something from the past.
And so, Morgan and the Major Crimes unit get to work on figuring out who the murder involved. With a dress covered in blood in the basement, Morgan and Karadec know that this was the trigger, and it’s the dress that helps to narrow down the murder.
Morgan notes that the dress is made of tinsel, which means it was made after 1985. Then she reads out a number on the label, so Daphne finds out the brand, and that means it couldn’t be after 2015 because the brand went out of business. With more deduction, Morgan gets the date to between 1998 and 2000, and Soto points out that someone was shot, and that helps to narrow it all down the murder of Greta St. John, a Black woman connected to the music industry that didn’t get the police work that she should have.
A family affair in High Potential
The investigation starts, with running through people close to Greta and Raina back in the day, as it turned out that they were both connected to the music industry. One man wishes that he had said something back then, but he was scared due to the man involved. It turned out that Greta’s manager, Mac Epps, was very obsessed with her and threatened her and her family a lot.
It’s clear that Mac likely killed Greta, but the police need to be able to prove it. The theory, then, is that Mac killed Raina when she started to remember it, worried that she would turn him in.
When Morgan and Karadec head to the club that Mac owns, Morgan spots a North Star tattoo. It matches the compass that Greta had, telling her that the two were romantically involved. Sure enough, they were, and there was something more to the whole thing.
Greta had ended up pregnant, but she didn’t want Mac to know that she was having his baby. When he found out, he killed her, but he never did know where his baby was.
Mac isn’t willing to go to prison, though, so he takes a woman hostage, forcing Karadec to shoot him. He doesn’t shoot to kill, though, but it does mean that Karadec has to talk to Internal Affairs, and he needs to go through an evaluation by the psychotherapist to clear him for duty again. That could take months, and when Karadec points out that this wouldn’t have been a case had it not been for shoddy police work back in the day, the IA guy agrees to get Karadec into the psych eval sooner.
While Morgan is worried about Karadec after this, he doesn’t seem all that bothered. It turns out that he starts the day at the shooting range, so he has done that shot time and time again for the last 20 years. He knew he was going to make the shot, and he knows he did what he needed to do at the time. There is no guilt, and I’m glad the show doesn’t seem like it will go down the route of him suffering psychologically because of that decision.
Back to the case, while Mac killed Greta, he didn’t kill Raina. He didn’t worry about her saying anything, and he didn’t buy her house and gift it to her in return for silence. It was in return for the rights on her music, which ended up with him losing out because Raina wasn’t the singer he thought she was.
So, who killed Raina? It all goes back to the baby. Sure enough, the young friend of Raina, Lucy, who said that she was at work at the time of the murder was Greta’s daughter. Lucy doctored the photos to make it look like she was at work, but Morgan could see through that.
Lucy had come to Raina for some answers about her mom, only to find out that Raina had witnessed the shooting. However, when she pushed Raina down the stairs, it was all an accident and in the heat of the moment, and she never meant to kill Raina. That doesn’t matter, though, and Lucy is arrested for murder.
Morgan meets the new captain
With that, the case is over. Morgan is now able to go to Soto to talk to her. During the episode, Soto found out that she was being passed over for captain, and Morgan suspects that it’s because Soto is a woman. She wants Soto to be a friend in this moment, and just be angry about the entire situation. Morgan certainly is.
Soto is angry, but there’s not much she can do at this point. At least, she can open up to Morgan, and this allows their friendship to blossom.
On the way out, Morgan runs into a man at the elevator. It doesn’t take long for him to introduce himself as Captain Nick Wagner. He’s the man taking the captain’s chair, and he has heard a lot about Morgan. Will he end up being friend or foe?
High Potential airs on Tuesdays at 10/9c on ABC.
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