TV Recap: “High Potential” – Morgan Fills in the Blanks of a Woman’s Blackout in “Hangover”

Does Morgan Gillory have a new love interest on ABC’s High Potential? It certainly seems that way with the introduction of a flirtatious janitor at the LAPD, played by Mayans M.C. star J.D. Pardo. Of course, he’s just a small part of this week’s new case, one that feels somewhat inspired by Elizabeth Holmes. Let’s recap!

Episode 6: “Hangover” – Written by Kassia Miller & Myng Joh Wesner

Metkair employee Samantha Wozniak (Alison Jaye) is confused when she wakes up in her boss’ office. She’s blacked out the entire night, but someone has trashed the place, writing the word “Forever” on a wall, cutting up a plush bird, and smashing a framed magazine cover. As Sam questions if she did this, and how she can cover it up, she moves around the desk to find her boss, Elaine Barton (Katie Ryan), dead on the floor.

Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson) is leaning her house when her partner, Detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), calls her to meet him at a crime scene. Soon, the duo are being led through the atrium by receptionist Denise (Nicole Chanel Williams), who explains that the company was having a launch party last night for its latest product, the KanAIRy, an anti-anxiety inhaler for kids. Denise says she was at the desk all night checking guests in. Morgan quickly takes in the scene, including an ad for the product showing several families who tested the product.

Daphne (Javicia Leslie) and Oz (Dennis Akdeniz) have already begun documenting the crime scene in Elaine’s office. The deceased appearas to have been stabbed in the chest with an award. Karadec and Morgan meet with Sam, who describes idolizing Elaine Barton so much that she went to Stanford to follow in her footsteps. She’d worked for her hero for four years, describing her boss as tough to work for, and increasingly more paranoid about the KanAIRy launch. Elaine had become secretive, adding locks on doors as the product was pushed toward launch. Despite Sam’s inability to remember much from the night before, she doen’t believe she murdered her boss.

Morgan and Karadec poke around Samantha’s office. Morgan sees that the last search on her computer, made at 10:29 pm, looking like incoherent gibberish. Karadec opens a notebook and sees a doodle of Sam holding a knife behind Elaine. Samantha is soon being interrogated at the LAPD by Karadec, with Morgan and Lieutenant Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) watching through the two-way mirror. Morgan is confident that Sam didn’t kill her boss, saying she’s worked for a lot of terrible bosses, and the fact that she stayed at Metkair for four years speaks to her dedication to Elaine. Soto asks them to go break the news to Elaine’s husband.

Eric Barton (Derek Richardson) sits on his living room couch as Karadec and Morgan meet with him, with Morgan making mental images of the photos of him and Elaine on the mantle. He first met his wife as an investor in her first invention. He was at the party last night, leaving around 10:00 pm. He confesses that things were tense when he left, chalking it up to his wife’s stress with the KanAIRy launch and a big distribution deal. He asks how his wife was killed, and Karadec describes her as having been stabbed with a trophy. Karadec won’t tell him who the suspects are, but asks if he was aware of his wife having any enemies. “She demanded a lot of her employees,” he tells Karadec, saying his wife wasn’t shy about letting people know what she thought of them.

Back at the LAPD, Morgan is enjoying a cheesy chip snack when the janitor, Tom (JD Pardo), introduces himself by giving her a coaster for her drink. He flirtatiously tells her that she keeps leaving cheesy fingerprints on the glass doors. Morgan acts like it hasn’t been her, but that she will keep an eye out for the perpetrator.

A case board has been set up. Oz comes in with results of Samantha’s toxicology test, which shows she had enough Diazepam and alcohol in her system to trigger anterograde amnesia. Daphne found that Elaine wrote a check to “cash” on the day of her death for $45,623. She doesn’t know what it was for.

A line of attendees of the KanAIRy launch party arrive for questioning. Morgan and Karadec learn that the party included a karaoke room. A woman named Wanda (Lynn Adrianna Freedman) sang “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele, and left with her husband Jonathan (Jake Regal) while an entire department was singing “Since U Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson. As Wanda and Jonathan were leaving the party, they heard Elaine shouting at someone in her office. Morgan discovers that the karaoke company used keeps a log of every song played. “Since U Been Gone” was on from 10:58 to 11:01 pm, the song after that was “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O'Connor, a quieter song. Nobody else reported hearing noise from Elaine’s office, so Morgan is confident that she was murdered during “Since U Been Gone.”

Morgan talks to Samantha, buying her a snack from the vending machine and bonding over her own experience with bad bosses. Sam becomes overwhelmed by the possibility of having murdered Elaine, and Morgan takes her to the restroom to calm down. While there, Morgan asks Sam if she’s checked everywhere she would store things on herself for any clues. Wearing a sparkly floral dress, Sam discovers something in her bra – a strip of photos from a photo booth at the party. In the photo, Sam is holding a magazine with Elaine’s face on it. Someone has drawn devil horns and a goatee on Elaine’s face.

Morgan notices a tiny detail in Samantha’s photo – purple lipstick that doesn’t match the shade she’s wearing now. But she does remember seeing someone at Metkair wearing that shade, the receptionist. Back at Metkair, Morgan and Karadec ask Denise why she told them she was at the desk all night. She comes clean, admitting that once all the guests were checked in, she joined the party and had a few drinks. She had been crushing on Samantha for a while, and the two ended up making out. Denise worries she may have let a killer into the building by abandoning her post. She saw a woman she didn’t recognize exit the bathroom, and she tried to get her name, but the woman ran away. She describes her as having brown hair and an average build, with an insulin pump attached to her arm. Morgan feels like she’s seen a woman who matche that description, pointing her out on the ad featuring families who tested the KanAIRy before launch. Sure enough, that’s the woman.

Karadec and Morgan go to the Jiminez home to meet with Carmen (Natasha Elías) and Arturo (Juan Alfonso). In the  backyard, their son Nico (Quintin Munoz) stands to the side, watching friends play soccer. Nico was one of the first testers of the KanAIRy. Carmen, who keeps her hands in her cardigan pockets, confesses to stopping by the Metkair party, but she refuses to say anything more. Morgan notices how nice their home is, compared to the shabby and sparse furniture. Based on Arturo’s unemployment check and Carmen’s retail nametag on the kitchen counter, Morgann correctly presumes that they’re new to the neihgborhood, and that the money that afforded their new living situation came from Metkair. Carmen refuses to speak. As Morgan and Karadec get up to go, Morgan intentionally knocks over a glass of water on the coffee table. Carmen removes her hands from her pockets to try and stop the spill, revealing scabs all over her knuckles, as if she punched a glass frame. Karadec takes her in.

Carmen is no more willing to talk in an interrogation room than she was at her home. As Morgan watches Daphne typing on her keyboard, she has a thought about Samntha’s gibberish websearch. She shifts her hands over and realizes she searched for PFAS, aka “forever chemicals.” Morgan thinks she understands the significance of the writing on Elaine’s wall, and asks for some time alone with Carmen. When Morgan mentions PFAS to Carmen, she opens up about how using the KanAIRy worsened her son’s asthma. Metkair paid the family off, a decision that Elaine and Eric fought over, but Carmen felt an overwhelming sense of guilt about it. She went to Metkair to confront Elaine, sneaking in during the party. While she waited in the CEO’s empty office, she wrote “Forever” on her wall and cut open a plush bird. She accidentally cut her hand, and when Elaine walked in, they got into a verbal fight. Carmen punched Elaine’s framed magazine in frustration when the CEO threatened to sue her, after which she left. Morgan asks Carmen which song was playing when she left the party – “Californication” by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Morgan asks Carmen if anyone saw her leave. She describes a woman in a sparkly floral dress – Samantha.

Morgan and Karadec return to Metkair, finding Eric in the boardroom holding a meeting. When they begin to ask about the company paying families off, he asks everyone to leave, except for his lawyer, Hornstock (Rob Mainord). Karadec asks about Nico Jiminez, and Hornstock says their financial agreement with the family is legal. Morgan, however, brings up the fact that this testing discovery was likely withheld from the product’s investors, which would be illegal. Eric confesses that this caused a fight between him and his wife and that he wanted to delay the launch so he could fix things, making frequent flights to the Bay Area to work on it. But Elaine was adamant that they meet their distribution deadline, and she refused to delay the launch. “I loved her, I just didn’t love what she had become,” he tells them.

It’s late at the LAPD as Morgan sits at her desk, watching a video of Elaine describing the inspiration for KanAIRy, a niece who had a panic attack, so she put essential oils on a kazoo and gave it to the child to help her calm down, which inspired the device. Tom offers to clean Morgan’s desk before he heads to nursing school, and she thinks out loud, questioning why, if Elaine had a niece this close to her, there wasn’t a photo of her in her home. Tom says he has lots of photos of his nephew at his place. Morgan hands him a sample KanAIRy, asking him what it smells like. He describes it as “a grandma’s purse.” Morgan says it’s an oil blend of peppermint, ginger, and licorice, also known as Xiao Yao San, a western medicine stress reliever that seems out of character with Elaine’s other work. Tom asks if the Metkair founder had an acupuncturist. And then Morgan remembers one of the party guests who came in for questioning who had cupping marks on her neck. Nina looks at the woman’s file and sees that she has a daughter.

Nina (Lynn Chen) is brought back in for another interrogation session with Karadec. She tells him about her daughter, Alice, who had panic attacks. One day, Nina put some essential oils on a kazoo to help her calm down and it worked. She told her friend Elaine about it, and Elaine paid her for the idea. WIth the money, Nina moved to the Bay Area with her daughter. Nina says she returned to her hotel by 11:00 pm last night. She adds how horrific it is tha Elaine was killed with her own trophy. Morgan and Soto watch the interview through the two-way mirror, assuming it’s over when Karadec pulls a Morgan-style reveal by asking Nina how long she has been having an affair with Eric. He tells her that only two people know how Elaine died, the murderer and Eric. “Either you killed Elaine or you’re having an affair with her husband,” he says. Nina confesses that she was helping Eric work on a fix for the KanAIRy’s issues on his trips to the Bay Area and that a relationship bloomed between them. She says Eric was with her at her hotel, an alibi for both of them that can be verified.

Samantha is brought back to the LAPD, despite Morgan insisting that she’s innocent. But when Sam overhears about he check Elaine wrote, specifically the dollar amount, she gets sick to her stomach and runs to the restroom to throw up. $45,623 is the exact amount Sam had to pay back for her student loans. She realizes Elaine must’ve written the check for her, and if that’s the case, she likely did murder her idol.

Morgan is about to accept the fact that she was wrong about Samantha when she has a realization. Elaine was reportedly paranoid and secretive, yet she had a mirror behind her desk, which would allow anyone who entered her office to see her computer screen. Morgan and Karadec return to Elaine’s office, and Morgan touches the mirror, noticing no gap between the glass and mirrored surface. She shines a light to it and sees that it’s a two-way mirror with a camera behind it.

Karadec and Morgan return to the LAPD, entering a room where Samantha is handcuffed to a desk. They tell her about the two-way mirror and how there is a recording of Elaine’s murder. During her blackout, Samantha went to Elaine’s office to quit. Elaine tried to pay Samantha to stay, writing a check to “cash” in the exact amount of her outstanding student loans. When Samantha still refused, Elaine threw a glass at her, causing Samantha to duck onto the couch. Elaine grabbed a pair of scissors and lunged at Samantha, who used her legs to kick her boss away in self defense. Samantha hit her head and became unconscious on the couch. The kick she gave her boss caused Elaine to fall over her desk, at which time she was impailed on her trophy. Elaine’s murder was an accident, and one that happened in self defense. Karadec removes Samantha’s handcuffs, sharing that with a good lawyer, she shouldn’t serve any time.

The team is going out for drinks. Soto invites Morgan, but she says she’s been looking forward to a night home alone since Ludo has the kids at his place. As Morgan moves to leave the building, she gets an idea. She goes back to the vending machine, purchasing a bag of cheesy chips. Using cheesy fingers, she writer her phone number on the glass for Tom.

Morgan changes her mind and stops by the bar. Karadec tells her that the KanAIRy devices won’t hit shelves until Metkair solves the issues that impacted Nico. Morgan gets a moment alone with Soto, thanking her for being a great boss. “So far, this isn’t a job I want to run from, and that’s mainly because of you,” she tells her lieutenant.

Next Episode: “One of Us” – Airing Tuesday, 11/12, at 10/9c on ABC

Morgan agrees to show Ava around the LAPD, but things quickly take a dangerous turn when the precinct is held hostage by the friends of a recently convicted man. Can Morgan and the detectives outsmart their captors and lead everyone to safety?