TL;DR: High Potential S2E3 trades big villain theatrics for a grounded, emotional case about a murder-for-a-heart transplant. Morgan struggles with Ava’s heartbreak while solving a tragedy that’s equal parts love and desperation. Strong episode, worth the watch.
High Potential season 2
There’s a particular flavor of crime-of-the-week television that, if done right, doesn’t just give you a neat little puzzle to untangle but also sneaks in some emotional gut-punches while you’re still trying to guess who strangled who. High Potential, ABC’s quirky crime dramedy anchored by Kaitlin Olson’s chaotic brilliance, has always tried to straddle that very tightrope. With Season 2’s third episode, “Eleven Minutes,” the show doesn’t just regain its footing after the high-stakes Game Maker arc—it takes a breath, cracks a sad smile, and reminds us that this is a series that’s ultimately less about murderers and more about how people put themselves back together after loss.
This is the first time since the season’s intense two-part premiere that we’re back in familiar territory: a case that begins with a dead body and ends with an uncomfortable truth about human frailty. But unlike the splashy villain theatrics of the Game Maker, this story revolves around Nathan Gould—a man who wasn’t evil or particularly remarkable, just unlucky, in debt, and, tragically, in the wrong kind of love with the idea of self-sacrifice. His death unspools like a cheap sweater caught on a nail: a little tug here, another unraveling there, until suddenly the whole picture is a mess you didn’t see coming.
The episode opens with Nathan strangled to death outside a restaurant, and already there’s a strange tonal mix: a man dead in the alley, but a host swearing she heard a duck quack at the exact wrong moment. Olson’s Morgan Gillory, with her usual manic gift for finding sense in absurdity, doesn’t brush it off. Instead, the duck sound turns out to be Nathan’s phone alarm—a small, almost silly detail that later becomes a linchpin in the unraveling mystery. It’s these touches that keep High Potential from collapsing into yet another grimdark police procedural. If Law & Order is a gavel smashing down, High Potential is more like a balloon slipping out of someone’s hand—funny until it drifts too far and you realize you miss it.
Investigating Nathan’s life reveals layers of bad choices. He’s a gambler drowning in debt. He’s made his loan shark the beneficiary of his life insurance, which is either the most masochistic financial plan imaginable or an act of warped nobility. He’s trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter Jessica just as she’s pregnant with his future grandchild. He’s a man preparing to disappear, but in his own twisted, tragic way.
What makes this episode sting more than the mystery itself is how it quietly threads Morgan’s personal turmoil into every beat. Morgan is still sitting on the secret of Roman Sinquerra—Ava’s father and the giant, unresolved question mark in her daughter’s life. When Karadec gently nudges her to come clean, Morgan finally tells Ava that Roman had been spotted holed up in a Nevada motel. It’s not the revelation of a father’s triumphant return, just the bleak acknowledgment of crumbs on a trail.
Ava, predictably, spirals. She vandalizes one of Roman’s murals in an emotional tailspin, Morgan gets swept into her orbit of chaos, and both end up arrested before Karadec plays the sensible adult to get them out. The emotional core isn’t in the arrest—it’s in Ava’s confession that the hope of Roman not having abandoned her hurt worse than the certainty of his absence. Olson’s Morgan, for all her manic genius and reckless decisions, is helpless in that moment. It’s not the kind of problem she can solve with intuition or deduction. It’s grief, pure and simple, and grief has never respected logic.
But the case keeps tugging forward. The duck sound, the suspicious medical visits, the debts—it all converges into a revelation that Nathan Gould wasn’t just a man preparing for death, he was a man whose very heart was being hunted. When the show reveals that his murder was orchestrated to harvest his heart for transplant, it veers from sad to macabre. Worse, the heart isn’t even going where it should. Bureaucracy and corruption reroute it toward a billionaire donor instead of the woman Nathan had promised it to—the mother of a young paramedic named Christopher Bishop.
Christopher, as it turns out, isn’t just some tragic bystander. He’s the one who killed Nathan, driven by desperation to save his mother. It’s a devastating twist because it reframes the murder not as greed or revenge, but as a warped act of love. The show doesn’t let him off the hook—he’s still a killer—but it refuses to flatten him into villainy. His mother’s final goodbye to him is the kind of gut-churning scene this show occasionally nails, where justice and compassion stand on opposite ends of the same small, suffocating room.
The episode ends less with closure and more with uneasy acceptance. Morgan delivers Nathan’s daughter the brooch he’d intended for her unborn child. She asks how Jessica managed to forgive her father after years of abandonment, and Jessica’s answer is disarmingly simple: her mother raised her that way. Forgiveness wasn’t earned, it was inherited—a muscle memory of kindness passed down. For Morgan, who’s grappling with her own fractured family, this isn’t just closure on the case. It’s a reminder that some wounds aren’t solved—they’re endured.
Karadec, in a rare show of tenderness, comforts Morgan by pointing out the name of the actual recipient of Nathan’s heart. It’s a bittersweet balm, a way of grounding the episode’s theme: even when choices are messy, painful, and cruel, the ripple of love—however distorted—still reaches someone.
“Eleven Minutes” doesn’t match the adrenaline spike of the Game Maker episodes, but it doesn’t need to. This is High Potential at its most quietly effective: messy, heartfelt, and a little absurd. Olson continues to juggle comedy and tragedy in a way that feels almost unfair—one second she’s riffing on duck sounds, the next she’s silently absorbing her daughter’s heartbreak. The case itself is twisty enough to stay engaging, even if you see the transplant angle coming earlier than the writers probably intended. But what lingers isn’t the mechanics of the murder. It’s the image of Morgan, staring down the truth that some mysteries—like why the people we love abandon us—don’t get solved in an hour.
