High Potential episode 10 opens with kids playing on the playground. As one little girl goes down a covered slide there is a thump, and a scream. A second girl follows and there is another thump, and another scream. One of the parents tries to go up the slide from the bottom but something is blocking it. He pulls out the body of a woman.
The park is taped off and the LAPD crew arrive. Some of the nannies tell Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne (Javicia Leslie) that the dead woman is a nanny named Tara Foley (Kate Boyer). Selena (Judy Reyes), Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) and Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) stand with the body as medical examiner Dr. Farzan (Kayvon Esmaili) tells them that Tara died from a blow to the head.
But Tara’s phone keeps dinging. Morgan puts on a glove and picks it up, seeing there are multiple messages from someone named Brett Lewis, so they start the investigation by finding him.
Chuck the Canuck
Brett Lewis (Rory O’Malley) and his husband (Jai Rodriguez) employed Tara to look after their son, Ward. They said that Tara mentioned a man with a limp and often reading a French newspaper seemed to be following her. Morgan knows there’s only one newsstand that sells French newspapers, so they stakeout the stand and find the guy. He’s private investigator, but former LAPD traffic cop, Charles Lavoie (Ken Marino).
Also known as “Chuck the Canuck”, Chuck knows Karadec very well. Chuck tells them he was hired by Brett to make sure Tara wasn’t mistreating Ward. Karadec and Morgan go to talk to Brett again.
Brett wanted proof that Tara was taking care of Ward because of posts in a Facebook group. It all started with their previous nanny, Rosa. Brett saw a post in the Brentwood Parents Facebook Group saying a child had been unattended at the library and had almost run into traffic. Based on the description given, Brett knew it was Ward. They fired Rosa and hired Tara. But soon after they hired Tara, Lewis saw more posts in the group talking about Tara being negligent. So, Brett hired Chuck to find out what was going on.
Brett shows Morgan the screenshots from the Facebook group where a mom, Carina Wilson (Eliza Coupe), was posting negative things about Tara. She was also the one who posted about the incident with Rosa.
The suspect pool widens
The next day, Chuck brings the 1500 photos he took of Tara to the LAPD. But Morgan and Karadec go to Carina’s house to talk with her directly.
She’s a hard-driving real estate exec who tells them she did write the post about Rosa, but she didn’t write any of the posts about Tara. She said she was so bullied by the other moms after her post about Rosa she deactivated her account.
With no solid leads, Karadec and Morgan head to Tara’s apartment to look around. They don’t find many clues that can help, but note Tara was Catholic and she had a number for an immigration lawyer written on a piece of paper. Nothing is adding up.
The next day at the LAPD, Oz, going through the photos Chuck took, notices there are a lot of photos of Rosa and Mark Wilson (Amir Talai), Carina Wilson’s husband. Selena has Daphne go talk to Mark Wilson, who says he and Tara were just friends, and reveals he has an alibi for the night she died. Frustrated, the detectives go back to the nannies at the park to see what they know.
The nannies tell Morgan and Karadec that Tara didn’t really join the group. Cynthia (Zylan Brooks) tells them the night Tara was killed she and the other nannies were all hanging out and that Tara might be alive if she was friendlier with them. Oksana (Irina Dubova), one of the nannies, crosses herself and says a blessing for Tara’s soul.
As Morgan and Karadec are leaving the park after talking to the nannies, Daphne calls them and tells them the moms in the Facebook group who posted negative things about Tara were fake profiles. Karadec and Morgan go talk to Carina again, thinking she could be behind the fake profiles. Carina reaffirms she only posted about Rosa, not Tara. She only happened to see what happened with Rosa because she was able to take her daughter to story time at the library that day.
The ah-ha moment
Morgan realizes all the negative posts about Tara were posted during the noon hour, when the nannies would be free because the kids were engaged at story time. The nannies infiltrated the parents group on Facebook to see what they were saying about them. Then, they made fake accounts to trash Tara because she wasn’t fitting into their clique.
Morgan tells Karadec she knows what it’s like to be on the outside of the mom clique and have people be nice to your face but trash you behind your back. She thinks Oksana was bullying Tara and also killed her.
When Oksana crossed herself at the park she crossed herself in the way that Russian Orthodox church members cross themselves, not the way that Catholics like Tara did. Morgan realizes Tara called the immigration lawyer to find out how to get someone deported. She then showed up at the Russian Orthodox church near the park on a Russian Orthodox holiday to confront Oksana, threatening to have Oksana deported for using fake accounts online, so Oksana attacked her. Tara ran to the park and hid in the slide, where she died.
Morgan and Karadec bring the other nannies into the station for questioning. Cynthia admits Oksana made them lie about being together. When Oksana is questioned, she admits to killing Tara because she would rather be in prison in the US than be deported back to Russia.
New episodes of High Potential air Tuesdays on ABC. They premiere on streaming the next day on Hulu.
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