High Potential episode 4 opens with a car racing down a dirt road. The car stops and the driver gets out and goes to the back of the car. They open the trunk and shine a light on two frightened little girls.
The scene shifts to Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) meeting up with Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), Oz (Deniz Akdeniz), Daphne (Javicia Leslie) and Selena (Judy Reyes) in the squad room. Morgan’s happy she’s finally getting an official LAPD I.D. badge, which Robert (Thomas Bell) from HR brings up for her.
In the bathroom, taking a selfie with her new badge, Morgan encounters Mia Ashford (Madeline Zima) crying. Morgan asks what’s wrong? Mia explains her soon to be ex-husband never brought her two daughters back after his custodial visit and she’s worried about them, setting in motion this week’s case.
Going off grid
Karadec and Morgan talk with Mia and her father, John Ashford (Christopher Cousins), about her ex, Wendell (Scott Kuza) to find out more about him and where he might have taken the girls. John tells them Wendell became a conspiracy theorist who believed the planet was being destroyed. He wanted to live completely off grid and bought a cabin and some land in the mountains.
The team digs up what they can on Wendell. They discover he applied for passports for his two daughters recently. They also find a report from Child Protective Services listing Wendell as an unstable and unfit parent.
Morgan and Karadec go to Wendell’s cabin to look for clues. They search the house but find nothing substantial. Morgan spots a greenhouse out back. Looking around the greenhouse she notices two plants growing next to each other that no one who knows plants, like Wendell, would plant together. She pulls one out, and it’s not rooted. She digs slightly into the dirt and finds Wendell’s body. Whoever took the girls, it wasn’t Wendell.
The detectives work the scene, trying to locate the girls. Oz finds out from the owner of the café where Wendell sells vegetables that he got into an argument with a red-haired woman the day he was killed.
In a survival handbook found in the house the detectives find a photo, printed from an inkjet printer, of an older couple at a resort. They don’t know what it means, but they bag it as evidence anyway.
Ashford’s secrets
Karadec and Morgan go to the Ashford estate to talk with Mia and her father. John owns multiple luxury resorts around the world, so the home is pretty impressive. Morgan sees John’s driver, Curtis (Mark Dancewicz) sitting in a car outside the home waiting to be needed.
Morgan snoops around the house and talks with the maid while Karadec asks John and Mia if they know of a woman with red hair that Wendell might have ties to. They don’t. Meanwhile, the maid tells Morgan Wendell was there last week and she saw him leaving John’s office, which was strange.
Back at the squad room Morgan, reading the CPS report, realizes it’s a fake. On a hunch they pull a photo of the caseworker who wrote the report. She’s a red-haired woman with glasses.
They go to visit CPS worker Sarah Keller’s (Amy Davidson) at her home. Morgan notices a Hawaiian lei, which hasn’t dried out yet. When Morgan and Karadec confront her, she admits John Ashford gave her a luxury trip in exchange for writing the report. They ask her about the argument she had with Wendell. Wendell told Sarah his father-in-law had bought off a lot of people and that Wendell had the evidence to bring him down. She tried to change his mind but couldn’t. She left and told John everything.
Morgan and Keradac return to the Ashford home. Morgan goes into Ashford’s office and prints a photocopy of her hand. The printer has pink streaks, just like the photo they found in Wendell’s survival guide. They bring John in for questioning.
Karadec questions him and confronts him with evidence of John bribing the judge in the photo that Wendell printed. The judge was allowing John to build resorts in protected lands in exchange for luxury trips and stays. But he insists didn’t have anything to do with Wendell’s death.
It’s all in the details
At home that night, Morgan watches a news story about the missing girls that has an interview done in the Ashford home. Morgan notices the Ming vase in the display cabinet has been replaced by a fake. The only one who could have taken it was Mia, who also withdrew $100,000 cash that day.
Morgan and Karadec find the only open antiques dealer in the area and find Mia there, trying to sell the Ming. She needs money to ransom the girls. Morgan insists she and Karadec go to the drop with Mia. The drop goes bad, and the perp takes the money and runs. But he leaves behind his car, which Morgan searches for insights.
She realizes the driver of the car, the kidnapper of the girls, and the killer of Wendell is Curtis, Ashford’s driver. They bring him in for questioning. Curtis confesses. He was in love with Mia and wanted to get the ransom money and bring the girls back to her to sweep her off her feet. But the girls escaped him and ran off.
The LAPD race to the mountain where Curtis last saw the girls, trying to find them before they die from exposure. Using the survival rules in the book that Wendell had given the girls, Morgan finds them, unharmed. She and Karadec return them to Mia.
This case hit Morgan hard, because she saw herself in Mia, but she was able to reunite Mia and her kids.
New episodes of High Potential air Tuesdays on ABC, the arrive to stream on-demand on Hulu the next day.
