High Potential Season 1 Episode 8 Review: Obsessed

“How far should and would you go for the person you love the most?” is a classic question asked many times, in many ways. It becomes the focal point of High Potential Season 1 Episode 8, “Obsessed.” This concept plays out in various plotlines.

Our heroine in this story must risk everything, including her life, to solve the mystery of who murdered her boyfriend. This case demonstrates the cost of love and devotion.

Penny barely survives an attempted murder but her obsession just transfers to Morgan.

We automatically know that Morgan will connect to this case, not simply because often she connects to these cases, but because of how familiar it is with her own troubles and mystery.

Morgan’s emotional investment gives High Potential its emotionally gripping nature. We care because she cares. Nevertheless, Penny and Morgan’s overlapping agendas don’t help “Obsessed” have a similar emotional depth as some of the previous plots.

This may be due to how the cases interlink with scenes of her outside of work and with her children. Those episodes show a lot more of Morgan beyond her job.

We see her raising children and dealing with everyday struggles. They make the series feel a little more homey than other police procedurals.

The eighth episode offers some moments of Morgan outside work, as we see her date Tom and intrude on Karadec’s life. However, these moments work to establish Morgan beyond her mother and domestic goddess role, but something feels missing.

It just doesn’t completely feel like the Morgan we love without her family’s appearance, even if it is just a few more scenes than her explaining why we don’t see the children.

Obviously, we know that strict child filming laws are necessary to protect everyone and ensure the best environment for child actors. Therefore, we understand why they will be absent for a few episodes.

However, even a few more scenes of Morgan alone at home could have reminded us of the importance of Morgan’s life and background for her crime-solving.

Of course, we can easily pick that up with the parallels between Morgan and Penny’s stories. However, “Obsessed” needs a bit more layering of Morgan’s life to make us emotionally invested.

Overall, “Obsessed” is about a mid-tier episode in an overall strong first season (so far). Nothing is offensively wrong with it but nothing to hold up as a gold-star example of High Potential’s best.

The episode does enough to reintroduce people to Morgan’s world but does not go beyond to convert new viewers.
However, “Obsessed” ends in a way that sets up a potentially very exciting endgame because now we need to know more about Roman, and what exactly happened to him.

Stray Thoughts

• High Potential knows what it’s doing with setting up Karadec and Morgan lore. Their scenes at his house were some of the best of “Obsessed.”
• Tom and Morgan are cute but their chemistry feels a little off in this episode. We’ll have to see how it all plays out.
• Some really cool music moments give it the network television style that we love. Now it’s starting to really feel like a hit series because it can afford to pay for major songs.
• I love how Morgan shuts down Oz’s big speech moment. It’s funny and reminds you that High Potential is very humorous at times.
  Did anyone else think that this was going to turn into a Luke-faked his death storyline?

 What did you think of this episode of High Potential? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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High Potential airs Tuesdays o ABC at 9/8 CT. 

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