‘High Potential’ Season 2 Episode 2 review: “Checkmate”

Things with The Game Maker (David Giuntoli) amp up in High Potential Season 2 Episode 2, titled “Checkmate,” but they also come to a screeching halt. After a stellar Season 2 premiere, this second episode can’t quite keep the momentum going with any of its mysteries.

“Checkmate” plays it safe on the Morgan vs Game Maker front.

While The Game Maker sits innocently in the LAPD precinct, Derek is on the hunt for Jason. This plan was set in motion by The Game Maker, but his motivations are hard to suss out. Keredec (Daniel Sunjata) and Selena (Judy Reyes) keep Morgan (Kaitlin Olsen) out of the interrogation room. Not surprising, but considering The Game Maker is stalking Morgan, seeing them outsmart each other in an interrogation room would have been cool. However, The Game Maker telling a childhood story of chicken while looking at her through the one-way glass was all kinds of creepy.

Even though they have their prime suspect for Maya’s (Kate Miner) kidnapping sitting in their precinct, the LAPD still scrambles trying to solve the multiple cases they’re tracking. Not only is Maya still missing, but Derek’s trying to kill Jason, Jason won’t accept police protection, and now there’s a bomb threat. All of these threads are placed haphazardly throughout the episode, with no strong grounding aspect to connect all of them. Yeah, it’s all seemingly put together by The Game Maker, but the episode rushes through all of the case developments, making it difficult to really settle into the fun of this final act in The Game Maker’s game.

Flimsy motivations kill The Game Maker’s threats.

The final showdown between Morgan and The Game Maker is a little lackluster. What should have been an intense game of chicken falls incredibly flat. The Game Maker’s ultimate motivations come out in a clumsily written expository moment, in which The Game Maker is cornered in his apartment by Morgan. He spouts out some superficial tid bits about how the rich exploit the poor and that’s why he went after Jason, though it doesn’t really explain all of the elaborate ruses he took to do it.

While Morgan’s IQ makes her great at figuring out puzzles, in this case, she jumps to a lot of convoluted conclusions and ends up being right. But where’s the work to get there? Half the fun of these shows is figuring out the mystery alongside the characters. But here, Morgan was 10 steps ahead of not just the other characters, but the audience as well, and not in the good way. There’s also no real connection or similarities between Morgan and The Game Maker. In these kind of hero and villain situations, there has to be a strong enough foil between the two. While there seemed to be at first, the end result wasn’t able to deliver on this promising premise.

Morgan’s able to find Maya in The Game Maker’s apartment building, but even that moment is anti-climatic. Just as Derek is about to shoot Jason, Morgan’s able to get Maya to provide proof life in the episode’s most moving moment. But while the premiere episode made a point to draw similarities between Maya and Morgan, Maya’s rescue doesn’t even is more about getting Derek to not do something horrible, and not about Maya herself.

A hat on a hat.

Meanwhile, Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne (Javicia Leslie) track down “Roman” (Mekhi Phifer) in Nevada, who dodges their attempts to chat. They are able to send a photo to Morgan as proof of life, but something’s amiss. Morgan tells them that isn’t Roman. The look on her face is an interesting mix of disappointment, and maybe relief? Contending with the fact that Roman might have intentionally stayed out of their lives is a hard pill to swallow, even if it does mean he’s alive.

While Mekhi Phifer is not Roman, he does know him. And when Oz and Daphne tell him that Morgan Gillory sent them, Not Roman pauses, then denies knowing who that is. The episode ends with another reveal when this mystery man tracks Morgan down at her kids talent show. We get his real name — Arthur Ellis — and another confirmation that Roman is alive. He seems to be evading the police, or at least, doesn’t trust them. And the fact that Morgan now works for the police complicates things.

What little information we get from Arthur makes it seem like Roman is staying away in order to keep his family safe. This does make the mystery of Roman’s disappearance a bit more intriguing, but the double reveal that Mekhi Phifer is not Roman but that Roman is alive when that reveal already happened at the end of Season 1 is like a hat on a hat. Going down one too many rabbit holes with this already.

High Potential Season 2 Episode 2 rushed too many of its conclusions, wasting a fantastic set up with a could have been a quality villain.

Stray Thoughts

• Elliot’s talent show side plot felt weirdly out of place for this episode. It was a cute story line with a heartwarming conclusion, but felt more like it belonged in a monster-of-the-week type episode, not part three of an overarching villain story.
• I am definitely disappointed Mekhi Phifer is not Roman. Seems odd to get someone recognizable and not have him be the guy who’s been missing for the entire show.
• While I’m glad Oz got to handcuff the guy that kidnapped him, it also feels a little unearned by not having him part of the team to track him down.
• There is still the possibility that we haven’t seen the last of The Game Maker. He doesn’t get the escape he wanted, arrested outside his apartment building. Considering Morgan clocked him as someone unwilling to be locked in a cage, perhaps there’s a grand escape in the works already. Maybe the show can capitalize on his potential in the future because Giuntiol plays The Game Maker very well.

High Potential airs news episodes every Tuesday at 9 p.m. Central on ABC

Katey Stoetzel

Katey is co-founder and tv editor for InBetweenDrafts. She hosts the “House of the Dragon After Show” and “Between TV” podcasts and can be read in various other places like Inverse and Screen Speck. She wishes desperately the binge model of tv watching would die, but still gets mad when she runs out of episodes of tv to watch.