ABC’s High Potential episode three, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrel,” kicks off with a man relaxing in a hotel room bathtub. Someone enters the bathroom, grabs his feet, and pulls him under.
Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) is the last on the scene and quickly scans the bathroom. She notes the clothes tossed everywhere, melted candles, and an empty glass. It’s a wild night gone south … followed by murder. She notes that the towel’s folded wrong and concludes that the killer used it to clean up after himself. He even used that towel to wipe the floor next to the bathtub dry.
The victim spent money on this fancy hotel room, so he wasn’t alone. Whoever he was meeting had to be attractive because the victim is “super-hot.” Detectives Lev ‘Oz’ Osman (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne Forrester (Javicia Leslie) find the wallet and learn the dead man is Ernest Lozano from Mexico City.
Morgan notices the glass is wiped clean, which means Ernest was drugged. (That explains why he could not get out of the bathtub during the attack.) Both Morgan and Detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) notice the glass is from the hotel’s bar since it doesn’t match the others in the room. The bartender remembers Ernest was there with a blonde woman and that they drank a lot.
Morgan and Karadec join Oz and Daphne in the security room and watch footage of Ernest and his date entering his room at 8:02pm, and the woman leaving at 8:33pm. No one else entered the room until the cleaner found the dead body. The doorman says the woman parked her red Kia in a no-parking zone at 7pm, and that LADOT arrived after that to write tickets. However, the Kia wasn’t ticketed which means it’s registered to either a cop or a doctor. Cops aren’t issued red cars, so it must have been a doctor whose car had a medical emblem allowing them to park in no-parking zones during emergencies.
Karadec instructs Oz and Daphne to visit the nearby hospital and see if anyone recognizes the woman from the footage. Someone does, and their suspect, Dr. Iris Bowman, is brought in for questioning. Iris confirms she met Ernest three months ago, but they aren’t in a relationship. They’re just having harmless fun with no strings attached. She’s wearing a wedding ring, and Morgan asks what her husband thinks about the fling. She reveals her husband died nine months ago.
Iris says they had a few drinks last night, went up to his room, and then Ernest fell asleep in the tub. She left. Karadec tells her about the security footage and agrees she needs a lawyer. As he reads Iris’s rights, Morgan blurts out, “She didn’t do it.”
Morgan notes all the candles melted except one. She owns the same type of candle, and they burn for just four hours. The one that didn’t fully melt looks like it burned for about an hour and a half and was then extinguished by water from the bathtub during the struggle. Iris was already gone by then.
The investigation is back to square one.
Lt. Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) gets new information on Morgan’s missing ex, Roman, and is forced to ask Lt. Melon (Garret Dillahunt) for help. He wrote up a vandalism report after Roman painted a mural downtown. She can’t read the address, and even after Melon reads his own writing, it doesn’t make sense. The address doesn’t exist, but Melon insists it does.
He makes a $50 bet that he’s right, and they head out to the non-existent location. As it turns out, he got the number wrong and a section of the mural is still intact on the wall. They argue over whether the remaining portion is a bird’s wing or fishtail, betting double or nothing on the answer.
And now comes a big twist in the murder case. The real Ernest Lozano is alive and well in Mexico City. Ernest recalls that a couple of years ago, he was in LA, took a ride, and joked with the driver about how much they looked like each other. Right after that, he noticed his wallet was missing.
Morgan brought the evidence box home and her son, Eliot, helps her go through it. She’s so wrapped up in piecing together clues that she’s unaware her daughter, Ava, has a boy over working on homework. Apparently, Morgan’s ex, Ludo–the paid babysitter–said it was okay if she didn’t shut her bedroom door.
Karadec arrives and saves Ava from any further discussion. Morgan’s not supposed to have taken the evidence home, and Karadec is shocked to see her son looking through it. Morgan points out that he’s wearing gloves, but that doesn’t matter. Since she took it all home, it’s no longer admissible evidence in court. So long, murder conviction.
Morgan concedes that it’s bad, but she really wanted to figure out the dead man’s identity, and they missed a lot of clues in the evidence box. He had cement on his shoes, and the stitching on his pants hems didn’t cross. She watched tons of sewing videos in the past and knows that the tailor must be from Madagascar. Karadec points out that the LAPD doesn’t have a list of Madagascan tailors, and Morgan thinks they should check for tailor shops with the longest names. Morgan then provides a quick lesson in Madagascan names.
Ava gives her mom a hard time in the morning, making fun of her job as a fake cop. Morgan reacts by asking Karadec for a badge, a request he ignores.
Morgan was correct about the tailor, and the tailor knows the victim is named Eduardo. Unfortunately, he paid in cash and never revealed his last name. He was a regular there and brought in second-hand designer suits for alterations. They leave the shop and hear a jackhammer, which would have been where Eduardo got cement on his shoes. Morgan looks for a nearby parking lot and finds it, then uses the keys she stole from the evidence box to make Eduardo’s car alarm chirp.
Karadec refuses to give her a well-deserved high-five.
Karadec snaps a photo of the license plate and asks Daphne to look it up. He turns his back on Morgan long enough for her to get into the car and look around. She’s already touched everything inside, so his warning about gloves is too late. Their victim is a rideshare driver and Daphne’s learned his name is Eduardo Cortez. He served time in prison for credit card fraud and has been working as a rideshare driver since his release. However, his apartment building looks a little too nice for someone getting by as a driver.
They arrive at his apartment and discover he’s married and has a young daughter. Morgan keeps the girl occupied while Karadec questions the wife. She reveals he stopped driving three years ago when he got a job at his cousin’s wine distribution company. He traveled a lot, so him being gone wasn’t unusual. Karadec breaks the news Eduardo wasn’t traveling for work; he was at a Hollywood hotel with a woman before he died.
Morgan and Karadec go over what they just learned, and nothing’s adding up, not the finances or using a fake ID to cheat on his wife.
That night, Morgan and Ludo get into it over Ava allowing Ryder to hang out in her room. Morgan’s worried, but Ludo thinks Ryder’s a good guy. Ava’s 15, so they should have expected this. Morgan insults Ludo by reminding him he’s not Ava’s father. The argument ends with Ludo leaving in a huff.
Back at the station, the toxicology report is in and shows Eduardo drowned with minimal alcohol in his system. (The bartender said he tied one on.) He also had Xanax in his system, which would have made him sleepy. Since no one but Iris entered the room through the door, Morgan suggests the killer came in through the fourth-floor window. Oz makes a Spider-Man joke, but Morgan points out that in the crime scene photos, there is one window with the latch in the open position.
Everyone seems to discount Morgan’s theory, but Lt. Soto instructs Oz to check it out. Oz discovers that the guest unlocked it and that there are a lot of ledges with crevices. Plus, there is magnesium carbonate powder on a ledge (the powder climbers use) outside Eduardo’s room.
Daphne discovered Eduardo deposited checks totaling $200,000 from Glenda Walker. Morgan and Karadec visit Legacy Roots Assisted Living community and Glenda says Ernest Lozano is her fiancée. She thinks they have plans to fly to Mexico City, and he’ll be there to pick her up soon. She confirms she gave him $200,000 for their home in Mexico, which shocks her son, Kyle.
Kyle tells Morgan and Karadec that his mom was diagnosed with dementia a year ago and is getting worse. He’s never met Ernest, but says Ernest stopped contacting Glenda once she got sick.
That night Selena shows up at Morgan’s asking whether Roman’s mural was of birds or fish. She wins $50 for guessing it’s a bird’s wing, and Morgan has a photo of the full mural of a phoenix. Selena believes Roman might have seen something he shouldn’t have while painting the mural in a bad area of town. A discussion of hiding cookies where kids won’t look leads Morgan to think about the dictionary Eduardo gave his young daughter. And that leads to a visit to his home, where she and Eduardo’s widow discover the dictionary is actually a safe with $50,000 in cash.
Eduardo’s little girl shows off some photos of her dad and one of them gives Morgan an idea.
She and Karadec meet at the hotel bar where Morgan’s taken the liberty of buying Karadec his preferred drink: a dirty vodka martini on the rocks. “A weird drink for my weird guy,” says Morgan. He wonders how she knows what he drinks, and she reminds him she’s been cleaning up in Major Crimes for months.
The photos showed Eduardo with a snake tattoo on his wrist, which just so happens to be the same tattoo the bartender has. He takes off running and causes a kitchen fire, setting off an alarm. He pulls a knife on Karadec but the detective gets the upper hand. Karadec places him under arrest and then yells at Morgan for not warning him about what he was walking into. He could have been killed, and he wonders how someone so smart can do so many stupid things. They argue some more, and Morgan quits her job.
Oz and Daphne can’t believe Morgan quit, but Karadec doesn’t address what happened when he arrives at the station. Instead, he and Daphne interrogate the bartender, who it’s revealed shared a cell with Eduardo in prison. The bartender confesses he thought he owed Eduardo after Eduardo helped him out in jail. When Eduardo came up with a plan to make money, he agreed. However, he claims Eduardo was his golden goose, and he would never have wanted him dead.
Karadec informs Selena that Morgan quit. Selena doesn’t believe it and thinks Morgan will be back.
Morgan tells Ludo she quit, and he’s sad he lost his sweet gig as a manny. She apologizes for what she said about not being Ava’s father. They’re lucky to have him in their lives. Ludo accepts and suggests she apologize to the LAPD, too. Elliot was bragging to his friends about his detective mom, and she shouldn’t disappoint him.
Morgan returns to the station with donuts and a new theory about the case. The bartender didn’t do it because he has long nails which aren’t good for climbing. She asks Karadec knows who has short nails, and he pauses to think about it. The answer: Glenda’s son Kyle, who was wearing a Long Beach climbing club T-shirt and used a carabiner as a keychain.
Kyle wanted revenge for his mother being tricked and used by Eduardo.
Karadec admits Morgan did good work, and Morgan says he couldn’t have done it alone. Karadec suddenly realizes that Kyle couldn’t have done it alone, either. He wasn’t on the CCTV footage and he didn’t drug Eduardo’s drink. And someone who was inside the room had to unlatch the window. All fingers point to Dr. Iris Bowman as the accomplice.
It’s revealed Iris gave Eduardo/Ernest $300,000. She met Kyle when he tried to warn her about Eduardo being a scam artist, but it was too late. Kyle wanted revenge and came up with the plan. However, Kyle says Iris was behind everything. It doesn’t really matter; they are both complicit.
Before Kyle’s locked up, he asks for a favor. He needs to say goodbye to his mom. Karadec agrees, and Kyle uses a mountain background in a Zoom call to his mom, lying about getting a job in Colorado. They exchange I love yous before hanging up.
Morgan apologizes for calling Karadec a heartless police robot. She also leaves his favorite pastry–an apple fritter–on his desk.
- High Potential Season 1 Episode 1 Recap
- High Potential Season 1 Episode 2 “Dancers in the Dark” Recap