Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched High Potential via ABC or streamed with a Hulu subscription, so be warned!
I’m not going to get hyperbolic here, but I think High Potential’s creative team is actively trying to ruin my life. Wait, no, I’m sure they’re a lovely bunch, and they’ve been aces at giving the network procedural formula a refreshing jolt of energy and comedy that allows Kaitlin Olson, Daniel Sunjata and the rest of the cast to pop even harder. But its latest episode to hit the 2025 TV schedule seemingly imploded the main storyline I was most hopeful for, at least where Morgan’s personal life is concerned.
It’s perhaps applicable that an episode titled “The RAMs” so easily gouged my heart with its piercing horns, or at the very least, it made me disappointed about a romantic arc that I kinda figured was going to be short-lived. But it still hurts! Though I do give all involved credit for pulling in a trio of guest stars that helped ease the sorrow.
JD Pardo's Tom Has Left The Building (And The Whole City)
I've written previously about hoping for more sparks between Tom and Morgan when High Potential returned from its winter hiatus, and was fully on board for JD Pardo's character sticking around for the long haul. Even when the episode synopsis mentioned Tom's personal news cropping up, I balanced my worries with optimism. It could have been a good thing!
Alas, not even Morgan herself was putting enough effort into turning their kinship into something more. Despite clearly having some kind of feelings for the dude, Morgan has already proven herself largely incapable of life balances, and has allowed her new detective gig to dictate the majority of her time and mental space. As we learned, she wasn't answering his calls, and she also wasn't returning them after the fact.
So credit to him for being as understanding as he was while formally telling her he was leaving town to take a job offer in San Diego. Pardo successfully played the scene as if Tom was struggling to keep the chip on his shoulder. Just because he understands her plight doesn't mean he should be happy about it.
Still, Tom playfully seemed to be keeping the door open to a connection down the line by saying San Diego isn't so far away, but I'm not so confident. Especially since their interaction was essentially broken up by Karadec walking by as they were hugging and asking Morgan if she was ready to go. I know a lot of fans want Morgan and Karadec together, but that just made me want that coupling even less.
I guess I'm happy that High Potential slotted Morgan and Tom parting ways in the first half of the episode, since it allowed the trio of guest stars to respectively work their magic.
- Steve Guttenberg, of Police Academy and 3 Men and a Baby fame, popped up as a pampered rich dude with a not-so-neighborly relationship with the episode's big victim, a famed baseball announcer. I'll admit my immediate assumptions that he was responsible were just because of his guest-star status, but his breezy attitude and amusing performance still played into my suspicions. Alas, despite owning the car used as the weapon, Phil Elko was innocent. But guilty of bad taste, in that he named his prized four-car collection after The Beatles.
- Sean Patrick Thomas (Save the Last Dance, Gen V) played another potential suspect, the announcer's son who just so happened to get written out of his father's will in place of a beloved assistant. The way Karadec was so transparently empathetic to Thomas' Dexter Price had me convinced for a minute that the detective's instincts were off-base, and that the son would indeed be guilty, but that was wrong. And I'm glad, since their mini-convo about losing their fathers was impactful.
- The Wire vet Domenick Lombardozziin is the only one of these three that I expect to see again one day, as he's currently a lynchpin in Morgan finding out more information about her long-missing husband. He's leaving town all of a sudden, right when he's able to offer information, which I'm sure is entirely due to BTS schedule-plotting more than anything organic to the story. But I'm definitely anxious to learn what he knows after he used the titular RAMs comment to "prove" he was telling the truth. I'm not all the way sold just yet.
All in all, it was a solid episode that also featured some fun cutaway humor and measurement-related sight gags, which make High Potential stand out even more from the competition. But it also sent JD Pardo's Tom packing, so I'm gonna go see if Steve Guttenberg's character will let me borrow one of his cars to make me feel better.
High Potential airs Tuesday nights on ABC at 9:00 p.m. ET.
