A man runs barefoot and bleeding from what looks like a demon as ABC’s High Potential season two, episode 11 begins. The demon has red eyes and horns, but two bystanders trying to help the fleeing man don’t see anything. The man stumbles into traffic and dies.
(The following is a recap of season two, episode 11 and there are spoilers.)
Detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) is surprised to encounter his ex-fiancée Lucia on the street. She’s been moving around but is back in town for now and confirms she met a guy but it “didn’t stick.” They’ve been sort of keeping track of each other via mutual friends. Lucia asks him to grab a coffee and Karadec, for once, decides he can be late for work.
Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) beats him to the crime scene and since he’s never late, her curiosity is piqued. Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) and Daphne (Javicia Leslie) have interviewed the driver and learned the man ran into traffic. The driver couldn’t avoid hitting him.
Morgan’s already figured out the man was poisoned, which is why he was seeing demons. There’s black vomit on the sidewalk and on the victim’s shirt, and it smells like rotten eggs. It’s activated charcoal, which releases hydrogen sulfide—thus the disgusting smell.
Morgan and Karadec track the man’s footprints as Karadec confesses that he ran into his ex-fiancée. He claims it’s no big deal that they had coffee together, and Morgan refuses to let it drop. She’ll circle back to it later, because now they need to look around the dead man’s apartment. His ID shows his name is Declan Harker and his apartment shows signs of being ransacked.
Morgan notices he has a gamer chair, gloves, and a magazine nearby that shows he’s a professional gamer. The computer’s missing so whoever poisoned him might have taken it.
As they’re looking around, Declan’s ex-girlfriend, Aditi, arrives with an audio recording from that morning. Declan asked her for help and said he killed someone over and over again, and now that person wants to kill him.
Back at the station, Karadec tells Lt. Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) that they believe someone from the game Battle Dynasty killed Declan because he kept killing the person’s character. Game violence spilled over to real life. Karadec reveals there were traces of blood on a food delivery. The blood isn’t Declan’s.
Aditi and Declan met online in the game before meeting in person. They hit it off, but then suddenly he ghosted her last year after quitting gaming. She doesn’t know why. Then last month he returned to the game. They were making plans to meet again when he was murdered.
Aditi confirms he got rid of his computer when he quit gaming but did have a laptop as a backup. She and Declan share a Find My Tech account and Karadec, Morgan, and Daphne head to the laptop’s location—a parking lot. They’re just beginning to look through car windows when Lucia texts Karadec. Morgan tells him he needs to answer it, but he refuses because he’s busy working. Morgan warns Karadec that she doesn’t want him to destroy the relationship before it has a chance to rekindle.
Daphne spots a car with asphalt-caked tires and recalls a street near Declan’s place was undergoing repaving. Instead of taking normal police investigative steps, Morgan makes the car horn go off. The man who owns it emerges from the building and he’s wearing a Jubilee Games shirt. He claims it’s not his car, but Morgan has him use his key fob and the alarm turns off.
Declan’s laptop is in the trunk, and he reveals he’s a senior game developer. Declan was a top player, but the Jubilee employee didn’t take the laptop to comb through his gaming data. He’s shocked Declan’s dead and admits he and Declan fought the night before Declan was killed.
Daphne looks through the laptop and finds Declan’s account had a $100k in crypto balance. The Jubilee guy admits that Declan was addicted to the game. Declan’s physical and mental state were deteriorating, and he helped Declan quit the game a year ago. He also introduced him to Gamers Anonymous. The reason he doesn’t want his boss to know he helped Declan is that Declan had begun helping other gamers also quit playing.
He noticed that Declan was playing again, because that’s what addicts do, so he went to Declan’s place. They got into an argument, and he wound up taking Declan’s laptop. He stayed for an hour and left around 3am. Declan claimed he just needed to finish one mission and he’d stop.
The Jubilee guy offers to help them figure out who Declan was killing over and over again.
Back at the station, the team goes over Declan’s play logs and watches him repeatedly killing a player. Declan’s character Beast Slayer kept killing an orc named Drednog, and Drednog was pissed. He sent messages to Declan telling him to knock it off or he’d come after him with a gun.
Jubilee determines Drednog’s account info is fake, and it looks like he’s been playing at cybercafes. As Karadec’s heading out, Selena suggests that he should try again with Lucia. She thinks he’s different now and with Morgan as a partner, he even leaves the office earlier than he used to when he and Lucia were dating.
Elliot’s playing a video game when Morgan checks on him in bed. She’s shocked to discover he plays Battle Dynasty and warns him that with their brains they obsess over things – like video games. Elliot claims that he’s not obsessing; he’s just using it as a palette cleanser before bed.
They discuss the chat and how someone wrote they will “plant” him. Elliot explains that since the game is worldwide, the chat translated the word “farm” to plant. The translation makes mistakes sometimes, which means the threat of a gun might have been something else.
Morgan arrives at work the next morning and announces that 12.6 million play Battle Dynasty every day. The game’s chat translator isn’t reliable. The Japanese word “teppo” can mean “gun” or “puffer fish.” The guy in the chat was threatening Declan with puffer fish toxin.
Morgan already had the lab test for puffer fish toxin and it came back positive. One drop causes hallucination, vomiting, and death. People can eat puffer fish without dying, but sushi chefs must go through a two-year training process to learn to remove the poison. So, only a handful of sushi chefs in the area probably serve it.
Morgan and Karadec visit a restaurant that employs a chef trained in preparing puffer fish. Only three chefs in the area are certified and one was employed by a restaurant that is closed. The other is a childless elderly man. That narrows their search down to this restaurant.
Karadec asks if the chef, Mr. Yasuda, if he has kids with access to his puffer fish. Mr. Yasuda has two sons but the pieces of puffer fish with poison wouldn’t be accessible to them. The parts are kept in a locked container until they can be destroyed.
Mr. Yasuda shows them the locked container and reveals he keeps a remedy on hand, just in case of an accident. He follows the law to the letter. Morgan notices an employee and deduces he’s not just the chef’s son, Jin; he’s also featured on a poster at the video game company’s headquarters. However, Mr. Yasuda says the gamer is his other son, Ryo.
His sons are twins, but the chef swears Ryo couldn’t be responsible for Declan’s death. However, although Jin’s a hard worker, Ryo only cares about his game. He feels like he lost Ryo to the video games. Karadec promises to do what they can to help but Ryo is the most likely suspect.
Oz and Daphne head to a cybercafé to talk to Ryo. He confirms one of his characters is Drednog and he knows Beast Slayer/Declan Harker. They take him to the station for an interrogation and his father joins Karadec and Selena to discuss Declan’s murder.
Without being asked, Ryo says he didn’t know Declan in real life. Karadec explains they found blood at the scene and Ryo does have a cut on his finger. Karadec presents a court order for Ryo’s DNA and Selena reveals they discovered a connection between Declan and Mr. Yasuda. Declan’s $100k of crypto in his computer traces back to Mr. Yasuda. It appears Mr. Yasuda was paying Declan to kill Ryo’s characters to get Ryo to quit gaming.
Selena and Karadec also discovered Mr. Yasuda met Declan at a Gamers Anonymous meeting. That’s where he asked for Declan’s help. But Ryo didn’t quit gaming. Instead, he became so angry that he followed the delivery guy from Teter’s Tacos and waited for the delivery guy to leave the bag at the door. Then he placed puffer fish poison in the burrito, leaving a spot of blood from cutting his finger on the receipt’s staple.
The lab results come back and the blood isn’t Ryo’s, but it is a 90% match. It turns out Ryo isn’t the killer; his twin, Jin, is!
Cops can’t find Jin and his bike’s missing. Ryo’s still at the station when Jin calls him. Ryo puts the phone on speaker, and the detectives hear Jin say he messed up bad. Selena offers to send a car to pick him up, and Jin confesses he left the poison because he thought that’s what Ryo wanted him to do. He hangs up after saying he loves Ryo and hopes their dad can forgive him.
Ryo thinks Jin might have gone to the Hollywood Reservoir.
Morgan and Ryo stay at the station as Karadec, Daphne, and Oz head to the reservoir with backup. Morgan wonders why he and his brother don’t hang out anymore, and Ryo believes they just became different people. Ryo feels horrible that Jin would have done this for him.
Ryo spills his almond milk and removes his sweatshirt, and Morgan notices a large birthmark on his arm.
Karadec calls in with an update. They found Jin’s bike in the center of the walkway. It appears he jumped into the reservoir. If he did, his body probably won’t be retrieved.
Ryo disappears while Morgan and Selena are speaking with Karadec. Morgan’s spidey senses are tingling and she believes she’s put together pieces that add up to a bizarre plot twist.
Morgan walks Selena through what she’s figured out. Ryo absorbed his twin as an embryo and has two sets of DNA. (It’s called chimerism.) The result can be large birthmarks and food allergies, as well as cheek DNA that’s different from blood DNA.
Morgan believes there’s only one son, even though she’s seen a photo album with two different boys. She thinks the desperate dad and son set this whole thing up to blame a son who doesn’t exist.
Karadec and Morgan confront Mr. Yasuda with the results of their lab’s analysis of the photo album. They determined the photos were digitally manipulated and that Mr. Yasuda has been doing this for Ryo’s entire life. He’s had Ryo pose as Jin since he was a kid.
Morgan spoke with his ex-wife and knows he was devastated when a twin didn’t survive. She also informed them that her ex-husband always blamed Ryo for killing his twin and that he’s never stopped grieving.
Ryo became a gamer to be free of his dad’s control. When his dad paid Declan to try and get him to stop gaming, Ryo became angry and poisoned him. Mr. Yasuda realized what happened, grabbed the charcoal remedy, and tried to save Declan. It didn’t work. He and Declan fought right before Declan ran into traffic.
Ryo didn’t know his father hired Declan. When his dad rushed home from Declan’s place, Ryo agreed to the cover-up. They tried to make Ryo disappear completely into Jin. That might have worked if Ryo hadn’t gone back to the cybercafé and been picked up for questioning.
Ryo recorded the phone call from Jin on his dad’s phone. That recording was played at the station as if Jin was confessing. The phone records confirm all this, and that the sous-chef from the restaurant planted the bike at the reservoir. The sous-chef is cooperating and Ryo was picked up in his basement.
Ryo’s brought in and his dad apologizes. They cry, and Ryo’s dad hugs him.
Declan’s ex stages a funeral for him in the game.
Just as the day’s wrapping up, Lucia arrives at the station. Karadec’s decided to take Morgan and Selena’s advice and give it another shot. Morgan’s all smiles as she introduces herself. Karadec rushes her away before Morgan can ask questions.
The episode ends with Morgan looking wistful as she watches Karadec and Lucia walk away.
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 1 “Pawns” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 2 “Checkmate” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 3 “Eleven Minutes” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 4 “Behind the Music” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 5 “Content Warning” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 7 “The One That Got Away, Part 1” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 8 “The One That Got Away, Part 2” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 9 “Under the Rug” Recap
- High Potential Season 2 Episode 10 “Grounded” Recap
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