‘High Potential’ S2 Recap: Fact-checking All Morgan’s Trivia

The Emmys proved what we all already knew: Procedurals are back, baby! Between the 9-1-1s and Dick Wolf’s Chicagos, we’ve got all the medical and fire emergencies we can handle. But last year saw a new cop show enter the great tradition of “cop and a quirky ____ solve crime.” This time, the _____ is a “high-potential intellectual,” what people perhaps used to call a “savant.” Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson) has a near-photographic memory, a highly associative mind, and a seemingly endless reserve of random trivia facts. She also has an overwhelming need to “um, actually” people, which has gotten her fired from every job she’s had. Until, that is, Morgan is roped into the LAPD by Selena Soto (Judy Reyes) and paired with uptight detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata). You would think they’d never get along, let alone become a highly effective crime-fighting duo! But wackiness ensues, crimes are solved, and every episode sees Morgan drop two or three factoids that have a high potential of coming up at your next trivia night.

A few running plots bubble under the show’s surface. Morgan joined the LAPD in exchange for their finding the father of her firstborn, Roman, who disappeared 15 years ago and is still missing. This season, she’s butting heads with Roman’s childhood bestie, played by Mekhi Phifer, as well as bristling under the command of a new supervisor, Steve Howey’s Captain Nick Wagner. (My money is on the new captain being connected to why Roman fled the cops 15 years ago, but we’ll have to keep watching to find out if I’m right.) Disappeared baby daddy drama notwithstanding, though, this show is at heart a mystery of the week in which Morgan uses lots of silly little facts to help catch the bad guy and/or annoy her family and co-workers. So we are compiling all those silly little facts, and, what’s more, we’re going to fact-check them. Because it’s important to hold the police accountable, even if they’re fictional.

Spoilers follow for the most recent episode of High Potential season two.

Morgan and Captain Wagner clash over a stolen Rembrandt. Clues point to a famous art thief known as Jean Baptiste and to a Holocaust survivor who says the painting was stolen from her family in 1939. LAPD higher-ups call in art-recovery expert Rhys Eastman … who never arrives. During the cliffhanger ending, we learn the man we thought was Eastman is actually the enigmatic Jean Baptiste. Morgan actually learns this mid-coitus with him. Go off, girl, get you some!

Meanwhile, Captain Wagner tries to horn in on Roman’s disappearance, and a mysterious man approaches Arthur to reclaim Roman’s backpack.

Gold braids on a Baroque lady signify sex work: Possibly! In the 1600s, fancy uncovered hair could indicate a sex worker or just an unmarried lady. Exposed hair wasn’t proper for a grown-up is what we’re saying. But thanks to the Dutch mercantile revolution, these standards were loosening in Rembrandt’s time. So the debate between Morgan and the art expert is legit.

Aluminum reacts with ferric oxide to create a thermite reaction, which would melt glass: True, big time.

Okay, here’s a thing I feel like Morgan have should known about: different British accents, especially as they relate to class. Morgan says the art expert sounds like he was born with a croquet mallet in his hand, but he’s not speaking RP at all. If she can pick out the Gullah Geechee dialect in American English speakers, surely she could recognize this guy’s chav signifiers.

Since this episode is light on factoids, let’s discuss the midseason cliffhanger and where we stand with the Roman of it all: I have long suspected New Captain was being set up as either a romantic interest or a secretly evil guy associated with Roman’s disappearance, perhaps both. But now that this art guy’s had that same plot play out in this episode, it seems less likely. Would they return to that well so soon? Anyway, my current theory on the Roman mystery is that Captain Nepo Baby’s dad was behind Roman’s disappearance, and when the captain figures that out, he’ll have to struggle with his conscience and what “the badge” means, etc., etc. It’s always useful for copaganda to have scapegoats in the previous generation of officers, ya know?

In a spooky-ooky Halloween episode, Morgan and the gang investigate the death of a divorce attorney who was seemingly scared to death. In the end, the crime wasn’t committed by a ghost, but rather by a spiritual adviser/grifter who was trying to get her hands on a priceless diamond necklace in a hidden secret room of his haunted mansion.

Copernicus discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system: Maybe if you only count white people. Okay, it’s less simplistic than that. Copernicus did theorize the mathematical model for heliocentrism, and it was a big enough deal to make him worthy of being Morgan’s kid’s Halloween costume. But astronomers in the Islamic world had been poking holes in geocentrism since at least the 1000s. Still, big ups to Nicolaus Copernicus.

Aristotle believed there was a right time and place to be angry: True. An imaginary Ari pops up in Morgan’s imagination when her son says the philosopher said a certain amount of anger is justified. Imaginary Aristotle says the kid is spot-on, and he is. That guy was obsessed with finding balance, his “Golden Mean” of everything within moderation. And “everything” includes anger.

The pentagram is a circle of protection in some cultures: True, if you count neopagans and the modern Wicca movement as “some cultures.” The pentagram has had every sort of meaning you could think of over the centuries. But it’s true that in modern witchy circles, it’s used as a protection sign.

Abundance rituals should be done during a waxing moon, not waning: Sure, okay, let’s go with that. It makes sense intuitively to do abundance spells during the waxing moon (ie: when she’s getting bigger). Your wealth grows with the moon, bing bang boom. But tying your spells to the moon is just one way to time things. You could do it based on day of the week (Thursday), the day of whatever saint guides your profession, astrological calendar, or just when the vibes are vibing.

Potassium chloride spikes naturally after death: Sort of true. Potassium chloride levels don’t spike after death, but potassium levels do rise in some bits postmortem. Specifically, the amount of potassium in vitreous humor (eye goo) can give a very accurate time of death. It’s also true that potassium chloride poisoning is very hard to detect because the poison (potassium) is a naturally occurring element in the body. One medical journal even called it a “forensic medical enigma.”

The 11th Earl of Strathmore was walled up inside a secret room of Castle Glamis: A true fiction. This is one of those classic Victorian stories designed to make the past seem strange and barbaric. See also: the almost entirely made-up medieval torture devices. Less PC tellings than the one Morgan drops call him the Monster of Glamis — an heir to the Earldom too hideous and deformed for polite society. The story about using handkerchiefs to find the secret window comes from Sir Horace Rumbold, a diplomat who visited the castle in 1877.

You can identify plain-sawn vs. quarter-sawn paneling at a glance: True. The grain of wood is determined by how a tree trunk is sawn. Plain sawn is that stereotypical wood grain, and if only one panel in a whole house was that grain it would stick out like a conspicuously light patch in animation.

Essential oil can take tarnish off jewelry: True, although a citrus oil is more commonly applied than the verbena used by our dastardly faux witch.

An investigative journalist is found dead in a submerged car. Morgan and the gang trace her movements to a content house, where she was posing as an ASMR vlogger in order to gain access to a new supplement. The supplement turns out to be a front for drug trafficking, and the dealer/killer is posing as the amiable operator of a post-prison halfway house.

Poodle dog plants are pyrophytes: True, but the way Morgan uses the plant’s maturation status to find a location is suspect. Poodle dog bushes indeed spring forth in SoCal whenever there’s a fire. LAist is currently warning hikers about the plant because it can cause a very painful rash if it gets on your skin. Unfortunately, fires have become too frequent and too widespread for me to believe Morgan could narrow down potential crime scenes from “there was a fire here X weeks ago.” Poodle dog bushes are all over the burn zone of the Eaton Fire, a whopping 14,021 acres.

The chemical reaction between soap, hydrogen peroxide, and yeast can cause steam hot enough to burn skin: You’re reaching, counselor. While the creation of “elephant’s toothpaste” (another name for this chemical reaction) is exothermic, it’s not steam-burn-level hot. More likely, you’d get chemical burns from any unreacted peroxide.

Concentrated hydrogen peroxide corrodes titanium: Unlikely. Morgan places a suspect at the crime scene because the hydrogen peroxide in elephant’s toothpaste corroded his titanium watch. (1) Elephant’s toothpaste doesn’t have hydrogen peroxide anymore. It has broken down into water and oxygen. (2) Even if there was some unreacted peroxide at the scene, hydrogen peroxide only corrodes titanium very, very slowly, per the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It would burn his skin before it rusted his watch.

Castoreum is from beaver butts: True! It used to be a big way to make faux-vanilla scent and to enhance strawberry and raspberry flavoring. You know that wildly unspecific “natural flavors” on some food packaging? What could be more natural than a beaver’s anus?

A woman with dementia has a flashback to a murder that took place 25 years ago. On New Year’s Eve in 2000, an R&B singer is murdered by her abusive producer/boyfriend, because she fled with her daughter. Now the long-lost daughter is back for revenge.

Gullah Geechee accents are rare: Mostly true. Renee, our demented murder witness (and later murder victim), slips into the accent at the end of her screen time. Literally, saying “and dat’s de eeynd” when she refuses to speak to police. Interesting that Karadec catches the accent too. Morgan points to the accent (and the Loblolly pines in her fridge photos) as evidence that (1) Renee is Gullah and (2) she made a 911 call reporting a shooting. As of 2019, 250,000 people spoke Gullah. Not many of those people live in L.A., so it makes sense that it would be identifiably rare to Morgan.

The fingerprints of drug users glow stronger under blacklight: Not likely. Many cop shows want you to believe fingerprints, blood, and uhhh, other bodily fluids glow under a UV light. But anyone who watched Room Raiders back in the day knows that you have to spray a surface with reagents like luminol to get that blacklight effect on biological material. I can find one source that says some fingerprints fluoresce under UV light without a reagent, but many others saying you still need a UV powder or spray. It’s true that some drugs (like LSD) are naturally fluorescent, but the fingerprint-haver in question would have to be literally sweating acid to leave a glow-in-the-dark print.

Any cell phone can call 911, even without a plan: True! That’s why many domestic-violence shelters will take your old phones. They give them to survivors for emergencies. That’s how Renee was able to use a deactivated cell from the 2000s to call 911, then not remember doing so due to her dementia.

Dementia can bring back old memories but they need a trigger: Semi-true. Dementia does reshuffle one’s memory, but there doesn’t necessarily need to be external stimuli to bring something up from the archives.

Tencel wasn’t around until 1985, and it burns distinctly: True-ish. Morgan uses a bloodstained dress to timestamp when Renee’s memories of murder are from. Tencel is a synthetic cellulose fabric that was invented in the ’80s, but wasn’t widely commercially available until the ’90s, per the NYT. Burning a fabric is one of the main ways to ID what it’s made of. It burns similar to other synthetically produced celluloses like rayon: catches fire instead of melting, smells like paper burning, and leaves relatively clean ash. However, the fabric they show in the show looks more like a synthetic. That dress would melt like skin off a Terminator.

The U.S. Registered Identification Number on a dress tag identifies the manufacturer: True, but RNs aren’t required on a label if the business is already clearly identified, per the FTC.

Care labels can date an item of clothing: Semi-true. Morgan mentions the Care Labeling Rule of 1971, and that care symbols weren’t approved by the U.S. government until 1998. It’s true that 1971 is when care-labeling was made mandatory on garments. But since when do Americans exclusively buy American-made clothes? The GINTEX care-label system has been operating internationally since 1963, so there could be labeled clothes out there from before the system became mandatory. Also, the FTC approved care symbols to replace written instructions in 1996, not 1998. Morgan also points to the lack of a barcode or inventory number as an indication that the clothing is pre-2000, but these are not federally mandated and vary brand to brand.

Nickel can trigger hives in under a minute, and there is nickel in the big confetti we see on TV: Nah. Morgan uses a corpse’s nickel dermatitis to nail down time and location of death (New Year’s Eve, da clurb). According to the Cleveland Clinic, Nickel allergies usually present 24–72 hours after exposure, and usually after a more prolonged exposure than metallic confetti falling on your skin. But our murder victim could just have been severely allergic? Also, as anyone who recalls the Great Glitter Conspiracy of 2018, glitter is usually plastic coated with aluminum and not nickel.

The “fourth trimester” of pregnancy has identifiable physical symptoms: True. Morgan mentions mommy wrist and hair loss as indications of the 2000-era victim being postpartum. Both these issues can definitely occur after giving birth.

Yucca moths are dependent on Joshua trees: True-ish. Yucca moths are in a symbiotic relationship with yucca plants, which include Joshua trees. Now how Morgan identifies a yucca moth from its squished guts on a windshield, and then infers that it was squished in the Mojave Desert versus any other spot with yucca in Southern California? That’s a stretch.

The Griffith Observatory sundial can tell you date and time: True. The murderer uses (doctored) timestamped photos as her alibi, but you can’t doctor the sun. The Griffith Observatory sundial does give you an accurate reading for the time of day, and its sunset and moonset radial lines could be used to approximate time of year.

Photographers may have silver nitrate on their hands: False. The murderer (a photographer) allegedly had silver nitrate on her hand when she pushed our dementia-patient victim down the stairs, leaving a stain on her shirt. Sure, film photographers can use silver nitrate in the development process. But contact with skin causes staining and/or chemical burns. It’s that stuff that burns off warts, you think you’re going to not notice it’s on your hands while committing a murder?

“All I want is to enter my house justified” is a line from the Bible, cribbed by Sam Peckinpah: True. New Major Crimes captain Nick Wagner quotes this line from Ride the High Country, but Morgan correctly identifies it as paraphrased from the Book of Luke. The Bible passage is Jesus telling folks to humble themselves before God. In Peckinpah’s film, Joel McCrea is saying he wants to stick to his principles even though they’re not financially remunerative. It seems like Wagner is just saying shit to be intimidating, the Jules Winnfield school of Bible/movie quotes.

A man plans to kill himself to pay off gambling debts with his life-insurance policy. He also promises to donate his heart. When he changes his mind about dying, a paramedic takes matters into his own hands so his mother can get the heart.

Ducks be poopin’: True! The victim is found by the hostess of a nearby café because she heard ducks in the alley. Morgan immediately knows there were no actual ducks nearby since there’s no poop around. According to PETA, ducks poop every ten to 30 minutes, so the 11 minutes the guy was lying there was definitely enough time for at least one duck to, uh, leave trace evidence. Turns out the duck sound was an alarm the killer had set so the body could be discovered in time for organs to be harvested.

Electronic card-shufflers can be rigged: True! Morgan gets an uncooperative loan shark to talk by pointing out that the electronic shoes (a.k.a. the card shufflers/dealers) at his illegal casino are easily rigged. While the specific model of automatic dealer mentioned is fictional (ABC’s legal team probably saw to that), black-hat hackers have proved you can tamper with an electronic card shuffler. While High Potential implies the shoe can be programmed to shuffle cards into a particular order, the easier/more likely way to cheat is to gain access to the shuffler’s internal camera so you know exactly who gets which card when.

An air bubble in the bloodstream will kill you: Semi-true! Injecting air into someone’s blood is a good way to cause an air embolism, but these aren’t as foolproof fatal as crime shows would have you believe. This is how the loan shark intends to take out the Vic of the Week. Ironically, sending a goon to deliver a fatal air bubble when the guy is already on life support clears him of the actual murder.

Social Security numbers aren’t as random as they seem: True! When Social Security numbers were invented in 1936, they had significance instead of being randomly assigned. And as Morgan says, the first three are assigned by geographic area. In 2011, SSNs became randomized, thus protecting recipients’ identities better than the loan shark does.

The Philadelphia Mummers Parade is uniquely crazy: True! Morgan uses a picture of the loan shark at the Philly Mummers Parade to link him to the SSN found on the victim’s life-insurance policy. A pic of the Mummers Parade is indeed immediately identifiable to anyone who has spent New Year’s Day in the tristate area. Go, Birds!

Brain death is certain after 11 minutes without blood flow or oxygen: Meh. The killer’s plan hinges on stopping the victim’s heart for exactly 11 minutes. That way, when he is resuscitated, he’ll be brain-dead but still have viable organs for donation. It’s a rule of thumb for doctors that brain damage occurs after ten minutes of oxygen deprivation, but brain damage does not equal brain death. And some people have recovered after 60 minutes of CPR.

Morgan and the team play a metaphorical game of chicken with the Game Maker. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Mekhi Phifer) is found in Las Vegas living under the name of Morgan’s missing baby daddy.

Queen’s Gambit Declined, Cambridge Springs Defense: Morgan calls this chess sequence the Pillsbury Variation, which is accurate. In chess, it’s when black ignores the obvious available pawn to instead shore up its defense. As a metaphor for taking down the Game Maker, it means they have to give up their pawn, i.e., the guy the Game Maker wants to kill.

Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear annihilation: True! Thanks, bud. Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces who, in 1983, saw five nuclear warheads coming at the USSR on his monitoring system. In a split second, he had to decide whether it was a false alarm or WW3. “Petrov went with false alarm,” his obituary reads, “later explaining he reasoned that if the United States really were to start a nuclear war, it would do so with more than five missiles. He was correct.” Never a bad idea to bet on America’s lack of subtlety. In High Potential, Petrov is yet another metaphor from the Game Maker about how he wants Morgan to play — this time meaning she has to admit defeat rather than coming in hot like a bellicose American.

An American POW in Vietnam sent secret messages by blinking in Morse code: True. In 1966, U.S. Navy commander Jeremiah A. Denton Jr. was forced to make a propaganda video for his Viet Cong captors, saying he and fellow prisoners of war were well treated. He read the script as directed, but blinked the letters T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code during the taping. It was the first confirmation that American POWs were being tortured in Vietnam. Morgan deduces that the Game Maker is forcing his captive to blink out an address in a video sent to the LAPD.

Tasmanian devils are shy: This is just an “Um, actually” from Morgan’s high-potential son. It’s true, but aren’t all wild animals shy around humans? That’s kind of what keeps them wild.

Tarsiers try to kill themselves when taken into captivity: Semi-true, semi-false. The Game Maker places a picture of a tarsier in his home as a message that he’d rather die than be in prison. It’s true that tarsiers are notoriously stressed out by captivity and can display self-harm behaviors when stressed. But it’s not inevitable. One man in the Philippines was even able to successfully breed tarsiers in captivity, releasing the babies into the wild and keeping the population alive during a period of rapid deforestation.

Dodgers fans wouldn’t also wear Angels merch: Anecdotally false. Morgan sees a picture of mystery man Phifer wearing a Dodgers hoodie and carrying a backpack with a Los Angeles Angels pin on it. She figures the backpack has to belong to her Angels-loving ex-partner since no Dodgers fan would also support the Angels. But I’m a Dodgers fan, and I also like the Angels. In general, people have beef with the Dodgers, not the other way around. It’s like that one Mad Men meme. The only team a Dodgers fan would feel real animosity toward are those vile cheaters the Houston Astros. Maybe the Yankees, too.

A woman resembling Morgan is kidnapped, and Major Crimes is on the case. Only Morgan believes the Game Maker is behind the abduction. In the end, she’s right, though the Game Maker frames a nepo-baby music exec for the crime.

Palm weevils are infesting Los Angeles: True! Morgan lies to her high-potential child about why her ex (Taran Killam) is staying with the family. She claims his neighborhood has a palm-weevil infestation, instead of saying he’s there to protect the family. Palm weevils are native to South America but go where the palms go. Thus, Los Angeles’s already fragile palm ecosystem meets yet another foe.

It’s “super-rare” for a piece of mail to be delivered to the wrong address: True. Morgan correctly surmises that a misdelivered piece of mail was a move by the Game Maker and not just a fuckup by the postal service. According to a 2021 audit by USPS, only .15 percent of first-class letters are misdelivered. From that, we can extrapolate that other types of mail have similar misrouting rates.

Ayurvedic medicine recommends starting meals with something sweet: True. Morgan’s high-potential son uses this as a ploy to get cookies before dinner. Although sweets are supposed to encourage digestion, he doesn’t get a predinner dessert.

The order of Japanese shogunates as related to the type of tantō knife developed in that period: This is a mixed bag. The suspected perp says he organized his tantō collection by shogunate. So it’s his gaffe, not Morgan’s. (Morgan does list seven Japanese clans that would have had tantō, the short dagger a samurai wears with his katana.)

Minamoto: Minamoto no Yoritomo founded the Kamakura shogunate, which ruled from 1185 to 1333
Taira: Clan founded in 825. Big part of the Genpei War (1180–85), which ended with the dissolution of the Taira and the founding of the Kamakura shogunate.
Tōdō: Clan founded in 1585.
Ashikaga: Ruling shogunate from 1336 to 1573.
Oda: Perhaps refers to the Oda clan and its most important member, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82). One of the three great unifiers of Japan, he dissolved the Ashikaga shogunate in 1573.
Tokugawa: This one we all know from Shōgun. Established by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Tokugawa shogunate ruled from 1603 to 1868 and moved the country’s capital to Edo, now known as Tokyo.
Takeda: Probably refers to Takeda Shingen, ruler of the Takeda clan from 1541 to 1573, during the late Sengoku period.

Check back next week for more factoid fact-checking!