Morgan-Wagner Romance Is One Messy Fanfic Ruining High Potentials Best Storylines

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High Potential built its entire Season 2 around two big promises.

The first was Captain Wagner — a new character whose loyalties nobody could read, and whose father turned out to be tangled up with a political fixer, who was either an ally or a slow-burning villain.

The second was Roman Sinquerra, the sixteen-year mystery that gave the show its emotional spine and Morgan/Ava their whole arcs.

Both of those promises deserved a proper payoff.

What we got instead, heading into High Potential Season 2 finale, was a romance that arrived in the penultimate episode and consumed everything around it.

The kiss in the elevator was genuinely steamy. Nobody’s arguing that.

But when you need to break half your own show’s logic to get two characters into an elevator together, something has gone wrong in the room.

Wagner’s Mystery Was the Best Thing About Season 2 Until They Rushed It

High Potential spent more than half its second season doing something genuinely interesting with Wagner. Every episode toggled the question: Is he here to help, or is he here to bury something?

Soto didn’t trust him. Karadec actively warned him off. And the viewers… couldn’t quite place him. That ambiguity was doing real work.

Then he vanished for several weeks without explanation.

When he came back in High Potential Season 2 Episode 15, he arrived as a completely different man — suddenly forthcoming about his family, his upbringing, why he tested everyone around him, and why he found it hard to trust other cops.

The entire reveal felt like six episodes of development squeezed into a single hour.

The show had parked him somewhere offscreen and now needed him back in a hurry, so the writing just… delivered it all at once, like a download, print, and paste.

High Potential Season 2 Episode 17, “Second Sunday,” pushed further. Wagner’s dead fiancée, Taylor, was introduced and mourned in the same episode that ended with him kissing Morgan in an elevator.

His vulnerability remains in question because of that; looking at the backstory and his subsequent actions, they felt too shallow to be believable.

The pacing was all over the place: One episode to meet Taylor, grieve Taylor, drink $90,000 wine over Taylor, and then kiss the civilian consultant on the way home.

Wagner’s drunken speech — goading Morgan to find the one perfect clue only she could find, playing the whole “amazing great Morgan” angle with some visible frustration — landed as a wink at the audience’s own exhaustion with the formula.

But a wink doesn’t fix the formula. It just shows the writers knew and kept going anyway.

A Civilian at a Shootout and a Hard Drive Explained Twice Isn’t Girl Power — It’s Just Convenience

The robbery case at the center of “Second Sunday” had a great premise, but it crumbled due to poor writing.

A vault heist that turned out to be about copying data rather than stealing anything physical, involving underground city tunnels and a pneumatic cash system, was pretty intriguing on paper, requiring solid procedural work.

And then Morgan got written into the live confrontation at the end.

She’s not a cop. The show has always been careful about that.

Morgan herself knows it. Her whole world stops when a suspect points a gun at her, because she’s a woman who desperately wants to make it home to her kids every night.

That’s been part of what made her compelling during High Potential Season 1, and helped the character feel grounded even as the cases grew bigger.

Putting her in the middle of a shootout between SWAT and an armed crew simply because she was the only one who had seen the layout of the building stretched the premise past its limit.

There are radios. There are phones. Heck, even Karadec is smart enough to come up with ways to communicate a floor plan without a civilian standing between gunmen.

The hard drive reveal followed a similar pattern. The overexplanation for a fairly obvious situation, such as the thieves copying the hard drive, questioned not only the LAPD’s but also the viewers’ intelligence.

Framing Morgan as the most brilliant person in the room does not mean making the other characters dumber. We’ve been here enough times in the show that it no longer feels earned.

High Potential Should Remember There Are Other Brilliant People in the Room

There’s a version of this season in which Morgan’s intelligence is demonstrated by what she notices, not by what the writing withholds from everyone around her.

That version would have been better for Morgan, better for Soto, and far better for the Roman storyline, and everyone else at the station, including Wagner.

The finale has one episode left to make good on two seasons of promises. Here’s hoping the writer’s room finds the Roman mystery before Morgan and Wagner do.

Are you rooting for Morgan and Wagner to work out, or has the show burned too much of its own goodwill getting there? And did Roman’s storyline get the space it deserved this season?

Tell us in the comments. Subscribe for the Season 2 finale — it airs tonight at 9 pm on ABC.