From Panama to Mars: How High Potential S2E2 Turned a Murder into a Masterclass in Globalized Guilt
High Potential, Season 2, Episode 2: A Global Power Play Dressed Up as Office Farce
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific
There’s a moment, roughly twelve minutes into the second episode of the second season of *High Potential*, when Morgan, the hyper-literate janitor-turned-consultant, tells an Interpol attaché that “crime, like carbon, respects no borders.” The attaché—Swiss, natürlich—nods gravely, as if this were an original thought and not the sort of line you find printed on the back of a UN souvenir mug. Still, the camera lingers long enough for the line to metastasize into metaphor, and suddenly the whole whodunit feels less like a network procedural and more like an allegory for a planet that’s outsourced its moral bookkeeping to consultants in ergonomic sneakers.
The plot, for anyone who’s been too busy watching actual democracies collapse in real time, involves the murder of a Panamanian shipping executive on the eve of signing a lithium-export deal that would reroute half the world’s battery supply from Chile to China, by way of a shell corporation in Dublin that exists only as a Slack channel and a WeWork fob. The victim’s laptop—encrypted with a password that turns out to be the Latin name for the endangered Andean flamingo, because subtlety died in 2016—contains a spreadsheet labeled “Plan B.” Plan B, we learn, is not a contingency; it’s a literal second planet, a private-sector initiative to terraform Mars using forced labor from three continents and venture capital from Luxembourg. The sheer audacity almost distracts from the fact that Luxembourg’s entire GDP could fit in the glove compartment of a Tesla Model X.
What makes the episode resonate beyond its 43-minute runtime is how accurately it captures the current international mood: everyone is guilty, no one is in charge, and the only thing moving faster than capital is the blame. When Morgan quips that “the supply chain is just colonialism with a tracking number,” the joke lands because it’s already printed on protest placards from Lagos to Lima. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles homicide detectives—the nominal heroes—spend half the episode on hold with a cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in Malta, waiting for compliance documents that will arrive sometime after the polar ice caps finish their farewell tour.
Director Ava DuVernay, guesting behind the camera for a one-off prestige boost, frames Los Angeles as a city that imports disasters the way it imports sushi: overnight, chilled, and with a carbon footprint that could power a small Balkan nation. Aerial shots of the Port of Los Angeles alternate with satellite imagery of lithium brine pools in the Atacama, creating the visual impression that the Pacific is little more than an aqueous conveyor belt for human folly. In one sly cut, a drone zooms out from a sweatshop in Dhaka to a sweat lodge in Santa Monica, suggesting that enlightenment and exploitation now share the same Instagram filter.
The B-plot involves Morgan’s teenage daughter, Ava, hacking into the Dublin shell company’s Slack channel and discovering that the interns—unpaid, naturally—are using the #random channel to organize a simultaneous walkout across five time zones. The scene is played for laughs until you remember that the largest labor strike in human history happened in India two years ago and barely dented the news cycle because a celebrity had a baby that week. Ava’s triumphant emoji-laden announcement (“global solidarity 🌎✊”) is greeted with digital crickets, a moment so bleakly accurate it deserves its own documentary.
By the time the killer is revealed to be not one person but a consortium of algorithmic traders operating out of Singapore, the viewer is left with the distinct impression that murder, like everything else, has been automated for maximum efficiency. The final shot—a slow pull-back from Morgan staring at a glowing world map studded with red supply-chain arrows—feels less like closure and more like a screensaver for the apocalypse. Somewhere, a ratings analyst notes that the episode trended in 37 countries, proof that we’ll binge-watch our own obsolescence as long as there’s a witty janitor to narrate it.
And yet, we tune in next week. After all, the planet may be on fire, but the Wi-Fi still works.
