‘High Potential’ Gets the Game (Maker) Going With Its Season 2 Premiere

High Potential wasn’t playing any games with last night’s season opener. The premiere, directed by Psych’s James Roday Rodriguez, picked up where the season one finale (also directed by Rodriguez) left off in the Game Maker storyline.

Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) and her family have been in lockdown at home for a week after finding a cryptic message from the Game Maker in their groceries, and everyone is over it. A young single mother who bears a strong resemblance to Morgan and lives around the corner from her goes missing after a night out. Morgan uses the case as an excuse to go back to the precinct and get to work.

Morgan spends the entire episode trying to convince the team that the Game Maker is responsible while they investigate the missing woman’s ex-husband and employer. Lt. Soto (Judy Reyes), Karadec (Daniel Sunjata), Daphne (Javicia Leslie), and Oz (Deniz Akdeniz) think she might be jumping to conclusions and do what cops on shows like this always do: follow protocol without making intuitive leaps of faith.

Morgan and the audience only caught a brief glimpse of the Game Maker (David Giuntoli) at the end of the season one finale, and Soto has her doubts that Morgan can really remember what he looks like, or that he actually exists at all. But they should know better than to underestimate Morgan’s high potential intellect by now. She crashes out in the squad room just as they get a lead on the missing woman, and Morgan has an epiphany that cracks the complicated plot of the Game Maker’s game wide open.

The episode ends on multiple cliffhangers: Have Soto’s contacts in Nevada located Morgan’s missing husband? Is the missing woman still alive? And whether or not the Game Changer is really behind it all.

As they did in last season’s closer, High Potential gives us a glimpse of David Giuntoli and his sinister smile at the end of this episode, with promises that we’ll see more of him over the season in the post-credits teaser. We also saw new cast member Mekhi Phifer for a moment in a hotel room in Nevada. He’s clearly tied into the missing husband’s storyline, but we’re not sure how.

We did not see Morgan’s maybe-boyfriend, Tom (JD Pardo), the cleaning man turned nurse-in-training. He left town last season but returned for the cheapest-looking Policeman’s Ball ever in the finale. With all of the doe eyes Karadec has been giving Morgan, they might have gotten rid of this guy altogether. If not, he’s a really terrible boyfriend for not checking in on Morgan while she fears for the lives of her children and herself.

There was also no sign of Domenick Lombardozzi’s Gio Conforth. The shady informant who gave Morgan information about her husband last season. Guys like Gio tend to pop up like bad pennies, so I won’t be surprised if he makes an appearance in future episodes.

The pacing of this episode was better than last season’s closer. Now we know they were rushing to set up a multi-episode arc for the Game Changer, and it seems like we’re going to be learning a lot more about Morgan’s husband, Roman, this year. Hopefully, we won’t lose the case-of-the-week format in favor of these deeper storylines. I’m looking forward to Giuntoli flexing his muscles as a psychopath, but not at the expense of the storytelling that drew us all into the show in its first season.

New episodes of High Potential air on Tuesdays on ABC and stream the next day on Hulu.