Photo: Jessica Perez/Disney
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, such as Morgan joining the LAPD in exchange for their finding her first husband, Roman, who disappeared 15 years ago and is still missing. The season-one finale also introduced a trivia-happy foe, the Game Maker, who appears to be targeting Morgan and her family as the second season begins. Yet this show is at heart a mystery of the week, with Morgan using 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.
Photo: Jessica Perez/Disney
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.
Photo: Christine Bartolucci/Disney
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 first husband.
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 husband 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.
Photo: Jessica Perez/Disney
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 factoid 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!
