High Potential Finale Shocker: Major Star Not Returning as Series Regular After Character’s Fate Is Left Unclear (Here are the details👇)

Warning: Spoilers ahead for ABC’s High Potential season 2 finale, now streaming on Hulu.

High Potential ended its second season with fans at the edge of their seats.

On Tuesday, April 7, the final episode of High Potential season 2 aired on ABC, with the fate of Capt. Nick Wagner (Steve Howey) hanging in the balance.

PEOPLE can confirm that the episode marked Howey’s final as a series regular, concluding a one-year deal as part of the hit crime series. Deadline was first to report, and the outlet added that Howey could still return as a future guest star.

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In the episode, titled  “Family Tree,” Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) and Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson) are tasked with investigating a death at a Los Angeles hotel. When all is said and done, Wagner calls up Morgan to let her know that he’s meeting up with someone connected to Roman. Morgan then heads to the park Wagner is at to find him — only to discover Wagner seriously injured with stab wounds. It isn’t clear whether Wagner survived.

The episode ends there, with Wagner’s fate totally up in the air months after the captain made his first appearance in season 2 in September 2025.

Howey, the actor who portrays him, is marking a busy chapter at the moment himself, appearing in Prime Video’s Off Campus, reportedly joining Netflix’s Ransom Canyon season 2 and securing a stint on The Lincoln Lawyer.

While Olson told PEOPLE there were “so many places that we can go with this next season,” she said it’s “very exciting and it definitely starts with” whether or not Wagner survives. She did promise that Wagner’s dog, Ingrid, makes it out just fine. “Oh my God! Don’t even worry about the dog,” she said. “Ingrid’s coming home. The entire season can be about that dog, as far as I’m concerned. I loved her.”

She later shared, “Now more than ever, now that somebody that she deeply cares about got really hurt or is potentially dead, everything changed. I mean, I think she just wants to put the lid back on, but it’s too late. That’s just always so much more fun to watch when things are completely off the rails, and it’s certainly more fun to play.”

When asked if season 3 will pick off where season 2 wrapped, Olson told Variety it’s “all in discussion as we speak, so I can’t say anything, but there is a lot on the table.”

Showrunner Todd Harthan reportedly exited High Potential after season 2 as he now focuses on the Disney+ live-action series Eragon. Speaking with Deadline, he teased the final episode of season 2 as “just as satisfying, if not even more exhilarating push-off into a potential season 3.”

“What we’re plotting and planning, it has a different flavor than what we did last year, but I think it’s gonna be even more personal, even more propulsive, even more surprising than what we did in season 1, because we’ve learned some things and the characters have gotten richer,” he said in January.

High Potential is now streaming on Hulu.