‘Full Circle’ Episode 1 Recap: Mistaken Identities

The Road Warriors never stayed put. Considered one of the greatest tag teams in the history of professional wrestling, the two muscled-and-mohawked behemoths known as Hawk and Animal brought their Mad Max–indebted brand of post-apocalyptic style and mayhem to wrestling promotions across the country and around the world, never staying in one place for very long. They’d dip in, wreck shop, and bounce. It made them superstars.

At the risk of being the first person in human history to compare Steven Soderbergh to a couple of gargantuan ex-bouncers who entered the ring wearing spiked shoulder pads while blasting Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” the director’s career reminds me of theirs quite a bit. Bouncing from genre to genre, style to style, tone to tone, and in this particular case film to television — a medium he visits every few years, directing the shit out some show or other before departing for the movies once again — he’s a journeyman filmmaker in the very literal sense that his filmography is a journey across one boundary after the next. 

Soderbergh’s latest trip to the small/streaming screen, Full Circle, is a reunion with his frequent collaborator, comedy-turned-crime screenwriter Ed Solomon. And based on its trickily plotted, emotionally earnest first episode…well, go ahead and cue up “Iron Man.”

The series premiere (“Something Different”) stars actors Sheyi Cole, Gerald Jones, and Adia as Xavier, Louis, and Natalia, a trio of very nice-seeming young people from Guyana who get caught up in a human-trafficking scheme that brings them to America under false pretenses. Natalia, who’s been here for a while studying to become a massage therapist or acupuncturist or something to that effect, is an indentured servant for Savitri Mahabir (CCH Pounder), the woman who brought her over. Known to all as Mrs. Mahabir, she’s a gangster with the incredibly nasty racket of selling indigent people insurance, then murdering them to collect on the policies. Natalia’s brother Louis and his buddy Xavier are brought over to be hitmen for Mrs. Mahabir, but under very specific circumstances. 

They start out by killing some poor motormouth in a wheelchair for the insurance payout as per usual for the outfit….well, technically, Louis chickens out entirely, while Xavier feels guilty afterwards and begins narc’ing to Mel (Zazie Beetz), a hip young U.S. Postal Inspector (you know the type, such a cliché these days) who’s investigating Mahabir against the orders of her asshole boss Manny (Jim Gaffigan). And here all Xavier wanted to do was meet his long-distance online girlfriend!

But this murder is just an audition for their real job, the job they were imported to do. For as-yet unclear reasons, Mrs. Mahabir believes a recent string of bad luck, culminating in the murder of her brother-in-law over an entirely unrelated beef, is actually traceable to a long-standing vendetta from the old country. Consulting with a sorcerer of some sort (Franklin Ojeda Smith) as well as with the aggrieved party (himself an elderly man), she comes to believe that the only way she can fix things is by inflicting pain on behalf of the wronged family commensurate with the pain her own family once inflicted on them. What can I say? Magic is complicated like that.

Eventually, Louis and Xavier get their marching orders: They’re to help Mrs. Mahabir’s Christopher Motisanti-ass nephew Aked (Jharrel Jerome) kidnap a teenager named Jared (Ethan Stoddard). Jared’s the grandson of celebrity chef nicknamed Chef Jeff (a nebbishy Dennis Quaid), whose glamorous daughter Sam (Claire Danes) and son-in-law Derek (Timothy Olyphant) manage his image and career. The idea seems to be to snatch the kid, extort the family for ransom, and then ultimately kill him in Washington Square Park inside a white circle drawn on the ground by the magic man to complete the ritual.

There’s just one problem. Unbeknownst to anyone involved in the plot, Jared has been summoned to meet with Nicky (Lucian Zanes), a mysterious teenager who lives in a warehouse squat and has been stealing Jared’s belongings for months for reasons unknown. Nicky promises Jared all will be explained if he comes to meet him, so Jared slips past his grandmother Kris (Suzanne Savoy) and does so. Nicky, however, has made the unfortunate decision of wearing Jared’s stolen hoodie and sneakers to the meet, leading Aked and his merry men to believe he’s Jared. 

So while the real Jared heads home to find his panicked family frantically dealing with the kidnappers over the phone, Nicky gets his fingers chopped off with bolt cutters to let the family know this is serious business. Now they’re faced with a dilemma that’s both practical and ethical: How can they help save a kidnapping victim who isn’t actually their son? And what will the kidnappers do if they find out?

It actually all kinda sounds straightforward laid out like that, but watching the thing makes you feel a lot more like Xavier and Louis getting drip-drip-drips of information and instructions from Mrs. Mahabir’s power structure: You learn just enough to get by at any given moment, until the next clue or connection is revealed. The best example of this is the way it seems like Nicky is in cahoots with Mrs. Mahabir, luring Jared out for the kidnappers, until the moment the kidnappers freak out when they realize Jared is breaking his usual routine for the meeting. I’ve loved this kind of editing-driven bait-and-switch ever since I first saw it pulled off in the final act of The Silence of the Lambs, and it doesn’t disappoint here.

Neither does the cast. The best thing I can say about the comparatively inexperienced trio of Adia, Cole, and Jones is that they easily hold their own against prestige-TV vets Olyphant, Danes, Pounder, and Beetz, not to mention actual movie star Quaid. It doesn’t hurt that they’re given the most interesting and high-stakes material of course, but that would mean nothing if they were charisma voids. Instead, they breathe life into their characters’ realization that they’ve been had, and into their conscience-driven decision, suggested by Natalia, to try to save Jared rather than kill him.

For their part, Danes and Olyphant are mostly there to look rich, trim, and gorgeous, which they do. Boy, do they ever! And despite being capable businesspeople, it’s clear they’re as out of their element dealing with a finger-cutting kidnapping as any two humans can be. Indeed, the episode’s best stuff is how it shows the family’s sense of urgency ebbing away when Jared shows up safe and sound; only the finger-cutting video truly snaps them back into action.

Kudos have to be awarded to Chef Jeff, however. He has the presence of mind to ask the fake “Jared” to talk about himself during one of those panicked phone calls set up by the kidnappers; this would both impress the boy’s humanity upon the kidnappers and give Jeff, his family, and his affable security guru Joey (Happy Anderson) more information with which to identify and hopefully save the victim. Contrary to what your expectations regarding celebrity chefs might have been, Jeff seems like an alright guy, a fellow who wears his hair in a boomerish ponytail to his apparent career detriment and plays chess in the park at night. I don’t know how he’ll be as an opponent for Mrs. Mahabir, but he’s certainly Nicky’s best hope.

And while it’s not the kind of weird Copenhagen Cowboy/The Idol fantasia that really revs my engine lately, the show is visually and sonically engrossing. Soderbergh’s cinematography, under his “Peter Andrews” sobriquet, blends casual you-are-there handheld camerawork with slow, stately pans and fades; at least two crucial conversations involving Xavier are seen rather than heard, the kind of off-kilter decision you wish you’d see more from TV filmmakers. The lighting is similarly shifty, sometimes realistic, sometimes romantic. Speaking of romantic, composer Zack Ryan’s score lends the whole thing some string-driven Hollywood glamour.

To transmit all this to the masses, Max (genuinely bizarre not to have HBO in the branding for this show!!!) is trying a best-of-both-worlds approach for its release pattern, airing new installments in bingeable pairs but doling out their release one week at a time to build anticipation. I think it’ll work; that’s maybe the ideal way to consume this show. At any rate, after the unjustly reviled The Idol pissed everyone off, a show directed by the universally beloved Soderbergh is the balm of Gilead for the streamer. (Which, by the way, should be paying and treating all its writers and actors fairly. Just take the money out of Zaslav’s cut, he’s good for it!) It’s pretty good stuff if you’re just a viewer, too. Looking for your new crime fix? You just found it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.