‘Full Circle’ Episode 3 Recap: I Know Something You Don’t Know

Move over, Transformers: There’s a new “more than meets the eye” show in town. Returning for its second double dose of twisty crime hijinks, Full Circle spends its third episode (“Jared’s Body”) revealing one surprising connection between the players after the other. It does so with minimalist precision, serving up just enough information to get the audience on the right track, confident everyone watching is smart enough to keep up. Personally? I appreciate that vote of confidence. Everyone else seems to be getting in on the investigation; why shouldn’t we?

It’s now the day after the “kidnapping” of “Jared Browne,” aka the rescue of Nicky Henriksen by some of the very people sent to kidnap him without realizing they got the wrong kid. By now reports of a gunshot in the park have reached the NYPD and a multi-agency task force has been assembled; thanks to some strategic cover-your-ass lying by her boss Manny, the insufferable but irritatingly perceptive postal inspector Melody Harmony (lol) joins the team. 

And boy, do I not envy them. The secrets the episode uncovers make this less like solving a crime and more like disassembling a spider web thread by thread.

Jared’s mom Sam, for example, suspects that her husband Derek isn’t merely upset about what went down, that he’s hiding something more. Mel suspects the same thing. They’re both right: Nicky is actually Derek’s secret illegitimate son from a relationship with an oft-referenced mystery woman named Charisse (Rachel Annette Helson). She’s not much of a mystery at all once you get to know her, just a lady who fell for a guy using an assumed name, had a three-night stand, and wound up with a kid she didn’t want and was no good at raising even though she works with kids, and apparently very well at that, for a living. 

Sam, however, is keeping secrets of her own. In much the same way that Derek’s avoidance of answering direct questions about Nicky triggered Mel’s suspicion, Sam’s ever-so-slight overreaction to the question of whether or not the kidnappers had Guyanese accents triggers it as well. Once again, Mel’s instincts are annoyingly correct: Turns out Sam’s dad Chef Jeff and his cop brother Gene (the marvelous character actor William Sadler) were involved in some kind of crooked deal back in Guyana over a real estate development called “The Colony at Essequibo,” before Sam ratted her uncle out. (Gene also provided the seed money for the Chef Jeff empire it seems; lord only knows where he got it from.)

Fortunately for Sam and unfortunately for everyone else, no one knows it was her rather than Jeff who snitched on Gene…except for, get this, Mel’s boss Manny, who was an NYPD detective on the case and who worked with Gene prior to Sam getting him in hot water. 

But things aren’t going much better for Team Kidnapper than they are for Team Kidnappee, even putting aside the fact that they snatched the wrong kid, shot a dummy instead of a human, and completely failed to execute the ritual Mrs. Mahabir had planned to restore her crime family’s good fortune. You know how along with the name “Charisse,” one of the items of information the kidnappers somehow knew about even though they weren’t supposed to is the existence of Chef Jeff’s credit line at a nearby casino? Garmen, the consigliere of kidnapping mastermind Mrs. Mahabir, is like $90K in the hole at that place, leading casino security boss Seymour (Stephen Badalamenti; yes, he’s related to David Lynch composer Angelo, who’s his uncle) to believe the kidnapping was intended in part to use the casino’s own money to pay off his debts. 

And the crack team assembled for the task is fraying pretty badly. Natalia has gone AWOL, minding “Jared” in a hotel room and taking care of his partially severed ear. (It was his ear, not his finger, that got snipped. My bad!) Louis wants to hang onto the kid in order to re-kidnap him and extort the family for ransom so that he and Natalia and Xavier will have a way to buy back passage to Guyana. Natalia is aghast, but also suggests using a friend in the organization of Mahabir’s rival Edward Chung (Henry Yuk) for help.

Xavier, meanwhile, is called to a meeting with his superiors Aked, Viktor, and Paul. By now they suspect that it was Louis and Natalia who were the informants, not the poor sap they murdered the night before. Further, Aked has figured out that the body they buried wasn’t Jared’s, though he has yet to suss out that it wasn’t even a body at all.

Even though these “whoa, wait a second” moments come at us fast and furious throughout the episode, it’s a much less suspense-driven effort than that outstanding second installment. Which stands to reason: You need a breather after all of that. It’s also a less visually striking hour of TV than what preceded it, which again I think is fair considering the comparatively low-stakes nature of the events depicted.

What you get instead are character insights that buoy the material above the waters of rote crime protagonists and antagonists. Mel being really good at her job despite having the glib affect of a Joss Whedon character — unequivocally meant to be annoying here rather than celebrated as it is in Whedonland — is a clever trick. Derek’s guilt-ridden fixation on the idea that maybe he unconsciously sabotaged the ransom dropoff on purpose, maybe to cover up the existence of his second son or maybe because he didn’t love the kid the way he loves Jared or who knows what else, humanizes him at just the right moment considering what else we learn about him in this episode. Jeff’s helplessness without Sam and Gene’s begrudgingly respectful statement that she’s too smart to be her dad’s handler indicate how crucial she is to the whole Chef Jeff empire. (This is a guy who’d clearly much rather play chess with his gravely ill “fan” Clarence, actually the engineer of the whole plot, than do press for his business.)

And once again, actors Sheyi Cole, Gerald Jones, and Adia hold their own against a full phalanx of well-known movie and TV stars, bearing fruit that comparable casting decisions on a show like, say, the Apple+ sci-fi epic Foundation (anchored by Lee Pace and Jared Harris on one side and a pair of relative unknowns on the other) have yet to yield. Credit there must also surely go to writer Ed Solomon and director Steven Soderbergh, who very clearly know exactly what to give these characters and how to coax it out of them to set up those actors for the success their talents deserve. 

So in Episode 1 (“Something Different”) we establish the stakes, in Episode 2 (“Charger”) we pull off a heist, and in episode three we reveal twist after twist. That’s a pretty solid flight plan for a six-episode show, though it leaves me wondering what course it will chart from here. Can it maintain a pace this brisk without falling apart? From what I’ve seen, I trust it to make its to its destination in one piece.

(PS: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Full Circle wouldn’t exist.)

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.