‘Full Circle’ Episode 4 Recap: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

I think I’ve sussed out what Full Circle is up to. Besides being the quintessential Gripping New Crime Thriller, that is. The show’s fourth episode (“Safe in the Circle”) is like a Jenga tower made of lies, dating back decades from the kidnapping at the center of the show, and the characters spend it pulling the tower apart piece by piece. Everyone lies, as (unfortunately) Morrissey once sang. That’s the big idea.

Naturally, an episode centered on uncovering untruths turns most of the characters into junior detectives, if they aren’t full-fledged detectives already. Thanks to the perpetually meddling postal inspector Mel, Sam figures out that her husband Derek had, er, extracurricular activities that contributed to the kidnapping, and he confesses he has a secret son with another woman, who was kidnapped in Jared’s stead.

On the flipside, and also thanks to Mel sublimely irritating perceptiveness, Derek figures out that Sam, and her father Jeff, and her uncle Gene, all had something to do with the Guyanese connection to the kidnapping. His forensic accounting in Chef Jeff’s books turns up a series of bribes and payoffs designed to grease the skids for a luxury condo called, you guessed it, the Colony at Essequibo. (Calling a building built by corrupt white dudes in Guyana “the Colony” is no accident.) So no one’s exactly a saint here. 

Continuing her investigation, Mel confronts her boss Manny with her (correct) belief that he was involved in the crime as well, helping to take down Gene in order to take his job. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Mel realizes Sam herself was directly involved too, albeit in a way we haven’t been told about yet; suffice it to say that Manny says over and over that he “saved” her by having her destroy key evidence, and that all she has to do is continue to do nothing and they’ll both be in the clear. 

Mel also doesn’t realize that Manny, sensing trouble coming from her direction, has finally turned in her disqualifying psych eval — she has borderline personality disorder — to their superior. Let’s hope she wraps this investigation up quickly, I guess?

Things aren’t much more honest on the other side of the kidnapping, to say the least. After calling up Sam expecting to ransom “her son” and getting told they don’t have her son at all, Louis and Natalia finally get the truth out of Nicky. Much to my delight, they proceed to metaphorically pound their heads on the desk about how stupid his plan was. He was gonna get back in his biological father’s life by robbing his other son, and this would somehow magically get him invited to live with them? “One big happy family?” Louis says, giving the impression that if he weren’t afraid for his life he’d be laughing his ass off.

Natalia gets lied to in an even more consequential way when she receives an offer from a friend in the organization of Mrs. Mahabir’s rival Edward Chung to come in for a meeting, exchanging her insider info on Mahabir and her crew for passage back to Guyana. Chung, however, senses an opportunity to patch things up with Mahabir and offers to hand over not only Natalia, but half of the money he stole from her slain brother-in-law, because he was stealing money from her, too. Fortunately Natalia escapes, just as she’d narrowly dodged getting captured by her fiancé (or ex-fiancé, as he’d insist) Aked when they left to visit Mr. Chung in the first place.

Mrs. Mahabir’s second-in-command Garmen is having marital woes that Sam and Derek could relate to, meanwhile. When his wife goes through his books, she finds $88,000 owed to the casino. A doting father when he’s not a consigliere, he’s been lying has ass off. Meanwhile he’s contemplating jumping ship anyway because he’s sick of Mrs. Mahabir, her wizard friend Mr. Willoughby, and their insistence that it’s magic rather than shitty management that’s messing up their operation. 

Finally there’s Xavier, who gets picked up by Mel and brought to a hotel for his safety, where he’s told to stay put and not call anyone. Being a young man in love who finds himself in possession of an expensive hotel room with no chaperones, he naturally calls up his girlfriend…whom Mahabir’s operatives follow right to Xavier. But Xav is no dummy, even if the booty call was pretty dumb; he knows they must want him alive or they’d have shot him the moment they broke in. 

And it’s true: The show is building to a big magically-mandated meeting Mrs. Mahabir is calling to once again close the circle, which will include unlikely guests like Xavier and the hapless casino employee Ron Cuneo (Danny Hoch, whose scene with Jim Gaffigan’s Manny is the comic highlight of the hour) — “loose ends,” as the cops put it, whom Mrs. Mahabir wants to tie up. 

So there’s your thesis again, courtesy of writer Ed Solomon: Everyone lies, and the small ones — infidelity, a little corporate bribery, shooting yourself in the foot to collect a pension you were going to lose — lead seamlessly into the ones that they make crime thrillers about — kidnapping, extortion, ritual murder. Tying it all together is Steven Soderbergh’s almost compulsively watchable way of putting a film together, and grand suspenseful music in the old Hollywood tradition by composer Zack Ryan. This is a fun one, folks. 

(NB: 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.