‘Full Circle’ Episode 5 Recap: The Downward Spiral

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Natalia wonders aloud at one point, “that [the circle] works and it’s all broke up now, or that it never worked in the first place.” After the show’s penultimate episode (“Loyalty”), I find myself in Natalia’s shoes, seeing things through the lens of Mrs. Mahabir’s superstitions. Though the crime boss believes she can set things back on track, maybe the breaking of the ritual really did irreparably harm, well, pretty much everyone. The thread that runs through the whole episode is that everybody’s lies are getting exposed while their plans fall apart. 

My favorite example of this involves Sam Brown, née Jolene Samantha McCusker. For years, she’s been covering up the fact that she ratted out her uncle Gene to the cops over his involvement in the shady Guyanese real-estate venture that appears to be at the center of the circle. But when Sam’s parents Chef Jeff and Kristin pay a visit to Gene and his wife Cindy, it quickly becomes apparent that the “J.M” who came forward and made a statement in Gene’s possession wasn’t “Jeffrey” at all. 

The moment hits home thanks to the way actors Dennis Quaid, Suzanne Savoy, William Sadler, and Kristin Griffith play, or underplay, the moment: Jeff and Kristin are immediately struck dumb by the realization, Gene is too fixated on his belief in Jeff’s guilt to understand what they’re reacting to, and Cindy has to gently guide him to the truth. It’s as expertly executed as the big park switcheroo was, in its own way; the subsequent happy afternoon the husbands and wives spend together feels hard earned.

And it gets a bitter little follow-up when a drunken Kristin reveals to Sam that she knew about Derek’s little indiscretion all this time thanks to checking on the company books; since he paid back the money he borrowed to facilitate the NDA with Nicky’s mom, Kristin says, she knew he’d be trustworthy in the end.

I feel similarly bullish about how the final sad collapse of the kidnapping plot goes down. Natalia and Louis track Derek to the hotel where he’s been exiled by Sam over his love child Nicky. They demand money or they’ll reveal his secret; he seems almost, but not quite, delighted to tell them it doesn’t matter anymore since everyone who’d care knows about it anyway. 

Nicky spoils the moment by making a break for it, but he and his pursuers run right back into the room when they see a gun-toting Aked approaching with murder on his mind. Louis wrestles with him, the gun goes off, and Aked dies, sparing Natalia his wrath. But again, the whole thing works as well as it does because of the acting involved, in this case Adia as Natalia. Her despair when she’s convinced she’s about to be executed, her terror when the fight breaks out, and her horror and devastation upon seeing Aked’s murder pour out of her in an endless series of choked sobs and heart-rending wails. Nothing in the show so far sells you more on the idea that these poor people have no business being anywhere near this kind of life.

This, too, gets a nasty coda, when Derek is forced to accompany his wounded son Nicky to the hospital There’s an excruciating scene where an unseen nurse asks Derek all the usual questions a parent gets asked about their kid when seeking medical treatment — date of birth, height, weight, allergies, medications — and can answer absolutely none of them. Brutal stuff.

But let’s not forget about the third member of the young Guyanese trio, Xavier — which leads us to another sad collapse. Taken into custody by Garmen and Paul, he barely hesitates when presented with the option of ratting Louis and Natalia out to save his own skin. Through Xavier and his phone calls with Louis, the braintrust learns about Edward Chung’s brief involvement, the culprits behind the switch at the park, you name it. They make the mistake of trusting him with their plan to steal an expensive painting and sell it to raise the money for the flight home, a flight they’ll never be taking since there’s no room on the fleeing Garmen’s plane anyway. You hate to see this friendship fall apart like this.

There’s one more life yet to fall into ruin. Mel learns that the interagency task force assembled for the Mahabir case is planning a raid, though Manny will be taking point rather than her. However, that’s the least of her problems; when her supervisor pulls her aside she realizes Manny sent in her bad psych eval, but that’s the second least of her problems. It turns out that our manic pixie postal investigator has a rich, well-documented, known-to-the-department history of committing domestic abuse! How quirky and charming!

Throw in the fact that the girlfriend filing at least some of these complaints was a witness in a case Mel worked, and she’s suspended as of noon the next day…which gives her just enough time to pump Sam for information she can use about the crooked investors in the real-estate swindle, so she can find more traffickers, so she can find more trafficked people, so she can turn that information over to the FBI agent on the case, so she can maybe get a job at the Bureau instead. It’s a Hail Mary, as Mel herself puts it, but on this show stranger things have happened.

But you want to know what my big hope is for the finale, more so than wanting this or that character to get freedom or justice or their comeuppance? It’s that the deal at the center of the circle never gets fully explained. The way writer-creator Ed Solomon and director Steven Soderbergh have depicted the chaos that followed from it is good enough for me. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here 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.