Many of the best crime thrillers and heist movies are sustained by characters screwing up. As pleasurable as it can be to watch a plan executed flawlessly — an impulse Steven Soderbergh clearly understood with capers like Ocean’s Eleven — what keeps the stakes high is the element of human error. So many movies are structured around the big mistakes that inevitably occur during schemes that seem easy in theory. The plot of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, one of the central inspirations of Full Circle, kicks off with the wrong child being abducted.
Soderbergh’s series incorporates human error at basically every turn, especially as it intersects with our reliance on inherently unpredictable technology. Derek Browne almost lost one of his sons because his phone died and the cheap car charger didn’t work. Aked destroying Louis’s phone almost led to the same result. Even the most powerful players put themselves at risk because of stubbornness; the dangerously charismatic Mrs. Mahabir, for example, is blinded by her superstitions, rushing through ritual after ritual and putting herself on the police’s radar.
I do think, though, that the more these mistakes pile up, the more they start to strain credibility in the storytelling. Last episode, I didn’t necessarily blame Natalia for thinking Edward Chung might help them out, especially when she correctly read her friend’s warning and escaped in the nick of time. But knowing how ruthless Garmen is, why would she and her brother believe he would take them home with his family for $60,000? Hell, why does Xavier briefly seem to trust that Garmen won’t harm them? And would Xavier’s cold-blooded call to sell out Louis really prove his allegiance to the famously suspicious Garmen?
In the appropriately named “Loyalty,†trust issues are still the focus, but it feels like everyone believes each other a little too easily; Garmen’s willingness to immediately accept Xavier’s (somewhat true) story feels a little inconsistent with his character, even if he has a soft spot for the guy. Maybe part of the issue is the structure of this season: Six episodes is a good length for a tight thriller, but a few more might’ve been helpful to really sell us on the characters and their gradually shifting motivations. Then again, this episode clocks in at only 37 minutes, so there was plenty of time to spare if Ed Solomon wanted to. The almost too-speedy pacing of these episodes, and of this season as a whole, is a conscious choice, not an imposition — and it occasionally makes the experience less engrossing instead of more.
The episode begins with the announcement of an NYPD raid on Mahabir’s place during tonight’s big meeting (the final one before they close up shop and complete the circle). The FBI will be in attendance, but Manny from USPIS will be running point after finally passing along Mel’s psych eval. We learn that Mel’s history with Carol was even worse than we knew: After their initial inappropriate meeting, Mel became the subject of three different domestic-violence complaints from Carol. A suspension would seem more than appropriate, even if Manny was only covering up his own corruption.
So Mel mostly sits out the rest of the episode, which pivots to a long-delayed confrontation at the hotel where Derek is staying. Nat and Louis are, for technically the third time, trying to extort the Brownes by offering them Nicky. Like I figured last week, blackmailing Derek with his secret son is a silly idea from the beginning now that they’ve already exposed the truth. Either way, their plans would’ve gone to shit: Aked tracked them here with Nat’s returned phone, and he intends to kill them.
Last week, I really thought there was a chance Aked would flip on Mrs. Mahabir to protect Nat: maybe pretending he killed her and her brother while letting them go free and leave the country or something like that. But, nope, he’s essentially the same spiteful guy we’ve always known him to be — willing to murder his “ex-fiancée†without a second thought. The struggle in the hotel bathroom that leads to Louis shooting him is sudden, intense, and a little cathartic, although it still feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to kill Aked off before he could really develop into a complex character.
But Gerald Jones and Aida continue to nail the utter panic that Louis and Nat are going through in this desperate scramble to get a ticket home. Like Mel later describes herself to Sam, they’re “flailingâ€; from here, they think their only option left is to buy their way onto Garmen’s plane by stealing the valuable painting from the Brownes’ apartment. (Cue National Treasure score.)
With one episode to go, it feels like everything will be converging at one of two places: Mahabir’s house (where Ron Cuneo will be wearing a camera and a wire) and the Brownes’ apartment. With Mel suspended, her main targets are no longer really the higher-ups in Mahabir’s Richmond Hill operation. It’s Sam herself who could potentially help Mel keep her job if she helps the FBI put away some other big-ticket names in other states. She can do that by digging up some of the routing numbers and bank names from the mysterious Series A investments that built Chef Jeff’s empire.
Amid all this action and drama, though, what might stick with me the most are the small, poignant character moments. I didn’t expect Jeff and Gene to be some of my favorite characters in the show, but it’s nice to see them reconnect after years of estrangement, even considering the undoubtedly ghoulish nature of what they got away with. The explanation for the misunderstanding might be a little silly — for all these years, Gene assumed that the initials on the Manny interview transcript stood for “Jeff McCusker†when they actually referred to Sam, whose first name is Jolene — but it leads to a genuinely sweet fraternal reunion. William Sadler does so much with his expression in the moment when Jeff hugs him: He looks confused, struggling with the weight of the realization that one simple misunderstanding led him to shut his brother out of his life for this long. It’s difficult to just flip a switch and go back to the way they used to be, but hopefully now they can heal.
I wish there were a similar sense of tragedy to Aked’s death, or at least a sense of the man Natalia may find herself mourning: not the one who threatened her life, but the one she presumably once genuinely fell for. They’re the same person, but Full Circle only really seems interested in one side.
Elliptical Thoughts
• Interesting scene when Kristin and Gene’s wife discuss Gene’s slow acceptance that his wife would be the breadwinner of the family.
• So Kristin knew about Derek and Charisse all this time. She points out that Derek has punished himself all these years by bending over backward to please Sam, including by living in Manhattan. The episode seems to frame this as a reason for Sam to forgive him like the Charisse/Nicky secret actually saved their marriage.