Subsurface Scattering issues

Hello all! As always, thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

I’m trying to make a subsurface material. All the tutorials I’ve seen make it out to be really simple for some basic functionality, but I can’t get it to behave like everyone else’s and I have no idea why. As you can see in **1 **it does look like the material does *something, *and it is getting a lot of light. When you look at **2 **though absolutely no light is getting through the objects themselves, just a slight halo at the edges. 3 and 4 show my material and light settings.

Number **5 **shows a separate issue I’m having. With any material I have set to “subsurface” as a shading model I’m getting these weird bands of shadow when a light is at an extreme angle to the surface.

Any insight into what I might be doing wrong is greatly appreciated.