'Industry' Embraced Chaos in Season 3

HBO’s Industry is a terrarium where we can watch the deadly, carnivorous, cannibalistic flora of late-stage capitalism from a safe distance, contained in glass. Misdeeds as bad as what we see on show or worse happen every day in our real financial system, but to see that nastiness contained within a fictional space where we can confront it with low stakes is a powerful draw. This season, Industry embraced the chaos and took viewers on a rollercoaster ride through its most dangerous games yet, which surfaced the show’s sharpest criticisms of the finance world to date and forced our pretty bankers into turbulent growth arcs. Now that it’s over, I want to sort through the wreckage of season three’s wide-ranging finale and speculate about where it might lead in season four.

Beware: there are spoilers for the third season of Industry beyond this point.

The finale found Industry’s ensemble (Harper, Eric, Yasmin, Robert, and Pierpoint itself) within reaching distance of their happy endings, except for Harper (Myha’la Herrold), who got black-bagged into a meeting with one of the ghouls who seem to run the world. Eric (Ken Leung) put both his skills at corporate evangelism and backstabbing to great use by shanking his best work friend and facilitating the sale of Pierpoint to Al-Miraj, an Egyptian holding company. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) seemed poised to run away with Robert (Harry Lawtey) on his capital-raising tour for psilocybin start-up LittleLabs. Could these two lovebirds finally pay off a three-season flirtation at last? Could Eric be deified as the prophet of Pierpoint?

Of course not. The bones of Industry are marrowed with cynicism. If anything, Industry shows that fortune is a spinning wheel and luck will always turn.

Take Eric, the hero who saved Pierpoint from ruin and rallies the rattled traders who are worried about what the bank’s sale to Al-Miraj will mean. He assuages them with depressing aphorisms like “money is peace.” This works for the moment, and Eric’s future seems assured, but the ax-fall isn’t far away. A few months later, a bewildered Eric is called into the Al-Miraj Pierpoint building and softly maneuvered into termination. It turns out that Al-Miraj is actually an Egyptian sovereign wealth fund and they’ve decided to focus their trading presence in New York. The London trading floor is shut down, and the office is dedicated to managing Egypt’s money. The severance package comes to $20 million over two years, but in a surprise heart-to-heart with Harper, he confesses it’s “not enough.” Leung’s ruefulness implies Eric knows there will never be “enough.” Still, he wrote a blurb for Harper in Forbes 30 Under 30, so maybe Eric can grow from his fall.

I saw the doom of Robert and Yasmin’s romance in Yas’ eyes as she watched him scratch that lotto ticket. Calling Henry Muck (Kit Harington) wasn’t only an effort to help Rob raise more LittleLabs capital, it was also a play to reunite with Henry. Henry has been on a mindfulness kick ever since he giggled his face off on ayahuasca a few episodes ago, and he’s amenable to Rob’s pitch when they meet at Muck’s newspaper-owning grandfather’s manor in “deepest, darkest Somerset.” Said grandfather thinks an engagement with Yasmin would even Henry out and heavily implies that he can kill stories on Yas’ behalf if she were to become his family. She appears to reject the idea when she fucks Rob in the gardens, but alas, she goes to Henry and negotiates an engagement. They announce it at the birthday dinner, and Rob is crushed.

After a three-month time jump, we find Yas planning her wedding with the help of Alondra, the woman from Charles’ yacht whose silence was bought with a job. Alondra tells Yas that Charles and his friends assaulted girls as young as 12 on the yacht and that if he ever treated Yasmin that way, she’s there for her. Yas is shattered, but she vehemently denies it happening to her. Marisa Abela plays this somewhat ambiguously, but it certainly seems possible. Yasmin has Alondra fired for her candor, casting that reality away.

Earlier in the episode, Yasmin is accused of sounding just like her father and to some extent, she appears to step into his role with her choice to marry Muck. Charles was an unserious layabout, a grifter, and potentially a child molester who used his wealth to insulate himself from consequences. Muck is an unserious layabout, too, one that play-acts business genius playing with functionally endless cash. Through marriage, Yasmin commits to unserious personhood and uses her status, power, and money to protect herself from realities she doesn’t wish to acknowledge.

Rob settles in as the Don Draper of mushrooms, touring VCs in California. He sought higher purposes but ended up shilling “enlightenment in a pill” to ennui-poisoned rich people. Pretty bleak! As for Harper, she learns that Otto Mostyn actually loves that she pulled a risky gamble using insider information and wants more of it! Harper initially rejects Mostyn, committing to the soft life of office donuts and rule-following with Petra, but that was never going to be Harper’s thing. She goes back to Mostyn with a hot new pitch: she’ll go to New York and start a fund that uses insider trading to short unethical companies and profit off their downfall. Mostyn loves it, so I guess it’s on for season four. The idea sounds a bit like a TNT drama, but this anti-heroic work seems right up Harper’s alley.

In assorted loose ends and season four possibilities, if Rob is in America, he and Harper could cross paths again. Industry made sure viewers know Rob and Yas didn’t use protection so the soapy potential of a baby seems on the table. As for Rishi, our last look at him felt final; being left with the corpse after your bookie shoots your estranged wife is brutal. As The Watch pointed out, someone was killed for $500,000 while Eric sniffed at $20 million. Here’s to Industry, the bell jar placed over the carnivorous plant called capitalism.