Simon Ridgway/Simon Ridgway
Spoilers for Industry season-three finale “Infinite Largesse” follow.
Industry’s supercharged season-three finale throws all its characters into extremity, whether by confronting them with a proposal that’s too good to refuse, a dodgy job offer, or sudden deadly violence.
After a season of trying to define herself against the controlling privilege of her father, Marisa Abela’s Yasmin Kara-Hannani chooses to marry Kit Harington’s Henry Muck, who offers hefty financial security, instead of Harry Lawtey’s Robert Spearing, who seems to really love her. It’s a decision that plays out at Muck’s family’s lavish estate (which I visited as they were filming) and puts a pin in many of the season’s obsessions with power and class. Myha’la’s Harper Stern leads the charge against her former employers at Pierpoint, especially Ken Leung’s Eric Tao, which forces the company to sell out to Egyptian firm Al-Mi’raj, while a burned Rob turns all his pain into a psilocybin sales pitch. And when the debt collectors come calling for Sagar Radia’s Rishi, who’d been falling deeper into a gambling hole all season, the man he’d been pretending was his friend shoots his wife point blank.
You might think that’s enough drama to constitute a series finale, but Industry has been renewed for a fourth season, and even before this one started airing, creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were thinking about ideas for the future. “We’re always writing,” Down told me. “We love thinking about what these characters can do next.” Without getting into specifics, he added, “there’s a big time jump between seasons, which should service character progression because we can evolve the characters quite quickly.” The showrunners are also characteristically irreverent about the corners they’ve written themselves into. “We’re going to have to do some serious writing our way out of Rishi’s wife,” Kay said. “Between seasons they’ll discover a cure for a head wound.”
As the show leaves its characters scattered across the chessboard, with the unsettling possibility that Pierpoint’s London offices are packing up shop for good, the creators and cast explain how they decided exactly where the pieces would fall.
Yasmin’s Choice
Simon Ridgway/Simon Ridgway
On a road trip for his psilocybin venture, Yasmin and Rob take a turn into “deepest, darkest Somerset” after Yasmin calls Henry and suggests Rob might pitch him for investment. Rob and Henry do go into business, but in a way, Yasmin and Henry do, too. Yasmin and Rob hook up on the grounds, but Henry’s the one who gets Yasmin’s hand in marriage — a decision she makes with the awareness that, as Henry’s uncle Lord Norton suggests, family connections will bury stories about her father’s death. “It felt like we were telling an old story, but it felt totally correct, this arcane setting and this idea of marrying into money,” said Kay, who also directed the episode with Down. “Yasmin came from all that stuff, suddenly it was stripped away, so how’s she going to get it? The quietest way is through the old money, not new money. In our experience of Britain, that world wields influence to this day.”
The reveal of Yasmin’s decision plays out over a poshest-of-posh dinner table scene reminiscent of something out of Gosford Park or Remains of the Day (the mansion they used for exterior shots is the same as the one in that Merchant-Ivory film), a stylistic break from Industry’s fluorescent-lit realism. When Henry announces he and Yasmin are engaged, the show cuts to a wide shot of Robert and Yasmin alone at the table, sharing a moment of psychic connection as she apologizes to him and he says he understands. That shot was improvised on set, after Kay and Down realized the potential in seeing Yasmin and Rob alone together. “I asked Mickey and Konrad the day before, ‘When we go to shoot the extreme close-ups, would we be able to empty out the room?’” Lawtey said, because it would be easier to perform without so many other people at close quarters. “Then by the time we came around to shoot it, they said ‘We think we might have a bit of an abstract departure where everyone disappears.’ They felt inspired by a practical request and ran with it.”
Yasmin’s arc, Down added, peaks in the episode’s epilogue, when Yasmin tells Harper she had full editorial control and copy approval of a magazine spread about her new life. At the beginning of the season, Yasmin was hounded by the press for being a privileged princess, implicating her for his embezzlement and suggesting she was happily living off his ill-gotten gains. By the end, she’s using that entitlement to warp the press to her advantage. “I don’t want to say she’s a bad guy because I have much love for the character, but it’s a show where the bad guys win sometimes,” Down said. “In the world we live in, the bad guys win often.” Or, as Kit Harington told me, “She chooses the safety of money and this world and its glamor over love. That’s the only way they could do it, the Industry way.” He was himself emotionally torn up by it, though: “I think that’s a really heartbreaking end to the season,” Harington admitted. “On set me, Harry, and Marisa were going, ‘Oh, come on! Why is she going for this guy?!’”
Harper’s Leap
Nick Strasburg/Nick Strasburg
Meanwhile, Harper cozies up to old money in a different way. After promising Sarah Goldberg’s Petra she’ll stop working with Henry’s family pal, the shady financier Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), Harper appears to get bored with following the rules and decides to meet with Otto anyway. She plans to run an all-short fund disguised as a white knight firm but trading on insider info (in her typically maverick logic, “it’s only criminal if we’re caught”), and like several other characters in this episode, suggests she might move to New York to run that business. Down and Kay did not reveal exactly where Industry will decamp next — they intimate they’re interested in how Silicon tech investment has become the center of the financial business, despite what Kay called the “horrific vibe” of the people there — but they did explain the wedge that drove Petra and Harper apart. Petra provides an interesting foil to Harper because she’s similarly ambitious, but draws a line in the sand on the issue of what’s legal. “It’s surprising when characters have the massive ambition and drive that Petra does — an enormously Randian Objectivist sensibility — and not morals, but legal red lines,” Down said. “The majority of people who work in business are like Petra! They’re smart, they’re hungry, they will step on people to get where they need to go, but they don’t necessarily have to commit fraud to do it.”
Rishi’s Rock Bottom
Simon Ridgway/Simon Ridgway
In the epilogue, Rishi comes home to his apartment to discover the loan shark he owes half a million pounds sitting at the dining room table with his wife. When she discovers how much Rishi owes, she begins yelling, and the loan shark suddenly pulls a gun and shoots her in the head. “The high-stakes world that he’s lived in has finally come to dawn,” said Radia. “Rishi could only get away with it for so long, and maybe naively thought he could get away with it. In the upper echelons of banking, people making that type of money feel untouchable to an extent. When this guy is in his room he still thinks he’ll sort it out.”
Shooting that scene, Radia told me, involved putting a lot of trust in Kay and Down to make sure the violence had the appropriate level of disconcerting surprise. “I hope the way it landed was with the shock factor we were looking for” he said. “Hopefully the audience are not going to see it coming, but it was an experience for sure.” Radia’s already thinking about where this moment will take Rishi: “The question it leads you to is, what happens to Rishi after that? Is he someone who changes, or does he go further down that dark hole?”
Eric’s Turn at Bat
Simon Ridgway/Simon Ridgway
Eric encourages Pierpoint to sell out to Al-Mi’raj, then discovers that the firm wants to shut down Pierpoint’s London offices. He’s essentially maneuvered himself out of a job, though things are slightly better between him and Harper (still in his phone as “Harpsichord”), as he gives a quote to Forbes on her addition to a “30 under 30” list. The two get a closing phone conversation, where Harper, having heard about layoffs at Pierpoint, calls to thank Eric for the plug and, though she’d never be so direct, to check in about how he’s holding up. “The call was bittersweet,” Leung said, adding that he liked the image of Eric throwing his baseball bat across the empty trading floor. “Myha’la, Marisa, and Eric came to keep me company and watch the scene, and Myha’la played the other side of the phone call as we taped it. It was sweet, and kind of sad.” There was also the technical challenge of trying to figure out how to throw a bat so that it covered the camera. “I don’t know what it looks like. I did it twice and the rest was edited.”
As an Easter Egg within the episode, Down and Kay had Eric pull from one of their favorite writers, Denis Johnson, in a speech pulled from his short story, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” (also the source of the episode’s title). In that story, an ad man remembers writing a spot for a bank about a rabbit paying off a bear chasing him with a dollar bill, the essential message, which Eric quotes, being that “Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money.” Eric says this in a speech to the Pierpoint employees to shore up their morale and seemingly convince himself of his own investment in the myth of the market. To get the quote approved, Kay said, they had to speak with Johnson’s estate and make sure they were using Johnson’s lines exactly. “They were actually quite particular. We couldn’t insert any words into the sentence or change the clauses,” he said. And the estate insisted Eric acknowledge he’s cribbing from someone else’s language, which Down and Kay decided improved the scene. “It hammers home the cynicism in a nice way,” Kay said. “It’s funny how some lines stay with you as total summation of a theory of life. Nobody ever said it better than Johnson, so to give those lines to Ken, it’s better than anything me or Mickey could have come up with.”
Rob’s Sales Pitch
Nick Strasburg/Nick Strasburg
In Industry’s greatest homage to its father figure Mad Men, the season ends with a very Don Draper-esque sales pitch from its seemingly most openhearted character, Rob. He’s driven away from Yasmin and Henry Muck and finds himself pitching the psilocybin company to former Pierpoint employees in tech-style vests at a Venture Capital firm. “Join us on the ground floor of what’s going to be a spectacular journey,” Rob says, channeling all his recent self-actualization right back into capitalism. “The idea was that he renounces Pierpoint and then just comes to repackage himself: get a new haircut, get a new suit, and then go and sell this,” Kay says. “Going into the psilocybin business was one of those writers room ideas we talked about that became hard to execute in a script, and we were worried was a bit underbaked. Then we were like, actually, this whole show is about how even the most sacred spiritual aspect of anything is for sale. When we were breaking the final episode, Rob’s monologue about taking this amazing experience and trying to print dollars off of it felt true.”
To Down, Rob’s speech also develops out of what he’s just experienced with Yasmin at Henry Muck’s estate. Before Rob drives away from the estate, he remembers her telling him she thinks she’s good at making people fall in love with her, but doesn’t know that she’s ever loved anyone. When the show cuts back to Rob, he’s smiling. Did he actually make Yasmin fall in love with him? Down and Kay want you to ponder that: “The more optimistic reading of that smile — which I actually don’t believe, but an audience member might — is that he thinks, I did make her fall in love with me. It was real and she chose something else,” Kay said. “For me, he’s thinking, God, that person was able to compartmentalize so much stuff and be totally false within that moment, and look at what she’s achieved,” said Down. He suggested Rob may be thinking, “Maybe I have to be a bit more cynical. Maybe I could be a little more like them.”
There’s also a slightly rosier read for Rob somewhere in between: Yasmin’s got the money and the power, but she’s trapped in this marriage. “You could interpret it as him escaping something terrible,” Down said. “She’s being shut, unceremoniously, like the back of the Land Rover, from reality forever. And he gets to drive away in his rental car.”
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