Simon Ridgway/HBO
Spoilers follow for the third season of Industry through finale “Infinite Largesse,” which premiered on HBO on September 29.
Like Rishi throwing cash down on a blackjack table in a gambler’s mania and frenemies Harper and Yasmin trading slaps straight out of Dynasty, Industry is unpredictable. Over its three seasons, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s series about a crew of young grads pulled under the toxic sway of the finance industry has set a frantic pace; characters sleep around, change alliances, and stab each other in the back constantly. As quickly as you can say “blah, blah, blah, ESG bullshit,” Industry has shaken up the board and rearranged its pieces yet again.
Which is why its latest season finale, “Infinite Largesse,” feels like such an open question mark for the series, which was recently renewed for a fourth season. This ending could have easily worked as a series finale, with Harper going further to the financial dark side with a new role dabbling in corporate espionage, Robert leaving the bank, Yasmin securing a wealthy husband, and Rishi hitting rock bottom. There is a sense of finality in each of those storylines, but they’re also compelling enough that they leave us wondering where a fourth season of Industry could go. The series’s willingness to blow up relationships, reveal hidden secrets, and zig the plot one way after setting it up to zag the other way give it a lot of options. Let’s go short and long on Industry’s future.
What happens to Eric and Harper?
The biggest lie Eric tells Yasmin is when he says of his relationship with Harper, “It was nothing special.” It was. These two loathe each other because of how vulnerable they’ve been, how much they know that the other can slash their soft bellies whenever they please. Am I, a sicko, still rooting for them to somehow get back together? Of course, especially because their enmity has softened by the end of “Infinite Largesse.” Harper was never going to be placated working in a place where the employees share doughnuts; she hates that she’s shown Petra how impetuous and personally obsessive she can be. Harper has already planned an exit strategy by securing funding for a short-only fund that will rely on corporate espionage and financial fraud to make money, and Eric could absolutely be swayed to her side again. He still calls her Harpsichord! He’s fresh off stabbing Bill Adler in the back; he sold out his “immigrant mentality, American promise, this place made me” story to a company that fired him; and his family is gone. My man has nothing left to lose. (Except for hair dye; he could definitely lose some of that.)
What happens to Henry and Yasmin?
The series spends a lot of time this season setting up Henry Muck’s web of influence — his newspaper-owning uncle Alexander, investor godfather Otto, and their Tory protege Aurore Adekunle — and inching him along the failson path toward government service. I don’t think you cast Kit Harington for just a season, so I can see a time jump in which Henry is trying to start anew as elected official. It’s probably easier to do that when you’re already a member of the landed gentry, and when you already have a family-approved ally like Aurore, Otto and Alexander’s preferred “future prime minister,” in your corner. Whether that will make Henry happy, though, is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, I’m sure we can all agree Yasmin is never going to find her joy in being a wife or a mother, or by being an advocate for women (even if she may herself have been sexually abused by her father, as suggested in the finale). Industry has lifted elements of Ghislaine Maxwell’s life for Yasmin’s all season, including Charles Hanani’s Jeffrey Epstein-like abuse of young girls. But I don’t really want to see Yasmin still being blamed for Charles’s crimes, or even covering them up on her own. Instead, what I would prefer: Yasmin secretly working as a dominatrix. Psychosexual mind games are this woman’s skillset; she should be leaning in.
Nick Strasburg/HBO
Will she, though? Probably not. What feels more possible is that Henry — who also invested in the ayahuasca startup Robert is working for — finds a way into the government and makes a name for himself as a compassionate conservative. Think of how, during his official questioning about Lumi’s collapse, he put all the blame on Pierpoint instead of taking any for himself: “The only thing I’m guilty of is optimism. If there is a predatory side to capitalism, they are on it, we are not.” Maybe Yasmin’s magazine shoot with tweeds and a rifle is part of a full populist rebrand that nominally pits Henry and Yasmin against the financial sector, one in which uncle Otto and his new protege Harper are running amok. But the pair won’t meet any actual resistance from representatives like Henry or new family members like Yasmin; the two of them have too much to lose. Yasmin doesn’t have any friends left besides Harper!
What happens to Al-Mi’raj Pierpoint?
I can’t lie; the Gulf representatives who ask Pierpoint’s snooty board, “We would like to know why you think your imperialism is better than ours,” did get a fist-pump out of me. As Eric told us in the season premiere, Pierpoint was established by slavers, and we’ve seen the generations of awful people who have risen through its ranks, and the board’s implicit distrust of the Egyptian Ali El Mansour, his powerful family, and the Al-Mi’raj Holding Company — the bank’s own clients! — does have a racist quality. But then Industry does what it does so well, reminding us that everyone at this upper level of wealth, power, and class sucks.
Of course this sovereign wealth company forcibly instills its conservative ideology on the bank it just purchased for legitimacy and foreign influence. Of course the remaining Pierpoint executives don’t stand up against the waves of cuts and automation in order to save their own jobs. Of course Eric placates the rebellious staff with a speech about how “money is peace … money is civilization,” and then sneers at his boss Wilhelmina that she’s gone from “Madame ESG to the mouthpiece for a state,” as if he’s not also a hypocrite. Wilhelmina is right, of course, when she says “We both know it’s all the same”; people like Otto Mostyn and Alexander Norton, with their fear-mongering and manipulation of the country’s political system, probably aren’t that different from the people running the Al-Mi’raj Holding Company and washing its royal money. So whatever happens to this new version of Pierpoint, on some existential level, it probably won’t be that different at all.
What happens to Sweetpea and Anraj?
These two crazy kids. He knows how she takes her coffee and she got him a new job at Leviathan Alpha, and both of them screwed over their torturer and boss Rishi in the process. Now kiss.
What happens to Rishi?
How does this show come back from Rishi’s wife Diana getting murdered in front of him? Industry was never going to let Rishi win; he’s an addict and a narcissist (as is basically everyone in his circle) and it’s fitting for him to again be on the downslide. He got rejected by Leviathan Alpha, his marriage is breaking up, he no longer seems to have a relationship with his son Hugo; things are bad. But Diana’s execution by Rishi’s bookie Vinay, to whom he owes more than 600,000 pounds, feels like a point of no return.
There are two ways a death like this could go: the Friday Night Lights route, in which a murder eventually fades out of the characters’ memories, and the Succession model, in which the guilt inspired by this killing becomes an overwhelming, corrosive force. Or, Industry could add to its pattern of “POC men serving as Pierpoint’s victims,” and have Rishi join Hari and Gus as characters the bank chewed up and then spit out — and away from the series’s main narrative. That would be a pretty cold end for Rishi, whose final scene involves Diana’s blown-open head falling downward into his birthday cake, but Industry can be very unsentimental when it wants to be.
What happens to Robert?
I just want him to be this happy and carefree for the rest of his days, especially if that means sashaying to America as part of his new pharma job and reuniting with former BFF, roommate, and colleague Gus. (Who presumably was not in the series’s third season because of his work as an android in Alien: Romulus.) If Emily can be in Paris and Rome, why can’t Robert be in Joshua Tree hocking ayahuasca? Be free, my sweet prince!
What happens to Industry?
Pierpoint is no longer what it was: Eric fired Yasmin, railroaded Bill Adler, and then got fired himself. Harper (for now), Sweetpea, and Anraj are at Leviathan Alpha. Robert might be moving to the United States, Yasmin is marrying into nobility, and Rishi has hit rock bottom. Industry basically blew up its narrative center, so fully ending storylines and scattering characters that “Infinite Largesse” really could have been a permanent conclusion.
But considering the way Industry has modeled Eric and Harper’s relationship after Don Draper and Peggy Olson, I could see a version of the show that takes another move out of Mad Men’s playbook: getting the gang back together for their own fund. I theorized earlier that Eric and Harper could work together again for Otto, and I stand by that! Thinking further ahead, though, I could see Industry mimicking the creation of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce by having Eric and Harper assemble a group of fuckups — a financial suicide squad, if you will — that use the shadiest schemes and tactics they can dream up to embarrass any and everyone who stands in their way.
Industry needs centralized claustrophobia and freneticism to keep its personal and professional relationships crackling, and just on a practical level, it works best when all of these people are competing against and complaining to and about one another in a shared space or in service of a common mission. That format can’t sustain the cast being too divided. So get Rishi in on this scam, have Yasmin and Henry’s money fund it, and have Robert cross paths with them as he’s searching for more VC money for the pharma firm. Imagine Mad Men’s “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.,” but shut the door, have a seat, you can’t get out because we locked you in here, and now we’re shaking out your pockets for cash. It’s the Industry way!
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