Industry makes our jaws drop to the floor

The moment I saw “Nikki Beach, Or: So Many Ways To Lose” start right back on the Hanani boat (named Lady Yasmin, of course), I had a feeling of dread take over. Yas’ words from the last episode—about how she’d killed her father—suddenly didn’t feel like hyperbole or the late-night melodramatic ramblings of a young woman at her wits’ end. Suddenly, they felt like a mournful confession.     

We may be tempted to compare Industry to Succession (as I have), but maybe we should be thinking of it alongside another modern masterpiece from the golden era of Peak TV: Mad Men. That was a show where workplace relationships helped comment and color the culture around them—and for anyone who’s seen “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency,” you know that AMC show could go to bold and bloodied places you’d never have imagined possible.

I give all that as a preamble to say that this episode may well rank alongside that Mad Men classic. 

Yas (Marisa Abela), as we’ve seen throughout this season, clearly didn’t have a great time on her father’s boat. That’s where we first see her once more, irked by her father’s casual condescension. (He was eating out a woman right on her bed!) As he tries to apologize for his actions, you can tell Yas has had enough; and as the crew prepares to lift the anchor to head to their next destination, Yas and Charles (Adam Levy) move back up to the deck where they air out all their grievances: “I have no memory of ever loving you,” she tells him. And even when they hug in a seeming capitulation to how fucked-up their relationship is, he’s still prompting Yas to further berate him. She all but tells him she hopes he dies, as it’d be the best thing he could ever do. Which is maybe not something to say when you’re on a moving boat to a drunken man who has long felt inviolate and invincible.

Because he does jump! And then Yasmin does nothing! Nothing! She’s in shock, then toys with the many ways this could go, then snaps out of it much too late. The boat glides away as he yells after her.

Was your jaw on the floor? Mine sure was. Especially once Harper (Myha’la) learns what happens (an hour later!) and helps nurse her friend back into herself and concocts a plausible alibi for Yas to move through this absurd scenario. Harper-as-fixer is a no-brainer since she’s long been able to carefully calculate what’s the canniest move at any given time. And it’s fitting we start with this show of friendly affection because by the end of this episode (which does return us to the two of them at the boat, reframing a scene we’d already seen a few weeks ago), it’s clear Yas and Harper may never be able to reconcile.

Their friendship will come to a head because, as we’ve been hearing now for weeks, Pierpoint is at an economic precipice. Harper gained that intel by eavesdropping and therefore can’t really bank on that. Instead, she goes hunting for people and tips that could help her make a case to Petra (Sarah Goldberg) that, as she puts it later in the episode, “Pierpoint is the short of the century.” 

Do I, someone who dutifully sat through The Big Short, fully understand shorts? No. Thankfully, Industry moves with such assured confidence through all those inanely detailed financial machinations that you probably don’t need a refresher on them (from the show or myself). What you do need to know is that Petra and Harper are hoping to figure out which banks are in most in debt with regards to their ESG investments (spoiler alert: it’s Pierpoint) and that requires meeting with several financial institutions to see who’s trying to offload. 

Petra insists they meet with Yas and Pierpoint to corroborate their hunch, but Harper wants to keep her friend out of it. She’s had a hard enough day as it is (what with Hanani Sr.’s body found—she saw it herself that morning), but Petra insists they keep all that friendship talk out of it: “Friendship and contempt are just two sides of the same coin,” she tells Harper. Plus, Yas is “comically shit at her job.” If there’s someone who’ll bumble her way through giving them all the info they need…it’s Yas.

Which turns out to be right! Rankled by an impromptu lunch date with Eric (Ken Leung) where his drunken ramblings (“desire is practical,” he begins) and her Oedipal fixation (“Sometimes I think it’s a child’s biological duty to kill their parents,” she says) clash in a spectacular fashion. To the point where she assumes he wants to sleep with her (or at least get handjob in the restroom, which she yells in the restaurant) and storms off.

By the time she’s sitting across from Petra and Harper, she all but gives them the dossier with the list of their ESG assets—a smoking gun if there ever was one, which the LeviathanAlpha women take to a group of Pierpoint castoffs (including Kenny, Daria, and Jackie) who hear how they hope to short Pierpoint and make hundreds of millions of dollars off of it. 

As whispers of that short start to make the rounds, Eric furiously heads to LeviathanAlpha where he confronts Harper. Note: Never start any professional interaction with “You listen to me you little fucking cunt.” But then, their relationship has clearly soured past pleasantries. He rails against her plan, against using Yas as a pawn in  it all, all while Harper (quite calm, given the circumstances) all but tells him she’s just following his advice. How galling it is for him to call her out on being such a good student. Leung and Myha’la are transfixing in this scene, where they clearly relish scalding each other’s wounds while being hurt by what they say to one another, all while trying to remain in control of a situation neither wishes to be a part of. Is Harper a monster? She’s one made in Eric’s image, he’d argue, but a monster nonetheless.

And it is that monstrousness which Yas wrestles with later when, after being fired by Eric, she confronts Harper at home over a glass of wine she’s been nursing. Their face off is one of Industry’s best yet. Whereas Harper’s blowout with Eric started at a 10, this one starts slow with it only gradually building to a truly shocking slap (and a counter-slap, at that) heard all around London. This is the kind of conversation that only takes place in television shows; both young women are so self-aware and so cutting and so literate that together they create dialogue that could only be scripted. At the heart of it is a question Yas asks herself out loud: “Why did you help me?” Was it because she was such a good friend or was it a way to feel better about herself, a way to bank it for later? Yas has been played and has been fired for her error of judgment.  

The more the two sling cruel words at one another, you see how much resentment had been building: “Being a narcissist with an inferiority complex doesn’t make you an underdog,” Yas tells Harper, “It makes you completely fucking nauseating.” And just as Harper had heard from Eric the very things she feared about herself, here she voices Yas’s greatest fears: She calls her a victim, a sex object, talentless (echoing her father,), and a whore. “Everyone deserves better than the way you treat people,” she tells Yas. But the key to the scene is the way these two friends acknowledge they’d long cared for each other in spite of what they potentially thought of one another. They saw past how others saw them and nurtured that vision for one another. With that meeting with Petra, Harper had unwittingly blown that up in the service of LeviathanAlpha’s future. 

I can’t even pick a favorite moment from this exchange (Yas taking a sip of wine as Harper leaves? Her cruel laugh as Harper woundingly brings up Rob? The way Myha’la hits the word “talentless”?) It’s all pitch perfect. And painful to watch. That the episode ends not in the silence that lingers in the wake of Harper’s exit but in a flashback to the boat again, with the two joined by their lies and a joke shared at such a horrid moment is proof that Industry loves nothing more than a narrative gut punch.

Stray observations

• • I love Industry (obviously) but ending with a Pet Shop Boys song that now irrevocably makes me cry thanks to All Of Us Stranger is just too much.
• • “Everything you think about yourself is true.” If that Eric line sounded familiar, it’s because Anna Gearing said basically the same thing to Harper back when she and Petra backstabbed her at FutureDawn. But it’s also ostensibly what Yas later tells Harper herself, which means it’s clear Industry’s writers want us to see self-reflection (both reflection of self but also how she sees herself reflected in others) as the thing that’s most terrifying for Harper.
• • Harper luring Sweetpea in for intel-gathering in the guise of a job interview is next level Machiavellian. 
• • Will HBO be selling “Save Water Drink Negronis” hats?
• • Harper and her new running love interest: thoughts?
• • Where does Pierpoint go from here?
• • Someone who’s better versed in sports will have to unpack the choice of using So Many Ways To Lose: The Amazin’ True Story Of The New York Mets—The Best Worst Team In Sports as the reference in the episode’s title.