Time is up on Industry

During a moment late in Industry’s new episode, “Useful Idiot,” Yas (Marisa Abela) grows increasingly exasperated by the rock and a hard place she finds herself in. Must she really do the good/right thing or can she get away with throwing others under the bus for her own selfish and self-serving purposes? “It is them or it is me!” she bellows into her phone. It’s a line that could very well serve as the thesis statement for this hour of television, which finds plenty of the HBO show’s characters wondering the same thing and acting accordingly.

And, if you’ve been watching Industry long into its three season run, you can probably guess how that rubric of me vs. them plays out over and over again—even with folks who try to pride themselves on caring for others. 

Take Rishi (Sagar Radia). Now sporting a cast on his arm (don’t ask!) and learning in real time—during the glitzy 150th anniversary bash for Pierpoint, no less—that his place of employment is mere hours away from imploding, he does what he knows how to do best: leverage his intel so he can land on his feet. Does that involve calling up Harper (Myha’la, giving a master class in prop acting with those cigarettes) and basically telling her she should move on her short ASAP? Yes it does. Does it also involves trying to get Sweetpea and Anraj (Miriam Petche and Irfan Shamji) to help him make the most of the final hours they may all have before Pierpoint’s stock options fall even lower than what they’re at right now? Also yes. And yet, by episode’s end, when Harper informs Rishi she can’t quite keep her word of hiring him as a buyer alongside those two junior associates he’d hoped to bring with him, he’s quick to remind her he was always just looking out for himself.

Time and time again, the folks in Industry show themselves to be craven opportunists. 

Eric (Ken Leung) may have been aghast at Harper’s actions last week, but as he watches in real time how the bigwigs at Pierpoint jockey for power as the clock ticks by and the chances of the company staying afloat start dwindling, he’s quick to sprint into action. He at first aligns himself with Bill (Trevor White), who’s been so helpful to him and who’d opened himself up to Eric about his own tumor diagnosis. The two try to mount a defense of Pierpoint as a longstanding institution that deserves the chance to survive their hilariously irresponsible risky investments in ESG funds that led to its unwieldy debt and lack of liquidity. Alas, the U.S. government proves to be uninterested in bailing them out: “The lesson of ’08 is no more bailouts” the Secretary of Treasury tells the Glengarry Glen Ross-looking group of dressed-up Pierpoint execs gathered in the dead of night as their employees party downstairs.

It’s clear to Eric there are dueling factions in that room, with Wilhemina (Georgina Rich), the mastermind behind the ESG push, hoping to sell off however much of Pierpoint is necessary to save herself and maybe the company in the process and he and Bill hoping, instead, to keep a semblance of Pierpoint intact without it being broken up into pieces and sold to…as it turns out, Barclays Group, which emerges as the white knight all these suits are all too happy to kowtow to. Except for Bill, that is, who jockeys instead for a deal with Mitsubishi that would give him and the company more time to right themselves.

After a lot of back and forth—much of it petty—between Wilhemina, Bill, and new Pierpoint head Tom Wolsey (a smug Harry Hadden-Paton), we learn that Barclays can’t actually follow up with its bid to buy Pierpoint (for its infrastructure, no less), leaving Bill’s Mitsubishi deal on the table. Only that also falls through when Eric, in a canny if cruel move, leverages Bill’s diagnosis to embarrass him in front of the Mitsubishi folks who arrive in the morning, torpedoing the deal in the process and aligning himself with the Pierpoint leadership once he brings in someone who may well quell the cash-flow crisis at the bank all while keeping the Pierpoint name and legacy intact: Ali (Fady Elsayed) and his associates.

The moment when Bill learns how Eric played him, how he was stabbed in the back in front of the colleagues he’d be fighting for, is heartbreaking, played so casually you could almost miss it were it not for the anguished anger in White’s face as the elevator doors close. Eric, as ever, chose himself—and did so at the expense of someone who’d long been in his corner.

Similarly, Harper may finally be running out of good luck. Considering her entire short has rested on an overheard conversation—and later fueled by privileged information fed to her by Rishi—she doesn’t have much time to claim any kind of plausible deniability. That involves coming clean to Petra (Sarah Goldberg), who is infuriated by this ethics malfeasance. Rather than merely stewing in her anger at Harper, Petra finally does something: She calls up Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay) and asks for the young trader to be removed from their joint fund. By the end of the episode, Harper will be picked up by an unnamed man in a black car who insists she get in, that Mostyn wants to talk to her. Petra is obviously looking out for herself. It’s clear she’s done carrying any water for Harper any more.

But the “me” vs. “them” question does hover ever more heavily on Yas. At the start of the episode, she learns Hanani Publishing is willing to cover the costs of the settlements coming from her father’s embezzlement schemes. The only request? That Yas become the public face of such a farce. They could all get stuck in a legal battle but wouldn’t it be easier for her to just take the PR hit and avoid the financial ruin that would come from trying to fight it all in court, which she can’t afford to do in the first place?

“Accept your father’s culpability,” she’s encouraged by the head of Hanani Publishing. Sure, she’s already being hounded by the paparazzi but now with no Pierpoint job, what would it mean to let herself be thrown to the wolves like that? What would her life look like?

As she ponders all of that, Rob (Harry Lawtey) comes in to swoop her away—from the house but also from her life altogether. He asks her to join him in driving to Wales, where he has a job interview with a lab working on medicinal uses of Psilocybin. (Yes, turns out that trip with Henry may have inspired Rob after all.) And just like that, the show keeps adding fodder to the Yas/Rob ship. It’s not smooth sailing, though, as Yas finds herself trying to make it all a kind of joke. “I’m good at making people feel like I love them,” she confesses to him after trying to make light of how he could fuck the girl at the inn they’re staying at, “but I don’t know that I have.” It’s a bit of brutal self-awareness that make the kiss that follows—not to mention the decision to not go into his room soon thereafter lest they sully their romantic moment—all the more telling.

But Yas is also preoccupied with whether to take the Hanani Publishing offer or not, especially once family friend Maxim (Nicholas Bishop) gives her some privileged information that suggests those who are trying to make her the face of her father’s embezzlement debacle may not be as innocent as she’d originally thought. Those NDAs some women signed came with some strings that have sullied the entire company, and she could use that information to avoid becoming the public scapegoat of it all. 

That she decides to ponder that while in the bathtub taking several of the therapeutic Psilocybin pills Rob had with him is clearly not smart. But it does give Rob a chance to play knight in shining armor (with a boner in tow!), helping her as she bleeds and pleads with him to tell her she’s a good person who’s allowed to do bad things. It clearly bonds them…just in time for Rob to nail his interview the next day and begin considering moving to the States to pursue a career change.

In sum, Yas may throw some women under the bus under the scrutiny of the press to save face; Petra has thrown Harper to Otto’s wolves; and Eric found himself on top while backstabbing Bill. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. And we knew that. But may Rob be able to show us the way out? 

Stray observations

• • Who do we think is the “Useful Idiot” of the episode’s title?
• • “Can I knock again tomorrow?” is such a deliciously succinct line to capture the transactional nature of Harper’s trysts with hotel employees that all I can do is applaud its casual deployment.
• • The bleakest part of the episode, of course, is that Pierpoint’s overnight bankruptcy saga is only backdrop for the power plays in the U.K. government that are now going to prop up former Tory MP Aurore Adekunle (Faith Alabi). 
• • “She’s a Democrat. She only pretends to have a heart.” What a sick burn that also plays like a self-own about how those in power see one another, no?
• • The one other line that could’ve served as a thesis statements for this episode is “So are we at the mercy of someone else’s ambition?” and its prompt, apt reply: “Aren’t we always?”