‘Industry’ Season 3’s Penultimate Episode Takes Back-Stabbing To New Heights
Spoilers below.
There are three main storylines playing out in the penultimate episode of Industry season 3—two of which are intimately wrapped up in Pierpoint’s success or failure, and the third of which escapes the bank’s radius if not its influence. Each subplot depicts our protagonists at a major turning point, and usually (as one Pierpoint board member later puts it) on the brink of a 'morally unconscionable' decision. Shall we start with the worst offender? You know Eric Tao would want to go first.
At the beginning of episode 7, 'Useful Idiot,' Pierpoint is celebrating its 150th anniversary just as its stock price falls off a cliff. Eric asks Bill how close the company is to declaring bankruptcy, and Bill doesn’t sugarcoat it: 'Hours.' As the more junior employees drink themselves into oblivion on the trading floor, a council gathers upstairs to scheme up a last-minute capital injection. (They’re looking for $15 billion to 'plug the hole,' a number that made my eyes nearly pop out of my skull.) Pierpoint is basically 'J.P. Morgan with WeWork,' as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions tells them. (Never a good comparison.) His boss—the U.S. Treasury Secretary herself, coming to the Pierpoint C-suite live from her elliptical machine—refuses to bail out the American bank during an election year. 'You’re all salaried capitalists, right?' she tells them. 'Order some Chinese take-out and find a solution.'
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Bill thinks he has that solution: He’s been in talks with Mitsubishi and believes that, if he can acquire an infusion of cash from the Japanese company, he can position himself as Pierpoint’s hero, dump the ESG catastrophe at Wilhelmina’s feet, and pull Eric to the top of the food chain with him. Once there, they can stage a 'putsch,' a coup against new CEO Tom Wolsey’s administration. 'How do you still have the energy for this?' Eric asks Bill, knowing the latter is a cancer patient. Bill looks downright haunted as he turns the question around on Eric: 'What else is there?'
As the board members weigh a sale to Barclays, Bill is desperate to fend off the possibility of becoming 'a subsidiary to a f*cking British high-street bank.' But Eric now seems less enamoured with Bill’s allegiance to Pierpoint’s storied history. After having been insulted by Wolsey for being a Pierpoint 'zealot' rather than a pragmatist, Eric seems to have reconsidered his strategy. Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe a big one.
When the Barclays representative arrives at Pierpoint’s table, Bill effectively throws a temper tantrum, prompting Wilhelmina to pull Eric aside and urge him to get the ailing Mr. Adler to 'fall in line.' If Eric can do so, then perhaps when Pierpoint becomes Barclays Pierpoint (or some such conglomeration), Eric will retain his seat at the table.
Ultimately, the Barclays deal falls through. (This is largely thanks to politicking within the British government, spurred on by Lord Norton’s conniving newspapers.) Bill, thrilled at a second chance to play messiah, jumps into action with the Mitsubishi Band-Aid. He asks Eric to triple-check the numbers they’ll present to the Japanese company, but it’s obvious Eric’s loyalty to Bill is failing as Wilhelmina’s promise hangs over his head. And after Wolsey corners him in the bathroom—'You’re not a romantic, are you?'—it seems all but certain Eric will do the unimaginable: He’ll betray the closest thing he has to a friend.
Sure enough, he sabotages Bill during the Mitsubishi negotiation. Noting an unfortunate calculating error in their presentation, Eric pins this 'mistake' on Bill’s cancer-induced amnesia, claiming there’s no shame in a sick man admitting his fallibility. In other words: Eric makes Bill appear 'incapacitated,' to both Pierpoint’s C-suite and Mitsubishi’s. Unimpressed with a less-than-reliable broker, Mitsubishi walks.
At first, Bill falls for Eric’s bluff: He startles at the thought his tumour is loosening his grip on reality. But as Eric walks him out of the building, it dawns on Bill that his colleague only made him believe in his own mental decline. It’s genuinely crushing to watch Bill realise he’s been tricked, and with such a despicable tool. Eric was never Bill’s 'useful idiot,' as Wilhelmina suggested earlier. In episode 7, that honour lies entirely with Bill himself.
Finally, Eric presents his own solution to Pierpoint’s pending insolvency. Tugging on the strings of his desk connection with new hire Ali El Mansour, he brings in some friends from 'the Gulf.' Maybe they can succeed where Barclays couldn’t.
And so we switch our focus to Harper, who’s busy making her own back-door deals as Pierpoint attempts open-heart surgery on itself. When the Barclays representative first ascends Pierpoint’s front steps, Rishi catches sight of him and calls Harper with the intel: A buyer is approaching, and she’d best pull out of her Pierpoint short if she wants to make any money. Rishi’s newfound fealty to Harper is thanks to his behind-the-scenes maneuvering; he doesn’t need financial sorcery to understand the company’s collapsing, and thus he’s sought 'an off-ramp' with Leviathan Alpha. He promises Harper pertinent information should her fund promise to take him, Sweetpea, and Anraj on as full-timers after they inevitably lose their jobs at Pierpoint. Harper thanks Rishi for the heads up about Barclays, but she regrets she can’t hire three new employees at Leviathan. 'Babes, come on,' he replies with a less-than-convincing smirk. 'You know it’s only ever been me.' Harper literally grits her teeth but agrees to meet with him once Pierpoint’s fate is sealed.
The possible Pierpoint sale means she can no longer keep up her charade with Petra. She meets with her fund partner in the latter’s kitchen, where she announces they need to end their short and profit while they still can. Petra not only side-eyes Harper’s nervy avoidance, but also disagrees that they should cut their short...well, short. It isn’t until Harper comes clean about her own 'morally unconscionable' choice—insider trading, courtesy of the conversation she overheard between Sweetpea and Yasmin—that Petra understands the gravity of Harper’s position. As anyone might have predicted, Petra freaks out and calls Otto Mostyn, claiming the young trader has become reckless with his money.
Otto sends a car to scoop up Harper off the side of the street, secret agent-style, and that’s the last we see of her in episode 7. But I have an inkling that Otto doesn’t intend to scold her. If anything, I wonder if he might present an even bigger decision for her to make: whether to cut Petra loose or stay true to the only trader who gave her a chance.
That’s the last of the Pierpoint-centric sagas this episode, but two of the company’s abused employees—Yasmin and Rob—have their own demons to battle. Yasmin, in particular, is in an impossible situation: The Hanani Publishing executive board has agreed to cover the financial damages of her father’s embezzlement, but only if Yas agrees to become the public face of his crimes. As such, the company would tell the press that Yasmin not only knew about her father’s embezzlement, but that she was 'its main beneficiary,' Never mind that this is a total fiction; the alternative is a long, drawn-out legal battle, and, as the Hanani exec tells Yasmin, 'By your own admission, you aren’t capitalised enough for that kind of fight.'
The exec adds, 'Accept your family’s culpability, and get on with your life.' To which Yas asks, 'What life?'
She’s presented with her own moral quandary when Maxim Alonso—a Hanani family friend whom fans will recognize from previous seasons—calls Yas to share evidence that Hanani Publishing was complicit in covering up Charles’s predation. (Maxim has procured a list of female Hanani employees who only started working for the company after they’d signed NDAs.) 'The company bought their silence for years, just as much as [Charles] did,' Maxim explains. Yasmin’s lawyer, Denise, advises her not to use this privileged information, in part because it would re-traumatise Charles’s victims. But Yasmin feels it’s the only leverage available to her; it’s the only way for her to retain even a scrap of the privilege she’s taken for granted.
Meanwhile, Rob is keen to get both Yas and himself as far from Pierpoint as possible. He has a job interview in Wales with a medical research centre there, and he invites Yas to join him in the passenger seat. He’s become very passionate about the medical potential of psilocybin now that this job opportunity has presented itself, and he’s happy to see his enthusiasm draw Yasmin—partially, anyway—out from under her dark cloud.
Still, when they stop for the night at a roadside inn, Yas catches Rob flirting with the receptionist. In the snootiest way possible, she reasserts her power by informing the younger worker that she and Rob are a couple. Later, when Rob offers Yasmin a battered sausage for dinner, she eyes it like it might sprout wings. Their attitudes about class repeatedly underline their incompatibility, but still—beneath all the daddy and mommy issues, there’s something real between them. When Yasmin makes another feeble attempt at sexual manipulation, Rob stops her cold. 'We’re beyond the game,' he tells her, and (miraculously) she agrees.
'I’m good at making people feel like I love them,' she says. 'But, uh, I don’t know that I ever have. Have you?' she asks. Rob stares at her—meaningfully—then deflects by bringing up the girlfriend he was f*cking obsessed' with in school. Yas then makes perhaps her most self-aware observation of the entire season: She tells Rob that, when she feels something akin to love, she tries 'to make it ugly as quick as I possibly can, turn it into something else. Turn it into sex. Anything else.' Rob doesn’t have an answer to this, apart from his own admission that he’s, for the first time in a long time, excited for the future. They kiss—and go back to their separate rooms.
That night, as she scrolls through the list of her father’s victims, Yas decides to self-medicate with a substantial dose of Rob’s psilocybin. Drugged and barely comprehensible, she cuts herself trying to make tea, and Rob rushes into her hotel room at the sound of her pained moaning. As he attempts to wrap her bleeding arm, she reaches for him. 'Henry [Muck] used to get hard when I’d cry, too,' she says. Rob demands that she stop touching him, but his concern for her outweighs his frustration, and he hugs her close. As far as I can tell from context clues, nothing further happens between them that night.
The following morning, a sobered Yasmin tells Denise that she wants to release the list of NDA names as a move against Hanani Publishing. She makes this call just as Rob comes out of his job interview and shares the happy news: He might have a role lined up in medical research, but there’s a good chance it’ll take him out of London to Silicon Valley. Yasmin isn’t equipped to deal with that kind of possibility just yet. If Rob is abandoning her—as Yas seems likely to interpret his move to the States—then she’ll need to find a friend elsewhere. And as the Industry season 3 finale approaches, we can only imagine whom that might be.
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