‘Industry’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: The Gambler

When was the last time you watched an episode of television that made you clap your hands and cheer at the end? It’s been a minute for me, I must say, and I watch a lot of television. A lot of really good television, even! But there’s something special about “White Mischief,” the fourth episode of Industry’s Industry-standard terrific third season. Written by series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay and directed with breathless panache by Zoé Whittock, it is both a showcase for the prodigious talent of Sagar Radia and for everything this show does well, which is, at this point, pretty much everything.

Radia fully stars the show as rogue trader, philandering newlywed, absentee dad, and degenerate gambling addict Rishi Ramdani. That’s right, it’s a Rishi spotlight episode. Who saw that coming? Until he was unexpectedly invited into Harper and Eric’s Mad Men–style mutiny at the end of Season 2, Rishi was a colorful presence on the show, but no one’s idea of a fleshed-out character. Boy oh boy, has that changed. You get the sense that Radia’s skill all but demanded it.

Anyway, this episode is basically Uncut Gems: Port of Call Pierpoint, with Rishi in the Adam Sandler role. We learn that he is in over his head from betting on horses, and has ensorceled several other Pierpoint employees into his constant throwing of good money after bad. We learn that he is way over his risk limit at work, having sunk nearly a billion pounds into betting on the U.K.’s currency based on the unpredictable behavior of its shitty Tory government. This, too, has ensnared other staffers, most notably Anraj, but it also puts Eric’s entire department at risk. 

So does Rishi’s behavior on the trading floor. His, ahem, salty language has become the main attraction on a subreddit dedicated to shit people overhear at Pierpoint, leading to an HR investigation led by the perennial thorn in Harper Stern’s side, the somehow menacing Justin Klineman. Maybe it’s the fact that actor Joshua James still carries residual Imperial vibes from his role as a torturer on Andor, but the dude freaks me out.

We also get a glimpse of his home life, such as it is. He’s bought a luxurious gamekeeper’s cottage and a nearby cricket pavilion from a land-rich, cash-poor posh git named Nichoals St. John (Al Roberts). Good old Nicky never ceases to lord his seniority in the area over Rishi, presuming to tell him what he can do with his own property. He also somehow acquired Rishi’s dog in the transaction — Rishi momentarily believed an allergic reaction was the cause of the obviously psychosomatic rash on his back — and renamed it from Rajah to Roger. Finally, he’s an old flame of Rishi’s wife, upper-class podcaster Diana (Emily Barber). Just how cold the flame remains is a subject of some conjecture.

Not that Rishi has a leg to stand on in the fidelity department. His constant carousing includes a sexual relationship with glamorous graduate Sweetpea Golightly, who has some kind of OnlyFans page on the side. And the moment he gets lucky enough at blackjack to win the money he owes his imposing bookie buddy Vin (Asim Chaudry), he blows a bunch of it on bottle service at a nightclub, at which point he gets beaten to shit for fingering some guy’s girlfriend right there in the booth. And oh yeah, his wife knows he fucked Harper in a pub restroom the night before their wedding. All this while he dismisses her sexually to her face as “a fucking mother,” no longer a woman. No wonder his coworkers think he’s a misogynist! (Diana defends him on this score, saying he’s a chauvinist rather than a misogynist; he doesn’t hate women, he just thinks he’s better than women.)

Despite white-knuckle anxiety-inducing tension that at times made it seem more likely that Rishi would die than see another episode, our man makes it through. The Tory government backtracks on its ludicrous tax cuts for the top earners and the pound rebounds, earning Rishi and Anraj a fortune. Diana ponies up the money to pay off Rishi’s debts from her own savings and her earnings as a podcaster. She chides him for not taking her more seriously in that department, and for not going down on her anymore, which he rectifies as quickly as possible. He claims to be very good at it, thus proving he’s not the male chauvinist she says he is. I dunno, man. If you think Rishi, who according to Venetia (who quits rather than work for him any longer) is dismissed by Sweetpea as a “five-pump chump,” gives good head, I’ve got a horse for you to bet on. It’s a sure thing!

Finally, Rishi takes a cricket bat and destroys Nicky’s sacred pavilion to the tune of Ramsey Lewis’s rapturous “Les Fleurs,” then reclaims his dog as the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a N—“ boom-baps us into the closing credits. This was the point when I started cheering.

Man, I don’t even know what to say, but I’ll start with the sex, because it usually pays to do so, and it is as hot and perverse and complex as always. I’ve seen the show dismissed as a soap (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with soaps, but it was intended to be pejorative), but on soaps sex serves one of two functions: A) I love you, or B) I’m sleeping at you to get back at my arch-rival, your bitch of a wife. On Industry, sex is an entire playing field on which character and theme can be developed and explored. It’s as fecund an aspect of the show as the characters’ work lives, or their friendships and hatreds, or the latest financial-thriller scheme. The stuff with Sweetpea, where he’s taking a leak while holding his baby and watching her strip while his coked-out nose drips blood onto the baby he’s holding with his phone arm? The stuff with Diana, where she talks about masturbating to an old flame in an unsuccessful attempt to turn him on, then goes ahead and hooks up with the old flame, knowing he’ll have to forgive her since he’s wronged her in so many ways, from fetishizing her upper-class Englishness on down? They don’t make ‘em like this very often, my friends.

And how I shouted at my screen when Rishi kept on gambling and gambling and gambling, blowing his winnings and digging himself deeper with every bet! Seeing what he was willing to do to himself, up to and including dragging himself into work on no sleep after getting the living shit beat out of him in a nightclub, left you convinced that he’d take down almost anyone with him, from Anraj to Diana to Eric, who is on the verge of calling security on Rishi when his long bet on the sterling comes in. Venetia wisely gets out of the company than spend another minute around “dying men” like Rishi; Sweetpea is confident enough to be frightening at this point and seems completely bulletproof, but we’ll see.

In the very best way, this episode reminds me of The Sopranos at the height of its power — the way it could introduce Tony’s gambling addiction (which seems as clear an antecedent to this episode as Uncut Gems) seemingly out of nowhere and make you believe it, or the way it could take relatively obscure characters like Eugene Pontecorvo or Vito Spatafore and make them the soul of the show for one brief shining moment. Earning a Sopranos Season Six comparison? There’s no higher praise. This show has it. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.