‘Industry’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: Murder, She Underwrote

Turns out there are more horrifying things to see than a decomposing corpse. A lonely middle-aged man, fabricating some kind of emotional connection with his much younger employee entirely in his head, then firing her hours after she rejects his clumsy romantic/sexual advances. That same young woman, too stunned by the prospect of a life without her awful father that she fails to stop the boat rapidly speeding away from his floundering form in the Mediterranean, guaranteeing his death. That young woman’s best friend, reacting to the news that criminally negligent homicide has been committed and needs to be covered up the way you might respond to getting tickets to the Oscars. That same friend turning on the young woman in the end, unable to face the fact that every terrible thing she’s saying about her is true. This week’s episode of Industry is an emotional abattoir, one that reminds me of the tagline for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Who will survive this season, and what will be left of them?

Not that there’s no such thing as life after Pierpoint. Much of the episode stems from the fallout of Sweetpea’s discovery that Pierpoint is on the verge of collapse due to the massive debt it racked up to finance its failed ESG investments; all it will take is a stiff wind. That wind comes in the form of Harper, who overheard some of this while in the loo last episode and is shopping the idea all over town with Petra. Their idea is to find the bank with the most ESG-related debt, then short the shit out of them, making a fortune while tanking the company in question. 

Eric, who we’ll return to, has no one to blame but himself for what follows. For reasons that remain a bit opaque to me — it could be as simple as denial — he’s been blowing off everyone’s questions and concerns about Pierpoint’s viability. That includes Yasmin, who asks about Sweetpea’s theory at a lunch Eric is ostensibly treating her to in order to take her mind off the discover of her father’s body. Its real purpose is for him to make this drunken, tongue-tied overture to her, which she very correctly susses out as an erotic experience for him in and of itself. Simply shouting at him that he’s a fucking asshole sends him racing to the men’s room to jerk off. (Will the last Industry character to masturbate on screen please turn out the lights?)

Anyway, point is, somewhere during the meal he blows off the Sweetpea theory — so when Harper and Petra come sniffing around about the ESG investments on Pierpoint’s books, Yasmin ignores the obvious concerns of her coworker in the meeting and hands over the whole laundry list. Petra deliberately brokers the meeting through Yasmin over Harper’s please not to because, she says, Yasmin is dumb and incompetent — sentiments echoed by both Yasmin’s father before his, ahem, accident, and by Harper at the end of the episode — and thus more or less deserves it. The same is true of Pierpoint. Once a dragon shows its underbelly, to borrow imagery from Petra, you’d be stupid not to aim at the missing scale.

Is Harper upset about this? Yeah, I suppose — though not enough to either call off the meeting, or provide Yasmin with some kind of surreptitious warning about its purpose, or otherwise sabotage it. This winds up providing Eric with the pretext he needs to fire Yasmin. And who knows? Maybe it is a firing offense in and of itself. But between Eric’s ulterior motives and his boss and buddy Bill Adler’s repeated suggestion that she should have been let go yesterday, we’ll never really know. It didn’t help, that’s for sure.

That’s why Yasmin’s brutal verbal evisceration of Harper in their big fight at the end of the ep feels as though Yasmin is on the side of the angels, while Harper’s attempt to go tit for tat rings hollow. Harper’s argument, that Yasmin is a spoiled, talentless, un-special whore who alternates between victim and sex object depending on which mode benefits her in the moment, is exactly what we’ve already heard from textbook abusive middle-aged men Charles Hanani and Eric Tao. By echoing their sentiments, virtually verbatim in some cases, she’s showing her own true colors.

Yasmin, by contrast, calls Harper a serial exploiter of other people’s vulnerabilities, a monster who delights in the suffering of others and hides it with a self-pitying narcissist’s smokescreen of self-pity. Eric says the same thing when he bursts into Harper’s office drunk and furious earlier in the episode, which might tempt you to take the overall message with a grain of salt. Don’t bother. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day; Eric is right about Harper being a vampire, because sometimes it takes one to know one. This goes double in Eric’s case: His own morally bankrupt tutelage in how to be an effective abuser helped hone her into the human weapon she is now.

In Yasmin’s case, we have ample evidence that has nothing to do with her own relationship with Harper in this episode alone. Grasping around for a weapon to use in her conflict with Petra over exploiting Yasmin’s naïveté, Harper incorrectly accuses Petra of having a substance abuse problem, when in fact it’s the woman’s son who’s an addict. Harper winces and apologizes, and it seems sincere — but would she apologized if she’d hit the mark, or would she have leveraged that knowledge in every way she could? You and I and she all know the answer to that one. Whether she knows it or not, she’s uncomfortable not because she feels she did the wrong thing, but because she did the wrong wrong thing. 

Harper and Yasmin have had a knock-down drag-out vent-everything argument in the past, but back then, Harper was our focal-point character. Writing her that way naturally sends our sympathies in her direction, especially when coupled with what we’d gleaned about her self-made status, her difficult upbringing, and the traumatic disappearance of her twin brother. 

But by now, a lot has changed. We’ve spent two and a half seasons seeing the damage Harper does at seemingly every opportunity, and how little compunction she feels over any of it. I’ve joked that if she’s walking around loose on the streets of London, warnings should go out city-wide like it’s Gotham City and there’s been a breakout at Arkham Asylum. This woman is dangerous. (Speaking of Batman, the show very satisfyingly brings back Freya Mavor, Caoilfhionn Dunne, and Conor MacNeill as Daria, Jackie, and Kenny, three Pierpoint “castoffs” now positioned, thanks to Harper and Petra, to take the entire company down.)

Yasmin, meanwhile, has become the show’s main character at Pierpoint while Harper is off on her own. Is she responsible for her father’s death? Well, yeah — not Kendall Roy vehicular-homicide responsible, quite, but in the ballpark. But unlike Succession, Industry seems willing to really grapple with what hiding knowledge like this does to people, and it isn’t “they say a lot of complicated swears.” 

In Yasmin’s case, she froze because this man had, just seconds prior, attempted to confirm all the worst fears she has about herself, fears pumped into her head by his own leering, erect-penis presence in her life through the years. These fears are confirmed elsewhere in the episode, when the loathsome Viscount Norton basically demands that she pimp herself out to his grandson Henry Muck so that a) Henry doesn’t kill himself, and b) she can marry him and thus inherit the entire family fortune and empire. Men (and the Viscount is one of her dad’s school chums) really do see her the way Charles did. How could she rush to save him, when she had just expressed her sincere belief that dying would be the single best thing he could do? He’s responsible for battering her into that state of inaction in the first place.

So when Harper tears into Yasmin, she comes across as being everything Yasmin and Eric and Robert all say: narcissistic, sadistic, delusional, deranged. She’s revealed for good and all as the nightmarish prestige-TV anithero she really is. All it took was screwing over her best friend in order to destroy the company that has served as Industry’s bedrock — its signature set, even its signature soundscape — since the start. But that’s the kind of service you can expect from Leviathan Alpha, as Yasmin has now learned the hard way.

That’s why the gloriously soapy slaps that end the episode feel so lopsided in impact. Yasmin’s feels righteous, earned; Harper’s feels like the work of a clumsy copycat, a Bizarro badly mimicking (super)human emotions. It’s almost Freudian-uncanny to witness — a Black Lodge doppelgänger where a human might once have stood.

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.