Summary
Harper’s birthday indulgence and a previous mistake both come back to spite her in “Sesh”, as a snowballing problem threatens her entire career.
This recap of Industry season 1, episode 4, “Sesh”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
“Sesh” was, for me, the episode when Industry really started to click. At one point, which we’ll get to, I realized I was firmly invested and legitimately anxious over a situation that I didn’t particularly understand, and that’s usually the sign of good, smart tension-building. I don’t know anything about financial trading or market bubbles or anything of that sort, but I knew that Harper, whose birthday it is in Industry episode 4, stood to lose Pierpoint a great deal of money and herself a high-powered career. That’s all that mattered.
Things are piling up around Harper, especially as Eric has made it pretty clear that she’s the MVP of the graduate class – he even offers to take care of whatever issue HR has with her visa. But he’d presumably be less inclined to sort out the deliberate misbooking she made last week, which is why she keeps it to herself when it all begins to spiral badly out of control thanks to both her own stubbornness and a lingering haze from her drug-fuelled birthday shenanigans, which she enjoyed with Robert, Greg, and Yasmin.
A couple of important bits to note from the party: Robert and Yasmin are still flirting, this time with the aid of balloons, and Harper tries to initiate sex with Robert, which he turns down to preserve the “thing” he has going on with Yasmin, which at the moment is nothing at all, but let’s not quibble over the details. After a tense Uber that they have to share, Harper goes into work incredibly hungover, leading to Daria pulling her from a college open day she and Robert were supposed to be participating in, and Yasmin – who else? – replacing her.
To add insult to injury, Harper then runs afoul of Duncan, whose job is to detect and iron out the kinds of discrepancies that Harper’s misbooking caused. So, he’s onto her, and Aubrey Allerton, the client who she reflexively insists is lying, has no intention of helping her out of the fifty grand hole she’s presently in. Harper knows the lie can’t continue since the original call was recorded, so instead, she pops more pills and plans to trade her way back into the black at great financial risk to Pierpoint.
This was the moment when I realized I was totally into this, despite not having any real understanding of what Harper was trying to do. The way the whole down-to-the-wire scene was constructed made the stakes very clear. I understood that she thought she’d cracked it and that she got greedy again, and then almost tripled her original loss, eventually selling on -$140,000. A big hit. A travesty for her career. And another immediate problem – how on earth was she going to make that money back?
She turns to Nicole, the client she was told to schmooze way back in the first episode. Harper’s desperation at this point is palpable, and her frantic breakdown on the phone to her mother made it all quite obvious what kind of predicament she was in. Nicole, though, tells her not to put a price on her dignity, but will only pretend the conversation never happened, not help out. Harper has no choice but to confess to Eric, who shares a personal story before revealing that Nicole came through for her after all. Pierpoint is in profit for the day, and he’d never have known if Harper didn’t say anything. But he’s glad she did, and she knows she can in the future. There’s a new level of trust between them now. It was, really, the best way things could have ended given the circumstances.
The bad days continue elsewhere. Gus doesn’t get much to do in Industry episode 4, but he is being given the cold shoulder by Theo, and the fact he’s emotional over that leads him to insult his boss, Clement, who threatens to kill Gus if he ever speaks to him in that manner again. Yikes. A shining light of sexy hope in “Sesh” is the developing relationship between Robert and Yasmin, though it’s hard to imagine that’ll go ahead without someone having to suffer for it.
Either way, though, it looks very much like it might go ahead. During the college open day they continue to flirt, eventually getting pelted by a red paint bomb lobbed by a protestor who thinks the company is evil, which it’s hard to argue with at this point. When Robert eventually asks Yasmin for a drink outright, she says she’s going out with Seb – a date he later gatecrashes to inform Yasmin that he hooked up with one of the male students, which she seems rather interested to hear. So interested is she, in fact, that she takes off her underwear and bundles it into Robert’s pocket, telling him to send a picture of them on his face later. Poor old Seb is clueless, but one imagines he’s probably clueless about most things.
What did you think of Industry season 1, episode 4, “Sesh”? Comment below.
