Summary
Industry walks a fine line between being ridiculous and uncomfortably accurate, and in Episode 2, “Smoke and Mirrors”, it’s equally as engaging in both modes.
The genius of Industry has always been that it can build knuckle-whitening tension without the audience requiring any knowledge of the financial world it depicts. This is a real writing skill; it requires a near-perfect balance of credible detail to make the plot authentic and macro stakes that viewers can easily understand. The opening of Season 3, Episode 2, “Smoke and Mirrors”, is a fine example of this.
All you need to know, functionally, is that Lumi’s stock is tanking seconds after its public IPO launch. The blackout – which turns out to be totally random, I think – didn’t help, but that’s far from the only problem the company has. There is chaos on the trading floor. Eric is going ballistic, Rishi keeps aggressively scratching his back in a way that tees up a plot point down the line, and at one point – specifically after getting a smug call from Otto – Yas collapses to the floor.
In the midst of all this, the season’s new Gen-Z insert, Sweetpea Golightly, wants to gossip. But more on this in a bit, since it reveals something crucial about Henry Muck.
Smoke And Mirrors
But let me start with a related but relevant point. The truly inscrutable financial underpinnings of Industry become more relevant than ever in this episode – they become an actual plot point. As Eric explains to the entire trading floor, “This is all smoke and mirrors.” In other words, perception is reality. Finance – this kind of finance, anyway, the kind involving numbers so large they could only ever exist as digits on a screen – is an illusion. It’s a game.
This is why the show works. It isn’t anything to do with stocks and shares. It’s about the game and its players; how its rules apply (or don’t) to everyone from investment bankers to silver spoon toffs to so-called socially conscious investors, green energy suppliers, media barons, heiresses, and so on, and so forth. And it’s about the deviancy that seems to curdle in the gut of high-stakes financial chicanery, the moral decline, and the sexual peccadilloes that everyone rich enough seemingly necessarily have.
Class Warfare
Industry | Image via HBO
Which brings us, neatly, to Henry Muck. It was obvious in Industry’s Season 3 premiere that he was hiding a darker side beneath his altruistic exterior – the creased t-shirt wasn’t fooling anyone – but his potential for villainy manifests much more starkly here in Episode 2.
With Lumi’s valuation shrinking at an alarming rate, Henry unravels with equal speed, as if he’s racing to tank his own company before potential investors can decide it’s worthless. Rob – still almost catatonic from waking up next to a dead body – tries to give him sage wisdom, but he ignores all of it, giving a press statement that sends the stock price spiraling even further downward.
The obvious entitled stupidity forces Rob to lash out at Henry for being a posh idiot, though he doesn’t put it in quite those terms. It’s easy to forget that a key part of Rob’s character is that he’s working-class, or at least comes from a working-class background. He’s quite good at his job – substantial ethical lapses notwithstanding – so he has been able to obscure his disdain for Henry and people like him, but that all comes out here. And Henry, almost psychopathically, seems to enjoy it.
Henry, of course, knows who he really is, so he knows what Rob’s getting at. In a moment of profound ridiculousness, the class warfare is made literal when Rob and Henry start physically tussling, eventually ending up in a ball pit smacking each other with soft toys.
Harper Remains The Worst
It’s hard to make an argument that Rob is especially principled, but he makes a stark contrast with, say, Harper. At least when Rob does bad things he knows he’s doing them and regrets them after; Harper delights in continuing to do them. For her, working at FutureDawn with a principled idealist like Anna is almost motivating. It’s a new environment to corrupt.
This, inevitably, is what leads Harper to Petra, who is sick of FutureDawn losing money and uses Harper’s Pierpoint knowledge to get a good price on natural gas and oil stocks behind Anna’s back. Anna is fuming with them both and it seems like Harper’s employment won’t last very long, but it also seems like Petra – an interesting figure who is like a less psychopathic and more pragmatic Eric, but equally unscrupulous – might be setting up on her own with Harper at her side.
Crucially, though, Petra points out that Harper’s crusade against Pierpoint, and the obvious pleasure she takes from stabbing people in the back, is not a great character trait in a prospective partner.
Ocean’s Investment Banker
Industry | Image via HBO
A big chunk of Industry Season 3, Episode 2 plays out like a heist, orchestrated by Yas, of all people, not that anyone will give her any credit for it (she’s still referred to as a nepotism hire by the other Pierpoint partners and Eric, despite being totally willing to sack his friend Kenny on a whim to prove his ruthlessness, is too spineless to say otherwise.)
Yas engineers a scenario in which Henry – who took something close to an overdose in the disabled bathroom, made up with Rob, and sprang into life when he got a look at how hot Yasmin is – presses the flesh with Otto and the guy from British Electric, ensuring that the paparazzi are there to photograph the meeting by calling them on herself. It’s a silky plan, though as Eric later points out, it does very much toe the line of market manipulation.
But whatever works, right? It certainly works for Henry, who becomes immediately obsessed with Yas and invites her out on a date. Now, remember what I said earlier about Henry’s darker and indeed weirder side? Look no further. For one thing, his attempts to seduce Yas involve smugly showing her that he pulled some strings with his uncle and got the picture of her aboard her father’s party yacht erased from the internet. He’s leveraging the power dynamic early.
But he miscalculates Yas’s own power. And I don’t mean the fact she’s due to inherit her father’s immense wealth – and possibly criminal charges; more on this in a minute – but rather the more potent power of femininity. We mustn’t forget the hoops Yas had Rob jumping through in the first season. Rich or not, Yas is an extremely desirable woman who most men – especially the rich and entitled ones who think they can just take whatever they want – can’t get enough of. Including Henry.
And Yas knows something intimate about Henry, thanks to Sweetpea – he’s into pee. As in, he has a fetish. The showers he likes are golden, and I don’t mean the taps. So, Yas guides him into the bathroom, tells him that nothing will ever happen between them, and then empties her bladder in the stall like a camel, knowing Henry can hear her. It must work since by the time she leaves Henry has paid the bill and left a bottle of wine on the table of such a distinguished vintage that the waiter refuses to open it.
What happened on that yacht?
Yas is less precious and uncorks the bottle, downing it on the bus home while flashing back – for the audience’s benefit – to that eerie day on the yacht.
This is unfolding very gradually, but a bit more is made clear here, including the fact that Harper was present. We see a bit more of the interaction between Yas and her father when he aggressively straddled her, but it turns out he just threw a glass of wine in her face, which isn’t nice but isn’t as bad as what I was imagining might have happened.
However, we still don’t know everything that unfolded. We know Hanani Snr revealed that his return to the U.K. would be met with criminal charges, but when the pregnant deckhand he was cavorting with comes to apologize to Yas, she’s sobbing. What happened between the two moments? That’s what we don’t currently know.
I’d say it’d be fun finding out, but in Industry, “fun” probably isn’t the right word.
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