Recap: ‘Industry’ Gets More Honest Than Ever in Season 3, Episode 6

In some hypothetical future where Marisa Abela wins an Emmy for her work on Industry, it’ll be for the show overall – but I think Episode 6 of Season 3, “Nikki Beach, Or: So Many Ways to Lose”, is what will swing it.

Everyone’s cooking in this episode, to be fair, but poor old Yasmin steals it as usual. Harper is a close second, delivering weaponized and unflinching shark-eyed psychopathy like it’s going out of fashion.

There’s a lot going on here, including a complex financial scheme to ruin Pierpoint entirely, complete with an Avengers Assemble-style team-up of everyone the company has ever wronged, but very few of the events are really about finance, if you get my drift.

Yasmin “Kills” Her Father

If you ever had a strong to desire to feel deeply uncomfortable and a little bit sick and wanted a quick and easy way to get you there, then any interaction between Yasmin and her father, Charles, will do the trick.

Let’s not get too into the weeds here – I think this is one instance where a barebones recounting will suffice. As has been teased out in various episodes of Season 3, Yasmin caught her father in the sixty-nine position with a pregnant deckhand, then they had an argument in which Charles straddled her and threw a drink in her face, and then, according to the flashback to the Lady Yasmin in “Nikki Beach, Or: So Many Ways To Lose”, they had a follow-up argument that led directly to Charles’s death.

Adam Levy as Charles Hanani | Image via HBO

They were this close to reconciling, to Charles getting his own way, but when they bring it in for a hug, Yasmin mutters in horror, “You’re still hard.” That’s the crux of the issue. He calls her a whore. She tells him she wishes he’d die. Charles jumps off the yacht into the churning water to prove a dramatic point, but one of his hips or legs or other senior body parts gives out, and he’s left in the water to drown.

When Yasmin confessed to killing her father to Rob in Episode 5, I was expecting a bit more complicity than this. But that comes after. Still in shock, Yasmin confided in Harper. And Harper, true to form, helped her to cover it up. They agreed not to turn the boat around, or tell anyone what happened, and cooked up an alibi together.

Harper Remains The Worst

If I was Yas, I’d feel deeply worried about Harper knowing my innermost secrets, since as she proves in this episode – though she has repeatedly proved it throughout the season, including when she helped to sink the Lumi deal in Episode 3 – she will use anything she can to cause pain to as many people as possible.

Episode 6 of Industry Season 3 is, I think, the most conflicted she has seemed. She even tries to talk Petra out of using Yas as a way to wound Pierpoint, but she doesn’t try especially hard. And besides, this is a situation that Harper has orchestrated herself. After overhearing Sweetpea discuss Pierpoint’s mountain of maturing debt, she pushed Petra in the right direction to discover that Pierpoint has the most substantial distressed ESG asset portfolio. They’re the easiest mark for Leviathan Alpha (that name really is awful, isn’t it?)

Thanks to some complex financial chicanery that I don’t understand, Petra and Harper visit with a lot of other banks – justifying a lot of familiar faces cropping up, like Kenny and Daria – to basically pitch an industry-wide short of Pierpoint. The company will be ruined, everyone will get rich. It’s a win-win for everyone except Pierpoint’s employees, including Yas, who was naïve enough to give Harper a full list of Pierpoint’s ESG assets because she thought she was doing her friend a favor.

Yas’s Life Goes From Bad To Worse

Marisa Abela as Yasmin | Image via HBO

As if being complicit in her father’s death wasn’t bad enough, Yasmin spends the rest of “Nikki Beach, Or: So Many Ways To Lose” having to identify his bloated and ruined corpse (pictures of which are subsequently leaked on Reddit), being lightly blackmailed by Lord Norton into rekindling her relationship with Henry lest a worrying counter-narrative about her father’s death hit the news, being hit on by a very drunk and spiraling Eric who has no choice but to masturbate in a fancy restaurant’s bathroom all over his own hand when she rebuffs him, and discovering that her only friend in the world used her to take revenge against Pierpoint, costing Yas her job in the process.

Yas, Eric finally pulls the trigger and fires Yasmin, motivated by a mixture of embarrassing himself in front of her, being leaned on by Adler to get rid of her so her attendant scandals aren’t inherited by Pierpoint, and the fact that she did, rather stupidly, pass confidential financial information to Harper Stern.

But Eric does, at least, berate Harper for how she manipulated Yas, telling her in no uncertain terms that she really is everything she privately worries she might be. “Heard your family fell apart,” Harper snarls as Eric is leaving, “Shame.”

Cards On The Table

Industry Season 3, Episode 6 ends with an argument between Yas and Harper that their relationship will never be able to recover from.

I’m on Yas’s side, for what that’s worth, even though Harper makes some fair points. But this is where Marisa Abela wins the Emmy, I think. It’s a dynamite performance on both sides, but Yas’s changing expressions and demeanor are remarkable to watch. By the time they’re exchanging slaps, physical violence is the least painful thing they could do to each other.

And this is the only other person who knows what happened to Charles Hanani. Yikes.