‘Industry’ Season 3 Ends At Its Best – By Showing The Worst Of Everyone

Industry Season 3 was never heading to a happy ending, but even I didn’t expect one quite so cynical as this. Episode 8, “Infinite Largesse”, is brutal; it depicts the uncompromising savagery of finance, business, and media, the depravity of the elite, and the immorality of the ambitious. Nobody comes out clean, though a couple come out rich enough to realize that they will never have enough wealth or power to feel any better about themselves.

The central story of the finale, and probably the best, is Yasmin’s, which by extension is also Robert’s. This story is also the most deeply crushing and symbolic of the black-hole gravity Industry revolves around – the power of cold, hard cash.

A Tragic Love Story

Yasmin loves Robert, let’s be clear. But she’s a besmirched heiress who is determined to fight the enabling publishing company of her child-rapist dead father. She needs money, and Rob, who takes a charming little pleasure in doing a scratchcard in the murky glass of a quaint shop window, doesn’t have any. That’s the best thing about him, but it’s also the thing that makes him unsuitable for Yas’s needs.

Enter Henry Muck once again, and particularly his media mogul uncle, Lord Norton. Yas returns to Henry’s palatial estate under the guise of manipulating him into providing seed funding for the medical start-up Rob is going to be working for; he’s a mark. This seems unambiguous until it isn’t.

Photo : Copyright © Simon Ridgway 2023

But the signs are there. When Yas has a moment with Lord Norton in the morning, he vaguely alludes to having known about her father’s improprieties for a long while and implies quite directly that, were Yasmin family, he would protect her in the way her own father never did. And on a core level, that’s what Yasmin needs. She doesn’t take from this conversation what I did, which is that Norton’s admission that he used his tabloids to bully Yas back into a high-profile relationship with Henry is psychotic. But Henry is broken, too, and needs protecting from himself.

One of the most earnest and lovely scenes in the show’s history occurs in Industry Season 3, Episode 8. Yas and Rob finally make good on the sexual chemistry that has been burbling between them for years, on a bench on the grounds of Henry’s manor, and they both say “I love you” and mean it. Then Yas gets engaged to Henry.

It’s easy to see this as Yas tormenting Rob, but I didn’t take it that way. I think this was Yas being honest with him, finally. She let the walls down long enough to share something with him that she knew they both wanted. She must have known what she was going to do. She was letting Rob experience, just the once, how things would be in an ideal world where her father’s abuses hadn’t shattered her, the guilt of his death didn’t haunt her, and his crimes and their cover-up didn’t follow her. During the ridiculously haughty supper where the engagement is announced, Yas mouths “I’m sorry” to Rob. He says he understands, and I think he means it.

Harper’s Redemption Arc (Sort Of)

Photo : Copyright © Simon Ridgway 2023

Industry isn’t a show with one villain – it’s a show entirely about villains. However, even in that kind of company, Harper Stern stands apart. She is, without a doubt, the most ruthlessly self-serving and pathologically vindictive character in the show. And yet in “Infinite Largesse” she is somehow more reasonable than she has ever been.

Harper is immune, for instance, to the allure of someone like Otto, who whisked her away at the end of Episode 7 for a chat which turns out to be a sales pitch. He’s mad at Petra, not Harper. Nobody likes a tattle-tale. In Harper, Otto sees himself, and potentially a very progressive successor to his empire. This is a man used to getting his own way and shaking hands on deals that benefit him above all. He doesn’t consider for a moment that Harper might reject his offer.

But she does. Leviathan Alpha cashes out of the Pierpoint debacle at a minor profit, having lined Otto’s pockets enough to justify severing their ties to him. He’s furious. But for once, Harper didn’t burn down an entire building just because she didn’t like the wallpaper. In fact, she welcomed in more people, including Sweetpea and Anraj, the two most deserving of a new job away from Pierpoint.

I wouldn’t say she has mellowed since she takes enormous and visible pleasure in leaving Rishi high and dry. And, after a while, she returns to Otto with a new pitch of her own. She’ll take his money, happily, but not to step into his former position and fill his shoes. She wants to return home to New York to run a hedge fund designed to exclusively short deserving stocks through a combination of nous and corporate espionage. She wants to become capitalism’s big game hunter. And Otto likes the idea.

Eric Wins and Loses

Photo : Copyright © Simon Ridgway 2023

Nowhere is the underlying theme of this finale best expressed than through Eric, who brokered the deal with the Al-Miraj family that saved Pierpoint and doomed himself.

It’s Eric who has to explain to Pierpoint’s London traders that the bank has been bought out by a sovereign wealth fund. In trying to do so he cycles through all of the modes that we’ve seen him adopt through three seasons; the upbeat motivator, the shrewd and obtuse senior partner, the by-the-bootstraps immigrant. In the end, he drops the façade and tells the truth. It’s all about money, and everyone will be well compensated. There is no room for morality or childish ideas of meritocracy. Money makes the world go around.

This is why Eric takes his own firing so well – it comes with a compensatory fortune. Is it enough for a guy like him, who has already lost everything in the pursuit of his career? Probably not, no. But it’s enough for now. In the cutthroat world of Big Finance, it’s fair. And some measure of fairness is probably the best-case scenario.

Industry Season 3 ends with Harper – still saved as Harpsichord in his phone – calling Eric to thank him for a glowing blurb he provided to Forbes for her 30 Under 30 entry. For once, they understand each other. Both have done what they need to in order to secure their own futures, though neither is quite where they want to be – yet. Eric tells her to take care, and he means it.

And Another Thing

There were a couple of extra things in Industry Season 3, Episode 8 that deserve a mention but wouldn’t fit into the recap, so here they are:

• A few months into her tenure as Muck’s wife, Yasmin has hired Alondra, the pregnant deckhand she caught her father frolicking with at the start of the season, as a personal secretary. Alondra tells Yas that her father and his friends abused girls as young as 12 on the yacht, and rather than properly wrestle with the implications of that, she coldly has Alondra fired.
• When Rishi returns home after being humiliated by Harper, he finds Vinay in his apartment. He’s still on the hook for half a million quid, his relationship with Diana has thoroughly broken down (she’s there for his birthday, but they’re not together), and he has no future prospects whatsoever. When Diana berates Vinay for putting them in this position, Vinay shoots her in the head at the dinner table.
• Rob and Yas had unprotected sex. I didn’t want to detail this in the recap proper because I thought it might undermine the romantic aspect, but Yas tells him outright to finish inside her, so there’s a good chance she’s pregnant at this point. Based on how she has finessed her way into the English upper class, this is probably part of some heir-apparent long con.
• The finale ends, fittingly, with Rob himself, who is still drumming up funding for his new company. He is free from Pierpoint, and from London, but not from money. In the end, nobody is.