On the “Industry” Season Finale, Father Knows Best

The third season of the HBO financial drama “Industry” opens on a luxury yacht, off the coast of one of those places where the very wealthy like to spend their summers: Saint-Tropez or St. Barts, Marbella or Majorca. A party is taking place on the boat, whose name, Lady Yasmin, is stencilled on its side in gold lettering. Youthful, lithe women in abbreviated swimsuits and bare-torsoed men—much older and more grizzled, naturally, than their female counterparts—lounge and dance, drink and snort drugs. Wandering among all this decadence is the darkly beautiful Yasmin Kara-Hanani (the fantastic Marisa Abela), a young banker and the boat’s namesake, who is spending her holiday with its owner: her father, Charles, a louche, gray-maned publishing magnate. Bored, restless, and annoyed by the hubbub around her, Yasmin retreats to her cabin, where she is confronted by a coital scene that is almost immediately revealed to be primal. “Oh, Dad, what the fuck? What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screams, shielding her eyes, as Hanani père, his penis glistening and erect, extracts his head from between the bare thighs of one of the ship’s stewardesses. “In my fucking room?”

Over the course of the season, this shocking moment keeps reappearing—sometimes in brief, return-of-the-repressed-style flashes, sometimes in a more extended fashion—to suggest, bit by bit, some of the backstory of Yasmin’s relationship with Charles, as well as its dénouement. (It is only in the show’s sixth episode that the scene’s arc emerges to its completion.) Learning from her father that he is in desperate financial straits (“He owes a lot of people a lot of money,” she is later told), Yasmin tussles with Charles on a cabin bed in a manner more sexual than familial—something, we sense, is off about this daddy-daughter bond—and the pair then return to the boat’s deck, where their fight rages on, with Charles telling Yasmin that she is a “whore” and “spectacularly talentless.” “I wish you would die!” Yasmin screams, and Charles, calling her bluff, responds, “Maybe I fucking well will!” Climbing over the deck’s railing, he jumps, only to realize that, almost as soon as he hits the water, he has made the wrong choice. As he cries out for help, Yasmin—paralyzed, mute, unable to act—can only watch the sea take him, as the boat glides away.

Since it began airing in 2020, the central events of “Industry” have mostly taken place in and around the London headquarters of the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co. (The show was co-created by two former City men, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay.) On the series, we got to know Yasmin and her fellow Pierpoint bankers—among them the intensely ambitious American Harper (Myha’la); the working-class Oxford grad Robert (Harry Lawtey); the foul-mouthed, fast-talking Rishi (Sagar Radia); and their boss, the prickly and unsated Eric (Ken Leung)—as they navigated lives whose meaning, whether in the realm of love or sex, work or friendship, is entirely tethered to the transactional logic of the free market. The fact that the series’ current season begins off-site, so to speak, in international waters rather than on the trading floor, might suggest that it has moved away from its previous preoccupations. And yet, as I kept watching the show in the past several weeks, it struck me that “Industry” has been able to delve even deeper into what has made it, to my mind, the most thrilling offering currently on TV. This time around, it has done so by zeroing in on how the masculine impulse’s attempt to dominate everything around it, at any cost, is indissolubly tied to the dark heart of capitalism.

One of the central narrative motors of the season is Charles’s disappearance. (And, if you haven’t finished watching yet, please be aware that this piece includes spoilers.) Yasmin, besieged by her father’s disgruntled debtors and hounded by paparazzi dispatched by Britain’s tabloids (“THE EMBEZZLER HEIRESS” blares a headline on the Web site of a Daily Mail-like newspaper), attempts to navigate the scandal, which threatens her job at Pierpoint; simultaneously, she is an easy target to be pursued by Sir Henry Muck (the excellent Kit Harington), a shrewd if depressive toff whose green-energy company, Lumi, is shepherded by Pierpoint toward an ultimately disastrous I.P.O. (The blame for that fiasco gets flung around the bank like a hot potato, landing for a time with Eric, who has newly been made partner, and then with Robert.) Harper, who was tossed out of Pierpoint by Eric at the end of Season 2, is ready to take revenge via the instrument of a new, rapacious hedge fund that she sets up with a more established banker, Petra (Sarah Goldberg), who seems, at least at first, to match Harper’s (ruthless) freak. Rishi’s love for risk-taking is dogging him both at the bank and at home, as he juggles a slew of addictive habits, including gambling and coke, in an ambitious episode that pays tribute to the Safdie brothers’ “Uncut Gems.” And meanwhile Pierpoint itself is heading toward insolvency, as its huge E.S.G. investments (described by an older partner as “woke investing, greenwashing,” in which bank executives “sign they/them a blank check”) emerge as their own kind of catastrophic gamble.

But let me backtrack here again and return, for a moment, to Charles Hanani’s boner, because it not only opens the season but also serves as the spectre haunting it. I mean this literally as well as metaphorically. Literally, because the men on the show often wreak havoc—sexually, violently—on the women and girls around them. (Charles, for one, is plainly a predator.) Metaphorically, because, in the world of “Industry,” it is in one’s self-interest to find a way to be very hard. Being hard is synonymous with being a man: it means making the most money; it means being feared; it means remaining dominant and vital and powerful. One might occasionally give in—consider ethical concerns, experience real emotions, suffer fragility of body or spirit—but if one wants to win, one must not be soft. Softness is for losers.

Robert is a case in point. When we encountered him on the show’s first season, he was a bit of a showboater—handsome, sexually voracious, occasionally callous—but over the years, his portrayal has deepened, and, this season, his growing vulnerability becomes a leitmotif. He is the only man who offers Yasmin his friendship and even his love, which makes sense for a “soft lad,” as Rishi calls him. As Pierpoint’s liaison with Lumi, Robert is considered “Sir Henry’s whipping boy.” (He is working class in a posh world, a sign of weakness: “All bitches must wear a muzzle,” Otto Mostyn, a lordly financier, tells Robert when he arrives with Sir Henry at their private members’ club.) And from the bank’s perspective, once the Lumi I.P.O. goes south, he is expendable, or, in the words of a higher-up, “fuckable.” “Off the desk,” Eric instructs him on the season première, when he begins to cry on the trading floor after his older sometime lover dies unexpectedly. “Are you going to stop being such a pussy? . . . Say it with me: I’m a man, and I’m relentless!” Only when Robert repeats the words until his voice rises to a roar does Eric seem satisfied. “Now, go to work. Now we do our jobs,” he says.

Seeing as how there’s nothing worse than being a pussy, women, too, have to perform their own version of hardness, either by cosplaying men’s heartlessness or by taking on heartless men as protectors. “Do you think I’m a psychopath?” Harper asks Rishi. He answers, “I don’t know. Does it matter?” For Harper, “psychopath” is just another word for nothing left to lose. Hellbent on bringing Eric to heel, she works behind the scenes to short Pierpoint, willing, even, to betray her friend Yasmin to extract crucial information about the bank’s soft E.S.G. belly. “You’ve got Daddy’s attention now,” Eric says, bursting into Harper’s office when he discovers her plot. The truth is, however, that Daddy himself isn’t doing that great. Flailing in the wake of a divorce, he is unsure of his virility (“Do I fuck like a young man?” he asks a new bedmate) and prone to sudden, worrying moments of emotional shakiness. (When his Pierpoint mentor Bill Adler reveals that he has an inoperable brain tumor, a fact that he was keeping secret because, intent on hardness himself, he “didn’t want people in the office thinking [he] was in any way incapacitated,” Eric bursts into tears.) “I’m a man, and I’m relentless,” he whispers, over and over, as if trying to convince himself of the words’ truth, after he decides to fire Kenny, a banker on the desk. Kenny, a sober associate, had kindly attempted to help Eric curb his alcoholism. “He took me in,” Eric explains to Yasmin—a fact that Eric grew to regret, as it made him appear vulnerable. “I shouldn’t have shown him that side of me.” Besides, now that he has been made partner, he needs to “show his teeth.” If he doesn’t let someone go, Pierpoint brass, he figures, would “think I’m weak.”