Industry Recap: You Got Daddy’s Attention Now
In Western culture, the most recognizable structure for a plot is Freytag’s pyramid. A story starts with exposition, the action rises, a climax occurs, the action falls, and concludes with a resolution or denouement. Industry, as I see it, doesn’t quite follow this structure. There’s so much that each character is going through, so many spikes of tension, so many moments of exposition. Instead, I think it’s useful to look to the Japanese/Chinese/Korean narrative framework of 起承転 or Kishōtenketsu. It’s a similar structure, with subtle differences, but most importantly for this episode of Industry, Kishōtenketsu allows for the tensest point of a story not necessarily to be a climax; instead, it’s a revelation, a flip on its head.
That’s “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose” in a nutshell. Two huge developments happen, which serve to flip the story over, showing us season three’s heaving, vulnerable underbelly. Those are, of course, the reveal of Charles Hanani’s death and Harper’s scheme to short Pierpoint. Each is a crucial turning point in Harper and Yasmin’s development as individuals and friends.
So, let’s begin right where the last episode left off: did Yasmin kill her father? I think not. Actually, it feels like classic solipsistic Yasmin to view this as her fault. It would do that girl some good to touch grass. The episode goes back to the yacht on the coast of Italy when Yasmin walks in on Charles Hanani hooking up with the yacht crew member, and Charles assaults her in a violent rage, throwing red wine in her face. Yasmin escapes to the deserted deck of the boat, where she is soon followed by her drunk, apparently apologetic dad. But when he goes to hug her to say sorry, Yasmin realizes that Charles still has an erection. For the viewers at home, this is the second time in Industry that Charlie Hanani weaponizes a half-chub at the expense of his daughter, the first being after his meeting with Celeste and Yasmin at Pierpoint last season.
I’ve seen people debating on the Industry Reddit whether or not they think Charles sexually abused Yasmin. My opinion is that whether or not Charles physically abused Yasmin is still unclear, but he certainly has abused her because it’s abusive to include an unconsenting person, much less your CHILD, in your sexuality. Charles gets off on Yasmin being around when he sexualizes and engages sexually with other women. He has no appropriate boundaries and has pulled his daughter into the black hole of his voracious carnal appetite. Charles is an atrocious father whose only provision is money, and while he may not have laid a hand on Yasmin, he has used his sexuality to abuse her.
Anyway, Charles and Yasmin get into it. I did laugh a lot when Yasmin shouted that she speaks seven languages. (A trait of hers that I’ve always loved when played on screen.) But eventually, Yasmin says that thing that I think nearly all teenage daughters have said to their parents: “I wish you would die.” Charles takes what she says at face value and jumps off the boat. It’s clear that he didn’t really intend to do the thing; he didn’t expect the yacht to be moving so fast and thought Yasmin would immediately throw him a life preserver. But Yasmin is too frozen by shock, and the yacht is pulling away too quickly, and by the time she snaps to it, her feckless, foolish, good-for-nothing father is gone.
As far as I’m concerned, it is entirely Charles Hanani’s fault that he drowned. You took something your upset daughter said literally and you JUMPED into the OPEN OCEAN? Uh, yeah, dude, you might die. Here is a man who has never truly faced a consequence, instead skating by on his privilege and the discomfort of others. Well, here’s the consequence of leaping into the sea, likely drunk, from a moving yacht. You die.
As for how Harper is implicated in this: Harper apparently was brought on the boat by a desperate Yasmin to make the yacht trip bearable. But where she actually comes in handy is when she hauls a completely unraveled Yasmin together, and makes it so that the silly girl doesn’t incriminate herself in her father’s death. Basically, Harper replaces the life preserver Yasmin neglected to throw off the boat and gets Yasmin to say they were together partying during the time Charles died. Without Harper, Yasmin would be living a very different life right now. Everyone needs a best friend like this, someone who can be alarmingly calm under pressure. Help you bury a body when you need it, in this case, literally.
In the present day, Yasmin is dealing with the fallout of the discovery of her dead dad’s corpse. She has to go and identify his body, which has been bloated beyond recognition. (I did love her cold-eyed certainty when she said she’d take his ring.) Her now ex-boyfriend’s rich tabloid uncle calls to imply that he has a possibly incriminating story about Yas’s dad’s death but would potentially spike it if she got back with Henry. Next, she is sexually harassed by Eric at a lunch meant to cheer her up. Friends, I REALLY wanted to be wrong about this one. All season long I’ve been saying that Yasmin and Eric’s vibe is gross, incestuous, makes my skin crawl. I hoped that maybe Henry and Yasmin dating each other would throw Eric off the scent, but I guess not. The midlife crisis looks so bad on Alvin America Tao. I know it’s stressful to be him and to be dealing with the bank falling apart, but GOD, I HATED WATCHING THAT. It is a bad day for Yasmin. And it isn’t even over yet.
By that, I mean Yasmin hasn’t yet been subjected to what Harper has in store for her. Harper starts her day looking hot, stalking James Ashford, the asset manager who kicked off the first episode of this season by sounding the alarm on Lumi’s bad financials. (I find it hard to take this actor seriously because I often see him in an English muffin commercial on Hulu.) She flirts with Ashford and gets some information in return: First, Petra has been spotted at rehab before. Second, that everyone is trying to do whatever they can to unload their ESG assets. While no one has as clear-cut a view as Harper about Pierpoint’s trouble, it seems there are a few banks with huge amounts of debt about to mature and massive bets on ESG, which could prove disastrous. That rumor is enough to get Petra inquiring about creditors looking to offload debt and finding out that Pierpoint is the debt creditors are most desperate to get rid of, eventually leading to them shorting Pierpoint.
What does it mean for Leviathan Alpha to short Pierpoint? Alright. So, remember how in Rishi’s episode, we talked about how Rishi was long, which meant he had a lot of something because he anticipated it would grow in value, at which point he’d sell it off and reap the growth as profit? Shorting is the opposite. To short a stock, an investor borrows shares of something from a broker for a certain price. They then sell those shares on the open market, expecting that the value of the shares will decrease. When that share price drops, they buy back the same shares at a lower price. Then, when they return those shares to the broker, they pocket the difference between the price they initially borrowed those shares for and what they bought them at later when the price dropped. For example: I borrow 50 shares of Hanani Publish Stock from a broker, for $100 a share. I sell the borrowed shares for $5,000. The news of Charles’s death comes out, and the share price drops to $25 a share. I buy 50 shares on the open market for $1,250, return the shares to my broker, and pocket $3,750 of profit.
If you think that sounds ridiculous, I don’t blame you. Shorting is a deeply speculative and risky way to invest. It’s fairly safe to say stocks will slowly increase in value or stay the same over a long period. But to say that a stock will dramatically drop in value, you have to have conviction, as they like to say on this show. After overhearing Sweetpea and Yasmin talk about Pierpoint using nearly mature debt to fund its ESG bets, Harper just so happens to have illegal insider information, so, yeah, she has a ton of conviction. Of course, she has to compile a convincing enough case that she got this information in a legal-ish way, so she engineers an interview with Sweetpea, who continues to be smarter than people give her credit for, sniffs out what Harper is up to, and refuses to give Harper the confidential information. No matter. Harper already has a gullible fool on the inside, ready to give a list of Pierpoint’s positions away. Yes, it’s Petra who pushes Yasmin to compromise the bank, but Harper doesn’t do enough to protest, in my humble opinion. Sigh. However, Harper’s remorse for hurting her friend registers with me as personal growth.
To short Pierpoint, who does Harper turn to but the Avengers of jilted ex-Pierpointers: Kenny, Daria, and Jackie, all working for Goldman. I adored this brief little shot. It felt like seeing old friends you haven’t seen in ages. Hi guys!! I’m so happy to know your hostility and malice are believable enough that you came back into play in the final moments of this episode. Hope you’re all doing well!!
Eric eventually gets his head out of his pants and figures out what Harper is up to. He tears into Yasmin for falling into Harper’s trap and he also calls Harper to chew her out. I must say, I found this confrontation anticlimactic after Switzerland’s delicious hostilities. Still, when Eric tells Harper that he wants her to know everything she thinks about herself is true, I shivered. After all these months of not working together, he still knows exactly what to say to knife Harper in the heart.
Harper returns home to find a furious Yasmin. They have it out with each other, fighting with their gloves off. Yasmin argues that Harper is evil because she still finds a way to use Yasmin on one of the worst days of her life. “That girl on the boat loved me,” she says. I don’t know, Yasmin. You knew how Harper could get about work. You two literally fell out about this last season. Also, why is Pierpoint so important? Forget the bank! Let it topple! You’ll land on your feet somehow! Yes, Eric essentially fired Yasmin, but isn’t that clearly due to William Adler’s email with the link to the Charles Hanani autopsy photos and Eric’s sexual harassment retaliation? (Which, may I add, is so illegal.) I’m not very convinced by her vitriol and, if anything, annoyed by it. Harper literally helped you cover up manslaughter. Get over yourself! However, this has always been a fundamental flaw in Yasmin: her inability to see other people as fully human if they aren’t fully in service to her. Harper calls her on this, though I sense her heart isn’t fully in it. Yes, they hit each other. Yes, they insult each other. Yes, there’s a sense of a dam breaking, that the two characters finally say what they’ve always thought about the other. Still, this isn’t the most cutting Harper can be (case in point, her telling Eric she heard his family fell apart) and I felt like Harper was playing more defense than offense. I love it when Yasmin and Harper are friends and feel genuinely miffed that they’re back on the outs. Here’s to hoping they get back together because this season is over.
Loose Change
• My big dilemma these days is what item of Pierpoint merch I will buy for myself. I really love the Pierpoint hoodie Eric wears to a management retreat, but I fear that the color purple is horrendous. Do I go rogue and instead find the hat Yas is wearing when she gets fired that says “Save Water Drink Negronis”? (Even though I don’t even like Negronis.)
• I’ve always wanted to point this out but never know where to, so I’ll do it here: Are there any folks watching Industry who also watched Skins? I suspect I love this show because I adored one of the final episodes of Skins where Effy goes to work for a bank. In many ways, Industry feels like an elongation and reimagining of that episode of television, another place where sex, money, drugs, and growing up all intersected. Also, of course, Freya Mavor plays Daria in Industry and Mini in the fifth and sixth seasons of Skins.