“So, I’m sure all been programmed to expect something radical, but what I have here for you today, it really isn’t new at all.” Normally it might be a cheat to start a review with the first line of the episode under consideration, but not when the line is so obviously designed for the purpose of framing the episode that follows.
When Robert Spearing makes his pitch about psilocybin microdosing to his investors in the near future, he sells the idea by presenting it as a familiar one. No save-the-world rhetoric for Robert: What he has is a product that will achieve absolutely nothing but parting rich people who want to put their heads in the psychedelic sand, and aspirational types who wish they could do the same, from their money. As with so much capitalism, gone is even the pretense of providing anyone with anything useful. It’s all just a shell game, and the little guy always loses. The magic mushroom racket is no different from any other form of snake oil the Pierpoint salespeople have been hawking since day one.
Robert himself isn’t anything radically new, either. You might think that getting emotionally kicked around by fate all season long — Nicole dying in his arms, Henry cooking the books, a terrible row with his dad, Pierpoint collapsing around him, and now Yasmin finally confessing her love for him only to surprise him with the news that she and Henry are getting married several hours later in front of the world’s richest dinner guests — would send him on a new path. Nope! He’s still trying to get rich by selling people piles of horseshit backed by familiar faces, because no one ever escapes this hell.
Some people thrive in it. It’s strange how marginal Harper has felt to this season, and it’s more than just having been pushed out of Pierpoint. As of right now it feels a bit like the show has run out of layers to peel back on her. Is she a psychopath? The meeting she arranges with Rishi just so she can ask him this question before revealing that she orchestrated the whole thing to humiliate him and leave him with nothing answers that question, I’d say. Does she thrive on proving she’s better than other people? Watch how she flees the newly friendly Leviathan Alpha offices — still a cutthroat firm, just one where people are cordial to each other and don’t engage in insider trading — for an almost supervillainous plan to target crooked firms with crooked shorts in league with the pompous plutocrat Otto Marstyn.
And look who affectionately blurbs her for her 30 Under 30 article! It’s her old mentor Eric Tao, who spends the episode convincing the London office to go along with the firm’s plan to sell itself to Gulf State oligarchs, then voluntarily firing everyone who needs firing after he himself has already been fired. This after he’s seen the changes being wrought by the new owners, from the tacky rebranding to the firing of the CEO for being gay.
Eric choke-sobs when he finds himself on the empty trading floor, so clearly just being addicted to the routine is a big part of it. (Listen to how his speech selling the sale can also doubles as a devout wish that he and his ex-wife could come to an amicable financial-legal arrangement. They don’t call him “the voice of the status quo” for nothing!) But what kind of person volunteers to lay off his colleagues, instead of saying “fuck you” and leaving with his $20 million buyout? The kind of person who thinks Harper Stern has earned a little compliment for a Fortune profile.
That Harper rekindles her friendship with Yasmin at the end of the episode says, unfortunately, a lot about Yasmin. Like Harper, Yasmin has been through a traumatic childhood — one we learn here is so traumatic she barely admits it even to herself. Her father was a pedophile, and she was one of his victims. Her tears when her father’s ex-lover Alondra (Angela Sant’Albano), now in Yasmin’s employ, tells her it’s okay, she’s safe, give the truth of it away.
So Yasmin immediately has the woman fired.
This fits with the creepy phony hint-hint intimidation routine Yasmine had done to Alondra earlier, forcing her to do coke and lecturing her about how family means loyalty or whatever. It fits with Yasmin’s frankly berserk decision to exchange I love yous with Robert and then not only immediately dump him for an asshole she doesn’t love and who doesn’t love her, but spring it on him in public without letting him know privately first. And of course there’s Yasmin’s rationale for all of it, which is she needs Henry’s grandfather to publish her story outing all her father’s victims and thus implicating his company in the coverup, and he won’t do it unless she marries Henry.
Unlike Harper and Eric, Yasmin seems capable of caring about people for longer than a few minutes at a time. And again, she’s been through a tremendous amount; she murdered the father who raped her, for god’s sake. But if it comes down to a choice between someone else and Yasmin, Yasmin’s choosing Yasmin every time. While leaving Henry’s estate, Robert recalls Yasmin telling him she wasn’t sure she ever really loved anyone. I’m not sure she has either.
That’s the big question about these people, isn’t it? What do human emotions look like when fed through the inhuman system that produces Erics and Harpers and Roberts and Yasmins? Are they even recognizable as human? Can someone like Yasmin, for example, really love anyone in the way that you or I understand love? When everyone and everything around you is fully instrumentalized — a means to an end, available for purchase pending negotiations — nothing is out of reach provided you can pay for it. There’s never the risk, the leap of faith, the trust fall into another’s arms that constitutes real love. No wonder even the hugs in this world are poisonous: comfort with a catch from Viscount Norton, catharsis turned into a firing offense with Alondra.
All of this is to say that when Rishi’s bookie Vinay shoots his wife Diana to death front of him, I wonder if it revived the part of him capable of caring about other people, or simply made him more keenly aware that he, the protagonist of reality, is in mortal danger. In the end, Vinay killed Diana for telling him he’s a bad person, that the way he makes money is wrong because it takes advantage of people. By killing her he’s just doing what every character on this show, Rishi included, has done at some point: shutting that voice up. It’s like all of them have had some crucial part of their brains blown out; Industry, now the hit it has always deserved to be, a show about the living dead.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
