It’s hard to know how to even begin to account for everything that goes down and piles up and spirals out of control in “Infinite Largesse,” the Season 3 finale of HBO’s haute-workplace drama Industry. So I guess I’ll just start with the episode’s bitter end. Three people (and a birthday cake) sit miserably at a table: one crying, one shouting, one holding a gun. The crying one, who is also the birthday boy, is Rishi, a once-braggadocious trader at the once-mighty bank Pierpoint. The one holding the gun is his loan shark, Vinay, to whom Rishi owes a half-million pound debt. And the shouting one—the one who thought it might be a nice gesture to drop by with a birthday cake—is Diana, Rishi’s soon-to-be ex-wife.
“You prey on him,” Diana yells at Vinay. “You exploit him.” She knows Rishi is a piece of shit, but she resents the way Vinay sticks his nose in it. “You are the worst kind of person,” she rages—as Rishi weeps and a French bop from the 1960s about a lyin’, cheatin’ man crescendos in volume—“because he might be sick and selfish, but you enable him!” She has a point, but Vinay has a gun, and it only takes an instant for him to extinguish her like a candle and leave the birthday boy to clean up the terrible mess that he made.
It’s a bold, brutal scene, the kind that shocks in the moment, nags at you afterward, and enhances the rest of the finale should you choose to go back to watch it again. (Did I ever wince when, viewing the episode a second time, I heard Rishi’s parting words to the Pierpoint trading floor: “I hope you enjoy feeling your flesh sear in the hell you’ve created for yourself!” And that was before he was out there yelling “You’ll always need an execution guy!”)
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It’s a scene that underscores both the ambition and the, well, execution of the creative team behind Industry. Showrunners Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, who pitched and wrote the series based in part on their personal experiences in the finance world, made their series directorial debuts with, oh, just the penultimate and finale episodes of Season 3, no pressure.
But what might be the most incredible thing about the scene is the way it’s just one out of many equally standout moments to be found in “Infinite Largesse.” Industry’s Season 3 finale is rich with small details and dense with tension, featuring bad hugs and big goodbyes and even bigger negotiations, all of it adding up to 70 minutes’ worth of bangers that may not get as bloody as Rishi’s walls, sure, but still pack a real visceral and visual wallop. “Infinite Largesse” is an episode about vulnerability and predation; about practical choices and fantastical stories; and about the way small problems have a way of cascading into unsolvable ones. Which makes it a fitting capstone to the past eight episodes of the series, Industry’s most harrowing—and best—season yet.
Over the course of its three seasons, the first of which aired in 2020, Industry has been described in a number of ways, and compared to a number of different shows. There’s “Billions meets Euphoria” and “Skins meets Wall Street” and “Working Girl for a New Generation” and “Succession meets Girls.” Just last week, GQ begged, appropriately: “Stop Comparing Industry to Succession, When It Really Wants to Be Mad Men.” Four years ago, the British iteration of the mag called Industry a mix of “a Thick Of It-worthy hostile work environment with the nail-biting financial roulette of Margin Call.” A piece in The New Republic also shouted out Mad Men and detected notes of Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, The Wire, Deadwood—and that noted literary-cinematic universe, Hell.
To this list I’d suggest adding another comp. Season 3 of Industry features dead bodies; scenic expanses of salt water that also possess threatening auras; exquisitely-cast guest stars; revealing and/or incriminating skips and hops through time; and clueless rich people who don’t realize how quickly they’re careering toward disaster. Season 3 of Industry, in other words, is The White Lotus, as streamed over a Bloomberg terminal. Whatever Industry might remind you of, though, the formula has been working: Viewership has risen by 40 percent since Season 2, fueled in part by a move to the big boy Sunday night HBO slot. The show was recently renewed for a fourth run. And the critical consensus has been that the latest releases in particular feel like an exciting step upward and outward for the show.
“They will always say, Mickey and Konrad, that they didn’t know what they were doing with the first season, but I think that’s utter bollocks,” argues Kit Harington—who was a huge fan of Industry before being cast this season as Henry—over Zoom. “I think they may have felt that, but you could not tell from watching it. It looked so accomplished and different.” At the same time, between then and now, the show has clearly found its stride.
In the finale alone, trader Harper Stern plots crimes with a White Walker–eyed guy named Otto who says things like “nothing comes from nothing.” Rob Spearing, the show’s designated Guy Who Is Going to Be OK, pitches synthetic shrooms from a Silicon Valley sofa. The cameras loll in a Saltburn-strength manse as Yasmin Hanani determines she’d rather be wealthy than feel love, and linger on a shuttered Pierpoint trading floor as Eric bids the shoeshine guy goodnight forever. The song “The Last Goodbye” by the Kills swells as Rob and Yasmin gaze across a table. The world Rishi has built ends with a bang, and his whimpers.
Harry Lawtey, who has played Rob since the Industry pilot, tells me that, “We really got a sense, when we were making this [season], that it was a show that was expanding, both in terms of its viewpoint and its themes and its worldview, but also just tonally. I think there’s some abstract qualities to this show, and the cinematography is slightly more advanced. And so, yeah, that was really gratifying as a cast member, to feel part of a project that was kind of staying true to its identity, but moving as well.”
It was clear from the first episode of Season 3 that there would be some changes around the Industry workplace this time around. Harper, having been fired in the Season 2 finale, was no longer at Pierpoint. Gus was in Palo Alto, trying his hand at venture capital. There was no sign of beleaguered kiss ass DVD. Kenny got shitcanned almost immediately in the opening episode, which sucked for him, but hey, it could have been worse: his character could have been written into prison, à la the tennis-playing, Wu-Tang-pumping Jesse Bloom; or gotten killed off, like Nicole, one of Pierpoint’s most reliably problematic clients throughout the first two seasons, who died as she lived: post-coitally with Rob, and in service to Industry’s thematic aims.
In between last season and this one, “the central question that we were asking was, ‘Are you able to be vulnerable in a place like this where it isn’t valued?,’” Down tells me. The Season 3 premiere “is really about Robert in particular and about showing vulnerability and it being thrown back in your face. This huge seismic thing happens”—Rob waking up to Nicole’s dead body beside him—“and he comes into the bank and does the most vulnerable thing he could possibly do in a situation, which is shocking to everyone, which is that he cries.” Most people just ignore him, but Eric forces Rob to chant “I am a man, and I am relentless,” and get back to work. In this high-achiever, high-stress world, Rob is far from the only worker who gets reminded that vulnerability can only mean weakness.
Midway through this season, Harper—who was taught from Day 1 by Eric that if you’re not a “world killer,” you’re worth nothing—suggests to Petra that perhaps they should be “more vulnerable with each other.” Petra is disgusted. “I don’t ask you who you fuck, or what pills you take to go to sleep,” she says. “I respect your work, and you respect mine. That’s the only currency that matters here.” When the waterlogged body of Yasmin’s lecherous criminal of a father is found, making tabloid headlines, the Pierpoint brass supports their employee by telling her she’s too much of a distraction to be working there anymore. And while Bill Adler’s a big jerk, it’s pretty messed up that when he confides in Eric about his grave health status, it winds up being used against him, all the way to his own grave.
Finally, though, there’s the upper-crust wantrepreneur Sir Henry Muck, in all his “dumb smart money” glory. Restless and cosseted, grandiose and grumpy, Henry is so rich that he refers to a seven-figure sum as mere ho-hum rainy-day “prosciutto money,” and he’s so uncool under pressure that in one key moment of corporate crunch time, he locks himself in a bathroom to cower. Above all else, though, Henry really is just a guy, standing in front of a girl (or an investor, or a roomful of regulators) asking everyone to please just get vulnerable with him—for business and pleasure alike.
“Henry Muck must say the word vulnerable, like, 100 times in this show,” Marisa Abela, who plays Yasmin, observes with a laugh over Zoom. “But what’s interesting is that the people that talk about vulnerability the most are often the most privileged, because they’re allowed to have it.” For Henry, vulnerability registers not so much as a risk but as a resource, one more tool for commanding intimacy, papering over shenanigans, or soliciting money.
In this season’s fifth episode, he jump-starts his morning by standing in the shower with Yasmin and propositioning her via these riddles three: 1. “Can you do something for me?” 2. “Can you be vulnerable with me if I’m vulnerable with you?” And then, 3. the real ask: “Can you relieve yourself on me?” Can she ever! Later, he testifies in front of a scowling political subcommittee about how his splashy, sketchy renewable energy startup Lumi managed to go from hero to zero so quickly. “I think the most important thing,” Henry says to his inquisitors, “is to be vulnerable in front of you right now.” He plays the hits again when he attempts to distract Yasmin from revelations that he’d been sexually inappropriate with subordinates: “I love how vulnerable you make me feel,” he says, with the vibe of someone jingling car keys to distract a fussy baby. “That was a holy moment, when we were vulnerable with each other!”
And in the finale, he tells Rob and Yasmin about the latest venture he’s funding. “A speaker circuit for public business failures,” is how he puts it. (He’s something of a public business failure himself.) “An arena where people can be vulnerable and learn from each others’ mistakes.” When you’re someone like Henry, you don’t have to hide all your damage; you can rock it like intentionally-distressed denim. When you’re someone like Henry, failure and vulnerability don’t have to be bad, they can be Veblen goods: the costlier, the cooler.
Perhaps Eric Tao can thrive on Henry’s public speaking circuit one day, if what we see from him in “Infinite Largesse” is any indication. About 10 minutes into the episode, Tao stands in front of a room full of disgruntled Pierpoint employees, trying to sell them a bill of goods. It isn’t just their jobs that are in danger, it’s their whole firm, and there’s a restless, cornered-animal vibe in the room.
“Orderly financial exchange is the basis of harmony,” Eric booms. “Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money!” The Pierpoint employees nod, as if they’re listening to a motivational Denzel Washington speech in Remember the Titans. But when Eric concludes his call to arms, and his bemused boss asks him where all that came from, she can’t possibly predict his answer. “I cribbed it,” he says, “from a short story about an ad exec and the largesse of a sea maiden.”
People contain multitudes, and Eric “The Terminator” Tao is, in Industry canon, apparently familiar enough with Denis Johnson’s short story collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden to conjure it during a high-stakes meeting. Which means he must know that,
in their original context, those crowd-winning money lines had to do with … a fictional Super Bowl ad featuring a cartoon bunny?
In this animated thirty-second spot, you see a brown bear chasing a gray rabbit. They come one after the other over a hill toward the view—the rabbit is cornered, he’s crying, the bear comes to him—the rabbit reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the bear. The bear looks at this gift, sits down, stares into space. The music stops, there’s no sound, nothing is said, and, right there, the little narrative ends, on a note of complete uncertainty. It’s an advertisement for a banking chain. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that’s only if you haven’t seen it.
[…]
It was better than cryptic—mysterious, untranslatable. I think it pointed to orderly financial exchange as the basis of harmony. Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money.
This sounds lovely, and the words briefly do their job, but as we know from Industry, money doesn’t tame the beast—it feeds it. What the commercial doesn’t tell us is that the bear will keep coming back for its buck, and that maybe one day, the rabbit won’t be able to pay.
By the end of “Infinite Largesse,” Eric has been sacked by the new Saudi owners that he so diabolically helped bring in, and his whole London desk is no longer. “I spent the last five-some-odd years building this tough guy,” says Ken Leung, who plays Eric. “And I knew that because of how nuanced our show is, there was another side. I guess I was surprised by how soft his underbelly is.”
So Eric is left to prowl the Pierpoint trading floor one last time. It is a haunted scene. The computers, already sheathed in dust cloths, look like ghosts. Eric dons his beloved headset and gets on the blower with imaginary business associates, and he’s right to do so. “It’s as big as losing a huge character of the show,” Down tells me about the lights going out on Industry’s most central space. “And I think it’s reflected in Eric’s reaction to it. It’s elegiac, it’s nostalgic. It’s also: Fuck, I gave all my life to this and it’s now gone. Who am I now?”
And so the end of the story is money. Twenty million cash severance over 48 months—a sum Eric later tells Harper isn’t enough.
Last season, when Harper proudly told contrarian investor Jesse Bloom that she worked for Eric Tao, Bloom negged her. “I love how you say that like I’m supposed to know him,” he said. “The only famous salesman’s Willy Loman.” Yet Bloom is a salesman of his own: locating Harper’s buttons—narcissism; ambition—and pressing them. And he does it again, in absentia, in the Season 3 finale, sending a message through Otto. “He asked if you were happy,” Otto tells Harper in a sub rosa encounter. “I said she seemed it the last time I saw her, and he said: that’s no way to live.”
It had seemed like a healthy work-life-balance breakthrough for Harper, early in “Infinite Largesse,” when she and Petra reconcile and promise to operate as a collaborative team with Sweetpea and Anraj at Leviathan Alpha. “Maybe reciprocity really is the key to a happier life!” a relieved Petra says. But it doesn’t take long before Harper is drawn back to her alpha-seeking lone wolf ways. She is searching for edge, and she has internalized that to be happy is to grow dull.
Back when The New Yorker published “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” in 2014, the magazine’s fiction editor corresponded briefly with the author about his work. The highlight:
Deborah Treisman: The story seems to me a vision of late middle age: perfused with tensions and regrets, fatigue and resignation, but also the occasional overwhelming joy, and openness. Do you think of Whit [the story’s narrator] as a kind of average everyman?
Denis Johnson: Wow, no—I hope the average everyman’s having more fun.
The dilemma faced by a number of characters throughout Industry is that they perceive the average everyman to be a real sucker. If everyone is out there having fun, it must be too crowded a trade. “Detachment, opportunism, predatory instinct makes a good trader,” Rishi tells Harper; to be content is to be unsuspecting, easy prey. What Harper hasn’t quite realized yet is that her confident discontent is a weakness of its own—one that has been honed in on by Bloom and Otto for a while. “You’re a troublemaker,” Otto tells her this season, waltzing on the line between persuasion and predation. “You’re one of us. You’re one of the bandits.”
When Otto says this, it’s a twisted and seductive compliment. But later, Harper isn’t so chuffed when her best frenemy Yasmin describes her in much the same way.
“You are hardwired to exploit people’s vulnerabilities,” Yasmin snaps in the midst of a crackling argument that culminates in mutual slaps in the face. It’s one hell of a scene, a pair of hurt people hurting people and using every shred of leverage available. “I was like, damn, they really went there!” says Myha’la, who plays Harper. “I truly thought that that was the end for them.” Which is exactly what Kay and Down had hoped to accomplish going into this season.
“Very bluntly,” Kay tells me, “our best characters were not on screen together enough in Season 2. Like, Yasmin had a story, Harper had a story, Rob had a story. For Season 3, one of our key things we put on the wall was: Let’s make sure all of our core three, Robert, Harper, and Yasmin, are constantly interacting, and that all of the business story lines hang off the interpersonal dynamics of those three.”
The Harper-Yasmin friendship is at the very core of the drama that unfolds throughout Season 3: they are, as far as we are aware, the only two people who know the circumstances of Yasmin’s father’s death in the waters off his yacht. Harper’s handling of her shellshocked, guilt-ridden friend on that day was magnanimous and loyal, but Yasmin doesn’t feel soothed by that, just suspicious and exposed. “She’s from an incredibly abusive and unloved and difficult background that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,” says Harington.
By the end of “Infinite Largesse,” Harper withdraws from her mainly-happy, normie colleagues and conspires with the bandits instead, just to feel something. Yasmin, meanwhile, makes a series of decisions driven by what she knows she doesn’t want to feel. “I’m nothing like my father,” she declares to an executive who is trying to take advantage of her vulnerability. “He was weak.”
Something I love most about this season of Industry is that it’s not only a step up from past seasons, it also works perfectly with them. There’s a satisfying verisimilitude to many of the characters on the show, in large part because their career arcs are so aligned with the creators who wrote them and the actors who play them. When Abela was cast as Yasmin, for example, it meant that her first big job was playing someone starting her first big job.
“I think people think that there was an element of, you know, fear and pressure,” she says of what it was like to shoot the first season. “And to a certain extent there were those things. But there was also, like, a huge amount of delusion! And freedom. Because I’d never done this before, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”
The early seasons of Industry might look a little bit raw in hindsight, but don’t we all? “Robert and Yasmin as characters, they’ve been on this kind of winding road together,” says Lawtey, in the understatement of the year. That winding road is what makes their road trip sing in the last few episodes of this most recent season. (Lawtey says that shooting the buddy journey took something like two weeks and “kind of felt like we were making a little film together.”)
When Yasmin crinkles her nose at Rob’s low-class foodstuffs, when Rob tells her to stop playing games and sit with her own vulnerability for once, when Yasmin uses and discards Rob one more time before getting strategically, blandly engaged to Sir Henry Muck and Rob’s not even mad, necessarily, just melancholy—the show has earned all of that. When Muck tells Rob that “something about you makes me either want to kill you or love you, not sure which yet,” I thought to myself that he was behind the times, that Yasmin had already done an expert job at both tasks.
When we last see Yasmin this season, she is flipping through a pitchbook, looking at two mocked-up logos touting Henry’s new concept. FAIL FIESTA, they read neatly, in duplicate. THE UNTAPPED OPPORTUNITY OF FAILURE. She has hired a new personal assistant: the worker she’d found in flagrante delicto with her dad on his yacht. “We’re a family here,” Yas insists, but when the young woman tries to reach out with a hug and a reminder that Yasmin isn’t at fault for her father’s many crimes, Yasmin can’t tolerate the warmth. She storms out, telling the butler to go fire her.
The showrunners may have spent this season searching for ways to bring its characters together, but as Season 3 concludes, everyone is beginning to grow exponentially further apart, geographically and otherwise. Harper is Big Apple bound. Yasmin is in her own world, and Rob is off in search of a new one. There’s no telling how or where Eric or Rishi will land. And it’s clear that this excites Down and Kay. “We get excited by the fact that we can just blow everything up,” Down told Variety about Season 4. “The show is evolving,” said Kay. “We are as creators, and the actors are as actors. Why can’t the show be something else? It’ll always be about business. It will always be about the intersection of these people’s lives and the capitalist instinct. But that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it has to be confined to a trading floor.”
With all that has happened this season, it’s hard to know how to close, so I’ll end with a fresh new start. Johnson’s “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” finishes with the narrator writing: “Sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.” Which isn’t all too dissimilar from how we find Industry’s Rob in the closing scene of “Infinite Largesse”: an informally-dressed guy hitting the road, in thrall of some higher, more mystical calling.
Rob sits in a room in the foreign land of California, with the ever-so-slight hint of a bussin cut, and uses phrases like “the listless ennui of the hyperprivileged” and “a shortcut to something higher, something transcendent” to describe why he’s decided to peddle the mind-altering drug psilocybin. (Crossing my fingers that Season 4 of Industry will be describable as, like, “Silicon Valley meets The Sopranos!”) The potential investor dudes are impressed to see that he has a million in seed funding: half from Muck, half from Ashworth Asset Management.
“I’m just here to give you an opportunity,” Rob says as Season 3 concludes. “Join us on the ground floor of what’s going to be a spectacular journey.” When he words it like that, the sales pitch has shades of the untapped opportunity of failure, but we know that Rob has already been walking the walk, making it thousands of miles away from the land of the Fail Fiesta. He hasn’t given up on becoming his own success story, and the beginning of the story is money.
