Spoiler alert: this recap is published after episodes seven and eight of Industry season two air on BBC One in the UK. Do not read on if you haven’t watched them.
“Be crystal with me,” threatens Rishi as he gears up to join Eric and Harper in jumping ship to a competitor – but no one can promise clarity in waters this choppy. Pierpoint London is sinking, scuppered by New York and there can only be so many survivors.
In these final two episodes of the series, set over a hectic couple of days, plans are abandoned and alliances broken just as soon as they can be made (even before, in the case of Rishi’s marriage) as our central characters scramble for safe passage.
Harper, Eric and Rishi take meetings with two banks, dangling Jesse Bloom’s account, but are sabotaged. With Danny Van Deventer (DVD) newly disillusioned by Pierpoint (not least for not having made him MD), Harper brings him in to help them court a third.
Watching these four play-act at being a “legit unit … more than the sum of our parts” for as long as it takes for them to get hired is very funny. (“This kid!” says Eric of DVD, plausibly fondly.) But their success comes with a hidden cost: the bank would want them in New York.
DVD and Rishi are onboard, but Eric does not want to relocate his family, and Harper, as always, only wants to move forward.
She wastes no time in prying from Gus that Aurora’s anti-competition inquiry has been killed, clearing Amazon’s path to FastAide and the NHS contracts – and decimating Bloom’s attempted short-sell of Rican (please do not ask me to explain it again).
Harper pays Bloom a visit in his comically cavernous office to give him a “hypothetical” heads-up.
Harper’s motivations are often opaque, not least to herself; but here – from Myha’la Herrold’s wonderfully tremulous performance – she seems to genuinely want to do right by Bloom and is confused when he responds with suspicion.
But of course Mr Covid has a play. He texts Harper to stock up more Rican, then goes on CNN and heaps praise on the UK government’s forthcoming anti-competition inquiry – forcing it back on to the agenda and winning his short-sell in the process. (Industry relaxes its usual rigour here: no way would Bloom be allowed to text on live TV – but the fickle politics is bang-on.)
Harper, however, realises too late what Bloom was hinting: she has been insider trading
If it’s a stretch to believe that Harper could be so naive, all of Industry’s characters are equally capable of exceptional self-awareness and colossal self-delusion: as I see it, a symptom of operating within Pierpoint’s malignant atmosphere of fear and greed.
Eric offers her a dignified exit to New York – but again Harper chooses the nuclear option. Together they force Bill into making them a new London “super-team” by selling out Rishi and DVD’s exit strategy – and blackmailing him about a looming HR crisis.
This, of course, refers to Nicole, who has preyed on Harper, Robert and Venetia. When Ven seeks help from Yasmin, Yas dismisses the assault, not least because she has suffered similarly – causing it to escalate upwards.
Between her failure of Ven, Kenny’s lecture about “pastoral care”, her historic assault and her unfaithful father – Yas has a crisis of conscience (or is it cold feet, having landed herself in a polyamorous relationship with her boss?), leading her to confront her father and Celeste.
Both reveal the full extent of her layers of privilege, then promptly cut her off, leaving Yas truly exposed for the first time. “Maybe I’ve been a bit rash,” she ponders to sweet Bobby – of course her first port of call.
Robert, meanwhile, is more demoralised than ever, having accepted a “reputation-changing commission” from Nicole, who knows he can’t afford to refuse, despite his revulsion at her predatory nature. When he is caught with Yas’s cocaine, Nicole bails him out – and lures him back in.
The last showdown of the season is unexpected: the night before Rishi’s wedding, he and Harper have a brisk bathroom shag. He is jittery about commitment, while Harper (we assume) feels guilty for having got him fired.
Both were seeking an exorcism of sorts – to “get the poison out”, they agree. And to see Rishi in church the next day, gazing lovingly at his new wife, you fear he genuinely believes it might have worked.
But Harper, at least, may be forced to detox. In the explosive final act, Eric is back on the floor as head of the new “super-team” and Harper has been cut.
“I’m doing this for you,” Eric tells her, just after admitting that he covered her hotel bill through Covid, and just before it’s revealed that he has dobbed her in for her forged degree. After all, the two of them “are past why”.
Harper’s eyes, as she is told she has violated Pierpoint’s principles of “honesty and integrity”, blaze with betrayal. She always flew too close to the sun. But she was denied the lovely light.
Closing up
For want of a better word: it’s all the grownups. Nicole’s success has bought her carte blanche to “get a bit handsy” with her young cover, while her echoes of his “tyrant” mum are too strong for Rob to resist.
Having thus far indulged Yas in her delusions, her father and Celeste are able to cut her loose without a backward glance. Aurora, too, drops Gus as soon as he has served his purpose, unwittingly positioning her for health secretary.
Bloom has sewn up his stocks with such a neat bow he knows he is endangering Harper’s (and Gus’s) future – while she’s forced to wonder if she wasn’t being manipulated all along. (Like his T-shirt says: “Of course I cum fast. I’ve got fish to catch!”)
Then there’s Eric. In a show full of strong performances, Ken Leung has been a standout. I’ve loved getting to know his character better and his arc this season – the oscillations between conviction and defeat – have been mesmerising.
“Do you feel like everything we do is a confidence game?” he drunkenly asks Harper. “I wonder sometimes: are we the marks? What did I build? What did I make? What do I leave? And do I believe in any of it now?”
Eric might have recommitted to being “Mr Pierpoint”, but in cutting Harper loose, I wonder if he hopes to save her from repeating his mistakes.
Of our young Pierpoint four, only Gus ends the season in a better place than where he started – having abandoned his novel-in-progress, connected with his moral compass and found love, or something like it, with Master Covid. (But does he jeopardise that by becoming Mr Covid’s assistant?)
You could interpret it as Industry rewarding its first character to walk away from Pierpoint and all that it represents – but its moral universe isn’t that clearcut. I’d chalk it up to “cosmic synchronicity”.
Closing down
Two of the roiling tensions of Industry is its young analysts’ uncertainty about whether they want to change the game, or win at it; and their older mentors’ ambivalence about whether to bring them in, or knock them back.
Staring down their third year at Pierpoint, Yas and Robert find themselves in a miserable position: in too deep to easily quit, but not yet so institutionalised as to be resigned to how it is costing them. They are right to push back on Celeste and Nicole – but it doesn’t do any good.
Harper may be more cut out for the job, but Eric and Bloom – the only people who seem to care about her, beyond whether she is “printing biz” – recognise in her what she cannot: that she is increasingly a liability to herself. (Her mistaking Bloom’s pat-down for a hug is heartbreaking.)
Knowing what Yas, Harper and Gus have endured may not excuse their work at Pierpoint – but the show does make brutally clear how they suffer to do it. Whether these young people play by the rules, or try to make it less brutal, the game is rigged; they can only help those above them on the leaderboard to move higher.
Rishi is not wrong to tell Harper that “the way you turn on a dime is sociopathic” – but she herself feels so numb, she has to check she is breathing to know that she’s alive. When she’s no longer taking in Pierpoint’s toxic air, she might actually come to feel it.
Best burn
The anonymous “designer to the stars” certainly got one over on Mr Covid when he asked her to work some billionaire-manchild magic on his house. “She asked me if I had ‘any opinions of my own’ – harrowing question!” shudders Bloom.
And that’s how a grown man ends up shooting hoops in an office-cum-ballroom with only Siri, the Wu-Tang Clan and 15 computer screens for solace. Jay Duplass has been a delight this season – self-deprecating but steely, surprising at every turn (and, dare I say, sexy?). With season three just confirmed, I’m hoping he’ll be back.
Boldest power play
Eric, Harper and Rishi are looking like safe bets to join the US bank until their chummy meeting is crashed by who else but Daria: the season-one manager Harper threw under a bus to save Eric – and now a newly minted MD, back in business after 18 months’ maternity leave.
The looks on their faces as they realise they will not be joining “the Yankees” are comical, but judging by Daria’s ear-to-ear grin, revenge is not only best served cold – it’s delicious.
Her reappearance so late in series two is also a sign of HBO’s investment in the show: it is fleshing out the Industry universe – and even cross-pollinating from others. When Rishi arrives, hollow-eyed wearing a baseball cap, Eric jibes that he’s “dressed like Kendall Roy”.
Lowest ebb
Industry is often likened to Succession in featuring largely unlikable people doing reprehensible things, and there are certainly similarities in worldview.
Succession, its creators have said, is a show about abuse, and how it can warp a family across generations. To me, Industry shows how that individual harm might be absorbed, weaponised and perpetuated by systems and structures under capitalism.
I’ve so enjoyed reading your comments on the series, and I know that many of you have been aghast that anyone could stick with a show about such horrible people. But of all the low ebbs Industry has brought us this season, the lowest might be the realisation that in many ways it’s pretty true to life.
If I take anything from season two, it’s this: don’t hate the players, hate the game – and vote out those who keep it going. Let’s hope that, when season three airs, we might be able to enjoy it more for entertainment value. In the meantime, thank you for following along.
Industry season two is on BBC One in the UK, HBO Max in the US and Binge in Australia.
