End Games
Harry Lawtey and Kit Harington dazzle, in HBO’s third season of Industry.
I felt I should write you immediately, while the feelings and the calculations were still fresh. My sense of the global economy is that carnage is opening its maw, at a speed that seems slow but only for our vantage point from remote privilege. If we jump before its teeth tear us apart, if we would be so brave, it doesn’t feel like the old days: like we could land somewhere half-decent, endeavour to build new ships, reconstruct enterprise in our own image and actually irritate some stalwarts. It feels as if capital is truly, genuinely finite, or as if it’s about to be rendered thus by a raging planet and the follies of automation, and we’re all just clinging onto something, someone, anything, anyone, for dear life. The clarion call of populism. Our alternative existence online. Blind hope that we’ll land somewhere when the ground cracks beneath our feet, just because we did the last time.
Even with a gun to my head I couldn’t explain to you the ins and outs of the transactions that power HBO’s Industry, and its big fat investment bank Pierpoint Capital, from episode to episode. Despite an increase in oratory self-congratulation, and a tad too much electronic music where it means to underline tension, this third season is the series’ best — for the way it intertwines the sinister interests of the private and public sectors, and for surmising that the most dangerous transactions in the world are not equal exchanges. Money can only really occupy one corner of the universe, and only for a period of time, before it shifts towards an opposing one. This is how a poet (beg your pardon) might define liquidity.
The show fools us into believing it has modest concerns this time around. Everyone’s talking or trading ESG, because the trick now is to attach morale to money. These are new-ish waters, but they are also tepid ones for all the graduates of Pierpoint’s heady glories. All the faces we recognise from seasons past are just doing their jobs. Rob Spearing is helping a ‘clean’ startup (and its spoilt founder) keep its head out its arse. Harper Stern is a glorified assistant, smiling through mundane tasks and passing along latte orders. The Pierpoint kids (one of the new ones is categorically named ‘Sweetpea’) shun financial rock ’n’ roll in favour of trading floor vlogs, and what sure bets they can ride safely into subsequent paycheques and tidy bonuses. It’s almost as if the world in which Industry is set, this London, that New York, has run out of moxie. But then there are flashpoints — an overvalued share price based on nothing; a whisper in a bathroom about endless, unbacked credit — that set everything on fire. To the victors, the remnants; every last penny of whatever the hell’s left.
Harper is a symbol for why the system works, or doesn’t, depending on how you sweeten your tea. Minus pedigree, let alone certification, she works her way back into very serious conversations because competition loves a disruptor. A peep of light where the facts, the data, the law, have refused to bend. Pierpoint is already reeling by this point, at the theatre of public inquiry, with Rob ushered into the furthermost seat as a dashing fall guy. A delicious, additional complication is that Henry Muck, the wafery founder of the wafery startup, is descended from lords. Muck’s uncle and godfather are already using the debacle to manoeuvre another promising upstart towards Downing Street. Despite his station, Rob is a representative of the fact that it’s the working class that will eat shit again.
Harper’s innocuous new fund soon has Pierpoint in its crosshairs, with hundreds of millions set to send this London, that New York, this world, crashing. The tapestry of what’s really at stake is expertly interwoven with previous grievances. Revenge for Harper against her old mentor Eric Tao, who is not only trying to hide Pierpoint’s looming insolvency from would-be rescuers, but now also trading a semblance of family life for full-on pursuit of power and profit.
Yasmin Kara-Hanani drifts between personal and professional crisis, between men of varying intent and stature, and is indecisive about which side of imminent battle she falls on. This is less of a problem for Rishi Ramdani: a proper City lad with a patent on the C-word, and about whom an entire episode captures the struggle to join and then keep up with society. His insecurities have culminated in an unhappy marriage to a woman of stock in the country, and also entangled personal debt with Pierpoint-adjacent arrears. In 2024’s most sensational hour of streaming, which resembles the drum solo in an Arctic Monkeys video, Rishi wins and loses money he owes the firm and also a large man in a hoodie — co-mingling what he owes the floor and what he owes the streets. What a brilliant way to expose this London, that New York, for the casino it really is.
That should make Yasmin the character we’re sympathetic towards, the one that seems the most human. But in the show’s finale, pressed with a simple choice between modest happiness and business as usual, the carnage nearly behind us or at least abated, she chooses survival over redemption. Because everyone does. Because everyone will.
