Spoilers below.
In episode 2, an uncomfortable silence sets in following the Lumi power outage. But at Pierpoint, chaos reigns. As the phones induce cacophony, Eric attempts to rally his little finance wizards to spin gold out of straw: “The story today is not the debt profile; it’s the growth trajectory!” But everyone knows better. Lumi is tanking.
Sweetpea—never one to neglect good gossip, never mind the inopportune timing—gabs to Yasmin about her friend’s date with Lumi CEO Henry Muck, but Yasmin’s too distracted by a call from Otto Mostyn, reminding her about their promised lunch from last week’s episode. That added pressure proves a tipping point for Yas. Overwhelmed, she slides out of her desk chair, nearly passing out on the trading floor. Eric has little sympathy to offer. “This is as good as it gets,” he reminds her. “You want to know what’s worse than a ringing phone? Silence. Are we going to get this stock to close above 480? If you can’t handle it, show yourself out the door.” A gentle parent Eric is not.
Yasmin gets back on the phones, but this time it’s Harper’s FutureDawn boss Anna Gearing calling, and she wants to know if Pierpoint overvalued Lumi. Yasmin dismisses Anna’s concerns, but that doesn’t halt the uproar around her. It takes Bill Adler himself stepping down from the C-suite, raising market maker Rishi’s (Sagar Radia) risk limit, and suggesting his employees locate “a bit of poise,” before the Pierpoint crew finally falls into line. Eric freezes; he knows Bill’s intervention doesn’t bode well for his own ability to manage.
Meanwhile, Muck refuses to face the reality of his catastrophe. At the Lumi offices, he sets up a “war room” to address their PR fiasco—and, much to Robert’s horror, he decides to invite video interviews with the press. These interviews go about as smoothly as Rob predicted, and soon the Lumi stock is plummeting even deeper, sending Rishi and Co. into a tailspin. “It’s not my fault this is the way our clueless society decided we raise capital!” Muck laments, hurling a stuffed sunflower at the wall inside Lumi’s children’s playroom. Robert has reached his wit’s end babysitting Muck, especially considering Rob himself comes from the sort of working-class community that’ll actually be impacted by Lumi’s failures. “Your wins are yours,” he rails at Muck, “and your losses? Well, they’re someone else’s problem.” Hilariously, this argument ends with the two men wrestling amongst the primary-colored bean bags and kindergarten toys of the playroom, where Rob tries to suffocate Muck with the stuffed sunflower.
Rob storms out of the Lumi offices before he commits actual murder, but as he makes his way down the block, he receives a call from his girlfriend, Venetia, who wants to know why Rob disappeared last night. (As you might recall, poor Mr. Spearing was visiting the home of one Nicole Craig, who died shortly after they had sex.) Venetia then apologizes for gifting him a necklace, and Rob realizes with terror that he abandoned the necklace in Nicole’s backyard. Unless he wants the police chasing him, he’ll want to go sweep that little piece of evidence up. But in attempting to do so, he encounters Nicole’s 15-year-old daughter, who wants to bond over their respective mommy issues and also—surprise!—wants to have sex with him, too! We should all know by now: In Industry, there’s no such thing as a well-adjusted human being.
The panic really sets in for Rob (and for Pierpoint) after Muck faces his board members, who’ve lost confidence in their CEO completely. When they make their intentions to oust him clear, Muck literally backs away through the conference room doors and runs for it. He then locks himself into a bathroom after swallowing a three-day dose of psilocybin. Rob, at a loss for how to proceed, calls in the big guns: Yasmin Kara-Hanani. For better or worse, she knows how to handle a wealthy man-child. “Be polite,” she commands Muck from outside the bathroom. “Look me in the eye.” Cowed, Muck’s conditioning kicks in, and he unlocks the door.
Yas then plays a surprisingly elegant game of rich-boy chess. She arranges for Muck and Rob to run into Otto Mostyn and British Electric’s Gregory Clark at a gentleman’s club on St. James’s Street. She then phones a newspaper and drops their reporters a tip: Charles Hanani’s daughter, Yasmin, was spotted on St. James’s Street. Her scheme works perfectly. Journalists appear outside the club just as Muck, Rob, Mostyn, and Clark exit together. Yas encourages the men to shake hands, and in doing so, she provides the ideal photo opp. Public perception of Lumi shifts as the images circulate; if Lumi’s CEO is out shaking hands with British Electric’s bigwig, then an acquisition could be forthcoming. The market calms, and Pierpoint ends the day with a “safe launch” of Lumi.
But over at FutureDawn, the celebration is taking place amidst a coup. Petra has taken an interest in Harper, despite the fact that Eric called FutureDawn nine times trying to convince the firm not to hire the young prodigy after her firing from Pierpoint in season 2. “So, either he really can’t stand you,” Petra tells Harper, “or he doesn’t want anyone else to have you.” Petra seems to believe that, if the latter is true, then Harper must be one hell of a trader. On that hunch, she lets Harper in on a secret: She wants to hedge FutureDawn’s exposure on the Lumi IPO, effectively going behind Anna’s back. Petra then asks Harper to point her in the direction of a “naive and amenable” Pierpoint employee who can help her with the aforementioned hedging. Harper responds without hesitation: Yasmin Kara-Hanani. Ouch.
Sure enough, Petra calls Yasmin to execute Harper’s suggested strategies, and Yasmin takes the bait. Only Eric seems to sense any strangeness. Why would FutureDawn suddenly be trading credit default swap protection on oil and natural gas names? If that sentence means nothing to you, don’t worry about the financial particulars; just know that it smells fishy, given Lumi’s near-implosion, and Eric senses Harper’s insider knowledge at work.
So does Anna. She barrels into Petra’s office, furious about the new trade confirmation she just received. Anna can’t comprehend Petra’s betrayal. “You drove me to the fucking hospital when I was having my fucking kid!” she shouts. “You are the godmother to fucking Boadicea!” (The fact that ESG-evangelist crunchy-mom Anna has a daughter named Boadicea? It tells you everything you need to know about a relatively minor character in a matter of seconds. Delicious.) To Petra’s credit, her response is equally cutting: “You asked me to be godmother. What was I gonna do? Say no?” No wonder Harper sees herself reflected in this brutal portfolio manager.
Then, to further establish the limitless bounds of her arrogance, Harper has the gall to sit at Petra’s desk after the latter’s abdicated her glass-walled office. She picks up Petra’s phone and dials Eric. When he answers, Harper doesn’t say a word; she only breathes quietly into the mouthpiece. But Eric has to know it’s her.
Later, Petra tells Harper she wants “to work with someone whose thinking isn’t confined to the orthodoxy of our times.” But if she is going to work with Harper, she needs to be able to trust her—and trust that Harper won’t take so much pleasure in screwing her former employer as she clearly did earlier that day.
For his part, Eric has made it clear he doesn’t want another Harper on his desk. Eager for praise after rescuing the Lumi IPO, Yasmin looks to him for a “well done,” but Eric warns her not to engage in such “market manipulation” again. Thrilled, frustrated, exhausted, and in eternal need of validation, Yasmin doesn’t require much convincing when she answers an unexpected call from Muck. He asks her to meet him for dinner, during which he reveals that he convinced his uncle—Lord Norton, the newspaper baron—to delete the “Embezzler Heiress” article about her.
Yasmin decides to thank Muck in the only way she knows how: manipulation of power. She invites him to join her in the restaurant bathroom. “Look at me,” she demands, meeting his gaze in the mirror. “Now look at you. That’s why this is never going to happen.” But she recalls an important tidbit from Sweetpea’s gossip earlier that morning: Muck is kinky, and he, uh…likes urine. Yasmin struts over to the toilets and proceeds to pee, prompting a wicked smile from Muck. He exits the bathroom and the restaurant before anything else untoward can happen between them, but he leaves an extremely rare bottle of wine at their table for Yas to take home. She chugs it on the curb outside the restaurant.
Finally—as if that weren’t enough drama for one episode!—we get a flashback to Yasmin’s trip on the Hanani yacht. Charles reveals to Yasmin that the Hanani Publishing empire is in trouble; if he returns to London, he’ll have to face criminal proceedings. Yas is furious at him for implicating her. They fight: She spits on him; he tosses a glass of wine in her face. He insists she’ll always come crawling back to him. Yas ends the episode on the yacht deck, Harper at her side, warning her not to cry. But the tears on Yasmin’s cheeks imply something serious has happened—something we’ve yet to have the privilege to watch.
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.