Spoilers below.
We’ve at last reached the end of Industry season 3, and Pierpoint as we knew it has crumbled. After a successful pitch to merge the bank with Al’Miraj Holdings—which one Pierpoint big wig describes as “private equity makeup masking the true face of a sovereign-wealth fund”—Eric delivers a more magniloquent version of the same pitch to the bank’s London employees. “Orderly financial exchange is the basis of harmony,” he tells them. “Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money.”
These lines, Eric later admits to Wilhelmina, are stolen word-for-word from a short story by Denis Johnson called “The Largesse of the Sea-Maiden,” and from which the season 3 finale draws its title: “Infinite Largesse.” It’s intriguing to me that Eric would be the sort to read a short story, let alone one like Johnson’s—and to recall it well enough that he can quote whole passages under pressure. Johnson’s short story, published in The New Yorker in 2014, went on to become the title of his final (and posthumously published) short story collection. The piece itself merges seemingly disconnected tales of mortality and detachment through the eyes of an ad executive, who finds momentary glimmers of the sublime amidst the dim of age and regret.
Eric pulls from a passage in which this ad man, named Bill Whitman, describes an award-winning advertisement he created for a bank. In this ad, a bear chases a rabbit, and right at the moment the rabbit seems trapped, it flashes a dollar and hands it to the bear. “The bear looks at this gift, sits down, stares into space,” Johnson writes. “The music stops, there’s no sound, nothing is said, and, right there, the little narrative ends, on a note of complete uncertainty.” Bill acknowledges this advertisement won him much acclaim, but that it was “mysterious, untranslatable.” He adds, “I won’t mention the name of the bank. If you don’t remember the name, then it wasn’t such a good ad after all.”
There are a lot of potential interpretations to draw from the Industry showrunners’ choice to connect this tale with Eric’s own. (Maybe they just liked Johnson’s writing!) But one through line, it seems, is indirect if apparent: Eric believes in the power of a transaction, like the one between the rabbit and the bear, as a form of protection, a form of “peace.” But, like Whitman, he has aged into a sort of irrelevance: He has “lived longer in the past, now, than [he] can expect to live in the future.” His supposed “peace” can never capture the sublime for more than a few moments. Eric has sought exceptionalism, if only to realize—over and over again—it’s not the same as transcendence.
I take this (perhaps indulgent) literary sidebar because Johnson’s writing frequently concerned itself with death, and I don’t think it’s dramatic to argue “Infinite Largesse” contains a multitude of deaths—some more literal than others. Pierpoint dies, only to rise from the ashes as Al’Miraj Pierpoint. Eric loses his job and thus the only stabilizing force in his life. Harper decides to extinguish her last remaining source of fear, and perhaps her last shred of integrity. Yasmin slams the door on a future she wanted to want. These losses are also choices, and liable to become regrets.
But let’s start with Harper. She began this season as an underdog clawing her way back to power through desperate, if strategic, maneuvers. Now, she’s managing her own fund with Petra, and Otto Mostyn has shuttled her to his fly-fishing camp with the intent of pitching her to become his “spiritual successor.” (As I theorized last week, he wants to reward her, not punish her for her criminal activity.) “I want someone who believes in trading like I trade, who understands that nothing comes from nothing,” he tells her. Translation: “I’m okay with you using insider trading, so long as you continue to make me money.” Harper admits the optics would look good on paper. A young Black woman as his figurative scion? He agrees: “Terribly modern.” But he insists she can never get caught. Duh. “Fuck me,” he continues. “This all sounds rather Faustian, doesn’t it?”
Harper initially turns Otto down, wary of the risk she’d be taking working for him. But after he visits her and Petra at Leviathan Alpha—and makes his disappointment with their decision to halt the Pierpoint short apparent—she appears to reconsider. Petra’s appetite for, as Harper later puts it, “corporate espionage” is in sharp contrast to Harper’s own. How long can their partnership possibly survive?
After the episode’s multi-month time jump—after the cards have fallen at Pierpoint, and Harper has Sweetpea, Anraj, and Venetia at the Leviathan offices working for her—she decides her metamorphosis isn’t yet complete. Under the cover of a nondescript rainy day in London, she meets with Otto and, this time, pitches him. She proposes a shorts-only fund, “a white knight” that will target unethical, fraudulent, and otherwise vulnerable companies through “a combination of forensic accounting and corporate espionage.”
Otto, naturally, is rather taken with the idea. He doesn’t agree to the proposal right then and there, but it’s clear he’s considering it, and as he does so, Harper makes her most surprising request: She wants to go home to New York. As long-time Industry fans will know, Harper has spent the lion’s share of her adulthood doing everything in her power to avoid New York. There lies only trouble, most of it familial in nature. But with her newfound success has come either courage or hubris. She will conquer the only thing she reckons she has left to conquer: her own history. As Otto warns her, “Harper, don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll grow up and live in a world without fear.”
So what about Yasmin? She, too, seems to think she can outlive what frightens her. After threatening Hanani Publishing with the receipts of their complicity in Charles’s abuse, Yasmin watches Rob scratch off a lottery ticket at a gas station—and immediately decides to call her ex-boyfriend, Sir Henry Muck. You can interpret this decision two ways: A) She genuinely wants to help Rob acquire seed money for his new job with Little Labs, and Henry is the most easily accessible resource, or B) She is inherently allergic to the accoutrements of Rob’s working-class background, and she calls Muck to rescue her from the assumed humiliation of a future with Rob. Frankly, I think both A and B are true, and that’s been the trouble with Yasmin all along.
Together, they drive to Somerset, where Muck has his own British equivalent to Versailles nestled amongst the hills. There, Rob makes his case for Little Labs, and Yasmin initially treats Henry with cool detachment. There’s awkwardness to be expected between the exes, sure, but her attitude seems more borne of judgement than of discomfort. She doesn’t buy Muck’s “whole rebrand,” dressed as he is in monkish white clothes (cashmere, I’m sure) and haloed in false contrition. His version of sackcloth seems like the sort of faux-apology her father might give.
The next morning, Lord Norton confronts her in the drawing room—an interaction I have no doubt Yasmin knew was coming. She tells him she wants his paper to run a story about the pregnant Hanani employee she witnessed 69-ing with her father on his yacht, way back in the premiere episode. That story, too, will lay bare Hanani Publishing’s complicity in Charles’s predation. Norton, hearing this, seems to change the subject. He tells her that he believes “a feminine touch, built into a family, saves it from itself.”
Yasmin knows what he’s trying to say. “I don’t think the key to Henry’s salvation is in some random girl,” she replies. It’s telling, to me, that she says “some random girl” here instead of “a girl.” She’s pitching herself, even if she’s unaware she’s doing it.
Norton waltzes through the door she’s so clearly opened for him and reminds her she is not, in fact, random. She’s “exceptional.” It’s everything she’s ever wanted to hear from a father figure. As Norton repeatedly insists Charles’s behaviors had nothing to do with Yasmin herself, he hugs her and kisses the side of her head. There’s nothing sexual to this embrace—that’s certainly a welcome change—but that doesn’t erase the scent of a transaction from the exchange. Norton tells Yas he always uses his “not insubstantial power” to protect his family. “But, then again, life is about the family you choose.” It’s a proposal, and Yasmin knows it.
The subsequent scenes are emotional, if weirdly discordant. Yasmin, realizing the future she’s on the brink of quashing, decides to indulge in its fantasy one last time. She strolls with Rob deep into Muck’s gardens, and they play-wrestle and end up having sex on a bench. As they climax, she tells him she loves him, and he returns the sentiment.
Almost immediately after these moments with Rob, she goes to Muck and presents him with the inverted version of what she just told Rob: “Do you love me?” She doesn’t deny him the truth, which is that she slept with Rob mere minutes ago, and so she demands he tell the truth about the depth of his depression. Muck is not faring well. His “higher consciousness shit” is just “escapist nonsense,” she insists. “And we should be practical.” She’s speaking as much to herself as to him.
That night at Lord Norton’s birthday dinner, Muck announces their engagement. In barely more than 24 hours, Yasmin has become a bride. For a moment, the camera depicts her and Rob sitting alone across the enormous dinner table, their eyes meeting.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him.
He replies, “I understand.”
There’s a montage of their history together, as friends and as lovers, and it’s something about which I’m of two minds. From one perspective, I think there’s a genuine undercurrent to what these two characters feel for each other. Rob has certainly always loved Yasmin, and I think Yasmin feels seen by Rob in a way she’s never experienced with another man. With him, she’s enjoyed the closest thing she’s ever had to a healthy adult relationship. He cares for her, and she yearns to be cared for. He thinks she has the capacity for good, and she yearns to be good. When she says she loves him, I don’t think she’s lying. But I also think it’s an idea of Rob (and of herself) that she loves, not the man himself.
From that perspective, this rom-com montage feels like revisionist history. Yasmin has let Rob down so many times. She condescends to him constantly. And Rob has always known, as he literally said aloud in episode 5, that she was destined to marry her father.
The last we see of Yasmin this season, months have passed, and she’s in the midst of sorting through her bonkers list of wedding invites. Harper has yet to RSVP, and so Yasmin calls her to solicit her acceptance. They share a short but surprisingly generous phone call in which their fight in episode 6 seems all but forgotten. Still, Yasmin’s capacity for ruthlessness has not diminished in the cushioned splendor of her newfound country life. When her new employee, the (formerly) pregnant woman from the yacht, asks if Yasmin’s father ever assaulted Yas—and offers her the kindness she’s so often been denied—Yasmin responds by firing her on the spot. Another opportunity for healing is dead on arrival.
Next, let’s turn to Rishi. After losing out on a job with Harper—during their interview-turned-ambush, she refers to him as “a dinosaur”—his life has spiraled into near-destitution. He’s living, alone, in a flat without a shred of personality. He and Diana are separated, though she’s arrived at his place with a birthday cake in tow. Vinay is waiting for him, too, sitting at his dining table expectantly, though everyone watching (including Diana) knows Rishi doesn’t have what Vinay wants. When Diana learns that Rishi owes Vinay more than half a million pounds, she loses it. “You broke us!” she screams at Vinay. His response is to take out a gun and shoot her in the head, spraying her blood onto Rishi’s “generic” artwork of the London skyline. Rishi slips into a panicked, horrified breakdown as the camera cuts away. It’s by far the episode’s most visceral death (though not the only literal one), and I can’t imagine it won’t haunt Rishi well into season 4 and beyond.
Finally, we turn our attentions to Eric. After almost single-handedly rescuing Pierpoint from insolvency, the bank has merged into Al-Mir’aj Pierpoint. However much Eric might love his job, it certainly does not love him back. Wilhelmina and another C-suite lackey corner him in his executive office, where they offer him 20 million pounds in severance pay as they declare there’s no longer a “business need” for his presence at the company. “I get that I was a useful idiot,” he tells Wilhelmina, in a callback to their conversation in episode 7. But what really jars Eric is learning that Bill Adler, whom he betrayed so viciously in the season’s penultimate episode, has died. Eric makes his way back to his desk on the trading floor, and there he weeps. The end of the story isn’t money. The end of the story is death.
But, alas, it’s not the end of the episode! Tonight’s hour-and-fifteen-minute runtime allows for a farewell sequence between Eric and Harper, after the latter calls the former to thank him for his “magnanimous” comment about her in Forbes. It’s clear they don’t consider each other friends, exactly. Maybe they will someday, or maybe it’s impossible for them to work together again. But Harper makes it clear her respect for her former boss has at last eclipsed her anger. “I hope they paid you,” she says, in lieu of “I’m sorry.” Eric knows her well enough to recognize it’s an apology nonetheless. He returns with his own version of a mea culpa: “Harp? Take care.”
I’m grateful, then, that the episode ends not on another goodbye but on something akin to an introduction. Rob is the only character to have survived this season with his soul somewhat intact, but protecting it has required him to cut ties with so much of what he’s used to define his self-worth: Oxford, Pierpoint, Yasmin, Nicole, his house, his mommy issues. Free from them all and seemingly settled in Silicon Valley, he ends the season finale with a pitch for Little Labs funding: “I’m just here to give you an opportunity. Join us on the ground floor of what’s going to be a spectacular journey.” He’s parroting typical CEO-speak, and yet, coming from Rob’s mouth, it doesn’t sound as much like drivel. Perhaps that’s because—for the first time in a long time—he actually believes in what he’s selling.
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.