With Succession and Curb Your Enthusiasm over, House of the Dragon done for the year, and Euphoria no closer to returning, the television-watching streets are primed for a new HBO show to obsess about. In its third season, Industry is primed to fill that need. After being a cult darling and developing a bubbling fanbase over the last few years, Industry enters Sunday night primetime with big expectations, and with the season premiere over the weekend, the show has started making good on its promise.
But beyond the drugs, sexcapades, finance jargon, and electronica that the Industry hive holds dear, the third season finds much of our cast in various states of disarray, despite how well things seem to be going at Pierpoint. Industry loves to put people through the ringer, even during ostensibly good times, but much like the stock market, the characters here go up only to drop down or are brought down only to be built back up. And much like with the market, the reasons for a rise or a fall often feel entirely arbitrary. So let's dive into who is up and who is down at the start of Industry Season 3:
Eric Tao: Going Up. Everyone's favorite angry Asian man. A walking, talking avatar of Wall Street toxic masculinity and monstrous ambition that is destroying him from within (like another character we will get into). We left things off with Eric betraying his young protégé and burgeoning rival Harper by getting her fired after revealing to the higher-ups that she never graduated college. In the first episode of Season 3, Eric has made partner, which has only increased his neuroses. He is concerned about being a diversity choice, he is stressed about having to be the ultimate cutthroat and make further cuts to his team, and, as revealed throughout the episode, he's separated from his wife and falling off the wagon after months of sobriety, sleeping on Kenny's couch. Eric, despite his excellent career situation, is in the worst shape of his life, a mess of inner turmoil and conflict and trauma. But this is not about life, it's about success, and Eric is up, up, up, set for a sure-to-come meltdown.
Yasmin Yazdani: Going Down. This show loves to put our favorite rich girl through some things. Whenever it feels like she couldn't get any lower, they find another basement level. Yasmin ended last season dealing with having the worst father in the world, a walking #MeToo allegation who has embezzled funds and stolen money from seemingly everyone in the UK. The third season opens with our girl having the worst-possible luxury-yacht birthday party ever, alongside a bunch of young women she doesn't seem to know and her father, who has sex with a staff member. Someone on the boat takes a secret photo of her and in the ensuing six weeks, she's on every gossip site as the "embezzler heiress" allegedly living out Brat summer off of her father's embezzled funds. If that wasn't bad enough, she feels herself under the guillotine as Eric's most obviously expendable employee. She's struggling at her actual job, and she's spending the little money she has left on lawyers. And that's not to mention that with her dad all but disappeared, the people he's stolen from expect her to answer for his crimes. Things could not be lower for our girl (again), but on the plus side, when things are at their lowest there's only one place to go: up. Pierpoint client Henry Muck, owner of an up-and-coming tech industry giant, has taken a clear interest in her, and after a wild coke-fueled night with Eric and her lawyer, she has held onto her job, though at the expense of her biggest cheerleader. This is a world of wolves, after all, and no success comes bloodlessly.
Robert Spearing: Going Down. Robert ended last season struggling with his addictions and his conscience, and starts this one in much the same place. This is all despite a new relationship and his getting to work alongside Muck, who doesn't seem to think very much of him. Robert can't stop self-sabotaging, still secretly sleeping with his sexually assaulting client Nicole Craig—at least until he wakes up and finds that she collapsed dead. When he gets to work he's reduced to a human puddle, which you'd think in a world like this would make him easy to cut out. But weakness can be useful to Eric, as it allows him to maintain control. I don't see things improving for this guy anytime soon.
Henry Muck: Going Up(?). Muck, a new character, is a very obvious stand-in for a certain similarly named overgrown-child tech billionaire. Muck's renewable energy startup Lumi is preparing for its big IPO, and though finance is full of big words I don't understand and also small words I don't understand, the gist seems to be that Lumi's stock price is being overinflated by Pierpoint, and a cursory glance at their books, as one of the investors does at the start of the episode, would reveal how wobbly this company is at the price benchmark they're aiming for. Muck is not particularly interested in fine print and proper accounting. Like most egomaniacal startup CEOs, Muck believes he is creating the future, something much bigger than a stock price or bureaucratic propriety. He is in love with himself and already interested in Yasmin primarily because of her evangelizing on his company's behalf (and also because as another wealthy nepobaby he can relate to her). Still, his company is on the up thanks to Pierpoint's shadiness, but as the closing scenes show, this may be the start of a major fall.
Harper Stern: In Stasis. Oh, Harper. Our patron saint of women's wrongs got close to touching God last season only to have her wings violently ripped apart as a result. She let her own ambition and the whims of the ultimate wealthy white whale play her into losing her job, and she's now in finance purgatory: working at a smaller firm as a glorified assistant, writing up diary segments for girlboss Anna. The new shop is much more polite than Pierpoint, but it lacks the action, and therefore the juice, of her old gig. Harper is stuck, the wheels in her head are spinning like a clickwheel on a frozen Mac screen. She is like a caged lion, just waiting for the moment when she can emerge with renewed bloodlust, watching Decision To Leave on Mubi in the meantime. To make matters worse, she is apparently living in an apartment with her former Pierpoint coworkers Yasmin and Rob, which feels like a recipe for more disaster. I feel for Harper, whose every bad decision thus far has been justifiable. Eric brings her up in his After Hours night with Yasmin, admonishing her for helping Harper get another job in finance and calling her a bad person. Absolutely true but absolutely rich coming from him, and it's ultimately just projection. Much of Industry has explored the similarities between Eric and Harper: two nonwhite people from lower economic backgrounds who embody ambition devoid of conscience, driven by trauma and how much harder they've had to work than every white person around them. But also it's for the implied threat of their similarity that Eric had to cut Harper out. Part of his bitterness over the fact that she's still in the business comes from his knowledge that she'll be coming back for blood. My girl will be moving up soon, I have no doubt.
Rishi Ramdani: Going Up. Rishi is forever going up. He's just the best.
