Hurt people hurt people: Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true. Cycles of abuse and violence are well-documented; obviously not everyone who is mistreated goes on to mistreat others in turn, but it comes as no surprise to find horrible people had horrendous childhoods.
Yasmin Hanani — the former Lady Muck — is one such person. Her abuse by her lascivious father is a massive feature of her psychic landscape. It’s such a present part of her life that at the end of the episode, she psychologically self-injures herself by blasting the bastard’s final voicemail message to her, inviting her on the cruise where she’d more or less murder him, while she lies on the floor and cries. She and Harper explicitly connected this painful history with her need to dominate and control other people just last week. In that light, the abusive dynamic of Yasmin’s life and work comes as no surprise.
But what happens when a person like Yasmin, through accident of birth or wealth or connections, is able to leverage those points of power to inflict their pain on the world at scale? What happens when such a person is presented with an entire ideology devoted to the domination of others, and to never being at anyone’s mercy again? You wind up with a scenario very much like the one we’re facing here in the real world: the one Harper Stern must look in its teary and tremulous eyes at the climax of Industry’s season finale.
By this point in the story, we’ve flashed forward several months following the collapse of Tender and the triumph of Harper Stern’s three-person crew. (They’ve made so much money that Sweetpea, who’s normally pretty nice, sneers at a two million pound bonus check as less than she’d make for showing feet online.)
Yasmin has broken up with Henry, divorcing him the day the Tender scandal broke — choosing the most sadistic possible time, in classic Yas fashion. Indeed, she and Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton, all but left Henry a loaded gun when they hung him out to dry for the Tender fiasco; I was genuinely shocked he exited the episode alive.
Henry’s hand is additionally forced by the role of Russian intelligence in the quote-unquote bank, which was nothing more or less than a data-mining scheme by a dictatorship in league with fascists worldwide. Unable to expose the truth without getting himself killed, he pleads guilty, pins as much blame as he can on the absent Whit Halberstram. Whit has flown the coop completely, living in disguise wearing fake beards and then fleeing the country on a clandestine flight. Ultimately it’s Henry’s classism that safeguards him from a life on the lam with this lunatic: He’d rather die a peer of the realm than live the life of a “fucking peasant” like Whit.
By the end of the episode, we see what being shamed and disgraced and implicated in massive fraud has done to poor Sir Henry Muck: not much. With his addictions more or less under control — he’s washing down lithium with beer, and hey, let he who is without sin — he appears to be living under house arrest, back in the loving arms of his uncle Lord Norton and his old family friend Lord Mostyn. Together they fish and cavort in the English sunshine, while Gilbert and Sullivan’s “He Is an Englishman” plays merrily on the soundtrack. In the end, some people are simply untouchable by the system, because they themselves are the product the system is designed to manufacture and safeguard at all costs. (There are exceptions, of course, as “Prince” Andrew recently demonstrated, but they are few and far between.)
Yasmin is a more marginal figure in that world. Her parents’ money is old enough, and her loathsome father’s connections posh enough, for her to be accepted in aristocratic circles despite her ethnicity. (Since MENA oligarchs and despots are a major facet of the new world order, her background may even be considered an asset.) But Yasmin is still a woman, and was once a child, and women and children are considered property by the men who run the world. She suffered accordingly, and was made to feel “soft” and “unnecessary.”
But Yasmin is different now, these few months later. While still a high society doyenne, there is now a definitive political slant to her networking. Her beauty and charm, her social graces and elite connections, her creativity and insight, and — this is key — her access to the network of escorts Whit Halberstram was running through his assistant Hayley, along with his penchant for hidden cameras and blackmail: All of this have made her an indispensable lynchpin in an international network of Nazis.
And there are absolutely no punches pulled about who’s who and what’s what during the nightmarish dinner in Paris that Yasmin hosts for her newfound circle of freunde — including Johanna and Moritz-Hunter Bauer, the very literal Hitler-lovers who helped Tender win regulatory approval in the U.K. Like Henry, they are of a class of people ultimately undamageable by such scandals.
Their open racism is cloaked by the dogwhistle “science” of evolutionary biology, just as Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft), the show’s representative of Britain’s fascist Reform party, hides his authoritarianism with the language of dynamism and change. (This has been a fascist staple going all the way back to the Futurist art movement’s infatuation with Mussolini.) You don’t have to be a genius to suss all this out.
Harper, of course, is a genius, and sees what’s going on here immediately. Well, from a political perspective, anyway. It takes her a little bit longer to figure out that her friend is now not just a pimp, but a pimp to influential fascists specifically. Yasmin is the new Ghislaine Maxwell.
In this sequence, despite her big brown eyes lambent with tears, Yasmin sounds like a stone-cold psychopath — like Whit Halberstram, whose role she has essentially assumed but with no pretense to performing any actual job. She is a power broker, full stop. “This world will own you if you don’t harden up,” she says. “Every man would swim through sewage if it meant that he could cum in the end,” she says. Is all this advancement or exploitation? “Both, and,” she says, no longer caring to make the distinction.
Amid all this, she springs Whit’s blackmail footage of Eric on Harper. She lies — at least I’m pretty sure it’s a lie — and says Eric knew he was having sex with a girl he believed to be underage. Neither Yasmin nor the girl, Dolly (Skye Lucia Degruttola), who I believe is Hayley’s previously alluded-to underage cousin, will confirm her age outright. How Yasmin came to possess this footage, what she’s trying to accomplish by showing it to Harper besides inflicting pain, what she plans to do with the footage she continues to amass — all this goes through Harper’s mind as they talk.
Finally she stands up and holds out her hand, begging Yasmin to get the hell out of there with her. At last, we have found an evil too heinous for Harper Stern.
Yasmin does take her hand, but only to kiss it goodbye. “The world is showing you what it is,” she tells Harper, quoting her own words back at her. “I feel important here, do you see that? I’m necessary! I feel new! I feel less pain!” All her shame and guilt and self-hatred, washed away in the blinding white light of might makes right.
Harper flees, returning to her hotel room and clinging to the bed like Syril Karn listening to his mother spar with Dedra Meero on Andor. Kwabena snaps her out of it long enough to inform her that their relationship isn’t working for him. “It’s like we’re intimate with no intimacy,” he says.
This prompts Harper to let her guard down a bit. She informs Kwabena that her mother died while he and Sweetpea — whom he knows told Harper about their one-night stand, leading him to wonder why Harper didn’t confront him about it — were in Ghana. She admits that she and Kwabena have a great rapport, especially given how everyone else she counted on is now out of her life, for one reason or another. (Eric himself remains conspicuously absent. Ominously absent, in fact.) Sure, maybe it’s because he’s “the only other Black person I ever interact with,” but still!
Yet even so, she says she’s no good at relationships, because she has to protect herself. “At the cost of everything else?” Kwabena asks, with kindness. “That’s too high a price.”
“No, it’s not,” she tells him. “It’s not for me.” After the way Yasmin betrayed not just their friendship on a soul-deep level, can you blame her for keeping her guard up?
Still, she sends Yasmin one last message. Giving an interview to a journalist (real-life journo Patrick Radden Keefe, playing himself), Harper comes across as the Last Honest Man, the one major financial player who’s looking to make money by exposing fraud instead of committing it. As such, she was the only voice proclaiming that Emperor Tender had no clothes. It’s clear the position was getting to her from the way she reacts when Tender’s stock finally tanks: not elation, but relief, as if some terrible thing hadn’t happened rather than like some amazing thing did.
So, the reporter asks, does being so spectacularly right, he wonders, make her feel vindicated, or alone?
“Both, and,” Harper replies, quoting her fascist frenemy.
The episode ends as basically every season finale of Industry has ended: as neatly as a series finale, just in case it is one. A flight attendant repeatedly asks Harper if she’s finished, if she’s done, and with that we cut to black. Then the Industry logo pops up in magenta. Then, for a split second, Whit Halberstram’s face appears in red, as if viewed through a tear in the world, like something from the Black Lodge. Just as quickly, he’s gone.
We live in an era of impunity. Crimes of world-historical scale are being committed before our eyes on a daily basis. The elite in both America and Britain are becoming known as the Epstein Class — a coterie of rich, pseudo-smart racist perverts pushing global politics to the right as part of their project of enriching themselves and exploiting the most vulnerable to feel more powerful. The Trump Administration is so lousy with these figures that the cabinet would have a staffing shortage if they all faced the justice they deserve, from the Oval Office on down.
Yasmin has chosen to embrace this evil. It served her father well; he faced no real justice while he was alive until she herself left him to drown. Whit Halberstram escaped punishment completely. Her ex-husband’s “disgrace” amounts to a life of luxury unimaginable to the vast majority of human beings alive in history. You can dress it up fancy and teach it to speak politely, but all that matters here is vulgar power. Yasmin sees this power in fascism — the libidinal thrill of smashing things just to show that you can. Yasmin has been destroyed in such a fashion over and over. Now it’s her turn to play destroyer.
By the end of last season, Harper Stern was in full Heisenberg mode, a criminal mastermind overseeing an empire, brooking no dissent. Compared to Whit’s utter lack of humanity and Yasmin’s embrace of authoritarianism, though, Harper is a veritable folk hero. As the interviewer says, the goal of her company is to uncover the ugly truth, when so many are so willing to listen to pretty lies. The financial world today is structured to reward fraud; Harper is rewarded when she exposes fraud.
As the last decent person in an increasingly reactionary Labour party, Jennifer Bevan gets on stage and says that neoliberalism has gutted the moral infrastructure of society for decades, a scheme with which she herself was complicity. In the wasteland left behind, monsters roam. Harper Stern is, or was, such a monster, until she encountered creatures even more loathsome and insatiable than herself. So what is her role now, here at the end of one of the best seasons of television I’ve ever watched? Is she a dragon, or a slayer of dragons? Is she finished? Is she done?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
