‘Industry’ Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: Urinetown

Industry is not an easy show to cover. Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure to watch — gorgeous to look at, a cast bristling with talent, gripping financial-thriller storylines, and the proverbial Strong Sexual Content we all know love. And it’s equally pleasurable to think about, to discuss, to pull apart and piece back together. You could unpack Eric’s feelings about Harper, or Yasmin’s sexual personae, or the show’s whole bitter commentary on capitalism with someone over drinks for an hour. (I don’t even wanna think about how long you could go with cocaine.)

But it isn’t easy to write about, for the simple reason that, well, it’s too good. There’s so much stuff going on, and so much of that stuff is so rich and attention-demanding, that it’s hard to know where to begin. Often I’ll hit this point with shows I really like fairly deep into a season or a run, reaching a point where all I can do is rattle off a list of superlatives. I’m now on my second review of Industry ever, and I feel as though I’ve hit that point already. Where do we go from here? I swear I’m going to limit this kind of meta self-referential nonsense in future reviews of Industry as much as I can, but after this episode? Come on. 

Why don’t let’s start with the sex stuff, since as is always the case with Industry, it leads us back to the traditional storyline. Treating sex as part and parcel of a character’s overall life, feeding into it and being fed from it: Imagine that! 

Anyway, Yasmin is one of the focal points here. The brief power outage at the start of the trading day has caused Lumi’s IPO to bellyflop, since its primary sales team can’t do their selling. (Presumably this was the point of the power outage.) During the ensuing chaos, a distracted Yasmin hears from Sweetpea, the desk’s new graduate, that her friend Treacle (god, the names on this show) told her Lumi CEO and — quoting the show here, don’t shoot the messenger — “posh cunt” Sir Henry Muck is “into urine.” (“What are you thinking about?” Eric asks her when he sees the far-away look in her eyes. “Urine,” she replies unthinkingly before correcting herself. This is a funny show!)

So when Yasmin links up with Robert to attempt to CEO-whisper Sir Henry, who after a few hours of bad news has locked himself in “the disabled loo” while tripping on psilocybin, she knows what to do. Simply by entering the bathroom and adopting a sexually dominant posture, she’s able to wheedle him into a staged meeting with a powerful energy executive at an ultra-exclusive gentlemen’s club; her own notoriety ensures that the paparazzi will capture the moment, thus bolstering both Henry’s tarnished reputation and the health of his company’s stock. 

A grateful, and frankly lustful, Henry responds by inviting Yasmin to dinner. At first it seems like his attempt at seduction is a disaster: He brags about having the lurid article about her supposed partying with her fugitive father (whose status she was unaware of at the time) deleted because his uncle owns the paper, and she cries silent tears of what appears to be horror and disgust. But then she lures him into the bathroom, makes him look at them both in the mirror, tells him it’s never happening…then enters a stall and pisses while he listens. He rewards her with a bottle of wine so rare that the sommelier won’t even serve it to her. She winds up corking it and drinking it straight from the bottle on the night bus — where, of course, she’s instantly photographed. Cue Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” on the soundtrack.

But in true Industry fashion, this storyline is a Russian nesting doll hiding a dark surprise. Rather than draw out the mystery of what happened between Yasmin and her father Charles, the wine draws out a Proustian flashback. After she catches him in the act in her bedroom, he finds her to apologize, but in typical Charles form can’t take it when she doesn’t fall into his arms obediently as a result. He shoves her, pushes her down, gets on top of her. She spits in his face and lashes out at him verbally. He throws the contents of a wine glass into her face, gets within kissing distance, and tells her she’ll always come crawling back, before he slinks away himself. So it’s not as bad as we might have feared, but it’s still pretty fucking bad — scarringly bad, life-ruiningly bad in some cases. The fact that Harper was on the boat can only complicate things.

As indeed it seems to. In her continuing effort to ingratiate herself to Petra, the star trader at her boss Anna’s ethical investment firm, Harper counsels her to exploit Yasmin’s emotional pliability in order to hedge her bets against the very IPO Yasmin’s putting her ass on the line to resuscitate. She additionally uses her knowledge of Pierpoint’s system to secure lower prices for the deal via the desk’s junior-level trader, Anraj (Irfan Shamji), since she knows a) his senior, Rishi, will be too busy to make the trade himself, and b) the junior traders work with slightly out-of-date information in this area, allowing them to score the lower price. 

But the fates align for Harper and Yasmin in one respect: They both get chewed out by their bosses, Petra and Eric, for playing fast and loose with the rules. Eric tells Yasmin she doesn’t need to degrade herself to be an asset to the desk, even if the looming presence of Bill Adler, who joins the team for the IPO, indicates she should use every tactic imaginable to survive. (She and Eric share a nice little friendly moment after this, recalling their friendship-building coke binge the night before.) Petra, meanwhile, angrily tells Harper that they’re smart enough people not to have to cheat, and that her gleeful grudge-holding against her old colleagues is unbecoming. I’m not sure who needs to hear which lesson more urgently. 

Running parallel to all this is Robert, who’s still reeling from waking up in the arms of his dead lover Nicole earlier that day. (It’s important to recall a week has not, in fact, passed in story-time since the events of the premiere!) His increasingly impassioned, increasingly hilarious notes to Sir Henry not to give interviews to the press as the stock flops around like a fish on the floor go ignored. HE and Henry get so angry at each other that they have a Curb Your Enthusiasm–style physical fight in the office’s childcare playroom, which ends with Robert half-smothering Henry with a stuffed Lumi doll while buried in the ball pit. The decision to use Kit Harington as a sort of comic-relief wrecking ball smashing through our heroes’ lives this season is already paying dividends thanks to that bit of physical comedy alone.

The lads make up in the end, but Robert has much more on his mind. A call from his girlfriend Venetia alerts him to the fact that the necklace she gave him as a gift got left behind at the scene of his lover Nicole’s death. When he breaks into her backyard to retrieve it, he’s interrupted by her daughter Pip (Edie Lambden). First she correctly calls him out for being one of Nicole’s playthings, then mocks him for actually liking her. Seconds later she’s kissing his neck and fumbling with his pants, desperate to be touched, only for Robert to rebuff her. Seconds after that she reveals she’s 15 years old. That creaking sound you hear is the door to another psychosexual warp zone opening in Robert’s brain.

This is what happens when start with the sex stuff on Industry. By the time you explore all the tendrils these scenes extrude into the rest of the show, you’ve talked up practically the entire thing. Fom the bedroom to the boardroom, everything fits together. It’s like another great HBO drama once said: “All the pieces matter.”

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.