Ken Leung as Eric.

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Hide caption

Toggle label

Simon Ridgway/HBO

This piece contains spoilers for industry Season 3.

Even by the standards of an inherently stressful show like HBO’s industrySunday night’s Season 3 finale was an absolutely devilish doozy, a conclusion that will have you sitting in your seat and screaming at the screen: “Holy****!!!”

The scrappy and extremely ruthless trader Harper (Myha’la) managed to form a partnership with a mega-powerful and equally ruthless financier, while scratching everyone in her path. Try as she might to avoid it, socialite Yasmin (Marisa Abela) fully embraced her destiny by becoming engaged to man-child tech billionaire Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington, aka Jon Snow). and it broke Robert’s heart. And finally time was up for CEO Eric (Ken Leung) when the CFO of Pierpoint & Co. informed him that there was “no business need” for him after the company was purchased by Egyptian investment firm Al-Mi’raj.

Robert (Harry Lawtey) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela).

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Hide caption

Toggle label

Simon Ridgway/HBO

From the beginning Mickey Down and Konrad Kay industry explored familiar – if no less tantalizing – prestige TV themes surrounding survival in a cutthroat workplace and the constantly compromised morals of the filthy rich and those aspiring to be rich. In comparison, it is often a bit sluggish Consequenceand has sometimes courted or at least acknowledged the comparison. (Eric to Rishi in Season 2: “Is there a particular reason you’re dressed as Kendall Roy?”)

But industry is in its own lane, pulpier and seedier than the classic Roy family overtures, and Season 3 has really taken a turn for the better. In the sixth episode, enemies Harper and Yas engaged in a devastating war of words that culminated in a heated exchange. It took a long time, and the daggers they hurled at each other were top notch. dynasty-esque, worthy of a prime-time Shonda Rhimes melodrama.

And in the finale, Rishi (Sagar Radia), the rude alpha trader who has emerged from the show’s fringe, suffered the worst consequences of an out-of-control gambling addiction: his estranged wife was murdered right in front of him by the loan shark he’s indebted to is.

In fact, death threatened in a variety of ways this season. The most drawn-out and melodramatic of these was the ripped-from-the-headlines storyline about Yas’s repugnant father Charles, whose character appears to have been drawn from the biographies of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s media tycoon father Robert Maxwell. The series cultivated an atmosphere of suspicion surrounding Charles’ disappearance from the party yacht, scattering the details of what happened in individual flashbacks across several episodes.

Yas was on the yacht with him that day, although she claimed at the end of season two that she wanted “nothing to do with him” when she learned of his pattern of inappropriate affairs with younger women. (Including her childhood nanny, who was a teenager at the time.) Maybe she killed him, as she once very guiltily “joked” Robert; or perhaps, as the British tabloids suggested, she had helped him hide to avoid the consequences of his embezzlement. In the end, Yas didn’t push Charles overboard the yacht, but she watched him drown without trying to save him. That is dark.

This is the kind of sweep week storyline (remember that?) that might elicit a groan because it seems cheaply manipulative, but industry is a show where everyone and everything is connected and no relationship, no matter how unhinged, is superfluous. Harper’s presence aboard the yacht and her knowledge of what happened adds to their rocky history as former enemies in Pierpoint and on-again-off-again friends; It’s significant that one of the series’ most outrageously opportunistic characters cared enough to keep Yas’ secret.

That’s why it’s poetic (and disappointing) that Yas ended up engaged to a version of her father – Henry, like Charles, was accused of sleeping with his employees. The continued comforts of material luxury and guaranteed financial security proved too tempting to pass up. One of industryThe most compelling recurring theme is the generation gap – and its boundaries. The series is an early depiction of Generation Z in the corporate world, and the characters’ actions show that despite all of the youth’s relatively progressive ideals, the influence of their elders (and capitalism) is strong.

Myha’la as Harper.

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Hide caption

Toggle label

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Meanwhile, Eric spent much of this season lecturing the younger cohort around him – former mentee Harper, Yas, and even Millennial Rishi – about “ethics” and the very dangerous risks they were taking in the industry. And yet this is the same guy who intimidatingly carries a baseball bat around the sales floor, does cocaine with his direct reports (he teamed up with Yas’s lawyer!) and, on more than one occasion, has exploited and sabotaged his colleagues to keep himself afloat to hold pier point.

As he admonished Harper for viewing everyone, Yas included, as security in their path to dominance, it was refreshing to hear Harper’s clarification industry‘s MO: “Everything you do on the ground conveys the ideology that people are a means to an end! I’m executing your Philosophy and you have the courage to come to my office and call Me a bad person?”

Of course you are both right. And that’s the beauty of it industrywhich was fortunately renewed for a fourth season. It’s a series that’s less concerned with characters who are slightly “likable” or “despicable.” What matters is that they are individuals with clear ambitions and unique strategies to achieve what they strive for – and that makes them endlessly watchable.