The best way to tell what a person is really like is to see them under pressure. Where are the cracks in their foundation? Are they strong and skilled enough to cut through the noise? This was always one of the main appeals of a character like Harper — her ability to execute a killer trade in a moral gray area while also being prone to the panic attacks that kept her from graduating from college. Three seasons in, the stakes are impossibly high. Who are our characters when things fall apart? “Smoke and Mirrors” is a stress test for all our favorite little traders.
The power has returned after a brief outage, but Lumi is trading below the price point Pierpoint promised. The power outage at the exact instant of the IPO has caused pandemonium, with people unsure if they’ve actually purchased stock or if the IPO has happened at all. Harper capitalizes on the chaos. FutureDawn had invested heavily in Lumi and Anna, the saintly founder of FutureDawn, is panicking about having to answer to her board of directors. Harper takes the opportunity to cross-talk with Petra, Anna’s disgruntled second in command, and pitch her idea for FutureDawn to hedge their Lumi exposure by buying natural gas futures and shorting the Great British Pound. This is anathema to FutureDawn’s status as an ethical fund, but Petra doesn’t care. She’s tired of her investments being tied to Anna’s dogma. Harper exploits her knowledge of Pierpoint’s inner workings to get Petra an ultra-competitive price, which makes FutureDawn money but causes Anna to charge into Petra’s office, enraged by her duplicity.
Is Petra the cool-headed shark that Harper has always longed to work with? Petra is like Eric without the volatility. Did Harper need a mommy, not a daddy, all along? Eric never made the mistake of thinking Harper was his friend, but his mentorship wasn’t entirely professional, either. Maybe Petra, with her Germanic aura of cool, will be the key to Harper genuinely maturing. Especially when, at the end of the episode, she dresses Harper down, telling her that if she wants to succeed, she needs to leave her personal animus for Eric at the door. Petra’s not wrong, but what is Harper without her toxic feud with Eric?
On the Pierpoint floor, Eric, without Harper, continues to be an absolute basket case. Lumi IPO is going to hell in a handbasket, and Eric is failing the stress test. Phones are ringing off the hook, and the share price continues to drop; all the while, Eric is colossally hung over and barely hanging on. Bill Adler shows up and works on some of the phones, which helps lift spirits slightly. Then, everything falls apart again, thanks to Kit Harrington being a total nut job.
Before I get into the next bit, I need to say once for the record: Harrington is delivering an excellent performance as Lumi’s CEO, Sir Henry Muck. There’s something he’s doing with his voice, which is, in turn, soft, threatening, whiney, and pathetic. It calls sonically to Charles Hanani’s voice, the way he begs Yasmin for mercy only to turn around and berate her. Not to get too gossipy, but it’s possible Kit’s doing such a good job because he comes from the landed gentry and perhaps knows people like Henry Muck in real life. Either way: great job, Kit!
Back to the recap: in the panic post-IPO, Henry Muck has decided to try to control the narrative by scheduling interviews with journalists. Robert is telling Henry in no uncertain terms that he should not talk to the press — it could be illegal, and it’s also just a bad move, but Henry ignores him. As a result, Henry inadvertently begins a rumor that all smart money — institutional investors considered to be in the know and influential to financial markets — has left Lumi, causing the stock price to plummet further. Things are so bad that the Lumi board gets together and tries to fire Henry, but this ultimately fails because Henry claims that the board’s misgivings aren’t real. I wish I could say that this is unheard-of behavior, but my days in corporate America suggest that many men fail by claiming that their critics are hallucinations. But I digress!
All of this culminates in a literal wrestling match between Robert and Henry Muck, which caused me to guffaw. I cannot claim to understand the intricacies of the British class, but one of Robert’s central anxieties has been his working-class background clashing with his white-collar job. This is why it’s particularly cathartic to watch him tackle Muck and tumble around in the Lumi nursery ball pit, not to mention continuing to prod at that central question of how good ESGs can be. Sure, Lumi cares enough about its employees to build a play area for children, ostensibly for working parents, but if it’s being used for its wealthy CEO’s temper tantrum, how good can the company be?
Robert isn’t only dealing with Henry. He’s also dealing with the sudden death of Nicole, and thanks to a phone call with his regular-degular, if a bit annoying, girlfriend Venetia, he remembers with a panic that he left the necklace Venetia gave him at Nicole’s house. This causes him to sneak into Nicole’s home, whereupon he encounters a surprise: Nicole has a daughter, and said daughter is home. Robert makes excuses for his presence there (something about needing papers signed by Nicole), but Nicole’s daughter sees right through him, clocking him as Nicole’s boy toy, of which her daughter suggests Nicole had many. YIKES! I take back everything I said about them seeming kind of healthy and loving.
Robert tries to leave, but Nicole’s daughter thrusts herself on him, trying to kiss him. It’s a parallel to the way Nicole behaved with Robert in the beginning, but Robert is visibly disgusted and spurns her, thank God, because it turns out she’s 15. I have to say, I immediately clocked her for a teenager, so it’s a little confusing to me that Robert didn’t?
We’ve touched on this a little before, but Industry has an ambivalent, complicated relationship with sexual assault. There’s Harper, who used Nicole’s assault as emotional and actual blackmail on people like Bill Adler, DVD, and Daria. Robert couldn’t see Nicole’s assault as more than an advancement, and so he left Venetia in harm’s way, which casts their now “healthy” relationship into more dubious lighting. (Is it a real bond or a subconscious trauma bond between them?) Yasmin’s run-in with Kenny in season one, her refusal to help Venetia last season, and now the extremely graphic, disturbing flashbacks to her father’s penis suggest three wildly different reactions and approaches to sex that crosses boundaries.
Initially, I wondered if the show’s view on sex was problematic, treating possibly traumatic incidents with wry flippancy. But I also chafe at media that can only see people subjected to sexual assault as martyrs and victims. I’m still working through this observation as our season progresses. Still, for now, I can say with certainty that the show suggests that sex is a hallmark of finance, not because money is sexy but because sex is about power. Power is what our characters are constantly coveting, stealing, bargaining with. Robert’s affair with Nicole was less about him being attracted to the physical person that she was and more to do with what she represented and where she stood in the hierarchy of the world of finance. His confusion with her daughter then makes sense. The daughter has no power over Robert, but she also symbolizes the person who did. This push and pull dates back to his first-season fascination with Yasmin, who was unavailable, often cruel, and dominating.
This brings us to Yasmin, this season’s leading lady. Yasmin nearly collapses on the floor under the pressure of the Lumi IPO. Her chumminess with Eric after their bender is rapidly cooling. She cannot handle the constant prattle of Sweetpea, the new grad that sits next to her on the desk. Honestly, I wondered if maybe she was going to be fired. But instead, Yasmin comes through and saves the IPO.
In the last episode, Yasmin had a small run-in with Sir Henry Muck, where he summoned her to watch him play squash and get reassurance about the IPO. While there, it was established that Muck’s squash partners, the investor Otto Mostyn and media mogul Lord Norton, ran in the same circles as Yasmin’s father, Charlie Hanani. This is all to say that Yasmin knows these people and the worlds they inhabit.
So, when Robert calls to say Henry has locked himself in a bathroom after taking a large quantity of mushrooms, Yasmin rushes over to Lumi and alternates her coddling mother voice with her best dominatrix tone, eventually coaxing the high CEO out of the toilet and over to a gentlemen’s club so he’ll be seen with Otto and Gregory Clark, an investor rumored to have tried to acquire Lumi in the past. Yas uses the paparazzi’s obsession with her to Lumi’s advantage, manipulating them into snapping photos of Muck and Clark exiting the gentlemen’s club, driving acquisition gossip and raising Lumi’s IPO price enough to save the day.
It’s a move reminiscent of Harper, and I think Yas was hoping to get the hero’s welcome that Harper might have. But when she returns to Pierpoint to tell Eric what she’s done, he takes her down a peg, telling her not to take credit. He also tells her she “[doesn’t] have to compromise or degrade [herself] to prove your value to [him].” This is not something I think he would have ever said to Harper. If anything, he was all about Harper compromising herself. I continue to dislike the Eric/Yasmin pairing. I get it— Yasmin has daddy issues on a Biblical scale, and Eric is always looking for a protégé to crush. But there’s a sexual, incestuous undertone here that slicks the whole scene with ick.
Later, Henry invites Yasmin to dinner to thank her for her work that day. In return, he’s spoken to Lord Norton, his uncle, who owns the tabloid (nothing more British than a Lord who owns a tabloid) that published the photo of Yasmin on the Lady Yasmin and has had it taken down. It’s both a thank you and a romantic overture. Yasmin picks up what he’s putting down and gestures for Henry to follow her to the bathroom. There, she rebuffs him verbally but also goes into a stall and pees, courtesy of Sweetpea’s rumor that Muck is into urine. I SCREAMED. Maybe I am outing myself, but I have never seen a show take someone’s love of a golden shower so head on. When Yasmin returns to her seat, there’s a priceless, rare bottle of wine, another gift from Muck. To the horror of the sommelier, Yasmin uncorks the bottle without ceremony and drinks it while heading home on the bus. It’s a triumphant moment, and I suppose I should be cheering, but I must confess to a little jadedness. Yasmin can’t seriously think another man will solve her problems, right? Baby, it’s time to grow up.
Loose Change
• SOMETHING is happening with Rishi. He’s making some questionable decisions with his book, and he has a back … itch? Watch this space.
• Anraj is so cuddly and so anti-Rishi. Also, I haven’t talked about Sweetpea yet because I haven’t had the word count, but what a lovely little Gen Z addition to the floor. These two appear to signify a changing outside world, where the importance of work is changing, becoming less directly plugged into one’s identity. Though I guess Sweet Pea is a literal influencer and content creator, so maybe it’s just a different way to view one’s identity as it relates to work.
• The screeners we get for these episodes don’t have captions so I only ever catch the cross-floor banter when I re-watch the episodes live. Which is to say if you had a background line you loved, drop it in the comments below.
• Otto Mostyn, the hedge fund owner who menaces Yasmin, is utterly terrifying. The city I’m from in Japan is home to the largest number of Yakuza in the country, most of them involved in financial crimes. What I’m trying to say is I’ve seen characters like Mostyn, who have a constantly moving, blood-thirsty look in their eyes. Scary!
