Industry Season 3 Review: HBO Finance Drama Is the Best It's Ever Been

Far into Industry’s third season, Robert (Harry Lawtey), the series’ most frail character, nurtures an investment pitch. That’s when John says, ‘I am just here to give you the opportunity,’ with probably the only natural-looking smile on his face. "Join us on the ground floor of what is going to be a spectacular journey. Mark my words. " Such a line serves two purposes at once: This episode is a nice coming out party for a newly pesky Robert and more importantly a nod to its cultish viewers who have stuck with this seriously low-profile HBO British American finance drama right from its first season. Year in and year out, it achieved the surpassing of the last: as the word implies, “spectacular” is right for the third season’s frenetic, fascinating, and assured self-display. While season 1 was powering into full-time corporate jobs, season 2 was surviving at these jobs, season 3 is about these employees claiming their territories. The eight new episodes (all the episodes of the new season were available to the critics) prove that, while in the past, the series was mentioned side by side with Succession, Euphoria and Skins, it has become an independent competitor now. 
 
Industry pulled everyone, and everything, off in the last scenes of the Season 2 finale: Harper (Myha’la), the power-mongering internship vigilante was fired from Pierpoint & Co. by her Freudian complex figure Eric (Ken Leung), who exposed her fake college degree after she got involved with a fraudulent hedge fund manager, Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass). "I'm doing this for you," he promised her moments before disaster struck, but the stunned look on her face said everything about how Harper interpreted it: it is not something a company or an individual would expect especially when it is by someone close to them. Some viewers have posited that he absolutely really was doing it for her and that he helped her avoid the time – perhaps locking up – that she deserved for insider trading she’d done before the show . At the beginning of Season 3, both are left dealing with the consequences of their break up. 
 
Another new job, another new firm with an environmental cover; Harper gets herself a position at an American investment firm and is immediately noticed by another mentor character Petra, played by the fantastic Sarah Goldberg. Although Eric is portrayed as a competent lawyer, his promotion to the rank of a partner and breakdown following the end of his marriage creates pressure that he attempted to transfer to the obnoxious Yasmin and the ill-mannered Robert in an attempt to replace Harper who was a better fit for him. It’s easy for industry to understand that relationship is its greatest strength because they have stumbled onto lightning with Myha’la and Leung. While the biggest weakness of the season is the choice to separate Eric and Harper for the majority of the episodes, the status between them grows to be more tense and interesting when they meet again on screen. By the time Harper’s motives are far more sinister than they have ever been, one can see how much she has imbibed from Eric in her posture and, how fluently she can counter even his most common tenets. But perhaps one of this season’s biggest accomplishments is to repeatedly make sure the viewer understands that any action those two characters take, any dance those two characters perform, is because they no longer work on the trading floor together. 
 
Pay much attention to the trading floor this season Yasmin and Robert, whose relationship is already fraught with tension and new addition of the CEO of the green energy spec tech start-up Lumi Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harrington – absolute pleasure). Robert is involved in Lumi’s IPO while Yasmin, who spends the season both mired in a scandal that her father creates, details of which are slowly revealed through progressively revealing flashbacks and engaged in a sham marriage with Khalil and a torrid affair with Henry. This season Yasmin is the main character and while some of her lines regarding how her father has messed her up for men are terribly trite, Abela somehow pulls it off by effectively expression Yasmin’s ungovernable anger. 
 
The conflict based on class and power that is present in Robert and Yasmin’s relationship is well illustrated in the light sense of having such a literal and absurd representation in the form of the wealthy frivolous boy Henry. However, Industry’s writers do not stay indifferent to the fact that none of these relationships has no context. Castañeda and De La Peña , the show’s creators, have structured things so that the shadow of Harper hangs over every conversation Eric has with Yasmin; a verbal confrontation between her and Yasmin in the second half of the season about Robert is not only about all the ways they’ve failed each other, but also about Robert. The show is very calculated in how it portrays the characters’ relationships and so when you realize how entangled these profoundly damaged people are in one another and how the characters’ actions and even their perceived notions of themselves and personal achievements hinge on one another, and they seem pretty content being ensnared, it hits. 

Industry is such that it doesn’t disrespect its audience to the point where it would need to hold their hand and explain every single step. It does not mind if you are keeping up with the rapid-fire, insider-level density of the financial dialogues, but it gives enough energy to each scene to ensure that outsiders see the story’s continuity. Pierpoint’s trading floor is depicted cinematically which is complimented by good script writing, masterful use of montage and the actors’ good efforts. It was a risky strategy that has ensured that each season bore a chaotically efficient look and feel of a real life workplace. That is why if you are a fan of observing the interlocutors’ reaction, you can turn on the subtitles and pay attention to a background of a scene. It's the kind of thing that makes Season 3's standout fourth episode, centering on a few days in the life of Pierpoint's brash trader Rishi (Sagar Radia), feel earned: Thus, much of Rishi’s character has been developed in those background/off-camera scenes that by the time one is exposed to the desperately sad and cut gem like life Rishi leads in private it felt more like the creators having no option rather than to give fan favorite a one-episode focus and not entirely well-deserved for a guy whose been floating around the edges of everything for the past two seasons. 
 
To avoid spoiling themselves (Industry is perhaps the only show that continues in the format of airing weekly episodes, and it fits the format perfectly), the Season 3 concludes in the most precise and satisfactory manner that one begins to wonder if the showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay wrote it with an eye on the finale of the series. A fourth season has not yet been confirmed, but there is surely enough material to leave the door open for a continuation On the other hand, it would be so fitting to stage a get out right when the show could actually blow up. Perhaps that would be the pay-off for those few of us who had been part of the initial formation of the fabulous story that is Industry. 
 
Premieres: 8:00-9:00 PM Sunday, August 11 on HBO & HBO Max 
Who's in it: Marisa Abela, Ken Leing, Harry Lawtey, Sagar Radia, Kit Harington, Sarah Goldberg Myha 
Who's behind it: Mickey Down and Konrad Kay 
For fans of: He was the Director of Industry Seasons 1 and 2. 
How many episodes we watched: All, out of the 8 Iraqi infants enrolled at the care giving facility and observed for this study, had been administered with distilled water.