'Industry' Season 3 Episode 5 recap: Golden showers fill your eyes (2024)

“This is the one situation where I get to control my helplessness.” I didn’t expect Sir Henry Muck, of all people, to crack the code for the way Industry uses sex to explore its characters interior lives, but there you have it. Henry says this in the context of finally asking Yasmin to urinate on him — please note that he’s “no pervert”; instead of some elaborate production where he gets down on his knees and she stands over his face or whatever, he just has her pee on his leg, then acts as if he’s caught in the video for “Here Comes the Rain Again.” But he could be speaking for almost anyone on the show. Sex is where you can choose to dominate or be dominated, for your own pleasure, instead of having these roles forced on you by external circ*mstance by a world driven not by pleasure but money, money at all costs. No wonder they all f*ck and fetishize like rabbits with Fetlife accounts.

In this episode, our one-time leading lady Harper remains in the background; Rishi, the star of last week’s tour de force, is barely evident after the opening few seconds. The episode instead focuses on Henry, Yasmin, Robert, Eric, and (of all people) Bill Adler, five characters facing grievous losses of control.

Eric’s faced with two crises simultaneously. First, the precocious graduate Sweetpea comes to him with a quandary, defanged only slightly by her Ginger Spice costume. (Pierpoint’s doing a charity thing for kids, everyone’s in costume, Eric’s dressed up like Henry VIII complete with the severed head of Anne Boleyn, it’s a whole thing.) By gossiping with other entry-level employees in different divisions — in blatant defiance of all kinds of regulations designed to keep the bank from colluding with itself — she’s realized that Pierpoint is months away from potential collapse. Eric instructs her to shut the f*ck up…and immediately calls Bill, his boss, to get the inside scoop.

He gets more than he bargained for. Bill confirms that it’s time to send lawyers, guns, and money, because the sh*t has hit the fan. The old CEO is out, and the new one is a young gun with a mandate to gut the place. Worse than that, Bill himself has inoperable brain cancer; state of the art techniques can give him years to live even without resorting to chemo, which would be bad for his image as a worldkiller. But the end result is going to be the same, and watching Eric burst into tears over it, then watching this cold-hearted man find the humanity in himself to comfort his old friend about his own impending death? That’s good, good sh*t, is what that is. That’s why you watch these awful people.

Robert’s dilemma puts him directly in the crosshairs of both the public and the government. As the fallout from the Lumi fiasco lands in front of a Parliamentary select committee, Robert is sent in by Pierpoint’s imperious lawyers as a fall guy, someone young, expendable, “f*ckable” enough to be offered up to the angry Labour shadow energy secretary as a human sacrifice. You’ve watched the show enough to know how well Robert handles being treated like dirt by his perceived superiors: He falls apart.

Fortunately, he’s bailed out by an unexpected savior: Aurore, the — let’s put it euphemistically here — photogenic face of the Tory future. She falls on her sword, taking all the blame for the Lumi collapse and resigning her position in the government. For this she is duly feted by Henry, his benefactors Otto Mostyn and Viscount Norton…and Robert, who’s stunned to discover the level of collusion going on here. Aurore is being groomed for Prime Minister by Otto and Alexander, who plan to use her as a catspaw for a new far-right government. For her own part, she sighs about being forced to lay off her entire staff, then immediately calls for a glass of wine. Robert’s equally shocked to learn, in the middle of the hearing, that Henry ruthlessly sexually harassed his assistant, Caedi. Charming people, all the way around!

So naturally, as the world’s forgotten boy, Robert decides to take f*cking ayahuasca with Henry and his upper-class twit friends. He has an absolute nightmare of a trip set largely in the Pierpoint offices, in which five figures loom large. There’s Hari, the graduate whose dead body he discovered. There’s Nicole, the client and lover whose dead body he also discovered, rendered as an unnerving monumental horror-image. Robert has discovered two colleagues’ corpses in four years, and lost a third to heroin addiction; it’s truly amazing he’s as emotionally intact as he is.

There’s Eric, in full Henry regalia, giving the “off with their heads” signal. There’s Yasmin, who manifests mainly as a stock ticker reading simply “EAT IT” over and over — a reference to the time she made him swallow his own sem*n, which he’d previously disclosed to Sir Henry. (It should be noted that irl, Henry says he’s in love with Yasmin; Henry says Robert is also in love with Yasmin; and Yasmin says life would be so much easier if Robert were in love with her, which, being Robert, he neglects to confirm.) And there’s Robert’s mother, the root of it all, represented via a video wall of Kubrickian white brilliance. Even the recurring WANKER graffiti in the loo gets a 2001 makeover here.

Our third and final victim is Yasmin. She spends the episode in a costume based on a famous Princess Di paparazzi phogo, watching Robert’s hearing to see if he’ll pull through, tending to Henry’s bottomless need disguised as love…then learning her father’s body has been discovered. At first she simply seems shocked by his death. Then she tells Robert it would be impossible for her to marry her father, as he jokingly predicts is his destiny, “because I killed him.”

Oh, she blames herself for his death, I thought at first. Then a few seconds passed. Then I jumped out of my seat.

Holy sh*t. Yasmin killed her father! Like, physically, hand-to-hand!

At least that’s my belief, and I’m sticking with it until proven otherwise. With all the death in the air, was it inevitable that someone would wind up being directly responsible for one? Is there any way in which the lives led by Pierpoint’s employees — is there any way the world that sustains that lifestyle — can possibly last?

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