Comparisons between Harper Stern (Myha’la) and other great television antiheroes come easy. The first that have always leapt to mind for me are Tony Soprano, the godfather of the archetype, and Don Draper, Harper’s fellow Virgil guiding us through the special hell of offices where people make a lot of money.
But I wonder if those comparisons are off the mark: While only one of them (arguably, at least) succeeded, at least they both tried to better themselves. Not our girl Harper. Her points of reference are better thought of as being Walter White or Cersei Lannister — people who only get worse over time, largely by their own desire and design.
Let’s review, in brief, what Harper does in this grim episode of Industry alone. All of the following is set against the backdrop of a cynical ESG investment conference, espousing noble goals in which exactly zero of the participants actually believe, even as the climate catastrophe they all purport to want to ameliorate is heating up the winter air around them. (“I can’t believe it didn’t snow,” Ken Leung‘s Eric laments. You and me both, brother.) Taking it one by one:
She backstabs her boss, Anna (Elena Saurel), by forming a breakaway firm with her cash-rules-everything-around-me trader Petra (Sarah Goldberg), using inside info about Anna’s schedule to broker investor meetings.
She tanks the company her friends and flatmates Robert (Harry Lawtey) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) are there to defend by tearing it to shreds on a live mic during a panel, with her mentor-turned-nemesis Eric sitting there flopsweating all the while — even though Yasmin had just helped her access vital records on Petra’s past trading successes.
She forces Petra’s hand when the trader gets cold feet, outing their intentions during the very same live-mic session that kills Lumi — unilaterally deciding for both of them that the plan is going forward even while she talks about Petra’s autonomy.
She spends the entire episode telling anyone who’ll listen that the entire ESG movement is a sham, as is literally all do-gooding from a financial perspective; all that matters is making money.
Finally, knowing full well that the damage she did to Lumi leaves Pierpoint in the lurch, she presents herself and Petra’s firm, given the deliberately sinister name Leviathan, as his only way out. Grinning like the goddamn Joker, she forces Eric to turn and make eye contact with her. De Niro in the final act of Heat couldn’t have done it more terrifyingly.
How can you not love this character?
Despite her “progressive look” — “new look, same great taste,” she quips — Harper is right at home with parasitical upper-class ghouls attending the conference. These include Henry’s grandfather, media baron Viscount Norton (Andrew Havill); his godfather, the noxiously well-read Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay); and kinder, gentler Tory apparatchik Aurore Adekunle (Faith Alabi), our old pal Gus’s old boss.
(Whither Gus, by the way? We learn in this episode that he’s working in Palo Alto after his benefactor Jesse Bloom got pinched by the authorities for some misdeed or other. His strange unhappy swagger is much missed.)
But just because the event is attended almost entirely by people you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire — don’t worry, it’s not like they’d piss on you under similar circumstances — doesn’t mean the sexual impropriety comes to a halt. Robert attempts to wheedle intel out of fellow Pierpoint employee Frank (Joel Kim Booster), whose job it is to declare Lumi stock a buy, sell, or hold. Frank, who’s both balls-out naked and rather forward in the sauna where this conversation takes place, leads Robert to believe he’ll play ball and recommend a buy; as with most of Robert’s flirtations with bisexuality, it’s unclear just how far things actually go, if anywhere.
Eric, meanwhile, breaks things off with Yasmin’s lawyer, but takes a blow to his ego when she calls him an old man. He almost immediately blows twenty grand on one night with Suzie (Elsie Hewitt), a stunning young sex worker who picks him up when she tires of her friend or client or whatever he is, a multi-hyphenate rich kid and friend of Henry’s named Xander (Gustav Lindh), being a dick to everyone for no reason. Eric runs off to a meeting without paying, but not without first getting an assurance that he doesn’t fuck like an old guy.
And Yasmin does finally have sex with Sir Henry (Kit Harington), but it’s not like you think. Okay, it’s kind of like you think: She does it on his private jet, knowing Robert and Eric can hear and see what’s happening through the flimsy door that separates their cabins. This is Industry; sex is always a power play of some kind. This goes double for Yasmin. Her dominant sexual personality compensates for the lack of respect and control she has in her day-to-day life. (The only time she’s taken the sub role is with Celeste, the personal wealth management specialist from Season 2, but she ultimately wanted to be Celeste, not bottom for her.)
That’s what makes the origin of that liaison so interesting. When she sneaks into the hotel pool that Henry has had closed for his benefit, you obviously think, once again, that watersports are in the offing. Instead, Henry divulges his darkest secret: His father’s suicide left him suicidally depressed in turn, and Lumi was the project he threw himself into to save his own life. He now lives in terror of ever feeling as helpless as he did back then. As a survivor of depression and suicidal ideation myself, I know that particular dread all too well.
Now, granted, he does all this while skinny dipping, but still! This is as close as Henry has come to honesty, maturity, vulnerability, likeability since he debuted. No wonder Yasmin is won over. His ass doesn’t hurt, though; when she gets an eyeful she almost passes out.
This is is as good a time as any to say the obvious: Myha’la and Marisa Abela are absolutely fucking outstanding as Harper and Yasmin, and they have been from the start. In part this is down to smart casting. Putting “a diminutive woman,” as both Otto and myself have called her, into the role of your leading sociopath is a deft bit of sleight-of-hand, while Abela has the kind of beauty that’s both striking and somehow approachable, both of which are key components of her job as it’s been constructed.
But it’s raw talent, too. That wolfish grin on Myha’la’s face as she brings Eric to heel, then lightens the mood by observing the glitter all over his face! The way Abela can change Yasmin from a woman who hates herself for missing her abusive father to a woman who can make powerful men beg for her favor using just the cast of her eyes! Coupled with the ferocity of the show’s stance against the personal and political hypocrisy and abusiveness of everyone involved, and the two actors are like samurai wielding their swords so efficiently you don’t even notice you’ve been sliced in two.
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.
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