Industry Season 3 ends in explosions of love, violence, and betrayal. The brilliant HBO drama crescendoes with an episode that sees the end of an era while teasing a great new adventure still to come.
**Spoilers for Industry Season 3 Episode 8 “Infinite Largesse,” now streaming on Max**
Industry Season 3 Episode 8 “Infinite Largesse” might feel a bit like a series finale at first glance. After all, the show’s primary setting — the trading floor of Pierpoint & Co’s London office — is shuttered by its new Egyptian management by the end of the episode. Harper Stern’s (Myha’la) alliance with Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg) has imploded, but she’s now got the full support of the scheming Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), setting her up for success as a power player in finance in New York City. The long-running will they/won’t they situationship with Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) finally reaches its bittersweet crescendo and a character is literally point blank shot in the dead at their kitchen table.
Needless to say, the Industry Season 3 finale will have you wondering where creators and showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay can take their ambitious show next. Here’s everything you need to know about the Industry Season 3 finale and what’s next for the show and its indelible characters…
Harper Stern, who started the season on the very bottom as an assistant, is now one of the most powerful people in finance, boasting her own fund and a Time magazine blurb. A key quote in her mini profile comes from none other than her former mentor, Eric Tao (Ken Leung). Harper calls him to thank him at the exact moment he’s in the midst of laying off his former colleagues from the empty trading floor. It seems his risky move allying with Egyptian oil money to save Pierpoint last week ultimately bit him in the ass.
Elsewhere, Yasmin is given something of an ultimatum from Sir Henry Muck’s (Kit Harington) powerful uncle Viscount Norton (Andrew Havill). While she and Robert stay at the family’s massive manor, she’s told that basically all her financial (and legal) problems can go away if she agrees to marry the erratic CEO. After pondering which family she will choose, she takes Robert to the gardens. They make passionate love and she finally declares her love for him and he for her. Only, later that night, it’s announced she and Henry are engaged.
“Yasmin isn’t fully allowed to be herself around Robert is the truth,” Industry star Marisa Abela said to Decider, explaining her decision. “You know the best parts of herself, maybe, but only in terms of what Robert sees as the best parts of her. And I think Henry allows an element of just the naked Yasmin that is comfortable.”
But Robert is okay, guys! Really! The whole episode is framed with him in the midst of a Little Labs pitch in the States and he’s killing it.
“I felt very proud of him to some degree. Like I think it was a real moment of arrival for him, a moment of self-discovery. Not to sound too corny, but a kind of a rebirth to some degree,” Industry star Harry Lawtey told Decider about where the season leaves Robert.
Lawtey stressed that by going to America, Robert is finally free of the classism that held him back as a Welsh working class boy at Pierpoint. “He can just be a Brit in that kind of vague, amorphous, but very conscious, likable sort of way in America.”
“He can find a way of making this business work for him,” Lawtey continued. “You know, it’s possible still to maybe still be a kind of a good guy and just do this thing.”
While Robert managed to finally transcend the cycles of self-loathing and self-destruction he fought against these past three seasons, Rishi ended Industry Season 3 coming face to face with hell. His storyline this season ends with loan shark Vinay (Asim Chaudhry) murdering his wife Diana (Emily Barber) right before his eyes…
If the bloody murder of Rishi’s wife felt wild coming out of Industry to you, don’t worry; the showrunners planned it that way.
“We really knew it was outside the grammar of the show and HBO felt that, as well,” Industry co-creator and co-showrunner Konrad Kay told Decider. “We had to do a bit of convincing in terms of how we executed it. But then when they watched it, they thought, ‘Okay, this is really powerful and visceral.'”
Industry star Sagar Radia told Decider the scene was even more shocking to him as a Brit. “You know, I’m from the UK, we don’t really have guns here in the same way,” he said. “So when something like that does take place, it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t.”
However Diana really truly is dead. According to Kay, the decision to murder Rishi’s wife was all about pushing the character to finally confront the consequences of his reckless actions.
“His life has been one long, or at least his working life, is a constant like gift of the gab evasion. There are no real consequences to anything you do because any time you dig a hole, you can always find a ladder out of it,” Kay said. “We wanted something which was irrevocable for him, which would change his life and that he would feel guilt for.”
“There was no one liner out of the fact that the brains of his wife were now on the wall. We knew it would have a visceral effect.”
Yes! Pierpoint may be dead, but Industry lives on. HBO renewed the series for a fourth season on September 19. That means we’ll get to witness Down and Kay’s ambitious plan for Industry Season 4 play out sometime in the not-too-distant future.
“Like the whole coda sequence after Pierpoint is shuttered, it was very important to us in terms of pushing the characters on into potentially new [frontiers]. You know, like if we do a fourth season, we’d want it to feel bigger again than the third [season],” Kay said.
“We have a great Season 4 idea and we’d like to do it,” Industry co-creator and co-showrunner Mickey Down said. “So, yeah, I mean, the characters are kind of a scattered across the chess board, but I think there’s definitely ways to bring them back together.”