When I was little, children’s media was really big on revealing that behind the guy you thought was the villain usually stood an even bigger, scarier villain. Darth Vader had the Emperor. Skeletor had Hordak. Gargamel had Balthazar. Cobra Commander had an immortal half-human, half-snake guy called Golobulus, voiced by Burgess Meredith. No mater how bad you thought a bad guy was, there was always someone worse.
Anyway, remember last week, when Eric exploded at Harper for taking advantage of a vulnerable friend to further her own career? That was the Emperor calling Darth Vader black.
“Useful Idiot,” the title of Industry Season 3 Episode 7, refers to Eric himself, and for what looks like good reason for a long time. The top brass of Pierpoint, Eric now included, abandon their 150th anniversary party — which soon becomes a “the Soviets are on the outskirts of Berlin” level debauch, with people fucking in the office windows and so on — in a last ditch effort to save the company from insolvency prior to Harper’s big short. Eric largely drafts along in the wake of Bill Adler, who’s intent on shoring up the company rather than selling it off, which pretty much everyone else in the room is after.
Over time, it becomes clear that this is about more than just Pierpoint to Bill: He’s treating the company as a proxy for his own sick brain, pouring all his anger and fear about his condition into his interactions with others during the negotiations. Perhaps because he senses this weakness, a weakness compounded by the hostility of the other Pierpoint execs toward Bill and vice versa, or perhaps because he’s just a psycho, he makes his move.
Eric deliberately “misses” a major error in their presentation to potential investors from Mitsubishi, a meeting Bill brokered. He then, and I could not believe my eyes and ears at this point, convinces Bill they discussed the error and Bill blew it off but has since forgotten that the conversation happened. Bill figures out what happened, but not before the higher-ups show him the door, after which they pin the entire ESG fiasco on Bill instead of the actual guilty parties. This, too, is done with Eric’s help and assent. It’s gruesome.
And keep in mind it’s not just Bill’s career or reputation that’s at stake here, it’s his health. Sure, he figures out what happened when Eric sticks the knife in, but what if he hadn’t? The fake incident could have led to a misdiagnosis, a riskier treatment, god knows what. Maybe Eric would have told the truth to Bill by then, but can you trust Eric? The answer is demonstrably no.
Like Bill, Yasmin — another vulnerable friend who was taken advantage of, and by Eric as well as Harper while we’re on the subject — is being turned into the scapegoat for a scandal with which she had little to do. Her father’s publishing company has agreed to settle all the lawsuits against her on its own dime, provided she accept moral (if not legal) responsibility for her father’s embezzlement. Her only way out would be to expose the complicity of the company, which repeatedly gave Charles’s victims jobs after their encounters, as favors or payoffs or whatever. (It’s a real Vince McMahon situation over there.) But that would entail outing the victims, or at least running that risk.
How are we supposed to see her decision to go ahead and do it? On the one hand, being forced to take the blame for the crimes of her abusive father, thus destroying her reputation forever, is monstrously unfair. (Let’s leave the fact that she left him to drown aside for now, haha.) And we also spend the back half of the episode watching her have a series of sincere, kind moments with Robert, even though she repeatedly tries to ensnare him in the unhealthy, gamified sexual relationship they once had. Force of habit, I guess.
Yet she offers up the plain-jane desk worker at the cheap little hotel where they stay, for which Yasmin can barely hide her baffled contempt, as a kind of toy for Robert to play with. (He declines forcefully.) Later she mocks the girl’s “Libra” tramp stamp tattoo, a joke an unamused Robert completely no-sells. I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that you also see Harper sexually use and then blithely dismiss a hotel room service guy elsewhere in the episode. Yasmin (and Robert for that matter) is still trying to be a good person, and she has a shorter distance to travel there from where she is currently than most people on this show, but she’s not there yet.
But there are always worse monsters out there. Harper ends the episode being whisked away in a black SUV to meet Otto Marstyn, the far-right aristocrat whose money he suspects she’s mismanaging. (Indeed, she’s lucky Petra refused to go all-in on her illegally obtained inside info that Pierpoint is going under and about to be bought, since the buyer bailed.) Rishi has a broken arm and lives in fear of Vinay, his bookie. Viscount Norton and his pet politician Aurore deliberately sabotage Pierpoint’s bailout so she can look tough on the big banks, literally writing the next morning’s headline about it together as the plan goes through. And after he scuttles the Mitsubishi meeting, Eric plays savior by bringing in his own buyers: Gulf State oligarchs. It’s Hordaks all the way down.
There are two final observations I want to make before we brace ourselves for the season finale. First, boy oh boy does this show capture the nature of the inchoate rage all these people feel for “woke” this and “woke” that: The suggestion that there should be even the slightest constraints on their financial rampage makes them incandescent with fury.
Second, I want to call attention to the face of actor Trevor White when Eric asks Bill how he can possibly still have the energy to make all these moves given his condition. Eyes wide, a mirthless grin stretching from ear to ear, he says simply, “What else is there?” That’s the life this man has made for himself, but looking at that skeletal smile, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s already dead.
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.