Industry's escape velocity

Walden Green on Industry S3 and breaking out of orbit. The following article contains spoilers for the third season of Industry.

“Fortune, good night: smile once more; turn thy wheel!” — King Lear, 2.2.173

HBO’s Industry is preoccupied with anchors. The investment bank as the command center of Capital, the still point of the past that the future pivots around. It is not a show about how things and people change, though they do, when pressed; it is about managing, forcefully, to stay the same when everything else is changing––the cycles of the market that turn losers into winners, and vice versa. The ouroboros of abuse in which victims become perpetrators. 

Television as a medium runs counter to this objective. What is the offer of television to the viewer, if not escape from the past, present, and––yes––future. Many things can and do change between when one season of your carefully plotted show goes to air and the next one begins filming. A global pandemic, for example. One of your ostensible leads choosing not to return for your next season, or not knowing if there will even be a next season.

But Industry showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have managed to take these TV contrivances—especially the coming and going of characters between seasons—and spin them into the thematic lynchpin for a story about who is trapped and who is free.

Now on its third season, and first time airing during HBO’s prime Sunday night block, captivity is the operative state for all of Industry’s remaining leads. Collectively, Harper Stern (Mhya’la), Eric Tao (Ken Leung), Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), and new focal point Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) are saddled with enough emotional baggage to sink the Lady Yasmin.

The opening sequence of the season premiere, “Il Mattino ha l’Oro in Bocca,” finds Yas, looking pallid and unamused, aboard the deck of her eponymous yacht. Here, Industry’s color grading—usually dominated by sharp, metallic blues and grays—adds to its palette a sickly yellow hue, like we’re watching things take place through a layer of standing water. As Nina Li Coomes, who’s handling the season’s Vulture recaps, writes: “even the show’s visual quality has darkened, with shots that feel slightly grainy and drab like something seen through tired eyes.”

Yasmin will spend the rest of the season hunting for safety: from financial insolvency, from the press, and from the abuses of men like her father (and, perhaps, also her father). In the season 2 finale, she was admonished by private wealth manager Celeste, who does not return this season: “I looked at people like you my whole life. I had to do very bad things just to get to where you started.” Celeste has spent her whole life climbing, and it has cost her morals; Yasmin can afford her convictions, but only on the dollar of her family’s wealth.

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