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SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 3, Episode 6 of Industry.
Industry has finally given audiences an answer about the fate of Yasmin’s father, Charles Hanani (Adam Levy).
The first five episodes of Season 3 have hinted that something ominous happened to the man on a lavish yacht trip, and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) had something to do with it. In the finale moments of Episode 5, she tells Rob that she killed her dad — but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The opening moments of Episode 6 reveal that, after Yasmin discovered her dad being intimate with a member of the yacht staff in her room, she confronts him on the top deck of the boat, where the two have a vicious fight that ends with Yasmin telling her dad that she wishes he were dead. In a moment of narcissism and likely self-loathing, Charles jumps from the boat to grant his daughter her wish. But, when he regrets the decision and calls to her for help, she stops herself from acting, instead leaving him to drown.
In the episode, Yasmin also receives the news that her father’s body has been recovered, and she leans on Harper (Myha’la) for support. But little does she know, Harper’s new mentor Petra (Sarah Goldberg) wants her to use Yasmin to help them short Pierpoint when the massive amount of debt that everyone’s been whispering about comes due. That, of course, puts Harper and Yasmin at odds once again, this time in a way that seems incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to come back from.
In the interview below, creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down spoke with Deadline about how Episode 6 serves as the catalyst for two explosive episodes to end Season 3.
DEADLINE: We’ve been waiting all season to see what happened with Yasmin and her dad, and it was expected to be pretty bad…but what were the discussions around actually crafting that final argument they have? It’s so gut-wrenching.
KONRAD KAY: The show has never traded in anything like this before. So we approached it in the writers room with a fair bit of caution. We liked the idea of a mystery box. We felt that it was an organic thing to flesh out more depth. When we cast Adam [Levy] as Charles in Season 2, we were drip feeding some sort of trauma, some sort of key to Yasmin’s character through her father. Adam was a great actor. He had a kind of charm and a slipperiness which lent itself very well to what we were trying to do with him. We wanted something seismic to happen to Yasmin between seasons. We knew that if we wanted to tease the idea of her being somehow culpable for her father’s death, it might be a bit of a betrayal of the audience, given they weren’t set up for this sort of thing in the show, if she outright killed him, but we thought that this felt like an organic way for her for her to be given a decision about whether to save him or not, which felt a little bit more [within] the reality of the show.
In terms of writing the dialogue, I mean, look there, there are two fights that bookend that episode, right? They’re two of the most electric scenes we’ve ever done in the show, and a testament to Marisa, Myha’la, and Adam’s acting. The show is so much about illusion and about what is not said, and about people not saying the right thing at the right time, this is a place where we felt very free to be as naked and as cutting and as truthful and as honest as we possibly could, because they felt like the the zenith of those two relationships. Both of them, in some ways, dissolving at the same time. They felt almost like counterparts to one another.
MICKEY DOWN: The idea of actually the way he died was obviously something we talked about a lot, and Konrad’s totally right. We felt like if she actually had a direct hand in his death, it would feel like a real betrayal, and it would actually do too much the character. It would traumatize the character in a way that’s actually very hard to come back from. I think it’s very, very hard to have to process that for the whole episode, [and] see it on her face in every single scene. So we just thought, ‘Okay, she has to be one piece removed from it.’ I still think that she was, in some ways, culpable. Then we started to think, actually, the way Yasmin feels about her role in it says a lot about her. The fact that she is, as Eric said in Episode 2, incredibly solipsistic… she was passive, and yes, she allowed him to jump off, and yes, she left him, but she didn’t kill him. I think the fact that she’s saying in the end of Episode 5, ‘I killed my dad’ — it’s indicative of the fact that Yas just puts herself at the center of everything.
She is the main character in her life. Harper saying, ‘You didn’t do anything. You’re not culpable here.’ Harper’s saying that from a position of friendship, but what she’s also saying to her is like, ‘Not everything revolves around you.’ This guy was a f*cking drug addict, serial predator, had his own shit going on, running away from the law. Whatever he decides to do himself is not not on you. You making yourself the center of it is just another reflection that you just think of yourself as the main character. I think that’s actually something that I really like about it, on top of all the practicalities of not wanting to make Yasmin a murderer at the end of Season 3.
DEADLINE: I’m glad you mentioned the fight at the end of the episode. It’s possibly the most brutal Harper and Yasmin have ever been to each other, after Harper is the best friend she’s ever been to Yasmin in the opening after finding out what happened to her dad. Why did you decide to bookend the episode that way?
KAY: I don’t think this is a weakness of the episode, I think it’s actually a strength, but in some ways it’s the most on-the-nose version of a story that we’ve ever done in the show, which speaks to how work impinges on the personal lives of the characters. That’s always been the thesis statement of the show across two seasons. One of the things we’re trying to say is like, coworker, friend,how blurry is that? Can one really, truly ever be the other? The stakes of that episode are quite on the nose, in the sense [that] Harper doesn’t want to betray her friend in the first third. Then her new mentor is saying, ‘You’ve got to leave that stuff in the past. We’re the future.’ It hinges on a kind of betrayal, right? It hinges on a simple thing of, ‘Yasmin’s in a vulnerable position. Despite a vulnerability, am I going to weaponize that and get this crucial piece of business, which is going to make the firm a lot of money?’ It’s a pretty simple story.
We were shocked by how much that scene could keep going. Just when you think the basement of the scene has been hit, someone’s capable of saying something worse and something worse and something worse. When we were watching the cut, we were laughing because it kept getting progressively worse, but it kept getting organic, like we felt no need to cut any of the lines, because we were like, ‘Actually, this is just what they know about each other.’ Every time someone slashes at someone, they feel the need to slash back…they just know exactly the right thing to hurt one another. They know all of their weaknesses. They know every part of their underbelly.
DEADLINE: So, the slap at the end is just them finally running out of words to hurt one another?
DOWN: It’s triggering. It’s very intentional. The same dialogue comes out of Harper’s mouth now, that it did her father’s, and it’s hugely triggering. It’s one of her massive insecurities, and it’s like, ‘That’s exactly my father made me feel. This is what he projected on to me, and ultimately, that’s the last thing he said to me before he died.’ As Konrad said, we’ve gone too far with words, now [she] has to take action. I think that was one of our writers’ ideas. It was a great one, and he was great on those little ideas, because we’d be like, ‘She says this. Then she says this.’ And he’s just like, ‘What if she slaps her?’
DEADLINE: Harper going to Goldman to make the trade — and the reveal that Kenny and Jackie have joined forces with Daria there — is also pretty crazy. You planted the seed with Daria last season, but did you know you wanted to bring her back in a this way when you did that?
DOWN: We always had Daria as a little Easter egg in the back of our minds, because we’re like, it’s quite fun to know what she’s up to. The idea that actually, now that she’s working with Harper, because Harper had the money to pay her, just felt like kind of playful and nice. And yes, we love Freya [Mavor]. We love the character, and it’s just quite funny that she’s doing exactly the same thing she’s doing in Season 2 in exactly the same room, just with two other confidants from PeerPoint flanking her. Freya was like, ‘I’ll do this every year if you want me to…’ I think we set in Episode 3, when we first mentioned it as a playful Easter egg. But then as we got closer to writing Episode 6 and beating that out, it felt like it was the perfect moment for this sort of Avengers to reassemble to f*ck Pierpoint.
One of the only things [Konrad and I] probably disagree on is, is shorting a company getting revenge against it? Because, ultimately, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference. It only makes a difference, I think, if the company’s basically insolvent as a result of that. In the business world, you don’t really short a company to get revenge.
KAY: In the fictional world we created, it 100% tracks, though, doesn’t it? It feels like, yeah, all of those people are in there basically just to stick that middle finger up at Pierpoint.
DOWN: They always just feel quite well adjusted, and it feels like great contrast to the chaos that’s happening at Pierpoint and in those characters.
DEADLINE: On that note, Eric is really spiraling. He has been all season, but this episode really drives it home. When he storms into Leviathan, it feels like the gloves have finally come off.
DOWN: That’s like the first time he’s really been in the room with Harper since Episode 3, and the first time he’s actually been able to say everything he feels about her. In this episode where people are slinging home truths for each other, I think it rivals the last Harper and Yasmin scene in terms of how vicious it is, but it’s all stuff that’s true. Yes, they’ve been at odds for the whole season. Actually, in this scene, even though they’re saying really horrible things to each other, they’re then giving each other — in the writers room we call it ‘they’re learning.’ They’re giving each other lessons to go and apply to the rest of their seasons. Harper says to Eric, ‘You’ve lost everything, you can now go after something that you actually want.’ That actually gives him the interest to then go and do what he does to Adler, without ruining it. Eric is saying to Harper, ‘You’re no longer making excuses…you’re actually a bad person.’ And she’s like, ‘You know what? Maybe I am trying to protect Yasmine too much. In fact, actually, I’m just going to go and actually behave in the way that everyone expects me to behave.’ That’s the teaching that she gets.
KAY: I find it interesting when the words come out of his mouth, it’s almost like he can equally be saying that stuff to himself, and she can equally be saying that stuff to herself. Me and Mickey talk about Eric and Harper a lot, and then someone put it to us this season that they’re actually just the same person. I always thought about it as a pedagogic relationship, or father daughter or something, never sexual, but I never thought about it as actually just like a younger and an older version [of the same person]. I’m always interested when lines of dialogue where they’re hurting each other could equally be applied to them, and I feel like Eric’s little monologue there about, ‘You think you’re a monster. You walk around with that feeling every day, looking for external validation…’ I think Harper could easily say those lines back to him, and it could have equal validation.
DEADLINE: I laughed out loud at the line, ‘There’s a green fintech company on there. Do we even know what that is?’ In the last episode, the line that’s like ‘I’ve always enjoyed a cafe au lait’ as well. I find this show is full of those background lines that, if you’re really paying attention or on rewatch, are some of the best writing in the show. How do you come up with them?
DOWN: Obviously the show is plot heavy, and hopefully it’s rigorously plotted. The plot sometimes is a jigsaw puzzle, and sometimes it feels we thread it to an inch of this life. We cram a lot into these episodes, so it feels like the real estate we have just to be a bit silly is diminishing a little bit. So when we have a moment to be a bit silly or to just say something funny or to say something bit cutting, we really relish it. It’s where me and Konrad are most unchained in our writing. We’re not having to think about plot or character, and then these lines are reflective of the character, but we can just say things that make each other laugh.
That’s where Rishi’s background dialogue came from. It’s usually at the end of scenes, or it’s beginning of scenes, or it’s in between pieces of dialogue which are in the main focus of the plot. Let’s just make people laugh as much as possible. There’s a lot of heavy sh*t happening, sometimes a lot of dramatic stuff. We can just undercut some of that by having someone say something funny. That cafe au lait scene…I think we came up with that line on the day.
KAY: We did.
DOWN: It really is an exercise to make me and Konrad laugh.
KAY: You realize the show could actually just never be too funny. So basically every avenue now that’s potential to just for it to be humorous, we’re just going to take and double down on.
DEADLINE: I already asked you this, but I’m going to ask again now that we’re further in the season. After taking the public lashing for the company, Rob seems checked out, especially in that scene where Sweetpea tries to tell him Pierpoint is in trouble, and he brushes it off. Is he on the verge of a breakdown?
DOWN: Something that’s not clear at all from that episode, and was actually built out a little bit more, but there was not the real estate for it, was that he’s actually on mushrooms in that scene. He’s discovered hallucinogens and psychedelics at the end of five through his Ayahuasca trip, and he’s on mushrooms in the Episode 6. There is a personal and business element to that in Episode 7 and 8. He’s had a bit of a reckoning. His eyes have been opened by the drugs, and he’s a slightly changed person. But like with all hallucinogens, that change is only as long as you keep taking them. You’ll have to wait to see if that kind of change in mentality actually holds.
KAY: I’ve been thinking about that storyline a bit in retrospect, and actually one of my favorite things about it is, in a little bit of a meta way, someone being tortured like Jesus Christ for three seasons and then having a revelation through drugs is quite TV writers room-y. But the way I think about it is, actually from a character POV, it tracks incredibly well that someone like Rob would do something like that and then change his whole outlook on life, especially at that age, and especially with what you see that will happen to him. He has something that he’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is profound.’ It kind of feels very true to life somehow.
DEADLINE: What else can you say about the rest of the season?
DOWN: They’re massive episodes.
KAY: We’re behind the camera for the first time. It’s up to people to see, but I think the show feels maybe slightly different visually. We have an extra long finale as well, like 12 minutes over length, which HBO granted to us on the strength of the material. I would say tune in, because the first six episodes are pretty explosive, but I feel like a lot comes home to roost in seven and eight, which I think will make it very dramatic view.
DEADLINE: I know you’ve said that you’re hoping for at least five seasons, but do you have all five charted out, or are you taking it season by season?
DOWN: A bit of both. You start to think about how it would end, but then, as long as we’re creatively fulfilled of it, we want to continue. We have a really good Season 4 idea. I’ll just put that out there.
