If you give a man a Zipcar, a beautiful heiress to ride in the passenger seat, and some psychedelic mushrooms, you’ve got the makings of an excellent episode of television. This week, on the penultimate episode of Industry’s third-but-not-last season, Robert breaks the news to Yasmin that he’s taking a road trip to Wales for an interview at a psilocybin healthcare startup. Considering that she’s been sacked by Pierpoint, Yas has nothing on the agenda aside from her who-knows-what-number day of sitting home, drinking wine, and avoiding the paparazzi, so she joins him.
During a late-night fast-food stop on the trip, Robert brings Yas a deep-fried sausage and Yas deflects any hint that she appreciates being cared for by informing Robert that they won’t be sleeping together. After Robert gets upset by this (because, remember, he sees the real her, not the sexual pawn that she often plays with men in her life), Yas tells him that she isn’t great at expressing love: “Whenever I feel anything like love or care, I want to make it ugly.”
Meanwhile over at Pierpoint, the bank is celebrating its 150th anniversary—with prosecco for the employees, the first red flag of the night. “We can’t afford champagne?” Eric says to Bill during a panicky call on his way up to the executive boardroom. After a brief encounter with Eric in the lobby, Rishi reads the tea leaves and marshals Sweetpea (in a sequined gown) and Anraj (in a tux) into overdrive on the trading floor. My friends, I do have some bad news to deliver: Rishi’s arm is in a cast, and Vinay (who Rishi owes a lot of money) will not stop blowing up his personal and work phone.
When Eric finally escapes the party and makes it upstairs, his C-suite coworkers are in a boardroom, downing Red Bulls and iterating on a plan to save Pierpoint, led by the company’s new Bain-consultant-turned-CEO, Tom Wolsey. Now, guys like this are usually outsiders coming into a company with an outsider’s perspective. In the last episode, Rishi explains him as “a butcher masquerading as a surgeon.” In other words, he’s not afraid to take a hatchet to Pierpoint and its history if it means saving his job. After the US Government refuses a loan to the bank, saying the lesson from 2008 was no more bailouts, the room has to find another solution with just hours until the US market opens back up.
While all this is happening at the office, we catch up with Harper, who’s living out of a hotel room outfitted with eight Bloomberg screens. After having sex with the room service attendant (I love how all of her flings are just “some guy”), the camera pans to a display that reveals how much LeviathanAlpha has made on shorting Pierpoint: $294 million.
One option on the table in that Pierpoint meeting is an acquisition by Barclays. This concerns Eric, who’s thinking about that 150-year-history and the idea of Pierpoint as a brand that stands alone, rather than as part of another bank (a la Merrill Lynch under Chase.) Eric and Bill advance a different option—a minor investment from Mitsubishi. Eric also clocks Bill making plans for a future (a short one, if his six-months-to-live brain-tumor diagnosis) as CFO of Pierpoint.
