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Industry is a show about how competition—and particularly its economic variant, capitalism—erodes the human soul. When two characters are together, one always wields power over the other. So it should’ve been at the end of Season 4’s penultimate episode, “Points of Emphasis,” when Harper (Myha’la) meets Yasmin (Marisa Abela) for a drink after learning that her team’s hard work in exposing Tender’s malfeasance has paid off. She was right about the company. Yasmin, her forever rival, was wrong. But instead of rubbing the win in her frenemy’s face, Harper listens to her laments and even makes herself vulnerable, posing searching questions about the drive for dominance. “You used to make me feel very alone,” Yasmin says. “Now you’re the only person in the world I don’t feel alone around.” After vowing to take care of each other, they go out clubbing together, their bodies melting together like lovers.
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The moment seemed to herald a kinder era for this friendship and the show as a whole. But, haha, who could really believe that the two pillars of Industry’s financial hellscape would skip off into the egalitarian sunset holding hands? Sunday’s season finale, “Both, And,” swiftly put paid to that fantasy, by reframing Harper and Yasmin’s perfect night out as an eclipse of sorts: two central characters blurring together as they pass one another, before each embarks on the path the other has left behind. There is much to say about Yasmin’s horrifying self-reinvention as a young Ghislaine Maxwell. I’m more interested, though, in what appears to be the beginning of the erstwhile nihilist Harper’s transformation into a more principled person. Out of a pessimistic show, working within a prestige-drama genre that tends to be cynical about human nature, comes the genuinely surprising argument that people can change—and change for the better.
Sloughing off the old, ruthless self is not easily done. For Harper, it’s a painful…
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