Industry goes full Uncut Gems

If you’ve been wondering whether Industry could fill the Succession-sized hole in your TV watching, ponder no more. Just like that Emmy-winning juggernaut of a series, Industry is bleak and unsparing in the way it portrays how our current economic system works and how those doing the wheeling and dealing are caught being the worst versions of themselves in order to survive (if not outright thrive). And what better figure with which to test that theory in this episode than Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), the ever-blustering associate and market maker who’s just as likely to yell out obscenities at his colleagues as to make obscenely tone-deaf comments about, well, anything really. 

From the start of this episode (cheekily titled “White Mischief”), Industry wants to remind you that Rishi sees his job as little else than a profit-making enterprise. For the company and its clients, sure. But mostly for himself. “Money is an illusion,” he asserts. It all comes off as rather callous—especially since he’s so tired of doing post-mortems on Lumi and the disastrous effects it’s had on its working class-customers. Rishi doesn’t want to hear it; he’s focused on the next thing—namely, the announcement of the government budget which he’s hoping will give him the windfall his books needs in order to offset some very shady dealings he’s been making.

It’s those dealings, both on the floor and outside of it, that fuel this banger of an episode, which find Rishis clashing with Eric and with HR, with his colleagues and with his neighbors, with those he’s indebted to and those whose money he’s playing loose with. And it all creates a thrilling portrait of a man both of the time and out of it, eager to be the man yet foiled by the staid performance of manhood he plays out instead.

At work, Rishi is walking on thin ice. An HR complaint has been filed against him after some questionable quotes allegedly attributed to him made their way into an Overheard@Pierpoint Reddit post. As ever, he’s brash and defensive, refusing to cater to such fragile sensitivities. In this episode, he’s one line of dialogue away from railing against wokeness and snowflakes, all while admiting his language is rather blue (what he tells Eric, even as he refuses to believe that should cost him his job). He’s making money, no? He’s getting the job done. So what if he swears and makes some people uncomfortable?

But he is tense at the prospect of being too closely watched at work. His gambling has clearly gotten out of control—not the best way to manage his finances given that he and his wife have bought a lovely and quite English estate with an adjoining cricket pavilion his neighbors insist should stay the same despite Rishi’s more modern plans for both buildings. With a newborn in tow, Rishi has been intent on further coloring in the pitch-perfect life he’s long aspired to. But that’s also become quite a burden, where he doesn’t feel welcomed by the aristocratic if money-strapped neighbors he now shares fields with. 

Therein lies one of the many vexing complexities Rishi represents. He suffers through condescending racism and yet seems not at all concerned to change the system that allows such racism. Like many before him, he finds refuge and succor only in wealth. The system will bend to him if he has enough money, he believes. He can disregard workplace complaints and brush off racist remarks if he has enough. This is perhaps why he’s drawn to gambling, the dark-bellied foil to trading. But now that he’s in the red (he can’t even send a tip to Sweetpea, whom he’s now both fucked and learned has an OnlyFans account), all of that risks crumbling beneath him.

Playing like a tense, edge-of-your-seat thriller (not too far from a Safdie flick—kudos to Zoé Wittock for such gripping direction), “White Mischief” follows Rishi as he tries to keep his trading and his gambling in check. The former has forced him to strong-arm Anraj (Irfan Shamji) to go over his limit (by millions!), prompting the risk desk to come a calling; but Rishi is banking on the government budget to go his way, which—spoiler alert—it does not. It may well cost Pierpoint a pretty penny (billions, perhaps) and leaves the paranoid (and coked-up) workaholic with an endless sense of dread and foreboding. And so what better way to brush it off than to try and stall those debt-collectors who are now hounding him at work and at home by…going gambling with his co-workers’ money? Yes, it seems Rishi has been running a horse betting game with his Pierpoint colleagues (including Eric), and he’s all too happy to take their money and rather than pay off his debts, walk into a casino.

Surprisingly, Rishi does quite well for himself. He plays. He drinks. He wins. He bets some more. Wins some more. Drinks even more. He ignores any sense of responsibility and stays out all night, even frequenting a strip bar after cashing in on his grand winnings. That’s when the night takes a turn as his drinking leads him to make out with a girl at the joint whose boyfriend then proceeds to beat Rishi to a pulp, all while hurling racist epithets his way. You’d hope this would be enough to sober him up and ring some sense into him. Instead, bloodied and black-eyed, he walks into the casino again and proceeds to lose everything, all to later walk into the office like a man who’s clearly losing control of all he’s ever built.

And that’s when he gets the news about the pound sterling trading worse than he could’ve feared, putting his entire livelihood further at stake. Industry is always at its best when it turns these economic crises into heightened workplace sequences. As Rishi tries to sort out what happened, the world seems to close in on him. (And he still doesn’t know who leaked his words to Reddit. Was it Anraj? Sweet Pea? Kenny? It could be anyone.) He knows he’s running out of time. All that leads to an HR-mandated meeting where Eric encourages his employees to share freely “anything about how they feel… about working on our desk.” 

It’s there that Rob says the line that best sums up Rishi’s quandary: “Rish, mate, I think some people may see it, the way you speak, as a bit backwards.” He tries to explain this away as his version of confidence, his need to show he’s in control, in on the joke. But as Venetia (Indy Lewis) rightly remarks, it’s misogynistic language nonetheless which has brought them all there. 

But Rishi won’t let such petty issues affect his work, even as they almost got him slinging punches at Ali (Fady Elsayed). He does what he knows how to do best. A call from Harper is enough to tee him up to knowledge of what the government is about to do and say with regards to the budget. Ever the betting man, he bets big and even as Eric almost pushes security on him to get him off the floor as he becomes riskier and riskier of a trader, he wins. He makes enough money to again hush all criticisms. As he leaves for work, he’s given a fitting send-off by Venetia; she confesses to have made up insults she fed to the Overhead@Pierpoint forum and tells him Sweet Pea called him a “five pump chump.” She’s leaving the company. “I’m bored of working for this dictatorship of dying men,” she says. 

At home, Rishi has to wrestle with what feels like a marriage at its breaking point. Diana feels unseen, unheard, and more tellingly, unwanted. She’s been cloistered in their English cottage by herself with a baby while her husband fucks colleagues and goes on late-night benders. As Rishi tries to explain why it’s all unraveling, we’re given arguably the best line of the episode, one which I’ll surely be using IRL for the foreseeable future: “Your shame is not helpful right now,” she tells him. 

So they’re in debt, she learns. How much? How? How did he hope to get out of it? He can barely say he hoped her parents would help before he realizes how hollow that sounds. She’s got money. She’ll help out. She’s not been blameless; she’s fucked the neighbor. All she wants is now to raise their son lovingly together (“It’s easier to raise strong boys than to fix broken men,” she points out, knowing how much of a broken man she has next to her).

As they rekindle their marriage, Rishi finds himself renewed. He heads to the cricket pavilion and proceeds to destroy it. He will start again. Will start anew. Will even get his dog back from his neighbor, claim it back as his own (a bit of a blunt metaphor, but sure). And just as the sun graces his bloodied, broken face in this land he owns and will make it in his own image, he makes the call that undoes it all: He’s gonna bet again. So much for progress. I kept thinking of Harper’s words from a few episodes back: “New look, same great taste.” 

Stray observations

• • Was last week the last we saw of Lumi and its gorgeous CEO? Must we really bid goodbye to Kit Harington?
• • Which Rishi line (both real and made-up) made you LOL (while rolling your eyes) the most this episode: “She looks like the kind of thick cunt who swallows her mouth wash,” “We don’t have time for this Bolshevik shit!” or “I have a feeling fate is shaving her cunt just for me”? 
• • It just occurred to me that the writers were having way too much fun in naming Rishi’s wife, who in this episode insists she doesn’t want to be his English rose of a wife; what a line for a “Diana” to utter, no?
• • The score on this show has long been its stealth secret weapon, but I have to give props to Nathan Micay for crafting such a thrilling one for this great episode.
• • How do we feel about the distinction Diana makes between misogyny and chauvinism? And how hilarious was it to have her invoke The Body Keeps Score?