“Industry,” which was created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, began, in part, as an exploration of the difficulties of reforming poisonous systems. The first season exhibits a skepticism toward optics-focussed D.E.I. initiatives, and the third season casts doubt on the banking business’s attempts to whitewash its practices through E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investing. The young people ushered into the system—like Harper, who’s sexually harassed by a client early in the show—quickly figure out that there’s more to be gained by going along with the workings of an institution than by challenging them. But Yasmin has been fascinating to watch because of her willingness to embrace the rot. She’s governed by a particular combination of entitlement and eschewed responsibility—a product, one assumes, of her childhood, during which she enjoyed every imaginable material privilege but, thanks to her volatile father, rarely a sense of stability or control. As an adult, she has no regard for what the world looks like, as long she’s on top. She has never bothered casting a ballot, despite a brief career as a politician’s wife, and her philosophy toward the media, over which she now exerts a modicum of influence through her dealings with Alexander, is “Who cares, as long as people are clicking?” The rise of the Reform Party in the fourth season’s backdrop isn’t just the show’s bid for relevance; it poses the question of who, other than the relatively few dedicated fascists in the U.K., would thrive amid their ascent. The answer is people like Yasmin, who’s so devoid of actual values that she characterizes this frightening new era as a simple pendulum swing from the left to the right, “achieving nothing but perpetual campaigning.”
On a different show, such self-serving nihilism might render a character irredeemably repellent. But Yasmin remains enthralling because she relentlessly pursues power over others, even when it forecloses on her own opportunities for happiness and connection. In the third season, she chooses the wealthy and connected Henry, who confesses that he may be too selfish to love her, over her on-off fling Robert, who opens his home to her when her father, Charles, locks her out of his. Her alliance with Stefanowicz and his ilk means ignoring the obvious fact that they most likely consider her part of the hordes of outsiders invading Europe (she’s a British-raised woman with Israeli and Libyan roots), leading to what they denounce as the “erosion of our culture.” Yasmin’s desperate wish to become untouchably powerful like Harper, whom she calls “a breathing example of how I can be more” in last week’s episode, ironically drives her into even more insecurity. Her decision to team up with Hayley, an assistant at Tender, in the scheme to secretly videotape johns as future blackmail material, after it had been done to her and Henry, is another instance in which Yasmin adopts the tools used to hurt her to injure others. But it’s a particularly shortsighted move, since she can’t trust that Hayley won’t one day blackmail her as well.
Yasmin’s closing scene echoes that of the previous season, when, as a newlywed in Henry’s ancestral manor, she is given devastating news about her father by Alondra, his former employee and lover: on his boat, the Lady Yasmin, Charles and his friends preyed on girls as young as twelve. Alondra expresses sympathy in the case that Yasmin was sexually assaulted by Charles, too, leading to an outsized reaction on Yasmin’s part that suggests Alondra was right to suspect such a transgression. In the latest finale, in another baronially decorated room—Yasmin’s hotel suite in Paris—Molly enters, tearful about something that seems to have gone wrong at the party the night before, but hesitant to spell it out. Before Molly can confide in her, Yasmin shuts her down with a professional smile and a disingenuous ode to resilience: “She is tossed by the waves, but she does not sink.” Only after she’s left alone does Yasmin allow herself to drop to the ground while tearfully listening to her dad’s voice on repeat. Defenseless against her own memories, she seems overwhelmed by a flood of remembrances of Charles—and, perhaps, to be grappling with the inescapable fact that she’s one step closer to becoming the man who made her a monster. ♦
