Lo and Behold, Harper Stern Has a Soul

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 process fueled by a season’s worth of professional wins, personal losses, and hard truths. The Season 4 premiere found her swishing into a posh office, only to discover that her short-only fund was created solely for optics by its blue-blooded backer, Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), who is now thwarting Harper at every turn. “You hired me on merit,” she protests. “I hired you as a face,” he corrects her, to bring his business a “progressive sheen.” In other words, she says: “You wanted to hire a puppet in blackface so you could continue being a crook.” Harper has never gone in for affirmative action, preferring to believe that finance is a meritocracy where her intelligence and tenacity put her on an equal plane with her white and wealthy counterparts. But we can see it dawning on her that some people will always see her first and foremost as a Black woman—one who becomes dispensable when, as Otto puts it, “that woke sh-t no longer moves the needle.”

In the same episode, we’re reminded that Harper is running from her past across the Atlantic when she opens a 30th birthday card from her mother, then immediately shreds it. (If I believed in astrology or thought Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were the types to go in for it, I’d say her Season 4 arc represented her Saturn return.) This is foreshadowing for Episode 5, in which Harper learns her mom has died suddenly. Initially circumspect about her private life, she comes to work early the next morning and confides in Eric (Ken Leung). “I don’t even know what to say. How to feel,” she tells him. “She was awful to me. And she tortured my brother so badly, she fucked him up to the point where he was incapable of loving me. And it was his love, when I was young, that’s the only love I remember.” 

It’s in this scene that we see Harper turn introspective about what has motivated her to succeed, even if it means hurting people. In place of love, she tells Eric, she was raised on resentment—and hate, even. “They can be good motivational principles,” he allows. “Until they’re not,” she replies. By the time their lengthy conversation is finished, Eric has opened up about how ashamed he is of his inability to care about his children, and Harper has finally explained what was going through her mind as she backstabbed her way through the financial services sector. “I ran through all these scenarios in my head of what it would be like to see [my mother] again,” she says. “She would have no choice but to fall to her knees and beg for my forgiveness—because I had become f-cking undeniable.” Eric: “You are undeniable.” This is precisely what Harper has longed to hear, from the closest thing she has left to a parent.

An episode later, Eric is out of her life, too, taken down by a kompromat video of his liaison with a supposedly underage sex worker. Another parental abandonment and, when Yasmin cruelly shows her the video in “Both, And,” a transgression to which Harper responds like someone who is not amoral after all. Yes, she wants power and autonomy and to prove herself formidable at almost any cost. But she’s no sadist—a word one of Yasmin’s former schoolmates apparently used to describe her. The former Lady Muck (a real derogatory term in British slang!) gives quite a performance of amorality at her Parisian salon, where she’s already over her recent split. At dinner, Harper is seated among genuine Nazis who say things like: “Repatriation is the only model to reverse this unbelievable erosion of our culture” and “A nation is its genetic inheritance.” While the largely old, rich, white, male, and lecherous guests digest, Yasmin brings out some young, poor, powerless but ambitious girls for them to prey on. Harper is disgusted to the point of near-incoherence, begging her friend to just leave this miserable room with her. “This is not who you are,” Harper insists. Alas, this might actually be Yasmin in her final form.

It’s easy to imagine the Harper of Seasons 1 through 3 shrugging off her friend’s pursuit of influence, however low she sinks to get it. In fact, we see her defending Yasmin to her would-be +1, Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh), just before the party he’s wise enough to skip. “She’s a survivor,” Harper says, and this is true as both a description of her friend’s toughened-up personality and in the sense that she is a survivor of abuse. “You have no f-ckin’ clue what she’s been through.” If Harper seems to have more empathy for Yasmin than she does for anyone else on the planet, it’s probably because they were both brought up in families that substituted hate for love. 

But something else has changed for Harper over the course of the season, something more subtle and oddly (for Industry) heartening. In Kwabena and Sweetpea (Miriam Petche), if not ultimately in Eric, she has found her people. These are the colleagues who flew to Accra to prove her suspicions about Tender right. When Harper finally closes their position, as the stock plummets into oblivion, they make an eye-popping nine figures. Soon, the trio is touring an airy, floor-through, permanent office space, and she’s handing out $2 million bonus checks. “Could’ve made more selling pictures of my feet,” Sweetpea cracks. By reinvesting the rest of the money in their business, though, Harper is affirming her belief in this partnership. Judging by her decision to take the same bonus she gave them, it’s an equal one, too. 

There is a lot going on in this storyline. For the first time, Harper finds it’s possible to win through diligence, trust, and collaboration rather than iconoclasm and treachery. And for all three partners—two people of color, two women, one of them a former sex worker—it’s a merit-based victory in an industry that has chronically underestimated them. Then there’s Harper and Kwabena. Weary of a situationship he describes as “intimate, but with no intimacy,” he goes out and hooks up with another woman while Harper is watching teenagers sit on the laps of white supremacists. He calls her an NPC, practically an AI. Instead of shutting him out, she makes herself vulnerable. “The people who I thought were constants in my life have all become something I didn’t know they were, or disappeared altogether,” she tells Kwabena. “I like being around you”—maybe, she ventures, because “you’re the only other Black person who I ever interact with.” It’s a rare acknowledgment on her part, one surely influenced by her Nazi tablemates, that shared identity can bind people together. 

Harper confesses, in the same breath, that she doesn’t know how to be in a relationship. This is probably an understatement. But I took it as a good sign that in the final scene of “Both, And,” when she’s literally flying high in a private jet, giving an interview, Kwabena is right there behind her, smiling. Asked what gave her the wherewithal to take on Tender, she replies: “I had a team of people who I cared about. Whose opinions I cared about.” Just to really drive home the point that she’s transcended her reputation, her interlocutor notes that “a few people I talked to made you seem like more of a, how shall I say, singular operative.” Harper: “People change.”

Maybe that’s a cliché, but in big, serious TV dramas like Industry has become (while keeping its soapy excesses alive), the opposite is more often true. From Succession to The Sopranos, HBO heavy hitters past have taken cues from the Western dramatic canon, where the tragic heroes of Seneca and Shakespeare are brought down by an immutable flaw. When it comes to Harper—who, again, has only just turned 30—we could, instead, be watching a wounded young person heal into, well, not a saint, but an adult who cares about some things besides her own success. Down and Kay are careful not to strike too optimistic a note. Confronted with the question of whether being right about Tender when everyone else was wrong makes her feel vindicated or lonely, she says: “Both, and.”

The show leaves her in a moment of seemingly inconsequential ambivalence that takes on greater weight because it’s the final exchange of the season. “Are you done?” asks a flight attendant, offering to refresh her drink. We won’t know her endgame until Industry returns for its recently announced fifth and final season. For now, both, and will have to suffice.