‘Industry’ co-creators break down that wild Season 3 finale

Note: This discusses the Season 3 finale of HBO's "Industry" and therefore contains spoilers.

It was to be expected that Sunday night's season finale of "Industry," the HBO series enamored with risk-takers, would take viewers for a wild ride. The show is known for its twists and turns, an effective way to keep a general audience captivated by the thorny workplace politics and backdoor dealings of Pierpoint, a fictional top London investment firm. Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have only leaned further into soapy drama with each season, supplementing some of the more jargon-reliant plots — if you don't know by now what it means to short something, you never will — with extra romance and betrayal.

Skip to end of carousel The Style sectionStyle is where The Washington Post explains what's happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories,. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter,. End of carousel At the end of Season 3, we see Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), sole heir to the controversial Hanani publishing empire who was in survival mode all season, making a romantic sacrifice she knows will help her maintain her social standing. Expert manipulator Harper Stern (Myha'la) continues to backstab her way to glory, while the comparatively meek Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) decides he isn't cut out for that sort of life anymore. These aren't the Pierpoint grads you remember from the first season.

The Washington Post spoke to Down and Kay mere minutes after news broke that the series was renewed for a fourth go-round. They broke down the provocative finale, but they kept mum about what it might mean for the fictional gang's Season 4 trajectories.

Harper Stern Mapping out Harper's Season 3 arc was difficult, because "we had written ourselves into a corner, having her fired and leaving Pierpoint at the end of Season 2," Down said. He and Kay debated how to handle it before returning to the writers room. They could simply reverse her firing and ignore the consequences "like a sitcom," Down continued, or she could spend the season yearning for her lost Pierpoint gig.

Neither seemed right. Harper doesn't do regret. She accepts her fate and pushes ahead.

They decided she would set out with Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg), a portfolio manager at the gig she finds after Pierpoint, and run her own hedge fund. Harper has always been ambitious, but what happens when she accrues power? Will she play by the rules or, say, trade on privileged information?

She straddles the line throughout the season, upsetting Petra before extending an olive branch, repeatedly. Eventually, the old Harper emerges. She goes behind Petra's back and sets up a clandestine meeting with Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), a former client who offers Harper the opportunity to return to the shady business tactics of her past. She can't resist.

Harper misses the rush she used to chase, Down said, describing the character's thought process: "I'm going to do something that gives me adrenaline and purpose. I'm going to roll the dice again."

Yasmin Kara-Hanani Yasmin is initially underestimated by her Pierpoint colleagues, deemed a pretty face from Notting Hill without much to offer. "We always thought of her as someone from money who was trying to prove herself outside of that privilege," Kay said. But in Season 2, when her father, Charles Hanani (Adam Levy), enters the picture, it becomes clear that there are a few unexpected obstacles in her path.

Down and Kay leaned into the natural on-screen friction between Abela and Levy in writing their Season 3 storyline. Yasmin learned when she was cut off from family funds that she can't be happy without money, and allegations of sexual assault against Charles have put her financial future in peril, too. He has become a liability, so she lets him drown when he falls off a boat during their summer vacation.

Now, then: How to guarantee a life of luxury without Charles in the picture? Even though she and Robert finally hook up in the season finale, cutting the sexual tension that built between them for three seasons, Yasmin becomes engaged that same day to Henry Muck (Kit Harington), the rich tech CEO with whom Robert once worked, and whose uncle owns the tabloids that can make or break Yasmin's image.

"Rob and Yas are in a triangle with [Henry], where they're triangulating for the whole season their own value to this character," Kay said. "What does he represent to them? Is it aspirational, as in the case of Rob? For Yasmin, it represents safety and security — a gateway to the life she gave up."

Robert Spearing Compared with his cutthroat colleagues, Robert can come across as a bit of a dud.

"We were very conscious of the fact that he wasn't competent in his work in the first two seasons, so we wanted him to be embedded in something where he actually cared about the outcome," Kay said. Though he now makes more, Robert comes from a working-class background and realizes after working with Henry that the CEO is "a bit of an upper-class shyster," Kay continued. "You think: 'Why do I want this ... guy's approval? Why is my neurology programmed for me to want this guy to think I'm important?'"

Some turn to therapy to unlearn such things. Robert turns to ayahuasca. In a sequence that Kay referred to as a "typical TV trope where he has an awakening," Robert realizes that psychedelics can open doors for him, both on a personal level and in his career. He and Yasmin road-trip to his interview for a gig selling drugs for therapeutic purposes. Even though they profess their love when they hook up, Robert gets why Yasmin chooses Henry. His new path doesn't suit her, and England's ingrained class system never allowed him to believe that he had a shot with her, anyway.

Besides, he's got his shrooms now.

"It ends on that quite 'Mad Men'-y, Don-Draper-inventing-Coca-Cola note," Kay said. "He's free of Pierpoint, but he's not free of capitalism."

Eric Tao Is there a more tragic figure this season than Eric (Ken Leung)? "He's a mess," Down said of the onetime tyrant. In Season 1, Kay added, Eric "was the guy with the baseball bat who scared the s- out of everybody. Season 2, we called him Sad Eric because he was moping around. We needed a corrective."

Eric spends Season 3 "scrambling for an identity," according to Kay. He misses his high-stakes working relationship with Harper, once his ruthless protégée, but doesn't know how to re-create that feeling. He tries to find his footing amid Pierpoint's merger with Al-Mi'raj, the fictional Arab state-backed entity, but ends up as collateral damage. Eric getting put through the wringer might be karma for doing the same to others.

Because of Leung's versatility as an actor, Kay said, "we were like, 'Let's just give it to him. It's going to be a gauntlet. He's going to have to play scared, horny, angry, sad, regretful, excited, ambitious.'"

At the end of the season, Eric walks onto a deserted trading room floor. All the computers are covered in plastic. It's almost like a graveyard. "He sells his soul and then is the king of nothing," Kay said.

Rishi Ramdani If Eric is the most tragic of the lot, then Rishi is by far the most pathetic. He has played a bigger role in "Industry" since Harper and Eric looped him into their efforts to break out of Pierpoint, and this season gives Rishi his own episode — delving into his mounting debts and consequential marital troubles.

"It's a character who's lived his whole life without consequence, finally getting consequence," Kay said.

Rishi's flagrant disrespect toward colleagues Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) and Anraj Chabra (Irfan Shamji) backfires when Harper hires Sweetpea and Anraj at her firm but leaves Rishi in the dust. He is desperate, underscoring his need for "liquidity" to pay off his gambling debts. He wakes up every day knowing he will eventually have to face the wrath of his longtime lender, Vinay Sarkar (Asim Chaudhry), to whom he owes half a million pounds. Toward the end of the finale, Vinay kills Rishi's estranged wife, Diana (Emily Barber), with a single gunshot. Her blood splatters onto Rishi's face.

"Just as the episode is winding down, you get this thing that just jolts you out of your chair," Kay said. "We want the grammar of the show to change in Season 4. We want to show people that this is a universe where this kind of stuff happens. It's not a comedy workplace drama. It could be a show about crime."