The “Industry” Season 4 finale was tough for anyone holding YasHarper stock. Not only does Yasmin rebrand from Lady Muck to a high-class madame serving British aristocrats, she rejects Harper’s heartfelt plea to leave this hell pit behind, humiliating her on-again off-again best friend in a room full of Nazis. Things have never been worse for us.
The show’s latest season explored the narcotic power of mythmaking and deception: “Your story starts the day you begin telling it.” This kind of self-mythologizing is core to the YasHarper relationship. It’s the source of their tension: Each recognizes in the other a tendency to justify their worst impulses through a narrative of victimhood. It’s also what binds them, as they grow closer and each acknowledges that the traumas that shape the other’s choices is all too real. And though Harper and Yasmin’s paths may have diverged, but the lies they told themselves along the way aren’t so different.
Yes, Yas and Harper come from different worlds. As a Black American woman who doesn’t even have a college degree from her (shudder) state school, Harper is the consummate underdog, a perennial outsider in London finance. Meanwhile, Yasmin is heiress to a publishing fortune, without the title or land that would cement her place in the ossified British class system, but plenty of money and posh connections. Now, their dynamic’s turned upside down: Harper’s star is on the rise, having just profited $110 million from shorting Tender, while Yasmin, is, well…a sex trafficker.
Despite this gulf, they both suffer in ways that validate their worst fears about the world. Yasmin’s spent her entire run on the show in a reactive, self-protective trauma response. Her entire worldview forged by predatory men, she exists in an endless confirmation loop that her only value is her body. One of “Industry’s” most heartbreaking moments comes when Yas realizes that even Eric, who she knows vis-à-vis Harper is capable of mentorship, only sees her as something to be fucked. This intersection of sex and power is the only place Yas knows how to exist, so it’s no surprise that she decides this is where she must make her patch.
Meanwhile, Harper battles against racist and classist prejudice everywhere she turns. From her abusive mother and estranged brother, she learned that she will never be able to count on anyone but herself, and Pierpoint only corroborates her convictions. On just her first day, she’s confused for another Black new hire by Yasmin, and another grad calls her a diversity hire. In the rest of the first season, Nicole gropes her, Eric locks her in a room to menace her, Daria and Sara leverage the incident as fodder for their own coup at Pierpoint, and Adler convinces her to let the harassment go. So she adopts Eric’s approach to career growth: ruthless self-interest.
I could go on. Both Yasmin and Harper have suffered ledgers full of trauma. They also both have more autonomy than they think.
Their current-day struggles largely stem from their devotion to the narrowest idea of success: joining the highest echelon of the ruling class they can. Harper’s college essay on the moral case for capitalism is a reminder that she has no fundamental quibble with a system that creates mass inequality and most hurts people who look like her. Her main gripe is that as a Black woman, she faces more hurdles to getting her piece. And Yasmin has more than enough connections to land an apprenticeship or two, build a skillset, and secure funding for her own venture, but views the prospect of working for her money as a middle-class fate worse than death.
Desparate to rise above their stations, they lie and manipulate their way through life, hurting friends, colleagues, and each other. Both get a peek at a different world: Yas in a potential relationship with Rob, Harper in a potential career with Petra. Both reject it, twisting the knife on their way out. And both justify their actions by telling themselves that their defining traumas have left them no other choice but to behave this way.
(This is not a critique, by the way. For “Industry” to function as an exploration of the soul-poisoning effects of capitalism, Harper and Yasmin must stay close to the heart of that system as possible. The plot would simply collapse if they both just went to therapy. Kenny Kilbane’s continued existence is a reminder that it’s possible to look inward, seek help, and come out the other end a better human being who is also narratively irrelevant.)
“You have no idea what it’s like for me,” Harper flatly tells Yasmin (Season 1). “You’re weak and a fucking hypocrite.”
“Frankly, Harper, I don’t have the energy to listen to your fucking whining, your bullshit, your rationalizations,” Yasmin spits back (Season 2). “Good luck finding someone to love you, yeah?”
“This is the business,” Harper retorts (Season 3). “Sorry the world is showing you what it is without any of the protections that you are so clearly used to.”
“The world is not exploitation or opportunity, it’s both/and,” Yasmin rejoins (Season 4). “That is the world, Harper. ‘The world’s showing you what it is.’ You said that to me. So you metabolize hard feelings. You become someone.”
Though Harper and Yasmin end the season more diametrically opposed than ever, Harper’s lament that everyone she thought she knew has disappeared echoes Yasmin’s own loss of innocence as Charles revealed the extent of his sexual misdeeds, Maxim assaulted her, Eric harassed her, Harper betrayed her, and her own husband’s mask slipped.
Even the reason Harper and Yasmin’s paths have diverged so far seems like a product of their divergent circumstances rather than intrinsic differences in character. Harper will never have access to the kind of structural power Yas possesses, but was fine taking Otto Mostyn’s money when it was offered to her. Harper punches up by taking down fraudsters while Yasmin punches down, sending Hayley and Dolly to do her dirty work for her, but Harper has on plenty of occasions sneered at those who are too weak to outplay her. It’s no coincidence that she only rejects Yasmin’s latest rationalization after she’s accrued capital of her own, built something undeniable.
In the end, Harper’s disgusted, and she’s right to be. But on some level she understands how Yasmin got there, because she’s one of the people who taught Yasmin that this is all the world will ever be. And she knows it.
That’s the brilliance of this show. A lesser writers’ room might yield to the temptation to cast half of YasHarper as the good one, the other the bad one. Instead, “Industry” dares to examine the narcissism of Harper and Yasmin’s medium-size differences, to ask how far apart they really are. The dramatic weight of their relationship comes from what they have in common, not what sets them apart. They each loathe the other for having what they never will, come back together because they recognize a kinship deeper than their material disparities.
Over the years, plenty of fans have called Harper a sociopath, evil, a bad person, a narcissist. Many will probably call Yasmin one now. This is boring. Those are fixed designations, and “Industry” is not a show about fixed people. It’s about what happens to people in a system that rewards cruelty and perversion, about the alchemy between someone’s innate characteristics and their climb to the top. Nudge them one way and they’ll get someone fired. Nudge them another way and they’ll become a madame.
When Joan Didion wrote in ‘The White Album’ that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she might as well have been talking about Yasmin and Harper, who since the pilot have been in conversation about whether they or their rotted surroundings are to blame for the harm they do. And now Yasmin’s trajectory is the thing that might finally get Harper to question her own. Buonissima!