Everything Was Building Toward This

Photo: Nick Strasburg/Nick Strasburg

Harper and Yasmin’s Industry relationship — whether as office frenemies, roommates, or romantic rivals — has always been volatile. But in Sunday night’s episode, “Nikki Beach or: So Many Ways to Lose,� Harper lights the match that finally torches it. “We’ve been waiting for Harper to have to make a decision about whether she’s going to prioritize her career over another person,� Mickey Down, co-creator of Industry with Konrad Kay, told me in an interview before the season started airing. “Everything comes out, the nastiest stuff they could say. It was cathartic for us and the characters to put the worst possible things that me and Konrad could imagine them thinking about each other into words.�

After pulling back the curtain on its big season-long flashback to reveal Yasmin’s father falling off his yacht (the Lady Yasmin) and drowning, the episode shows Yas and Harper covering it up — and still making their reservation at trendy hangout Nikki Beach — before coming back to the present day. Petra pressures Harper to use Yasmin to bring down Pierpoint, and by pretending to show an interest in “buying the dip� in collapsing ESG companies, the pair convinces Yasmin to hand over data showing how deeply Pierpoint invested in the shoddy operations. Eric finds out and rips into Yasmin on the floor before putting her on indefinite leave, leading Yasmin to confront Harper in a permanently scarring, possibly friendship-ending fight.

Down and Kay wrote the scene with input from Marisa Abela and Myha’la, who play Yasmin and Harper, in order to address the breadth of the characters’ insecurities and long-held wounds. They lay it all at the table: Yasmin needles Harper for her Machiavellian nature, and Harper strikes back over Yasmin’s privilege and arrogance. Myha’la told me she enjoyed the opportunity to “say some nasty shit. We were like, ‘How do we make this as hurtful as possible, like we are never coming back from this?’�

For Abela, diving into the depths of the pair’s dysfunction was thrilling. “Scenes like that are so fun because the stakes are so high and their intentions are so clear,� she said. “Yasmin wants to confront Harper and get an apology, and Harper wants to get an apology from Yasmin. Because we have such a good working relationship, there is a lot of playful stuff that can come on top of playing those objectives.�

The fight itself builds to an explosion, first in words, then in actions. “I used to think that the worst thing you could think about me and the worst thing that I could think about you might still be true and we might be able to love each other in spite of it,� Yasmin says, “but I am certain that is not the case.� Harper calls her a whore, and Yasmin slaps her. Harper then slaps Yasmin back, a move that wasn’t originally in the script. Myha’la insisted to Down and Kay that she didn’t believe Harper would stand down from a hit. “I was like, ‘Guys, there’s no way in hell she’s just going to let her hit her and not hit her back,’� Myha’la said. “You’ve crossed the line. You’ve broken that physical barrier. I don’t know a single other Black woman that if you put your hands on them first, they’re like, ‘cool.’�

The goal of the scene, Down says, is to give the impression that this is the last straw for Yasmin and Harper. There are two episodes left in the season and the two are still, you know, roommates, but is their friendship over? To that, Down puckishly suggested another question: “Were they ever friends? That’s a question for the audience,� he said. “Just because you sit next to someone for ten hours a day doesn’t mean they’re your best friend,� which is, admittedly, “probably a justification Harper would give,� he added.

Harper might prefer to make everything about business, but Industry is interested in how there’s more to her bond with Yasmin than just being friends from work. (Or maybe it’s that, in a world where work is everything, “work friends� are just as real as actual friends.) The actresses’ performances, even when they’re laying into each other, evince a level of compassion between the characters that both belies and magnifies their brutality. (You can watch the pain in Harper’s expression when she realizes she’s going to use what she overhears against Yasmin.)

The two have been through a lot of shit together, and the episode ends not with the pair of slaps but with the final piece of the flashback to the aftermath of Yasmin’s father’s drowning. We see the original print of the tabloids’ favorite photograph of Yasmin in her bathing suit and sunhat on that yacht; we watch Harper, in the mode of Don Draper telling Peggy Olson to forget about her child, telling Yasmin to stop crying. The credits roll over the Pet Shop Boys’s cover of “Always on My Mind,� with lyrics that sum up the state of their whole dynamic: “Maybe I didn’t treat you / Quite as good as I should / Maybe I didn’t love you / Quite as often as I could,� but in the end, “I guess I never told you / I am so happy that you’re mine.�