Where do I even begin this recap? It’s probably best to start by giving Sagar Radia, the actor who plays Rishi, his flowers. Rishi was introduced in season two as nothing more than a catalyst, delivering funny quips and goading the main characters into various actions. By the end of season two, he was the problematic potty mouth I was nursing a small crush on, a character who had deepened in his own right in no small part thanks to Radia’s deft performance of the braggadocian trader trying to hide a molten core of insecurity. Season three has seen Rishi on the outskirts of the story line, though several hints have been dropped that something big and bad is happening under the surface. Well, consider said surface punctured. This episode is a nightmare of stress and bad choices, and Sagar Radia plays Rishi with such subtlety that despite his reprehensible behavior, I was still left feeling oddly soft for him.
The last time we spent any time with Rishi was at his wedding, where he had hurried sex with Harper the night before marrying a posh woman named Diana. A year or so later, Rishi is spending Christmas in Somerset with Diana’s people and his new baby (!!), trying very hard to fit in. One of the ways that he is doing this is by buying and renovating a cricket pavilion, which clearly means a lot to these rich people. In the same way, it is weird and off-putting to watch Eric flounder in his midlife crisis; it makes me feel very cringe and sad to watch Rishi doing his best to hobnob with the wealthy whites. I, too, have been in situations where I have tried to fit in with white people, caught in the double bind of hating myself for adopting the mannerisms of people who will never accept me and feeling that there’s no way to survive the social interaction otherwise. Rishi seems to believe that money is the ticket into these upper echelons of British society, but anyone could tell you that with landed gentry types, race and class trumps cash every time. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much because, in private, Rishi remains the gross frat boy we know him to be, as evidenced by him peeing while holding his baby and watching an OnlyFans video (that is later revealed to be SweetPea’s?!).
Outside of the social woes, Rishi is having a rough time in his marriage, which is a surprise to no one. These days, Rishi is incapable of having sex with his wife because her new maternity puts him off. He’s hounded by Diana’s childhood friend, who is also now their neighbor and keeps making weird little insinuations about how he’s known Diana since she was 4. Not to mention Rishi is hiding a massive amount of credit-card debt from her (the screenshot of his bank statements sent me into a tailspin). To make things even tenser, Diana and Rishi are visited at home by an old “friend from school†of Rishi’s, Vinay, who is, in fact, NOT Rishi’s old friend but his loan shark. It turns out that credit-card debt isn’t the only financial hole Rishi is in. He owes LOTS of money to Vinay, who shows all the signs of someone who will get fed up with Rishi’s antics by the end of the episode.
At work, Rishi is also flailing. For one, he is running an illegal horse-betting scheme with his colleagues, wherein he supposedly takes their cash to bet on races. In actuality, he’s simply taking their cash, as none of the horse-racing bets are turning out. If this were Peaky Blinders, Tommy Shelby would have killed him already. More importantly, he is behaving extremely recklessly in professional matters. Here is the part of the recap where I try to explain financial things. (Please have mercy on me.)
Rishi is long sterling cable. I know, I know — what does that mean? Let’s break it down: To take a long position means you own a lot of something with the hope that its value will rise. Being long is what most of us are when we invest money in stocks and bonds for retirement — we’re hoping that by the time we no longer want to work, those financial products will have risen in value and we profit. Next, sterling is short for pounds sterling, or the currency of the U.K. Cable is a financial slang term for the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Great British pound. (Fun fact: It’s called cable because of the underwater telegraph cables that used to connect NYC and London!) So when we say Rishi is “long sterling cable,†we mean he currently owns a lot of pound sterling with the view that its value will rise over an extended period of time as it is traded against the U.S. dollar. You follow me?
The problem with Rishi’s long position is that it turns out he owns a MASSIVE amount of sterling cable: almost half a billion pounds, to be exact. This is so massive that if his bet is wrong and the value of the pound drops rather than rises, that will be a huge hit for the bank. This is to say that Rishi isn’t in a well-balanced position. There’s only one option for him to succeed: for the pound to increase in value, and he’s pinning all of his hopes on a rumored top-rate tax cut to make that happen.
Before we can even get to that, though, Rishi is called in by Pierpoint HR because of a sub-Reddit that’s been posting lewd and inappropriate things overheard at Pierpoint. HR can’t prove that Rishi said any of these unattributed things, but they’re trying to insinuate that they think he said them. This is objectively a hilarious plot point because of the running gag that the Industry writers have had where Rishi is always in the background saying truly ridiculous things. Taking this seriously and turning it into an issue is very meta. Rishi says he can’t recall saying any of these things and loses his cool with the HR folks.
Before he can return to his desk, Eric waylays Rishi and has a quiet chat: The HR hullabaloo is more serious than it looks, and Rishi needs to tone it down. Rishi refuses to take responsibility for his language, telling Eric that maybe if he were a straighter talker, he wouldn’t have had to stab Harper in the back, which causes Eric to retaliate by saying he knows about Rishi’s massive sterling position. Eric tells Rishi to stop whatever it is he’s doing, but Rishi ignores him. Instead, he follows Sweetpea to Starbucks, acting disgustingly and shaming her about her OnlyFans. It’s also insinuated that they had some affair, which makes it even more awful because that means he’s slut-shaming someone he had sex with. Ugh! But no matter. Rishi gets the news he hoped for: The top-rate tax cut is live. He essentially dances back to the office in what feels like a play on the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey returns home proclaiming his Christmas miracle.
Except it isn’t, because the pound is trending down when Rishi returns to his desk. I’m not going to pretend to completely understand why —something to do with the bonds market hating the tax (if you know macroeconomics, feel free to jump into the comments). The important thing to understand is that Rishi’s inability to foresee this is a symptom of how out of touch he is with reality. He’s so wrapped up in his own schemes that he can’t read the writing on the wall.
Nothing brings Rishi’s delusion home so much as the Pierpoint Christmas drinks that happen next. Vinay shows up at the office, causing Rishi to flit around the drinks and try to collect the money he owes Vinay. He badgers people for money to “bet on horses†(poor, poor Anraj, getting conned out of his rent), eventually giving the lot to Eric as if it were his “payout.â€Â In a moment of holiday- and alcohol-inspired largesse, Eric returns the money to Rishi to bet on another round of races. Something in his face makes me wonder if he doesn’t know what Rishi is up to and pities him for it. Anyway, when Rishi returns to Vinay in the car, he tucks Eric’s bundle of money in his coat and says he doesn’t have any money to give Vinay. Instead, he hands Vinay his watch to buy himself some time.
What follows is a typical gambling-addict-night-out sequence. Rishi takes the cash from Christmas drinks to the casino, bets it all, and wins big. He takes all his money to the club, clearly satisfied and thinking everything is solved. Never mind that he’s missing Christmas with his wife and child to be at the casino, and never mind that this is almost an exact repeat of what happened earlier today when the top-rate tax cut was announced. Rishi celebrates at a club by getting bottle service, making out with someone’s girlfriend, and getting beaten up by a disgruntled boyfriend, who calls him a slur while he’s at it. As if to make up for his now-wounded pride, Rishi takes the money he just won and goes back to the casino, looking for validation from gambling. It’s not hard to see how this ends. Of course, he can’t leave well enough alone and leaves with nothing but impressive shiners. It’s a stomach-churning sequence of affairs, to be sure, but I couldn’t tell if I found it more nauseating than watching Rishi grovel for the approval of Diana’s friends and family.
The next day at work, everything seems to be continuing its downward trend. Sterling is trading even worse, and Rishi is getting insulted on the desk by the mysterious Egyptian salesperson that Bill Adler left on Eric’s floor. Even Robert, our tragic prince, is getting a small dig in. But then, who should call but Harper, asking if Rishi can sell her some pounds? Rishi can sense something underneath Harper’s request; something’s about to shift, which will make his long position hit. And he’s right — the U.K. chancellor reverses position on the top-rate tax, and the desk pops off, full of people who want to buy pounds at an elevated rate. He makes £18 million across the banks’ books and emerges a hero, whether by hook or crook. Not the positive reinforcement he needs.
You’d think the episode would end there, but instead, we’re brought back into Rishi’s home life. It’s a move that harkens back to the central question of the season, wondering after the characters and their growth. In Rishi’s case, he sold the GBP he was hoarding to significant effect, but in the end, he’s still very much in debt and in a very unhappy marriage. The financial deal-making isn’t all that different from his gambling; Rishi is still in the hole, albeit not one made exclusively of money. At home, Diana and Rishi have a row, and it’s revealed that Rishi’s been in debt of this kind before. He has a problem; it’s an addiction, and the man really needs to go to rehab. The fight ends with Diana announcing that she’s had an affair.
Oddly, the news of the affair kick-starts something in Rishi, and it … patches things up between him and Di. I want to say something flippant about not understanding the emotional repression of Brits, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I know how sometimes blowing the lid off of a conflict by introducing a bombshell helps clarify the stakes. In this case, Diana is one of the few people still on Rishi’s side, even if she also poses a huge part of why he feels he needs to keep making money. Anyway, Rishi eats Diana out, and all is well!
The final scene here is one of the most unabashedly joyful things I’ve seen in Industry. Rishi takes a bat to the cricket pavilion he’s meant to be renovating and destroys it. It’s cathartic, a release of all of the tension that’s been building all episode; it’s symbolic, Rishi flipping off the societal hierarchy that’s getting him down; it’s also just plain fun. I would have really loved it if the episode had ended here, but no. Rishi takes these triumphs and decides he’s feeling lucky, placing a call to Vinay to take out another loan to gamble away. I quote my notes: NO DO NOT TAKE THAT 50,000. UGHHHHHHHHHHH NO NOOOOOOOO RISHI; NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
Loose Change
• The Overheard at Pierpoint leak was Venetia! I love the idea of her trying to undermine Rishi and secretly hating him the whole time. Her final parting blow to him in the elevator is also gold. I hope she finds happiness somewhere else.
• Possibly because I am a new parent, but I am SO ANXIOUS for Hugo. What kind of life will he lead?? It is also heartbreaking to me because I feel like Rishi genuinely loves his child despite maybe being baffled by the responsibilities of parenthood.
• What to make of Sweetpea? She started the season as a foolish, superficial sort of girl, but she seems to deepen in this episode. There’s the OnlyFans account, her insistence that Rishi talk to her about her work and see her as more than an object of sexual conquest. When the team meets to discuss Lumi’s failure, she also seems to be the only person in the room asking smart questions about the bank’s future, which Eric later admits is looking very grim. Personally, I love a Legally Blonde moment where the hot girl who everyone thought was dumb is actually working on multiple levels.
• Leviathan Alpha is an even sillier name for a hedge fund.
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