BOTH/AND

Understanding the conclusion of Industry's latest season on HBO.

I was a latecomer to HBO’s Industry. Hey, don’t get mad at me, I had a baby during the pandemic. I have been woefully behind on everything cool for years. So, I’m playing catch-up. For those living under the rock I just climbed out from, Industry is about a group of young people navigating the complexities of the world of finance. The first season follows Harper Stern, a US transplant, as she moves to London to work the desk at a multinational investment bank called Pierpoint. There, she meets Yasmin Kara-Hanani, a nepobaby from the world of publishing trying to make a name and career for herself.

For four seasons, we have watched Harper and Yas grow up. Harper, brilliantly played by Myha’la, is whip-smart. She grew up in Binghamton, New York. She has an estranged twin, an estranged mother, no father in the picture. She didn’t graduate college. She fights her way into this male-dominated space and dominates. Sure, sometimes she engages in insider trading, and sure, sometimes (most of the time) she is hard, borderline cruel, in her aspirations, but she is really the heart of the show. Maybe even its moral compass, if a moral compass can exist in the grey area. Harper, for all her intelligence and strength, comes off as the villain for much of the show. There is no softness to her because she cannot allow herself to be soft. She has experienced significant trauma and heartache in her life. The glimpses we get of her past are depressing. She has been trying to prove her worth since she was born.

Yasmin, played by the incomparable Marisa Abela, on the other hand, seems to be Harper’s opposite. She grew up with means—with more than means, with a whole treasure chest. Her father, who we don’t meet until season two, is a publishing magnate. Her mother, who leaves at the end of season one, is an artist. She grew up with everything handed to her on a silver platter. The best schools, the best nannies, the best clothes, the best experiences. Her life drips of wealth and privilege. But still, we learn throughout that she has also experienced significant trauma. We learn that her father not only had many mistresses, but paid them all off. He has had her on a tight leash. She’s financially dependent on him. He’s used her and called it love. She tries to live life on her own terms. And it’s hard for her. And because she is beautiful, rich, soft-spoken, and behaves the way beautiful, rich, soft-spoken women are supposed to behave, she is painted as the show’s victim and the audience feels for her, wants her to pull herself out of the pit her father dug for her, do better, be better. Because what’s the point of being beautiful and rich if you can’t enjoy it?

For a while, Harper and Yasmin are friends. For a while, Harper and Yasmin are enemies. They are polar opposites. They shine a light on each other’s pitfalls. They try, each in their own ways, to help, but they are not equipped.

So that brings us to this latest season. Harper is leading her own firm. Yas is married to Sir Henry Muck, played by Kit Harington, a spoiled, depressed aristocrat who wants so badly to be good but just can’t. To pull him out of his depression, she gets him a job as the new CEO of a banking app called Tender. But, unfortunately, the CFO, Whitney (Max Minghella), has been weaving an intricate web of fraud. Harper’s team is onto Tender’s financial crimes and intends not only to expose it as money laundering and gambling, but to short it and make an incredible amount of money. These things are happening at the same time. Henry takes over the role of CEO after Harper has already put the wheels in motion to short the business.

When it all comes crashing down, Henry is the one left to take the blame. Yas finds a way to extricate herself from him, lay it all on his head, assuming no responsibility for the inner workings of the business and its inherent failings. His life is ruined, her life is spared. More than spared. She starts hosting parties to raise money for…whoever wants to raise money, evidently.

And here is where the audience is met with the reality that Yas is no victim, that Harper is no villain. To call the finale, which aired on March 1, 2026, explosive and shocking would be an understatement. The finale is entitled “both/and,” just like this article. Yas invites Harper to a fundraising dinner in Paris. There, she, the lone black woman in the room, is seated between two Nazis, forced to listen to another thinly-veiled Nazi fundraising for his Reform party (right-wing extremism) campaign. Later, Harper and Yas find themselves seated together. Harper comments on the extreme viewpoints of the people in the room which Yas calls “fresh ideas for a broken social contract.”

As if that wasn’t jarring enough, Harper (and the audience) notices young girls walking into the party, draping their bodies over much older men. Harper asks who they are. Yas says they’re there for a good time. She says they have no education, no prospects, that she pays them to attend her parties because “it’s for the gender balance of a good party. I mean, they make the whole thing visually memorable.”

But it doesn’t sit right with Harper and it doesn’t sit right with the audience, especially amid the horrific revelations coming out of the Epstein files in real time. Harper is uncomfortable. Then, Yasmin says: “Do you have any idea how this kind of access changes people’s lives? How it levels them up? I mean, she’d never have fucking seen Paris if it wasn’t for me. We both know that this world will own you if you don’t harden up.”

She says the quiet part out loud. She frames the exploitation of these young girls as opportunity, like she is somehow giving these girls a chance to rise up beyond their means. She says, “I lost my virginity at 14, okay? I became a woman as soon as I wanted someone. Besides, the world is not exploitation or opportunity. It’s both/and. That’s the world, Harper. Both/and. That’s maturity.”

It hits like a slap. In the real world, we are being inundated by the horrific things Ghislaine Maxwell did for Jeffrey Epstein. I have spent literal years wondering how any woman could do the things Maxwell did to other women. The way she promised a life of luxury and comfort and opportunity to girls still in high school, and in some cases, middle school, never fully explaining what they had to do to get it. Putting them directly in harm’s way for…what? To please rich men? How could someone…?

But with Yasmin’s character arc, we can see how. We see her in the first season, young and timid, trying to be anyone but a Kara-Hanani. Also trying to sexually control a man who very obviously loves her from the moment he sees her, which was the first red flag. In the second season, she verbally abuses a new girl fresh out of college to the discomfort of everyone. But, you reason with yourself, you tell yourself, well that’s all she knows. That’s how she was treated in her first year, she might think it’s a rite of passage. But then again, shouldn’t she know better? Then, in season three, we start to see her world unravel. Her father is dead and she is kind of the reason for it. He invited her and Harper onto his boat in Mallorca. It looked like an innocent party at first, then you start noticing all the young, scantily clad girls. Then he has sex with a stewardess in Yasmin’s bed, intending on Yasmin walking in on them. He relishes her discomfort. He jumps off the boat to make a spectacle. She doesn’t help, doesn’t tell anyone. He drowns. She has to pick up the pieces, harden herself, become someone new who the world won’t break.

Then, we meet her in season four, married to an aristocrat, but bored out of her mind, so she gets rid of him. She starts this venture planning parties for the rich and famous. She brings in “escorts,” to Harper’s horror. Back on the couch, Harper tries to reason with her, tell her that it’s not her, that she can leave. But Yas simply says, “I’m sorry, the world is showing you what it is. You said that to me. So, you metabolize hard feelings and become someone. I feel important here, do you see that? I’m necessary. I feel new. I feel less pain. That’s it.”

And that’s it. Harper can’t push Yasmin off this train. And we finally, jarringly, see that Yasmin is anything but a victim. Or maybe she was once but has learned all the wrong things from her own exploitation. Rather than trying to help girls in the very precarious positions her father put her in, she puts them in those positions herself. Unapologetically. Because it’s all she knows. She later tells one of the girls, first in French, then in English, “she is tossed by the waves, but she does not sink,” as if this is an affirmation for her tumultuous life.

Later, at the very end of the episode, Harper sits down for an interview. It goes like this:

Harper: It’s hard to short frauds in a good market. There was nothing to believe in at Tender, and we proved that. Hope is more profitable than truth.

Reporter: That’s not changing, ever. So how do you stay sane in a market that brutally punishes truth-tellers all the time, in real time?

Harper: There will always be stories in the world that people are too afraid to question. But…I had a team of people who I cared about. Whose opinions I cared about.

Reporter: A few people I talked to made you seem like more of a…how shall I say…singular operative.

Harper: People change.

Reporter: You really believe that?

Harper: Aren’t you supposed to?

Reporter: Does being so uniquely right, when everyone else was totally wrong, feel like vindication? Or does it ultimately make you feel very alone?

And there you have it. At first, Industry makes it seem like, at its core, the story is about pitting these two young women from vastly different backgrounds against each other. That there is no world in which they can be mutually successful, supportive of each other’s strengths. And in a way, that’s true. Harper and Yasmin, in a perfect world, would help lift each other up. And Harper does try, but Yasmin is just too far gone. She subscribes to the belief that she is helping the girls she “hires” as escorts. She believes that she has to be hard and play this dangerous and deceitful and disgusting game to keep her head above water. She actively chooses to participate in the ongoing exploitation of young women. Whereas Harper steps into the role of truth-teller. She has seemingly changed for the better since we first met her, though she still occasionally engages in questionable financial practices, her moral compass remains true. Where Yasmin will do anything, good or bad, right or wrong, to get ahead and stay ahead, Harper is considering a different path. True, she will do what she can for prosperity and success…but we found her line this season.

And therein lies the existential question at the end of the show: does telling the truth and being right feel like vindication or loneliness? Can one get ahead in this world without tearing other people down, or will there always be casualties—corporeal or financial—along the way? Both/and.

Now I’m all caught up. Now I have to wait and see how their roads continue to diverge in the final season next year (I hope next year???). Can Yasmin redeem herself? Where will we find Harper? I’m dying to know.