Industry Season 3’s Safdie-Esque Fourth Episode Is an Anxiety-Inducing Masterpiece

“I’m not sure introspection suits you,” Harper (Myha’la) tells Rishi Ramdani, played masterfully by Sagar Radia as a dead-eyed, perpetually aggrieved trader bro stereotype in “Jerusalem,” the Season 2 finale of Industry. It’s the day he’s getting married, and Rishi will shortly share drugs, and a rough, very brief encounter in a pub bathroom stall with the show’s protagonist. Four episodes later, this will still be true, but after one of the best episodes of television of the year, we can finally at least begin to understand the character you would be forgiven for ignoring until now.

“White Mischief” is Season 3’s fourth episode that unfurls over 48 tense hours, named after the theme of the party where Rishi’s posh English wife Diana lost her virginity—itself a reference to a 1987 period piece about the hedonism and colonialism, the hubris and vanity contained in a scandal that rocked the English ruling class in a Kenyan hamlet called Happy Valley, a kind of Babylon for the British empire during WWII. The hour of television follows in a now requisite tradition of the prestige series streaming age: the contained side mission with a peripheral character. It’s a device that was once wild and invigorating, playing with the form and structure of television’s episodic narrative, but has since become predictable and stale. When it’s bad, it’s a writer’s room attempting to sneak an unpublished short story into the novel of a series, inventing backstory and motivation that feels stapled on because it wasn’t set up or earned in previous episodes and seasons.

In a show with a deep bench, where small parts briefly become all important, stars show up for season long cameo arcs, and main players regularly fall out of the narrative, Rishi might be Industry’s great magic trick. Since the pilot, he’s been Pierpoint’s on-the-floor trader and intercom/voice of an annoying, blasphemous God MC; the profane wallpaper, parking his Porsche across three parking spaces, and equating nearly everything that has to do with money to violent sex. He has slowly been built up in the margins by thoughtful writers who have long had a handle on what he’s been up to offscreen, and finally emerges into the forefront of the show after two seasons in the wings as a boorish Greek tragedy. His descent is more than a reheated Safdie Brothers anxiety nightmare. Rishi’s politics, his wife and chosen family, his estate in the country, his manner of speech, his reason for being speaks all to the themes of the show. The rotten core of greed and loneliness poisoning the titular world it covers, and by extension, London, and beyond that, society in the death throes of global capitalism.

Rishi is Industry’s breathing id of late capitalism, unbothered by any notions of ethical investing because he knows it doesn’t exist. He’s a cuck who talks like an alpha, presumably a son of immigrants who parrots Tory xenophobia and heartless economic policy; new money doing his best to look and act like the old guard, a black hole of need who reads Brett Easton Ellis characters as aspirational. Everything is an extension of the Thatcher/Reaganite dream he’s fully bought into, which has gotten him this far, but as we watch in slow horror, he’s losing his grip on that promised life. 

He enters the episode £236,563.69 in debt, not including the additional 200k (plus weekly growing vig) he owes to a shady old classmate called Vinay, who is showing up at his work and home. The debt is an accumulation of appetites and perversions. Rishi is addicted to porn and gambling and expensive scotch and drugs, but no one decision or vice is killing him, it’s the overleveraged lifestyle. It’s Christmas and he’s living on haunted grounds, visited by the past ghosts of aristocracy who used to occupy his home: those who keep pictures of their ancestors on the founders wall of his cricket pavilion, who critique how he trims his hedges and drives his car, who walk his dog and fucked his wife. It’s an idyllic middle life repose set in the English countryside, the oppressively slow and silent life he’s supposed to want—drinking around a fire pit swaddled in Patagonia with his infant child and white in-laws—that Rishi hates, and the NPR-ish journalist/podcaster partner he tries to cast as a meek, attentive and prim housewife says she never wanted. 

He stays away for days at a time, steals money from his coworkers and loses it at stripclubs or casinos. He can’t keep any of his ill-gotten gains because he’s hellbent on betting longshots and pressing his odds until he loses everything, pawns his watch, and blows up his life. Diana articulates the problem, Rishi’s misguided value system, and what could be his salvation when she warns him, “You know what being a man is? It’s not how you seem around other men or what you do to make yourself feel a certain way around other men. It’s how you treat the people who expect your love.” Which, of course, falls on deaf ears.

At work, he’s paranoid and abrasive, coarse and abusive, emulating an approximation of the man he wants to be ripped from Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese cautionary tales. He’s doing things the way he believes they’ve always been done, playing a part, attempting to project strength but making himself a braying, pathetic, transparent cartoon. His boss, Eric Tao (The God Ken Leung), warns Rishi early in the episode that his hyper-machismo can be seen in direct relation to his appetite for risk, and he’s right. In addition to living beyond his means at home, it extends to the office. He’s taken a 625 million quid position, long on “Cable” (sterling against the dollar) and, by extension, Brexit-flavored UK nationalism, conservatism, and a Friedman-esque antiquated vision of trickle-down economics. This exceeds not only Rishi’s risk limit, but the risk limit of the junior trader Anraj (a soulful, eroding Irfan Shamji), who, in addition to risking his job and license with this dangerous bet, he takes advantage of and bullies close to tears on a daily basis. 

Rishi ends up being correct in his prediction of idiotic, retrograde government budget policy, and completely off in his read of how the market will react to that policy—until he isn’t. Emboldened by a call from Harper with a trade he steals, Rishi goes longer on his position after nearly destroying the bottomline for his desk for the year and nearly getting dragged off the floor by Pierpont security. He erases his mistake, which results in an 18 million dollar windfall. When the trade is done, he whispers, a satiated, well-fucked “For Britannia” into his mic. Anraj looks on in disturbed wonder, and Rishi’s line from earlier in the episode is crystallized: “As long as I’m making money, I’m free.”

The idea is these are the drunk, broken maniacs piloting the ghost ship of the market, using their illusions to hide from their various traumas, worshiping a learned brand of excess under the banner of hedonism and nihilism that only lasts as long as the highs of a substance or a dangerous trade they chase in escalating sizes and volumes. Their avarice is boorish and protected by the system that needs their gambling for as long as it yields profits, and, in many cases, even when it doesn’t. 

“White Mischief” is elegant in its construction and, at times, needlessly unsubtle in its themes and message. Rishi’s win is a comma, not a period. By the end, the reprieve he gets from his big trade, his coming bonus, and some savings Diana has kept away from her husband allows him a moment to regain possession of his wife, his property, and his dog—but seconds later, he’s back on the hook with Vinay betting on horses, as a cover of Minnie Riperton’s badly overused needledrop “Fleur De Lis” plays us out. It’s one of a very few missteps in a near flawless hour of television.

Abe Beame is a Flatbush local and the former mayor of New York City. Follow him here and/or here

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