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 When it’s bad, it’s a writer’s room attempting to sneak an unpublished short story into the novel of a series, inventing backstory and motivation that feels stapled on because it wasn’t set up or earned in previous episodes and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.