The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘Industry’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Wosny Lambre and Jodi Walker join forces to discuss Episode 7 of HBO’s ‘Industry’ and preview what is sure to be an epic Season 2 finale. Hosts: Wosny Lambre and Jodi Walker Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Limit time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the latest edition of the Prestige TV podcast. I'm your co-host, Big Wazzi, Laplace, I'm a little under the weather today, but I'm feeling much, much better now that I'm with, as always, my lovely, wonderful and talented co-host, Jody Walker, what's going on, Jody?

Oh, Waz, you know, we've called this emergency podcast here today because soon you will find out that I have been recording other podcasts and taking meetings all day. But if we come together here, there is an opportunity for us to do something incredible.

So I was, before I got on here, I was wondering, what would be the, nickname of our shop at the ringer. And I was like, it would definitely have to be something Boston inspired. And I'd landed on, we would call, the nickname

would be Sully's. They would call it. I know. I was thinking, wow, industry using sports metaphors is like the most ringer thing that's ever happened. And as someone who's on the pop culture side of the Ringer, I could barely keep up with what was

going on. But Yankees, than Red Sox I can handle. Yeah. So I was trying to decipher which banks they were talking about. When they said the Yankees, I was like, well, that would have to be probably either Goldman or J.P. Morgan Chase. I know it wasn't J.P. Morgan because they mentioned J.P. Morgan later. So it has to be Goldman, right?

And then when they were talking about the German bank, like, but then they settled on the crowds. So what did they call them? I don't even remember. It was, yeah, I should have Googled it. It was something that I'm sure was not okay to say. Yeah. So I was like, that's probably Deutsche Bank, right?

Yeah. And the Japanese bank, I assumed which HSBC, which I think is Japanese, might be Chinese, which is slightly problematic. But like, I'm pretty sure it's HSBC. I was not sure about the Japanese bank. and I was so far out of my depth of understanding how they could just kind of, you know, sell themselves as a trio of financiers to an entire bank that I really wasn't.

But it was very clear that Yankees was the only nickname that was not problematic. Yeah. So anyway, I loved all of that fake cloak and dagger. You know, we're doing this clandestine mission. But we wanted to do a preview, for Industries season finale.

I think you and I will both agree. Season two has been incredible just from start to finish. They just keep us going and the action

is nonstop. And, you know, what gets the episode and a lot of the storyline rolling in episode seven that is basically going to set up

what happens in the season finale is Rob is meeting with Nicole, who he's, He's been ignoring for a little while now. And Venetia interrupts.

And she wants to pick the brain of, you know, this great girl boss. You know, she wants to, you know, I just really think as a woman, you inspire me and all of this crap. And Rob's like, look, like, you interrupted this, but you're super thirsty. And like, I don't think you should be doing. You know what? I don't want to be hanging out with this woman anyway. Have at it. He leaves the meeting.

Of course, he realizes the mistake that he's made because this woman is a predator. Like, it's been established now that this is what she does. Comes back and it's too late. And the woman, you know, it's revealed later on in the episode, Nicole sexually assaults Venetia. And that gets this whole thing rolling. What did you think about that? sort of powwow at the restaurant.

I thought that dinner scene was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. I mean, it was really rough to watch, extremely well written the way that... I think what episode seven throughout does so well, and like it's what you want out of a penultimate episode, is that it takes, you know, everything the season has been doing all season long,

and then it just lays a platform for the finale. So we're getting like all these sort of weird, unusual combinations of people that we've seen throughout the season, like Venetian Rob, like Harper and Rishi, like Yas and Kinney. But here they're like really given the platform to show the character growth that they've achieved, that the writers have achieved throughout this show. And so Rob looks like he is chewing glass during that dinner scene. Like he is so miserable. He looks like he's about to throw up. But seeing the dynamic that has become between he and Nicole is pretty gross, you know, the way that there's especially the way that she's speaking to him.

She calls it, what does she call him? Like a fucking wimp or something like that. And watching Venetia watch this and be like, I guess this is how it goes. Venetia's been a fun character because she's smart and I assume she's faking all that girl boss stuff. She just has to get through RIF. You know, she just needs to get herself in front of a client and she's going to do what it takes. But watching the way that Rob

deals with it and like immediately regrets his decision to leave her alone. But there's just, you know, there's nothing black and white about the morality of this episode. It is all in gray. Yeah, it's all over the place. And so, of course,

Venetia being, you know, the young Jen Zier that she is. She's unlike Harper who just, you know, she rebuffed it, moved on with her life, was like, whatever, I need to get bigger clients anyway, moved on. Rob, who was just like, well,

this is a way to get a client on the hook and embraced it. She takes a third path and is like, y'all, I'm going to report this woman. Like, this is unacceptable behavior. She sexually assaulted me. I need to let my superiors know.

And it starts a chain of events where she tells a bunch of different people what happened. And one by one, just the clumsiness that this is all handled with. And all the approaches have their own merits, if you will, and their own problems, of course. And she talks to Yaz, who Yaz lied to her when she left the desk and said, oh, I'll always be a mentor to you. come find me whenever. So she never goes and finds Yaz and gets, Yaz's just like,

I don't see what the big deal is. But you know, like, Yas thinks that's being some sort of mentor. Like, she's like, you're a pragmatic person. And, but, you know, Yaz is just pretty typically wrong. And so, like,

watching that, you know, this episode is so interesting because we've talked a lot in our industry conversations about, how well they portray class and the differences between class, especially in the UK. But one of probably my favorite thing about industry

is industry as a workplace drama. And watching in season one and in season two, in both seasons, in the back half, they've kind of dipped into this thing of showing like the generational changes and the way that structures and systems in a company can change, but watching it happen in real time

is so awful and so painful to watch people just butt up against kind of like old school powers and to watch who in these newer, younger generations are still trying to operate in these older systems. So, like, Yaz's telling Vinisha to just, you know, just be pragmatic, just use this. And you see how even women can keep these structures in place for other women.

It's just so realistic. Everything about industry feels so realistic to me as someone who experiences almost nothing within industry to actually know if it's realistic. But the way that I can relate to it as someone who is not involved in any of these fields makes me feel like they're doing a very realistic job of portraying it. So, yeah, I'm happy you brought up the system that can be in place at a given institution. And as much as we recognize that Yaz's advice and the way she handled this woman coming to her in a sensitive moment, in a certain way she's right about the culture and how the superiors, how the bosses are going to view this. The bosses are not going to care that this woman behaved reprehensibly.

They're going to care that she does big business with them. And that's what Yaz was sort of getting at. It's like, isn't this a big client? Yeah, this shit don't rate. This shit doesn't rank. And as the episode sort of unfolds, like the people who do care just like, yo, this is fucked up. We legitimately want to do something.

When it gets to the top guy, he's just like, I mean, I don't even want to, why are you bringing this to me? Well, right, because Yaz is operating within the system that exists around. her. She is operating within what she knows to be true. Venetia, a very young person and someone we already know to be someone who, like, really gives thought to these things, is operating within a system that she wants to exist. Or at least she hopes will exist, but we see that hope literally die in her eyes throughout the episode, which is very sad. But watching someone like DVD, who's what, 35, you know, and really, like, ultimately is seeming it, despite cries of like that guy's a snake, is ultimately seeming to be like a pretty good guy, like, just somehow this

corny, decent guy who has ended up in this nasty, nasty business. But for him to not know the system that he operates within this far into the game is interesting, but I really like the sort of parallel that pops up here in episode 7 between DVD in season 2 and Dund-D-D-Daria in season 1. I could smell Darya in the air before I saw her. I swear, I knew she was going to pop up

and when she didn't, I was like, oh, I guess I was wrong. And then, boom, she didn't show up. But we can get to that later. But yeah, watching these people who actually are capable of creating change because they have not been so indoctrinated into these systems and structures yet, watching the sort of like impossible path set before them

of how they're possibly going to create change from these lower levels is hard to watch. But I think industry does it so much better than almost any other show on TV. So we catch up with our gang. We knew that Harper and Eric were, about to partner up to find a new home, find a lifeboat,

but the episode opens and Rishi is part of the conspiracy to find another lifeboat. Reluctantly, of course, at first, because he's just, you know, last time he saw Harper, she was stabbing him in the back. But, you know,

quickly because everybody in the show is so fucking self-interested, quickly everybody's able to put that stuff to the side and just be like, all right, whatever, fuck it. We got to do what we got to do. Let's go out and find a new home. And they do that. They go to a couple of places.

We mentioned the nicknames that they had for the different shops or whatever. And they get rebuffed at the one. And then when they show up to the meeting that they're like, all right, you know, we wanted to be Yankees, the pinstrives, blah, blah, blah, all of this. turns out that they were just being used as leverage against new people that they actually wanted and to bring their asking price down to show that there was some level of competition

and nobody wanted them and the person who came to stick the knife in quite just savagely and viciously and rightfully so the way they handled her last season was Darya. I'm not going to lie, I was legitimately surprised by this twist. And it was really fun.

And, dude, Mahela Harold's eyes in that scene with like, like when she realizes that it's Darya who's doing it, who's doing them right there, chef's kiss. Because you can see it.

You can see that she's still thinking, like, how can I spin this? She knows it's dead in the water, but she's always thinking she's always moving. It was an incredible twist to bring Darya back. I'm not saying that it was predictable,

but she was on my mind. It was so perfectly placed for that character to come back because she was on my mind for all of the reasons that we talked about with Venetia because, you know, she was trying in, at Pierpoint,

Daria was trying to be a voice of reason, a person who supports women in the workplace, a person who actually tries to like create, a healthy environment for the people she manages. And Harper had the opportunity to choose between Darya and Eric, and she chose Eric, which I think, you know,

no matter how much we enjoy that relationship between Harper and Eric and enjoy watching its destructive and toxic tendencies, it was incredibly clear that she was making maybe not the wrong choice from a business point at that time, but definitely the wrong personal choice. However, I love what this episode does. It shows that, like, those decisions, once you make them, they don't stop happening.

Them double-crossing Daria was a fork in the road, and it felt like they took one side of it. But here they are in front of the reality that they have created, which is, like, that they chose to operate within this chaotic system that they understand and that they're like, well, if you can't do it, then shit or get off the pot. They kick Darya out, but she's got her own things she's doing. You know, like maybe there are new ways.

Maybe Goldman is a more ethical company. Ha, ha, ha. And she, and now here she is. It's like, you know, we see so often in these situations with, like, sexual assault or any number of terrible things happening in companies like these, that it gets swept under the rug or that these people get fired and they get silenced.

And, like, in firing Darya in the really, like, bad way that they did, they didn't silence her. Like, Eric's, like, I thought you were gone. She's like, nope, I just took 18 months maternity leave, and here I am about to ruin your life.

And as much as I root for these characters, I just loved that twist. And you're so right. Like, I loved watching their face. just absolutely crumble at the situation they've created for themselves. And, you know, maybe it would have worked with that first company that they went to. But it didn't because Eric's ego is so big that he couldn't do it. And he just knew this Yankee's shot was a sure thing.

And it wasn't. It was perfect. So they're left scrambling, of course. I want to take it to Gus, who he gets to kicking his ass from his sister. He's going to do this politics thing. He visits Bloom to give him the news like, yo, your kid didn't get in. I tried my best. I think he's, you know, a solid guy.

And I think he's got potential. But he didn't get in. It's unfortunate. But he's on the right path, right? Like he really is taking this type of stuff more serious. Sure. Bloom pays him for his services. And it's like, listen, man, this is what you got for just coaching them up.

Imagine if you would have delivered a championship. I was with Gus on this, though. Like when he gets this envelope of pounds, I'm like, for what? Having sex with your 19-year-old son for a couple of months? I didn't see a lick of tutoring happening for that entire storyline. They didn't crack a book. It doesn't matter. The young man has had an awakening.

That's all that matters here. 30,000 pounds really cannot buy you an awakening. It's priceless. And of course, he, um, he intimates that like, look, getting the job done would have gotten you even more money, which sparks an idea in Gus's head. And it's a great, great scene because they're talking around

what is actually happening when, so Gus goes to Oxford visits. I guess one of his old teachers or advisors or whatever this guy is supposed to be at Oxford. And they proceed to just have a quid pro quo. Okay? Like, you do this with your political connections. Get my homey in into the door, into Oxford. I get to have a shit ton of cash for setting the whole thing up.

Everybody wins, right? And we see that Gus is now in the great game. Right? He's using his political connections to enrich himself to help a boyfriend. And, you know, just he's moving and shaking and operating. And look, there's a way to read this as wow. Like, this is all politicians do, huh? Just use their connections to enrich themselves. They don't actually serve the people as their job says that they should. But I thought it was cool to see that Gus is like, all right, I'm in the game. now. Like, I'm really, really in the game now.

It was cool to see from a sort of character development standpoint on a show-like industry where everyone's already terrible, so might as well suck Gus in, too. But was, remember when Gus was briefly a social worker? Do you remember those wonderful times? Like, the fact that Gus went from trying to help that man who put dog shit on his desk, and he was still committed to trying to help his consensuant to a mere matter of episodes later, he's using his poll to get Jesse Bloom's kid into school, as if this kid needs any help.

This is what you're using your privilege for. Like, to hear that professor, the professor literally says, oh, he's one of us. Oh, my skin was crawling. And yet I'm immediately way more interested in Gus's storyline than I have been. Yeah, it's great. It's great to see him operating. Again, you know, it kind of hurts your soul a little bit

to see him just wholly and completely sell out. But this is reality we're talking about. And I enjoyed it. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

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Kick boring in the bowl with Beneful freshly prepared meals. Visit Purina.com slash Beneful to shop now. things end off with our characters. They're flailing. Flailing in the wind. They're looking cooked. They're taking meetings with competitors. Banks don't abide by that.

Like that's traitorous, treason as shit. Their heads are going to get chopped off for it. And a lifelide comes in the form of Harper having once been sexually assaulted. There's that pragmatism. Gazz was talking about. It's incredible. DVD reaches out to Harper and he basically expresses

some discontent with the company. And Harper's like, oh shit, DVD's not happy over there. This is it. This is going to unlock the key. He's going to take us to the promised land. He gets brought into the fold. And now what started as two

and became three, we now have the four horsemen, which is a wrestling reference, Jody. believe it's also a biblical reference when we bring in the apocalypse that is coming so yeah i got it on that end and and so it's now the four of them dvd harper uh rishi and eric uh they're going to package themselves DVD negotiates terms with them like i'm going to be the boss i'm going to make the most money you guys get to keep your jobs at a dope spot everybody's like fuck it let's do it we're all in at this point

And yeah, that carries us into the next, is going to carry us into the finale. We're going to see what happens with that new partnership. We're going to see what's happening with Harper and Bloom because they mentioned in an episode that he's still sitting on that short position, which means he doesn't want to give up on it yet. So, again, that's a Harper play. So he's still into the play that she gave him. So we're going to see how that unfolds. And we're going to see what the fallout is. of the sexual assault case.

Yeah, Jesse's sitting in that absurd, I don't even know what it was. A cathedral, an auditorium turned into a basketball. I think he bought a castle and it's just empty. Was you saying I think what he did is, I think that he bought a castle. Yes, I think that you're right. I think that it was a castle.

I just, like, couldn't figure out what room in the great castle it was that he had emptied out for all of his screens, it was so obnoxious. Him, like, talking about the Wu-Tang Clan. Oh, it's so obnoxious, but it's so, like, picture-perfect of the kind of person that he is. And at those screens, in that huge, empty room,

telling Siri to turn off the music, he quite literally looks like the great and powerful Oz. And I was just thinking that, while you were talking about, that he's just, like, sitting on this short and sitting on this possibility that he has. And I think what I can't wait to find out in the finale is if Harper really understands Jesse the way that she thinks that she does.

Because she talks a big game about knowing, you know, it's like he speaks a language that only she can speak to. But since nobody else can speak it, we can't really be sure if she speaks it or not. It's really high stakes going into the finale. Yeah, I just got to shout out Conrad and Mickey. Conrad Kay and Mickey Down. I just said their first names as if they were like my brothers from another. But shout to them because they just, this character is so well written and drawn out.

And what Duplas is doing with it with his performance is just, it's just so rich. Like the smarmy, just dushy energy just oozes out of every single scene that he's in. And it's perfect. And also I got a shout out whoever's decision it was to play Wu-Tang. Because honestly, I listen to Bill. I'll listen to Chris and Andy. I'll listen to Sean's show. And oftentimes they're talking about needle drops and all of this.

and like it's always like some fucking rock band or whatever, some shit that I've never heard in my whole fucking life. That means absolutely nothing to me. Wutang being played in here? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's me. That was a needle drop for was. No, I love that too.

I noted it too. I like immediately went and listened to the whole song. It's like I, and I was such a perfectly placed needle drop because of the very dorky way that he'd been talking about the Wu-Tang clan earlier in the episode. it was just, just, yeah, Chef's Kiss. The music on this show, the score was also hitting on all levels during this episode. And they've, like, conditioned me now to hear a certain replication of this score and be like, oh, something good is about to happen.

Because they played the score like something good was about to happen when they walked into that Goldman meeting and then their shit got wrought only to then come back around and, and use this DVD lifeboat. But I'm thinking, going into the finale, DVD's got to get some of this stuff in writing. Rishi has to get some of this stuff in writing. Because they both have like the same sort of standards. You know, they're like, I'm MP, I'm in charge.

And I'm sorry, DVD is looking at Eric and saying that he's going to run the desk and then just believing him when he says yes, I'm not buying it. They are looking at two of the most duplicitous people. in Harper and Eric. And they know it. I mean, we literally hear Rishi call Harper a sociopath. And like, if Rishi's calling you a sociopath, it must be really bad. But, and yet they still buy into it.

Because what does Eric say at the very end of the episode? He says, isn't it lucky that no one's ever satisfied? And that's such a maniacal thing to think that then I was like, maybe I could use that in my life somehow. Yeah, it was just a perfect capstone to the episode and to the season, just what the show was about, just boundless ambition and greed and avarice. And, you know, this is just the world that these people operate in. So, yeah, make sure you guys tune in to our, actually, of course, watch the finale.

It's going to be insane. And then we will have a recap of the finale. next week. Be sure to go listen. Go stream Jizz's Liquid Swords because it's a fire record. And yeah, man, just been incredible, incredible second season. I love this show. It's up there with everything for me. I'm talking about succession. I'm talking about Thrones. I'm talking about all of it. When it comes to how entertained I am as I'm watching this show, it's right there with anything that I watch. And so so dope to be doing this. And yeah, Jody, you got anything else before we wrap up here?

About the show, I mean, I'll just say, you're right. These episodes have hit on every level, but I think what we're seeing here in episode seven and going into the finale is how well this entire season has gone together and how these sort of seeds that they planted early on have now grown into these trees. these mountains of what we will like having to be conquer. I mean, they're potentially all about to work

for an entirely different company or alternatively be completely unemployed. So I just, I can't wait to find out. And I hope everyone will join us back here for the finale. All right. That was our show. I want to shout out to Devin for producing this for us. We'll see you guys next week.

Peace out.