Inside the Shocking ‘Industry’ Season Three Finale

Sixty-two minutes into the Season Three finale of Industry, you might have mistakenly thought it was safe to exhale. HBO’s notoriously tense finance drama, which revolves around the exploits of employees at the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co., was giving us a rare moment of resolution for its key players: Crisis-ridden nepo baby Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) got engaged to aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harington). College dropout Harper Stern (Myha’la) was having a #GirlBoss moment in Forbes magazine. Even so-called sad boy Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey) was getting a fresh start in Silicon Valley. But, Industry being Industry, the show had other ideas.

The finale’s brief flicker of harmony was shattered by Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) finally getting his comeuppance. Earlier in the episode, the loudmouth misogynist was humiliated by Harper, who told him that “a machine could do your job” before kicking him out of her office. Then, at that 62-minute mark, things got much worse: Vinay (Asim Chaudhry) — a terrifying debt collector who Rishi owes £500,000, which he borrowed to fund his gambling addiction — shows up at his home. Their dispute escalates and Vinay shoots Rishi’s wife, Diana (Emily Barber), in the head. Her blood splatters all over him.

The shocking moment came out of co-creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down ruminating on the idea of repercussions. “We thought: ‘What if we actually started to show what the consequences of someone’s actions are in this world?’” Down explains. “Because Rishi, like a lot of the characters, has never had to face any.” 

Rishi’s tumultuous narrative arc began in the season’s fourth episode, “White Mischief.” The gasp-worthy installment, which often felt like living in some sort of nightmare simulation, was the first episode of Industry to focus on one character, bringing Rishi and his inner demons from the periphery to the center. When Season Three was greenlit, “Rishi episode” was one of the first things Kay and Down scrawled on the board in the writers room. “It was the twentieth episode of Industry, so we wanted it to be high-octane and fast-paced,” Down says. “Sort of like a palate cleanser, but also not, because it’s so anxiety-inducing.”

Mission accomplished. In “White Mischief,” Rishi careens from one calamity to another as his gambling addiction spirals out of control. After driving himself to the brink of financial ruin, he’s scamming his colleagues in a variety of bogus betting schemes. Debt collector Vinay keeps appearing at random intervals, upping the tension. Sagar Radia, who plays Rishi, still remembers reading the script for the episode: “As an actor, you go: ‘Oh, man, how am I going to pull this off?’ You have a moment of terror, then you get to work.” 

Prior to this point, the audience didn’t know a huge amount about Rishi. In the first two seasons, he didn’t feel like an essential character, but “White Mischief” — which Radia considers “almost like a movie” — showed us that he actually exists at the intersection of what Industry is all about. On the surface, the show revolves around the pursuit of money. But really, it’s about the U.K.’s elitist class system, which you can’t always buy your way into. And for a character like Rishi, it’s also about what it means to be a man.

We soon learn that Rishi has two distinct personas. At work, he’s bullish and brash. (Someone even created an anonymous social media account, “Overheard at Pierpoint,” dedicated to exposing his chauvinistic workplace behavior.) But at home, we see he’s much more insecure. He has moved his wife — a self-described “English country rose” — to the leafy countryside. Living near where she grew up, Rishi uses Diana (Brittany Ashworth) to fulfill some kind of upward class-mobility fantasy. He becomes fixated with renovating a cricket pavilion on the grounds of his home, which is on his land but technically belongs to the village. (Cricket is most popular in former British colonies, including Pakistan and India.) The resistance to the renovation — from Rishi’s white, posh neighbors, who he is desperate to be accepted by — starts to feel more loaded.

In these surroundings, Rishi is subjected to a slow-drip feed of microaggressions, delivered in a subtle English way that’s never blatant enough to call out. Even attempts to make him feel included — like when his mother-in-law tells him she’s cooking a “very accessible red cabbage biryani” at Christmas — underline that he doesn’t quite fit in. It’s something Radia can relate to himself. “Being a British South Asian, I know that feeling of othering,” he says. “As someone who was born and raised in London, in this hotbed of multiculturalism, I can really feel my brownness whenever I leave.” 

Eventually, Rishi takes a bat to the cricket pavilion, smashing framed pictures of the village’s lineage of well-to-do white men to smithereens. It’s a moment that feels anticolonial and surprisingly anti-elite for a man who, just a few scenes earlier, was jumping for joy at the announcement of tax cuts for the rich.

Whether it’s his dirty jokes or flashy sports car, Rishi’s bravado is a protection tactic. The specifically British nuances of how he is portrayed as an underdog might be why viewers in the U.K. seem particularly sympathetic toward him. Radia was surprised when Rishi became somewhat of a “fan favorite” among Brits in Season Two, but comparatively, American audiences have been more keen to witness his downfall. “Obviously Rishi behaves appallingly,” says Down. “But he is the underdog in the world he’s made for himself, and although he’s brought a lot of it on himself, he’s still pushing against things that it feels like he should be pushing against.” 

At the end of “White Mischief,” we see Rishi’s softer side when he crouches over his son — the baby who, right at the start of the episode, he held while watching porn on his phone, as his nose dripped with blood after doing too much cocaine at a family BBQ. “It’s much easier to raise strong boys than fix broken men,” his wife whispers in the episode’s penultimate scene. Finally, he seems ashamed of his behavior.

In many ways, Rishi is a character who doesn’t fit within existing stereotypes. The standard British media depiction of a gambling addict, for example, is a working-class white man from a provincial town, not a city banker with the last name Ramdani. Even Rishi’s boss Eric (Ken Leung) seems surprised by his ultraconservative politics, describing him as “the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in a handsome Asian kid.” 

It might surprise people to learn that the character is very closely based on real people that Kay and Down met while working on the trading floor in their twenties, from his right-wing views and vulgar language right down to his addiction to risk-taking. “Betting on everything from horse racing to the times that people would take their lunch break was very much baked into the culture,” Kay remembers. “The idea of loss and reward, which is obviously so central to the show, bleeds from the trading floor into all areas of Rishi’s life.” There were practical benefits to the gambling storyline, too: “We knew he was going to be losing money on the trading floor, so we thought: ‘How do we not lose that intensity in his domestic life? It made sure the story never lost any energy.”

Ultimately, aside from being a little bruised and battered from a brawl at the casino, Rishi doesn’t face any real consequences in “White Mischief.” At the end of the episode, after a blazing row, his posh podcaster wife agrees to pay off his debts. And just when it looks like he might start to sort himself out, he immediately starts betting again. This is maddening to watch, but it’s not far removed from what Radia discovered while researching the role. “What I learned is that, in a way, addicts sometimes love losing as much as they love winning,” he says. “It’s almost as if the lower the low, the higher the high will be. It’s about that process.”

When HBO encouraged Kay and Down to continue Rishi’s bleak story beyond Episode Four, they toyed with the idea of Rishi being killed, but that almost felt like “letting him off too easily.” Eventually, they settled on his wife becoming a sacrifice for his sins. Still, the plan for Diana to be shot in the head originally received some pushback. 

“We wrote it into the script, and HBO said: ‘What the hell?!’ And they very rarely say that. Normally they want us to push it further, be darker, and be more provocative,” Down says. Even after filming had wrapped, HBO still had reservations that the scene didn’t “feel” like the show. It was only when they saw it in the context of the episode that they agreed it worked. “They thought it really hammered home the [point] we were trying to make,” Down says, “which is that there are consequences in this world for some people.” 

The act feels like retribution for Rishi’s treatment of women, too. Throughout Season Three, he continually slut-shames Sweetpea, a junior colleague he is sleeping with. At the same time he forces his wife, the one person who genuinely loves him, into a desexualised matriarch role. (Or she puts it, a “dull breeding machine.”) Like many of the men in Industry, Rishi seems to view women primarily as vehicles for sexual gratification or for appeasing his own anxieties over masculinity and class. This eventually comes back to bite him: In Harper’s office, when she mocks him and brands him a “dinosaur,” Rishi finally discovers what it’s like to feel disposable. Here, it’s no coincidence that Sweetpea is the one who shows him the door, or that his final punishment is his wife — his prized possession and the last remaining layer of his armor — being taken from him. 

Looking ahead to Season Four, which has already been confirmed by HBO, what’s next for Rishi? “I believe his story isn’t quite closed,” says Radia. “I think there’s still something there, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what that looks like.” Whether or not we see Rishi again, his storyline has opened the door to more standalone episodes featuring different characters. More importantly, the shooting scene fundamentally changed Industry, because the stakes are now so much higher — literally life and death. “It signals that the show is going to be very, very different now,” Kay teases. “We’re going to see a part of London and the finance world that is even more complex and corrupt.”