This story contains major spoilers for Industry season three episode six, “Nikki Beach.”
It’s time to consider what a season of Bravo’s Below Deck would look like if it took place on Charles Hanani’s yacht. We have a predatory billionaire father, a 12:1 champagne-bottle-to-guest ratio, and I’d love to see what the mess of phone chargers on this boat looks like—I’ve yet to see an extra on the boat without an iPhone in-hand. “We need to get to dry land, it’s like un-fuckingcomfortable,” Harper complains about an overly-flirtatious man who mistook her for a “link in bio” girl. Meanwhile, Yasmin is grappling with the fact that she allowed her father to drown.
This is when Harper snaps into character as a little something we call a “girl’s girl.” A woman who supports another woman. The kind of person to cover up your friend/former colleagues’ negligence, and allow her abuser to die at sea.
Fast-forward and we’re back in foggy London. Yasmin gets a call from a pathologist to take a look at her father’s waterlogged, decayed body. In typical Yasmin fashion, she puts on an entire face of makeup for the visit, and of course she wants the gold pinky ring off his finger. For anyone wondering, these are the Linda Farrow shades she’s been wearing all season.
I have to say, something was off about the outfits in this episode—the Bear Stearns t-shirt that Lumi investor James Ashford was jogging in was excessive, I saw a few tweets about Harper’s blazer (it looked like it was wearing her), and Sweetpea’s jewelry was distracting. But the costume-department bar is now quite high after Nicole and Robert’s matching pajamas, so maybe I should calm down.
But back to Yas. Eric takes her out to lunch for a bloody (in his words, blue) steak, which he says is a cure-all for bad days. Unsurprisingly, he’s already drunk by lunchtime due to his brutal divorce and percolating paranoia about Harper, and because this is Industry. Within minutes of their steaks arriving, Eric embarks on one of the most uncomfortable spirals masked as mentorship. “Desire is practical,” he tells Yas, and almost immediately she realizes that once again, a man she thought was protecting her is in fact, once again, hitting on her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she gets a phone call during lunch that the photos of her father’s body have leaked and are all over the internet.
A big part of this week’s episode is Harper’s mission to short her former employer, Pierpoint. In order to do it without involving her always-fragile friend Yasmin, she calls in Sweetpea in an attempt to poach her, or at least gather some intel from her desk, but that doesn’t work because Sweetpea doesn’t get pushed around. Instead, despite Harper’s earnest protests, Petra goes around her back and asks Yas for Pierpoint’s positions—and Yasmin sends her the whole list.
The moment Eric clocks what’s going on, he marches over to the Leviathan Alpha office for a showdown that deserved a spaghetti-western soundtrack—those two know how to go for each other’s jugular better than anyone in the show. “Everything you do on the floor communicates an ideology that people are a means to an end,” Harper says to Eric, after he tells her everything she believes about herself—that she’s a monster—is true. She continues: “I enact your philosophy and you have the nerve to come into my office and call me a bad person?”
