The moment I saw “Nikki Beach, Or: So Many Ways To Lose” start right back on the Hanani boat , but maybe we should be thinking of it alongside another modern masterpiece from the golden era of Peak TV:. That was a show where workplace relationships helped comment and color the culture around them—and for anyone who’s seen “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency,” you know that AMC show could go to bold and bloodied places you’d never have imagined possible.
Petra insists they meet with Yas and Pierpoint to corroborate their hunch, but Harper wants to keep her friend out of it. She’s had a hard enough day as it is , but Petra insists they keep all that friendship talk out of it: “Friendship and contempt are just two sides of the same coin,” she tells Harper. Plus, Yas is “comically shit at her job.” If there’s someone who’ll bumble her way through giving them all the info they need…it’s Yas.
As whispers of that short start to make the rounds, Eric furiously heads to LeviathanAlpha where he confronts Harper. Note: Never start any professional interaction with “You listen to me you little fucking cunt.” But then, their relationship has clearly soured past pleasantries. He rails against her plan, against using Yas as a pawn in it all, all while Harper all but tells him she’s just following his advice. How galling it is for him to call her out on being such a good student.
The more the two sling cruel words at one another, you see how much resentment had been building: “Being a narcissist with an inferiority complex doesn’t make you an underdog,” Yas tells Harper, “It makes you completely fucking nauseating.” And just as Harper had heard from Eric the very things she feared about herself, here she voices Yas’s greatest fears: She calls her a victim, a sex object, talentless , and a whore. “Everyone deserves better than the way you treat people,” she tells Yas.