The Tragedy of ‘Industry’ ’s Eric Tao

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In the season-three finale of HBO’s ‘Industry,’ we see how Pierpoint veteran Eric Tao (Ken Leung) believed too much in an institution that saw him as disposable.

The empire is crumbling. Subordinates rail at each other in the open. Takeout boxes litter the trading floor. Pierpoint, the 150-year-old financial titan at the heart of HBO’s, is plunging toward bankruptcy after a series of calamitous investments. It’s like ’08 all over again, except this time daddy government won’t bail them out. Sleepless, the bank’s top brass shut themselves into a conference room to scramble a rescue plan.

But Eric also looked out for vulnerable talent with something to prove. It is he who took a chance on the state-school college dropout, seeing in her a kindred spirit — a capitalist believer from the States who, as a biracial woman raised by an abusive single mother, didn’t grow up with the advantages of privilege. “People like us, born at the bottom, where would you ever put our chance at making it to the top quintile — that’s intimidating,” he told her.

At times, though, Eric seems to have overcome his minority status, exhibiting predatory behavior of his own. He has learned the arcane codes of old money — that it’s gauche to ask “how many” while hunting pheasants in the countryside, for example — and what rules to break to win respect.

“In the U.K., we talk about social mobility, the erosion of class divides,” Konrad Kay — who, along with Mickey Down, createdVulture. “But Mickey and I think it’s more entrenched than ever.” The show also illustrates the stubbornness of racial hierarchies, which its Asian characters have particular difficulty overcoming. Eric slips into the executives’ room as the biddable deputy of Bill Adler, whose career Eric launched when he hired him years ago.

It’s Eric and Rishi who meet the most tragic fates at the end of season three. Rishi’s downfall is his chauvinism; Eric’s is his belief in a capitalist institution that always saw him as disposable. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re a useful idiot,” Pierpoint’s CFO Wilhelmina Fassbinder says to Eric of Adler, prompting the former to betray his friend by weaponizing his cancer diagnosis against him in the boardroom.

 

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