'Industry' Episode 4: Harper’s grave mistake could cost her Pierpoint job, Robert and Yasmin realize kinks IRL
'Industry' is set within the banking world of Pierpoint, in London, where a young woman from New York is trying to build a life away from the trauma that she had experienced in her home. This is Harper and at the moment, she is at the top of the world. She is celebrating her birthday at the office, her calculations turn out to be right, she wins bets and is living the trader's life that Pierpoint promises all its new employees. She is the only graduate who has managed to make a dent in the business and that is because of Eric Tao. Her mentor and the head of CPS had given her free space and leeway to pitch ideas, being a part of sales meetings along with the VP and himself and even depending on her to sort certain ideas out for him.
For a while at the beginning, Yasmin had been extremely jealous that Eric would let Harper take calls and even sit in on meetings with clients. So her frustration at being a "salad girl" for the FX team only mounts a lot of pressure on her. So this could be why Yasmin ends up relieving her pressure with her sexual banter with Robert. It begins with Yasmin sliding her underwear to Robert in a restaurant to tell him to send her a picture of himself with it and the two of them end up exchanging sexts all the time.
Their relationship is something that Yasmin purely uses to translate her needs for some kink in her life. Her boyfriend, we have noticed so far has not been very receptive to her sexual needs so Robert to Yasmin is only an outlet to her needs, nothing more. However, from the way Robert reacts to her mere presence, he seems a lot more interested in her than she in him. It is also clear that Harper is suspicious of the two of them. Even as the sexual tension between Robert and Yasmin rises, Harper faces a more serious problem at the company and that is a result of her desperate attempt at speaking to Daria's client to book a sale that she had pitched to him. While booking the sale, she had bought in sterling instead of dollars that he had suggested and that results in a possible risk for the bank in the sum of $50,000.
Harper being the smart woman that she is tries to offset this loss before halftime at 1.30 pm and even manages to convince one of the managers to not inform her boss Eric. She convinces him and is just about to succeed in offsetting the loss, but in seconds, things change and the loss triples up. From $50,000, the loss increases to $150,000 and so she approaches a client who had sexually assaulted her before because she was desperate. When she is told that there is nothing that the client can do, she ends up confessing to Eric that she screwed up. She also learns that Eric knows the truth about her fake transcript. So at the end of the episode, Eric has something huge on Harper that he could use in the future, and in return, Harper knows the truth about why Eric lost one of his biggest clients.