'Industry' season 3 finale ends with a series of sad farewells

A series of painful goodbyes signal that the tide has turned as Industry prepares for season 4.
Spoilers Alert
We've finally reached the end of Industry's third season, and Pierpoint as we knew it has collapsed. After a successful proposed merger of the bank with Al`Miraj Holdings - which one big Pierpoint man describes as "private equity makeup obscuring the true face of a sovereign wealth fund" - Eric presents a more pompous version of the same proposal to the bank's London staff. "An orderly financial exchange is the basis of harmony," he tells them. "Money tames the beast. Money is the world. Money is civilization. The end of history is money."
These lines, Eric later admits to Wilhelmina, are stolen word for word from a Denis Johnson story called "The Mermaid's Bounty," from which the season three finale is also titled "Endless Bounty." It's interesting to me that Eric was someone who would read a story, especially one like Johnson's, and remember it well enough to quote entire passages under duress. Johnson's story, published in The New Yorker in 2014, later became the title of his final (and posthumously published) collection of short stories. The piece itself brings together seemingly disparate stories of mortality and alienation from the point of view of an advertising executive who finds glimpses of the sublime amid the gloom of age and regret.
Eric grabs a clip of this advertising executive named Bill Whitman describing an award-winning ad he created for a bank. In this ad, a bear is chasing a rabbit, and just when the rabbit seems to be caught, the bear shows a dollar and gives it to the bear. "The bear looks at this gift, sits up, and stares into space," Johnson writes. "The music stops, there is no sound, nothing is said, and then the little story ends on a note of utter uncertainty." Bill admits that the ad brought him a lot of acclaim, but that it was "mysterious and untranslatable." He adds, "I won't say the name of the bank. If you don't remember the name, it wasn't such a good ad."
Many possible interpretations can be drawn from the Industry showrunners' choices in connecting this story to Eric's own story. (Perhaps they just liked Johnson's writing!) But one throughline seems to be indirect, if obvious: Eric believes in the power of a deal like the one between the rabbit and the bear, as a form of protection, a form of "peace." " . But like Whitman, he has aged into a kind of irrelevance: he has "lived longer in the past than [he] can expect in the future." His supposed "peace" can never capture the sublime for more than a few moments. Eric aspired to exclusivity, if only to realize again and again that this was not the same as transcendence.
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