‘Industry’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap – The Thing Is Nothing (And Other Revelations)

There are a lot of good ideas in “Eyes Without a Face”. It’s the first proper out-of-office hour of Industry Season 4, which is always nice, sending two underused characters to a far-flung location on a side mission that rattles the foundations of the main plot. But its best ideas are familiar. Episode 5 delves into the complex, largely despicable characters of Harper and Eric, adds new wrinkles to their relationship, and continuously puts the show’s Machiavellian string-puller on the back foot. Despite all the ground that SternTao makes here, Harper is steadily losing control of all the playthings she uses to paper over the cracks in herself.

What might peep through when she’s vulnerable? Is there a softer, more empathetic person underneath, or even more of a monster? Time will tell. But since Tender remains in her sights and has finally rolled over and shown its soft underbelly, she might have enough dysfunction to keep her going. We’ll see.

In the meantime, let’s get to the bottom of all this corporate scheming.

SternTao Is Not Doing Well

Here are some things to note from the shocking ending of the previous episode: Jim Dycker is indeed dead, his article has been buried along with him, and Rishi is facing manslaughter charges. This is having a pretty big knock-on effect for SternTao, since their business depends on Tender’s stock price falling, and as Kenny from Deutsche Bank informs them, their stock is rising. This means SternTao needs to shake out their coffers for additional collateral on their original $250 million trading loan, which they can’t afford to do.

To keep the cash flow going, Harper has liquidated Kwabena’s equity positions without telling him, which he isn’t thrilled about, but is very on-brand. The whole fund is collapsing around their ears, and Eric, who is reeling from his daughter having been expelled from her very posh and expensive boarding school, is debating how best to board the whole operation up.

The only real option is a Hail Mary play suggested by Sweetpea, which is to travel to Accra, Ghana, and investigate Tender’s sketchy overseas operations in person. Hopefully, they can drum up some actionable intelligence. Harper is originally going to go with her, but she receives a phone call that rattles her, so Kwabena ends up accompanying Sweetpea instead.

Harper and Eric Are Both Nuts

While their acolytes are abroad, Harper and Eric spend the time arguing and then bonding, although it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is which because the tone of their interactions never really changes. The big takeaway is that both of them are truly bonkers.

Eric, for instance, doesn’t really like his kids very much. He knows he’s supposed to – he knows his lack of desire to spend any time with them is a betrayal of “something ancient”, but it is what it is. He needs things to occupy his attention, and his children don’t. He’s at least self-aware enough to know this is bad, but that’s about as far as he’s able to get. It’s part of the reason why Harper lashing him with a nasty line – “You think if you leave your girls some money they’re going to love you” – yikes! – barely elicits a response.

Harper’s feeling bitter and confused because her mother – whom she hated and had been estranged from for years – has had a freak accident and died. That’s what the phone call was about. Harper doesn’t really know how to feel about this, since her entire motivation thus far has apparently been to make herself so undeniable that her mother would have no choice but to fall to her knees and beg her forgiveness. Now that’s never going to happen.

“You are undeniable,” Eric tells Harper, which reduces her to a flood of childlike tears. This is the most humanity we’ve ever seen her show, and that’s somehow even more terrifying than usual.

The Thing Is Nothing

Meanwhile in Industry Season 4, Episode 5, Sweetpea and Kwabena try to get answers in Ghana by soaking up some culture and bribing a few local employees. Sweetpea carries all of these scenes; she’s determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on and secure her own uncertain future, since she left Mostyn Asset Management with Harper and hasn’t been able to get another job thanks to her brief OnlyFans stint when she was 19. This is it for her.

Kwabena is either the best or worst partner in this endeavour, since he can barely summon the energy to even pretend to care about what’s going on. The good news is that this allows Sweetpea to take the reins, bribing security guards and outwitting Tender employees and lying about who she’s working for and what she’s doing in the country. Kwabena is literally singing karaoke when Sweetpea is attacked in the bathroom in a nasty little scene that somehow doesn’t break her nose but gives it a good effort. The trauma of the situation leads to a probably ill-advised night together and Kwabena finally pulling his finger out, realising that he knows someone – he’s Ghanaian – who sold their family business to Tender.

SwiftGC, the payment processor that Tender supposedly paid $50,000,000 for, is eventually revealed to operate out of a ramshackle building in the middle of nowhere, its only employees two security guards indistinguishable from squatters. Tender’s “big investment” was nothing; “the thing is nothing”, Sweetpea tells Harper and Eric over the phone. Their scam is manipulating their financials by claiming they’re making oodles of cash by pretending to reinvest it in gigantic acquisitions. The cash can never be traced, since it’s always somewhere else, but the clincher is that it was never anywhere in the first place. Tender became a bank to obscure the fact that it wasn’t a profitable payment processor. The whole thing’s a scam from top to bottom.

The Proof of the Pudding

Knowing all this is one thing, but proving it is quite another. SternTao is now positioned to be able to properly damage Tender, but they’re going to need something resembling evidence in order to do that. There’s a two-pronged play coming up. Harper is going to use an invite from Pierre, SternTao’s primary backer, to speak at a women-in-finance conference that she’s going to use to blow the whistle. She’ll be backed up by Tender employee Tony Day, whom Sweetpea met in Accra. He was Dycker’s source, but he’s petrified of going public unless he can be guaranteed some sort of protection. For that, Sweetpea gets in touch with Jim’s editor, Edward Burgess.

Will any of this work? That remains to be seen. It’s going to require Ed coming through with something that’ll convince Tony to flip, and even then, he has to be kept safe from not just prosecution but also the kind of violence that found Sweetpea in a random beach bar about ten minutes after she arrived in-country. And will Harper go public with all this way before her position is backed by any meaningful evidence? Almost certainly. It’s all likely to go up in smoke for everyone.

Will it be fun to watch, though? Of that there can be virtually no doubt.