‘Industry’ Season 4, Episode 6 Recap – Oh, That Was Pretty Masterful

Not to be hyperbolic about things, but “Dear Henry” is a properly masterful hour of television. When I talked about how Industry Season 4 gets better as it goes along, this is the kind of thing I was talking about. Sure, there has already been a contender for the artiest hour, with Yasmin and Henry’s descent into marital mania being a true standout, but Episode 6 has the same kind of escalating dread without the need for any artifice or ambiguity. It’s just a bristlingly taut installment full of great individual moments and impressively arranged interlocking narrative components.

Thanks to the way it comes together, though, it’s very difficult to recap, least of all chronologically, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to collect together the most salient threads and developments with a mind to seeing how they all fit together. There’s a spoiler warning at the top, but let this be another, since it’s basically impossible to discuss certain ideas without revealing where they ultimately end up. So, sorry about that. But I think it’s probably for the best.

“Dear Henry”…

This episode is threaded with Whitney reading aloud short snippets of letters addressed to Henry. They begin relatively innocuously, but begin to take on an increasingly weird, sometimes almost threatening tone, but it isn’t until the very end that the true context is revealed. It’s a mirror of the twist in Netflix’s His & Hers, now that I think about it.

The snippets sometimes pull double-duty as characterisation. We already had a bit of a sense of Whitney’s proclivities, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that he has a thing for Henry bordering on obsession, though whether it’s solely sexual or underscored by class envy is a little bit unclear. But after hearing from Harper about SternTao’s case against Tender, Yas obviously recognises some worrying signs, such as Whitney enabling Henry’s drinking. Henry, in turn, sees how Whitney flirts with the auditor he keeps in his pocket, legitimising the accusations. At a dodgy sex club, after leading Henry to a glory hole, more of the “Dear John” quotes sound out, colouring Whitney’s viewpoint.

One of the better scenes in Industry Season 4, Episode 6 is the morning-after-the-night-before that Henry and Whitney spend together, with the former revealing that he sees through the obvious inconsistencies and fictions in the latter’s embellished backstory. “Don’t worry, I’ve got lots of middle-class friends,” he tells him. Their entire dynamic is bundled up in that patronising reassurance. Whitney wants to be what Henry is, and he’ll never be able to. But at the very least, he can ensure they’re as bad as each other. At the end of the hour, it’s revealed that the various “Dear Henry” asides have been Whitney trialling out different openings to a letter that reveals Henry is just as implicated as Whitney in Tender’s criminality.

Day’s Double Cross

After the previous episode turned up the sheer breadth of Tender’s deception, Tony Day has become Harper’s smoking gun. He’s willing to go on the record, so Harper uses her appearance at the ALPHA conference to lay out her case against Tender, sending the stock price into a nosedive. Day’s statement will be the nail in the coffin, forcing an independent audit that’ll reveal the whole operation is bogus. The price will crash, SternTao will reap the reward, and the truth will be revealed.

A lot of “Dear Henry”, then, is about Whitney doing damage control (and we’ll have more on his favourite methods of doing this in just a moment). In lieu of having Tony killed, which is floated to him by Ferdinand, who has some shady-sounding Russian connections, Whitney instead approaches him moments before he’s due to meet with Burgess and Sweetpea, and gets into his head. When Whitney goes on CNN to debate Eric about the accusations, Day beams in unexpectedly in support of Whitney. Luckily, Eric is able to push the new audit agenda, but what was going to be a slam-dunk becomes, in an instant, more tit-for-tat.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That seems to be Whitney’s guiding principle. But it wasn’t initially clear quite how seriously he takes the idea.

Kompromat

Sensing weakness in Whitney, Haley pushes him for a payout. When he refuses, she goes to Yasmin and drops another bombshell — she, like all of his assistants, was hired from an escort agency. Whitney used her to get close to money men and then recorded their no doubt illicit interactions. Haley suspects it’s to extort them later. Even her threesome with Yas and Henry was caught on camera.

This makes sense, since Eric receives a message — sadly, when his daughter is telling him how much she loves him, a sentiment he can barely focus enough to return — containing video footage of his recent tryst with a sex worker, and a picture of her passport showing she’s much younger than he thought she was. Like, criminally young. He’s now so compromised that he can’t go after Tender without jeopardising SternTao and, by extension, Harper.

So, Eric does the only thing he can do. He gets his legal representation to sign his share of the fund over to Harper in its entirety, with no strings attached except, in the event of future profits, his initial investment be paid into a trust fund for his daughters. He’s extremely emotional, as is Harper. Eric even tells her that, in seeing her speak at ALPHA, he realised he was capable of feeling pride in someone other than himself. But he won’t explain why he’s doing this. He doesn’t want her to remember him any differently, even though she claims she’ll only remember him as he is right now, a sobbing wreck walking away from their partnership.

Industry Season 4, Episode 6 ends with Eric literally walking away from the camera. But is this the last we’ve seen of him? I strongly take leave to doubt it.