Summary
Industry Season 4 delivers another showpiece episode in “Points of Emphasis”, as Tender comes crashing down, leaving several characters to figure out how they’re going to navigate the rubble.
Industry Season 4 is now proceeding with such full-throttle end-of-run HBO primetime confidence that every hour is a new delight, often in a different way than the previous. We’ve had surreal, dreamlike examinations of marriage, taut thriller-like investigations overseas, and, most recently, masterful escalations of personal and professional crises. Episode 7, “Points of Emphasis”, is something else again, the moment when Whitney’s carefully arranged house of cards comes dramatically crashing down.
You’d think this would be a good thing, some catharsis for the characters who, almost by accident, have found themselves on the right side of moral depravity. But it isn’t, since Whitney’s manipulations and the generally debauched lifestyles of the people who tripped and fell into his orbit have created various inescapable vortexes, now strewn with Tender’s rubble. Some come out worse than others, granted, but from the outside looking in, I wouldn’t want to be any of these people, which is probably the point.
Whitney’s Gambit
Thanks to Whitney’s highly dramatic epistolary flair, Henry and Yas are now, to use a technical term, snookered. They’re both — at least on paper — totally complicit in Tender’s various illegal activities, which at one point Whitney smugly reels off like he’s listing treasured accolades. There’s no way out, least of all for Henry, who’s still the CEO and the face of the company.
You might be wondering how Whitney plans to get away with all this. His big gambit in “Points of Emphasis” is to try to merge Tender with Pierpoint. He has been given a slight uplift in confidence by Tony Day’s industrialist doublespeak press remarks keeping Tender’s stock price on an upward trajectory, and there’s still no real push for a new audit. If the merger goes through, Tender’s sketchy finances will be bundled up in such complex corporate accounting that nobody would ever be able to make sense of the anomalies.
This is Whitney at his most smug. He has ready-made justifications for everything he has done, even the illegal stuff; he laments the gap between his “velocity of vision” and the “velocity of regulations”, which had to be plugged by balance sheet finessing until such time as Tender could become legitimately successful enough to paper over the cracks. They’re almost there. And thanks to his vast archive of kompromat and deft positioning of Henry, Whitney’s the only hope that Henry has for getting away with it.
Yas Opens An Escape Hatch
Henry is his own worst enemy, and turns out to be Whitney’s worst enemy by extension, since both of them deeply underestimated Yasmin’s capacity for causing untold amounts of carnage. In hindsight, Henry will probably look back on the moment he told Yas that he didn’t care about her or all the money he invested in Tender stock and isolate that as the root cause of his inevitable downfall. For Yas, that was the moment she started working on unlocking her escape hatch.
It goes thusly. The Labour government is implicated in the Tender scandal on account of having pushed for the company to be regulated as a UK bank, which has left Jenni on the hook. Yas knows that she can protect the family by throwing the government under the bus and using Norton’s tabloids to lead the story with their complicity, but that’ll mean the destruction of Tender, which won’t survive the scandal, and indeed Henry, who’ll be implicated in the fallout. It’s a sacrifice that Yasmin is willing to make, and by telling Alexander about his relapse, she ensures it’s one he’ll be willing to make, too.
So, Yas tries to strongarm Jenni into sacrificing the Secretary of State, Lisa Dearn, on the altar of career preservation. When she’s too principled to do that, Yas instead goes to Harper, since if they can pick up the story from an independent publication, they can report it in the public domain without risk of defamation litigation. For once, she and Harper are on the same page, so Harper tells Burgess that Dearn suppressed a memo warning that Tender was in breach of U.K. banking regulations at the ministerial level. He runs the story, and pre-publication, Dearn is forced to resign.
Whitney’s True Colours
Whitney and Henry have no idea this is happening. They’re busy flying private so that Whitney can put the moves on Pierpoint’s board, which he has to do since he owes a lot of money to some unsavoury types — the same types who arranged Jim Dycker’s death — and has a very specific role to play. But, as mentioned, Industry Season 4, Episode 7 finds Whitney at his most deplorable, the slick mask having slipped a little to reveal an emotionless monster underneath. Observe how easily he threatens and torments Henry, the little pressure-valve release of energy when he realizes his creditors have caught up to him. The guy’s a psycho.
But he’s good at what he does. Despite the negative sentiment swirling around Tender and the laundry list of illegality that has got him to that point, he talks a good game. Henry is clearly still impressed by him, blissfully unaware that the coming headlines will destroy Tender and ruin him, and that Whitney will leave him to answer for it alone. His pitch to Pierpoint is compelling, even though the wheels are greased by an executive who may or may not have “dated” Haley in the past. If it weren’t for Yasmin, he might have gotten away with it.
The Truth Is Out
No such luck, though. The tabloids run the story. Tender’s share price plummets. Henry gets back to the office to discover that Yas has resigned, Tender’s merger pitch has been rejected, and Whitney has vanished. He’s on his own to face whatever storm is coming.
Yas isn’t especially happy about this, but needs must. Jenni isn’t happy either; her career has been preserved, but she knows she was a puppet on Yas’s strings all along, which isn’t easy for such a principled politician to reconcile. Such is life in government, one supposes. Of the two of them, I know Yas can live with it.
But not without help. And given the general trajectory of her life, the only person she has to turn to for help, or even companionship, is Harper Stern. On what might turn out to be their final night out, they drink, dance, kiss, and smoke in each other’s arms, for once totally aligned, and probably as happy as either of them will ever be.
Roll on the finale.
