Summary
Industry Season 4 paints a vivid picture of debauchery in its finale, as expected. There was never going to be a happy ending, but was anybody expecting one as macabre as this?
Industry Season 4 was never going to have a happy ending, since happiness doesn’t exist in or indeed anywhere near this show. How can it? It’s about truly deplorable people doing truly deplorable things, mostly as a way to address such deep-seated moral and psychological maladies that the potential for them to ever change is basically nonexistent. At one point, Harper even says, “People change,” out loud, in a scene that is explicitly framed to highlight that she hasn’t really changed at all. Episode 8 is like that all the way through, as it circles a bottomless drain of unimaginable depravity. I can’t wait for Season 5.
There will be a Season 5, of course, and if that hadn’t already been confirmed, it’d nonetheless be obvious from this finale, which far from resolving anything leaves everyone worse off than they were when they started, morally if not necessarily circumstantially. Some of the declines are shocking, even for this show. Some are a bit more expected — perhaps inevitable would be the better term? — but equally uncomfortable to sit through. But when you’re dealing with the upper echelons of power, privilege, and politics, there’s very little that’s truly surprising.
Henry’s Downfall
As was made clear by Whitney’s sudden absconding in the penultimate episode, Henry has been left to take the fall for Tender’s many misdeeds. The authorities are raiding the place, Jennifer Bevan is being forced to answer for the scandal on the Industry equivalent of BBC’s Question Time, and Henry, given his prior public failures, makes the perfect fall guy.
In her husband’s hour of need, Yasmin dips. She tells Henry she wants a divorce. Having been fed to the wolves by his wife and uncle, Henry knows he’s alone. “Did you ever?” he pathetically asks when Yasmin tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. As much as this breakup scene emphasises how little these two really knew each other in the first place, it also brings out that flicker of a dark side in Yas, the trauma ghoul she keeps caged but occasionally spills out when a pretense is becoming too much to sustain.
Henry’s only potential ally is Whitney, who calls him while wearing a hilarious disguise and directs him to a loose panel in his bedroom cabinet that has been stuffed with an ungodly amount of cash. He’s trying to encourage his unwitting conspirator to join him in exile, since without one or the other of them, the authorities can’t reconstruct events accurately enough to bring charges. And Henry considers it, meeting Whitney aboard his private escape plane with the money, which turns out to be airfare. Henry might be a mess, but he isn’t stupid. He recognises that for all Whitney’s clandestine pageantry, he’s trying to keep Henry around as leverage, not as a partner.
Classist as it is — and blimey, it is — there’s a perverse satisfaction to be found in Henry’s evisceration of Whitney. “There is dignity to knowing your place,” he tells him, and he means it. He even calls him a peasant, out loud. This is the last we see of Whitney. We have no idea if he managed to escape. I like to imagine him licking his wounds for the entire hour. It’s more than he deserves.
The Russian Connection
We might as well stay on Henry for the time being. During his “let’s run together” pitch, Whitney just so happens to tell him that there has been Russian state interference in Tender — Ferdinand presumably being the Kremlin’s inside man — and this seems like the last potential solution Henry can pursue. He tells Jenni Bevan about it, and she tries to take it further, but the message from Downing Street is clear: Best to leave the matter well alone.
Jenni directs Henry to Otto Mostyn, who echoes the same point. Sure, Tender might have been used as a shell for Russian intelligence to harvest personal data and launder money for covert operations, but even if that’s the case, it puts Henry at more risk, not less. Unless he wants to find himself skewered on a fence in mysterious circumstances, his tragic fate blamed on his substance misuse and unresolved trauma, he’s better off taking the blame himself. And that’s precisely what he does.
After pleading guilty, Henry crawls back to Alexander, literally collapsing to his knees in his arms in floods of tears and apologies. The next time we see him, he’s out fishing with Alexander and Mostyn, swilling prescription pills down with bottles of beer. He’s still wearing his ankle monitor, since he’s on house arrest. Maybe he’ll catch something.
Myha’la, Toheeb Jimoh and Miriam Petche in Industry Season 4 | Image via WarnerMedia
Yasmin’s Villain Arc
Financially and socially, Industry Season 4, Episode 8 finds Yas having benefited from her recent divorce. Morally, though, she’s bankrupt. The extent of her decline doesn’t become clear until she invites Harper and Kwabena to Paris for a “political function” that turns out to be a very polite white power rally designed ostensibly to drum up funding for the Prime Ministerial push of Sebastian Stefanowicz (didn’t she date this guy in Season 1?). What she’s really doing, though, is working from Whitney’s playbook, employing a harem of young girls — some of them too young — to seduce the assembled titans of industry and film them in highly compromising positions.
Haley works for Yas now, as does the underage girl Eric was caught with — she’s even in possession of video footage of their tryst, presumably handed off to her by the girl herself, who’s being put to the same purpose. Yasmin shows the footage to an aghast Harper, who can’t quite wrap her head around the idea that she has essentially become a high-society madam. Yas justifies her behavior in extremely flimsy terms — she lost her virginity when she was 14, so no big deal, I guess? — but not even she’s buying it.
As Yas’s final scene makes clear, Yas has become the very person she hated most in the world. She has become her father. When Harper Stern has to be your voice of reason, something has gone badly, badly wrong. Speaking of which…
Harper Isn’t Done
The only person who comes out of the ending of Industry Season 4 with a smile on their face is Harper. Tender’s ruin was her gain; she, Kwabena, and Sweetpea all take a modest bonus of £2 million, and the fund — SternNotTao now, I guess — goes from strength to strength. She even manages to sort her love life out, or at least get close to it. While she spends the night having dinner with literal Nazis, Kwabena goes out and cheats on her again. When he gets back, he confesses and says the relationship isn’t really working for him, and clearly isn’t working for her. The fact that Harper disagrees with that assessment is one of the bigger surprises of the finale.
In a rare bit of openness, Harper comes clean about her mother dying, about all the constants in her life leaving or changing so substantially that they’re unrecognisable, about not knowing how to be in a relationship, how to nurture it, and help it grow. But the frankness is, in itself, her reaching out. It’s the closest she’s ever gotten to romance. It’s still wildly dysfunctional, obviously, but it’s a start.
But the season ends with Harper being interviewed about her Tender coup, asked if being uniquely right made her feel vindicated or totally alone. “Both, and”, she says, which is also the title of the episode. When the stewardess asks her if he’s done, meaning with her gin and tonic, Harper can’t help but smile. Of course she isn’t.
