Warning: spoilers ahead.
It’s been a crazy two weeks for our friends in Industry. In the fifth and sixth episodes of the HBO drama, relationships, whole companies, and under-the-table schemes are unravelling. The end of the season is nigh.
Previously, we saw journalist Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton) say goodbye to the show after a drug overdose killed him in Rishi’s (Sagar Radia) apartment. In Episode 5, and with no one left to investigate Tender’s activities, Harper (Myha’la) sends Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh) on a trip to Accra, Ghana, to see if Dycker’s hypothesis, that Tender’s running a money laundering scheme, is true.
It turns out the journalist was wrong, but something else is afoot. “The thing is nothing,” Sweetpea tells Harper over the phone when she and Kwabena discover that SwiftGC, the Ghanaian payment processor acquired by Tender, operates from an empty office space in a rundown building, and that Tender didn’t even pay the full $50 million promised for the acquisition.
It wasn’t easy to make this discovery. Kwabena leveraged his family connections to get around Accra, but in his downtime, he had a blast singing Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” in a beachside karaoke bar. Sweetpea, on the other hand, really went through it.
While she uses her wiles and wit to get Tender Africa CFO Tony Day (Stephen Campbell Moore) to talk, he also threatens her out of prying, sending her a hitman (of sorts) to deliver a knuckle sandwich. Still reeling from an OnlyFans leak and a death threat, Sweetpea manages to uncover the empty SwiftGC office and get Day to accept a whistleblower deal. But when she gets back home in London, Petche sheds the strong Nancy Drew personality, and Sweetpea cries in her room, fulfilled, fatigued, and literally beaten down all at once.
The Fall of Tender… and SternTao
Episode 6, titled “Dear Henry,” picks up right where Episode 5 left off. With her intel, Harper warns Yasmin (Marisa Abela) that Tender isn’t what Whitney (Max Minghella) has made it all out to be. Yasmin doesn’t take the warning well, determined to see Tender succeed but unable to shake off her own discomfort with Whit.
Harper’s plan to reveal SternTao’s findings goes through, and Tender scrambles to save face.
We find out that the episode title draws from a letter that Whitney is writing to Henry (Kit Harington). People who want to see these two finance bros really go at it have had to sustain themselves with sexual tension, and this episode, thankfully, gives us a little more when Whitney watches Henry take a shower (for a second time this season, we see Kit Harington’s bare ass).
But Yasmin shows up in the hotel room and, after kicking Whitney out, expresses her worry that because Henry has given head in high school, he’s capable of doing it (homosexual acts) again with his new business partner. In response, Lord Muck says, “Everyone gets a pass for that. You can be a homo at school.”
Yasmin is right to worry, of course. After dinner, the men head to the club for drinking, dancing, and sexual tension relieved through a glory hole. Whether there are any real feelings there (between them, not in the glory hole), or if Whitney’s just softening Henry up for when Tender eventually blows up, is still unknown.
But we find out that Whitney is holding a secret phone and a Lithuanian passport with a different name, and that his modus operandi involves hiring escorts and underage girls to sweeten deals with other businessmen before blackmailing them with video evidence.
Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) tells Yasmin all of this in confidence, revealing that she was hired as an assistant through an escort service. When Yasmin asks if their one-time ménage à trois from Episode 3 was orchestrated by Whitney, Hayley says his only instruction was to “be in their lives.”
Unfortunately, Eric Tao (Ken Leung) has fallen for Whit’s MO, and he finds out through blackmail that a girl he had hired to “make him feel big” earlier in the season was born in 2011. Eric is shocked, but he already knows he’s going down. So, in what Ken Leung calls his character’s “ultimate show of love” for daughter figure Harper, he turns over his part of SternTao to her.
We don’t know what Yasmin’s going to do with the new information from Hayley, or if Harper will ever find out why exactly Eric dipped (in the last scene, we see him walk down a tree-lined road). All we know is that there’s a hole in Whitney’s bucket, as he so tenderly writes in his letter to Henry.
Industry Season 4 is streaming on HBO Max.
