Warning: Spoilers ahead.
We’ve reached the end of Industry Season 4 with Episode 8. Tender has fallen, but something even darker and more sinister is on the rise, and this finale sets us up for the fifth and final season of HBO’s hit financial drama.
The episode picks up right where we left off: Yasmin Muck (Marisa Abela) is home from her night out with Harper Stern (Myha’la), and tells Henry Muck (Kit Harington) that she wants a divorce. The YasHarper believer in me would like to think this is because Yasmin has finally found her true love, but we all know she is only trying to save herself from Tender’s nuclear fallout.
SternTao, meanwhile, is celebrating this fall. In the hotel room-makeshift office, Harper, Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh), and Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) finally profit from successfully shorting Tender, and each takes £2 million, while the rest of their earnings (There’s more!) go to a real office space and other necessary expenses for the firm.
The Russian Connection
Meanwhile, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) puts his exit plan in motion, fake beard and all. He calls Henry and proposes running away together, which he calls “Repositioning ourselves, stalling the bloodlust of the investigators.” Whitney also reveals that there’s Russian state interest in Tender, and that if Henry doesn’t join him, he may end up dead.
But when Henry finds out that he’s expected to lie low with a fake passport Whit had gotten for him, he finally stands up for himself, realizing he has the privileges of the landed gentry and doesn’t have to slum it with Whitney’s Lithuanian alter ego. “Eat my shit, you peasant. I’d rather die as me than run as you,” he says.
A red notice goes out for Whitney, while Henry talks to left-leaning Labour Party MP Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly) about Tender’s supposed dealings with Russia. Jennifer asks the prime minister’s office if they should look into this connection, but she’s told, “Don’t poke this particular bear.”
Uncle Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay) tells Henry the same thing over lunch as Henry mulls his next steps. Lord Muck thinks he’d be doing the right thing by bringing up Russia in his defense, but Lord Mostyn, like Whitney earlier, tells him he could end up dead under suspicious circumstances. Ultimately, Henry decides to take a plea deal, pleading guilty to being an accessory to Tender’s fraud in exchange for house arrest. In the end, he’s fishing with his uncles, medicated on lithium, and the happiest he’s ever been all season.
As for Jennifer, the leftist MP is determined to atone for letting Tender off the hook in parliament, and we can expect her to poke the Russian bear next season.
Predators and the Alt-Right
After she dropped Tender and Henry, I had faith that Yasmin would ethically girlboss her way out of the trenches. Maybe she’d put up her own PR firm, and let her close friendship with Harper blossom into something more beautiful. But there have been signs warning that she’s never really cared about ethics.
Since her encounter with executive assistant Hayley Clay (Kiernan Shipka) in Episode 3, the show’s been teasing an arc that involved Yasmin becoming her predator father’s daughter, and the season finale — satisfyingly, and yet nauseatingly — realizes this.
Yasmin, back to being called “Miss Hanani,” now continues working as a public relations consultant, this time under right-wing Reform Party MP Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft). At the office of Viscount Alexander Norton (Andrew Havill), Henry’s media magnate uncle, the three discuss ways to make Sebastian a more appealing politician. While the MP has made a few appearances throughout the season, this episode gives us a better understanding of his character, undoubtedly priming us for the bigger role he will take on next season.
Sebastian is an alt-right figure, a close friend of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and very Catholic. He tells Yasmin he’s sorry about her divorce, and that he disapproves of it. “We’d need to distance your image from fringe, outright authoritarian, or racial elements,” says Alexander.
In Paris, Yasmin holds a dinner to raise funds for Sebastian’s campaign. In attendance were Harper, the Nazi-sympathizing Bauers from Episode 3, lots of old men, and young girls. Oh, and “evolutionary biologists.”
Harper, a black woman, immediately feels out of place, especially sitting next to Austrian Princess Johanna Bauer (Susanne Wuest), who tells her things like “Importing people who reject your values is national suicide” and “You’re not like the other ones, are you?”
Harper worries for Yasmin and questions everything, from the donors’ shell companies in the U.K. to Yas pimping out underage girls to white supremacists. As Edith Piaf sings “Mon Dieu” in the background, Yasmin declines Harper’s tearful offer to take a step back from her schemes.
Ultimately, Yasmin does achieve a twisted form of self-actualization. Throughout the whole series, she has felt incompetent and inadequate. But in this room of predators and noblemen seeking to make Europe white again, she is important. “Do you see that? I’m necessary,” she tells Harper. “I feel new. I feel less pain.”
In an interview with a reporter following her successful short, Harper is asked if it feels like vindication to be right when everyone else is wrong, or if it makes her feel alone. Having learned about why career father figure Eric (Ken Leung) left SternTao in Episode 6, and watching Yasmin go down a dark path, Harper answers, “Both/and.”
Industry Season 4 is streaming on HBO Max.
