Warning: spoilers abound.
For Industry fans, a Christmas episode is always an event, like Thanksgiving for Gossip Girl and Halloween for Pretty Little Liars — and this season did not disappoint.
Last season’s Christmas episode followed Rishi Ramdani’s (Sagar Radia) spiral into a life-ruining gambling addiction. This season, Christmas falls on the second episode, where we watch Henry Muck (Kit Harington) fall into depression following his loss in the general election and the failure of his company, Lumi, while Yasmin (Marisa Abela) attempts to pick up the pieces for him. Here, she arranges for Henry to meet Tender CFO Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), who asks Henry to be the CEO of the payment processing startup following the firing of Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn). Could she get him out of his rut?
Muck Goes Macbeth
For much of the show so far, Yasmin has had to grapple with being a mediocre employee at Pierpoint. But with the bank now out of the picture, and her marriage to Henry on the rocks, Yasmin excels at being a Lady Macbeth figure in his life, and actress Marisa Abela shines — the same way a knife would — in playing the part.
Yasmin is at her best when she’s insulting men to their faces, from her power-tripping line manager Kenny in season two and her philandering father Charles in season three to Henry. Instead of just calling him a sad boy for withdrawing from his lavish Rococo-themed 40th birthday party, she tells him, “Do you realize that oblivion won’t be macho?” in one of the episode’s most tense scenes. With Yasmin’s Marie Antoinette-esque powdered wig, gown, and heels, Henry has to look up when he reminds her of their prenup, and it’s delicious to watch.
True to William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Henry is unwell, not as a sad boy but as a man traumatized by his past. He’s haunted by hallucinations of his father, who died on his 40th birthday, and worries that he will suffer the same fate. But the following day, Henry feels much better, having “beat” his father “by a single sunrise,” and he agrees to be the new CEO of Tender.
As Henry and Yasmin have celebratory outdoor sex (their first in a while since Henry began spiraling) on the hood of his Jaguar, his uncle Viscount Alexander Norton (Andrew Havill) — who pretty much brokered the marriage last season — watches from a window, and says, “Spring is coming.” I can think of at least two other things coming, Alexander. Three, if you count next week’s episode of Industry.
Industry Season 4 is streaming on HBO Max.
