Warning: spoilers ahead.
HBO Max’s Industry is getting a lot crazier as the latest season progresses. And we have to buckle up, because this week brings us not one but two episodes of the hit financial thriller, with Episode 5 set to come out this weekend to make way for the Super Bowl on Monday.
In SternTao’s continuing quest to dig up dirt on Tender, Harper’s (Myha’la) gamble from the last episode starts to wobble. The payment-processing startup, she and Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) discovered, has been laundering illegal porn and gambling payments in Africa through a covert satellite office in Sunderland, England. Harper passed the intel to journalist Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton) in the hopes that he’d publish it, tank Tender’s valuation, and help SternTao short the company into oblivion.
But when Jim finally publishes the story, it’s been redacted and stripped of the detail that would make it radioactive. Worse, Jim now feels like he’s being followed. Suddenly paranoid and spooked by forces much bigger than him, he and his editor at FinDigest become reluctant to put out the version of the story that actually matters.
Meanwhile, Sweetpea is still doing what she does best: trying to find any reason possible to short Tender. Kal Penn returns as its disgraced ex-CEO, Jonah Atterbury, calling Sweetpea from a strip club, because if anyone knows where Tender’s bodies are buried, it’s Jonah.
Over at Tender, Yasmin is now officially embedded as a paid communications consultant, and she pitches a “buzzy launch” for Tender’s new app, complete with “named entertainment.”
“Charli XCX expounding on the virtues of a digitized spending report to track her nocturnal trips to the ATM?” a Tender exec suggests sarcastically. Yasmin (Marisa Abela), with absolute sincerity, says yes. But Charli XCX, to my own disappointment, doesn’t even make an appearance.
At the launch event, Henry (Kit Harington) delivers an impassioned speech about sincerity and transparency, language that feels dangerously aspirational given what we now know about Tender’s illegal operations. The irony hangs thick in the room, especially for Tender CFO Whitney (Max Minghella), who we now know isn’t taking spontaneous trips to Africa for pleasure, but for business.
Behind the scenes, Yasmin’s real power play is already in motion. Leveraging her proximity to Henry, she convinces his uncle, Alexander Norton, a newspaper proprietor, to lean on Jim and scare him out of Tender’s business. Jim is fired, and Yasmin is rewarded with a permanent role as the new head of communications.
Hayley is promoted to a new role under Yasmin, who has convinced her that the discomfort she felt from their threesome with Henry in the last episode was actually discomfort from her night with Jim. Predator-father Charles Hanani continues to influence Yasmin from the grave. Things only get worse as Hayley seems to have shown a willingness to be part of her new boss’s villain arc, flashing her and saying “Thank you, mommy” before she leaves the elevator.
We also catch up with Rishi (Sagar Radia), who’s been earning his money selling drugs and casual porn. Amid his struggles, he’s also lost custody of his son.
At a pub, he meets newly-fired Jim, and they both go back to Rishi’s place for what I call a drug-fueled Flop Summit, where they talk about their failures. Here, it’s revealed that Rishi is partially to blame for Jim’s paranoia, as it turns out that he jimmied Jim’s window in search of intel to sell to Harper.
Just when you think things are bad enough for Rishi, who still gets flashbacks to the moment he saw his wife get shot in the head in Season 3, he finds Jim unconscious in his living room after a bathroom break, and cops are now at his door for a noise complaint. As the police break in, Rishi jumps from his balcony. For better or worse, he survives the fall, but his legs are mangled. As authorities come to cuff him, Alphaville’s “Forever Young” plays.
Industry Season 4 is streaming on HBO Max.
