Industry isn’t a game show, but it might as well be, given the competitive nature of the finance world that it examines and satirizes.
Across the financial thriller’s four seasons, we’ve seen companies rise and fall, employees fired or leave for greener pastures, and many characters die. Protagonists and antagonists alike seem to oscillate forever between winning and losing, subject to the highs and lows of the trading floor and beyond. Here, we look at how these characters fare by the end of Season 4.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead.
Eric Tao: Loser
A divorcee and absent father, Eric Tao (Ken Leung) has lived a pleasant life in retirement, with a relatively young girlfriend at his beck and call and the Mar-a-Lago golf course in his backyard. But when his protégé Harper Stern (Myha’la) invites him to start their own firm, he comes out of retirement, believing there’s more he can still do as a financial stalwart.
However, it turns out unc doesn’t have it anymore. In fact, he’s lost it all after hiring a sex worker who was revealed to be underage. We’re not sure if his blackmail tape will ever surface in Season 5, but we know that it’s out there, and that’s why he left SternTao to Harper.
Sweetpea Golightly: Winner
After doing meticulous investigative work for Harper and SternTao, weathering a reputation-damaging OnlyFans leak, and getting her nose broken, Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) absolutely deserves her win. At the end of Season 4, she’s happier than everyone, with £2 million in her bank account, a new office to work in, and her nose fixed. She’s charming but bullish (“Show me dollars.”), and very, very intelligent — and has rightfully been rewarded for being so.
Whitney Halberstram: Loser
Series newcomer Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), CFO of the now-defunct Tender, fled the U.K. on a cheap private jet, a fake Lithuanian passport, a fake beard, and Russians on his six. Whitney’s downfall is tragic, even if we saw it coming, because he’s one of the show’s most compelling characters by far. We don’t know anything about his personal life, only that he’s ambitious and has a penchant for bullshit, or, to put it nicely, perfuming his schemes with flowery language. But in the end, his extensive knowledge of the dictionary wasn’t enough to save him.
Jennifer Bevan: Winner
This season, we were introduced to Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly), a leftist Labour Party MP. On TV, she seems idealistic and uncompromising, but her off-camera pragmatism is what leads her to back Tender in a hearing with the company’s executives and the Prudential Regulation Authority, where regulators were pressured to approve a deal between Tender and the European bank, IBN-Bauer.
Tender’s fall was a bad look for Jenni, but through her speech on TV, she’s able to put the Labour Party back in the public’s good graces, admitting her complicity in Tender’s schemes. If Jenni’s truly resolved to do better as a politician, we might just see her become a hero of sorts next season.
Rishi Ramdani: Loser
Past male protagonists like Gus Sackey (David Jonsson) and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) were allowed to leave the narrative on their own terms, but Rishi Ramdani’s (Sagar Radia) exit was undignified, a fall in the most literal sense. He’s gone through so much, from watching his wife get shot dead to nursing a gambling addiction and substance abuse, that I could only wish him a peaceful death to end his agony, but he isn’t even granted this grace. Instead, he survives a jump off his balcony and is detained. Hopefully, he finds respite in prison.
Henry Muck: Winner
I don’t like Henry Muck (Kit Harington) one bit, but the show is good at making his classist tirade against Whitney in the final episode feel triumphant. He saw Whit’s plebeian runaway jet, said, “Ew!” and realized he could use his privilege as a nobleman to cushion himself against Tender’s collapse.
In some ways, he’s back to where he was when we met him in Season 3, emotionally volatile and coddled by his uncles. But even on house arrest, he’s in a much better state than when Season 4 started. This is a man who, despite facing betrayals and mental health issues, will never truly know rock bottom.
Harper Stern: Loser
Harper’s success with SternTao is Pyrrhic. Yes, she, Sweetpea, and Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh) managed to short Tender, earning a total of $110 million, and will be moving into a new office. But she also lost the most important people in her life in the process. Her mother passed, Eric left SternTao after being blackmailed by Whitney, and Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela)… well, you’re about to find out.
Yasmin Hanani: Loser
There were signs throughout the series that Yasmin was capable of becoming a fictionalized Ghislaine Maxwell. There are blatant parallels to Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, from Yasmin’s father, Charles (Adam Levy), being a media magnate and naming his yacht “Lady Yasmin” to his drowning on a cruise off the coast of Spain. Yasmin’s attitude towards abuse victims in Seasons 2 and 3 — brushing them off or outright silencing them — also clues us in on her arc. Yet it’s also understood that her animosity towards Pierpoint junior Venetia (Indy Lewis) and Charles’ former staff was a symptom of her struggle to make sense of her own abuse. Because of that, she was, up until the Season 4 finale, an object of sympathy for the show’s viewers.
But like many other characters in Industry, Yasmin is motivated by a need for power, and her trauma has unfortunately taught her that the only way to get it is through exploitation and abuse. She’s a loser because she knows that playing madam for white supremacists is wrong and still chose to do so.
