Where does Industry go from here? The whole fourth season has lead our morally gray finance bros (gender neutral) to some seriously dark places. The Industry season 4 finale “Both, And” just confirmed the point of no return. Will Harper and Yasmin ever get back to the metaphorical club with regards to their relationship? After what went down, it would take a miracle.
The show has come far from its seemingly innocent days on the trading floor of an investment bank called Pierpoint & Co. That trading floor technically no longer exists, as the bank’s London office closed and the characters have pretty much all moved on to their own financial ventures. In the fourth season of Industry, Harper starts her own firm with Eric Tao while the newly married Yasmin and Sir Henry Muck get involved with a CashApp/Paypal/Venmo type of business called Tender. Over the course of the season, however, the corruption behind the startup is revealed and draws every single character into its sinister web.
Did Tender totally crash and burn?
Oops! As Harper and her team exposed and Whitney (Max Minghella’s character) confirmed, the app was fraudulent and a Russian intelligence gathering scam all along. The aftermath of the scandal rolled out like this: the CEO (played by Stephen Campbell Moore) is arrested. Whitney, meanwhile, flees to Lithuania. He tries to get Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington, obvs) to run away with him. He made him a fake ID and everything. But Henry doesn’t want to assume a fake identity and instead goes home. The cops, press, and his now ex (?) wife Yasmin, are waiting for him there.
He pleads guilty, tells the press that everything was Whitney’s fault, and testifies against him without implicating the Russian government. As a result, he gets placed under house arrest at his country estate. His uncle and godfather are now his infantilizing guardians. When you’re that rich and powerful, the worst consequence is admitting to yourself that you’re a loser. That’s the ceiling for humiliation, honestly.
The event in Paris had who and what now?
Yasmin, Yasmin, Yasmin… organizes a fundraiser/salon for a politician in Paris with quite literal Nazis, who she invited, and underage escorts she hired. If that isn’t the Dictionary definition of girlbossing too close to the sun, I don’t know what is! Part of her gambit’s goal is to have the girls gather blackmail material to use against these men, but you can’t spin that as noble. The whole thing is so grody. The way Yasmin talks to and about these girls like she’s giving them an opportunity while actually putting them in dangerous situations is vile. It’s shocking that we’re seeing “ripped from the Epstein files” (not exactly, but uncomfortably close) storytelling, like, already.
Of course, because this is still technically fiction, there are more story layers to Yasmin’s heel turn. At the end of the episode, she takes a moment for herself to process and listens to a voicemail from her toxic dead dad on repeat. She really can’t escape him. Even if this is a cage she built and gilded herself, she is still trapped.
Are there any plusses here? Hayley told Yasmin that she doesn’t have a sex tape she can use against her… but can we trust that? At least she got divorced from Sir Henry.
Harper’s victory is bittersweet…
On one hand, her business is doing well even without Eric Tao. She has money for herself, her team, and capitol for future investments. But on the other hand, Yasmin showed Harper video footage of Eric having sex with a minor. So now she has not only lost Eric as a business partner, but also as a mentor and a friend. Yas has, obviously, majorly betrayed her just after they made up. She sat her next to the afore-mentioned uber racist political extremists at a dinner. Harper is as morally gray as anyone, but she’s not sex trafficking with Nazis kind of evil. Then Kwabena kind of broke up with her? That one didn’t seem to stick, but it didn’t make a bad day any better.
There’s ultimately nobody in this world who Harper can trust except herself. That realization is not as empowering as people think. At the end of the episode, she sits for an interview about how she had the right instincts about Tender. The journalist asks directly if that makes her feel more vindicated or lonely. The answer, obviously, is both.
What was that at the end?
Right before the credits rolled on the Industry season 4 finale, there was a lightning fast shot of Whitney from the POV of a hole in the wall. Is this another glory hole? Is it implying that there was a camera recording him?
According to the show’s creators, the first part is absolutely true. In an interview with Indiewire, they explain that the blink-and-you-miss-it moment was part of a deleted sequence. In it, Whitney meets a man at a bar in Lithuania. He follows him to a bathroom where there’s a glory hole just like the one he visited with Sir Henry. Neither Whitney nor the audience was supposed to know if this was a romantic encounter or a perilous one. Does this mean we’ll see more of Whitney in season 5? I kinda hope so.
