‘Industry’ Season 4 Episode 4 recap: Mommy complex

There’s a lot of good TV on right now. Even more specifically there’s a lot of good TV on HBO Max right now. In addition to Industry, there’s The Pitt and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Heated Rivalry. They’re all big buzzy dramas. (For the record, Knight isn’t a comedy or a dramedy, it’s a drama that’s funny, a subtle but crucial distinction.)

But even relative to its strong contemporaries, Industry is in a class by itself. It’s in the conversation with The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Young Pope/The New Pope. I don’t know what that conversation is, necessarily — something to do with artfully made, ruthlessly penetrating television about how the cycle of venal but irresistible desire unmoors us from the morality that makes us human beings — but that’s where Industry is. Every time I sit down to write a review of this magnificent smorgasbord of sociopathy, my first thought is “Where do I begin?”

I’ll go with the apotheosis of Sir Henry Muck, more or less chosen at random. Henry’s big moment comes when Yasmin forces him against his will — there’s really no other way to put it — to be the public face of Tender at their big government-backed presentation to the financial world. “I don’t have it in me to be torn apart again,” he tells her earlier in the episode, and from what we’ve seen of his psychological fragility we know he’s right. 

But he winds up on stage anyway, bombing under the glare of the white lights, until he goes off-script and speaks from the heart about how he’s been forgiven his failures because of his rank and privilege. The idea behind Tender, he says, is to level the financial playing field, so that you don’t have to be a peer of the realm to succeed. He says this with what I’m afraid to report sounds like the actual “sincerity” he’s touting. He’s not bullshitting. He means it. 

God help him, then. He’s falling under the influence of Whit, a born seducer who almost physically inveigles Henry into becoming his new best self. In the process, he’s peeling Henry away from Yasmin, whose blunt-force approach to whipping Henry into shape has begun to rub him the wrong way. I mean, can you blame him? When he talks about potentially relapsing during his bout of stage fright, she actually endorses the plan. He’s aghast. She thinks he was testing her, because ultimately for Yasmin, everything is about Yasmin, but he wanted someone to hold him down, and she wasn’t there. Whit is, and it’s into Whit’s arms that he throws himself after the successful speech.

Frankly, it serves Yasmin right. From her Andor-style Imperial white getup to her manipulative conduct with both Henry and their shared one-night stand Hayley, she’s in the middle of the supervillain arc that her frenemy Harper completed last season. The way Yas judo-throws Hayley from accusing her and Henry of sexual misconduct into using her as a weapon against reporter James Dycker by saying it was only her PTSD from their encounter that’s causing her to question the threesome? Masterful stuff. Sauron couldn’t have done it better.

But Hayley, it turns out, is a somewhat willing victim. Either that, or Yas’s manipulations are too effective for her own good. Either way, Hayley is flashing her ass at Yas and calling her “Mommy” before the day is out, saying that when she went down on Henry, it felt like Yasmin was in her mouth instead. It’s all a response to a promotion she senses is at least in part a bribe for her continued silence — and, perhaps, her pliancy in future liaisons. It’s like an old boss who used to sexually harass Hayley used to say, the younger woman explains: “Baby, when it all gets too much, just remember, not a single one of us gets out of this alive.” Thanks, Jim Morrison! 

As Hayley saunters away, Yasmin looks at her the way Victor Frankenstein looked at his own monstrous creation. Or perhaps it’s more like how her dad looked at her as she sailed away on his yacht, leaving him to drown in the sea. She’s already effectively recreated at Tender the climate of sexual predation that sank her father’s company, at her own hand no less. She takes sadistic pleasure in defenestrating her uptight predecessor in the comms role to which Whit promotes her. Why shouldn’t her transformation into the monster that hurt her so badly become complete?

Yasmin weaponizes Hayley into the method of James’s destruction. She passes Whit’s secretly snapped photographs of James and Harper Stern together to James’s editor (the marvelous David Wilmot), who also learns he and James and Eric Tao (?!?) are about to be named as anti-Englanders in one of Yasmin’s uncle-in-law’s newspapers. In addition, Yasmin has Tender’s legal team assert that James went to Hayley’s place (technically Whit’s, but whatever) and sexually assaulted her, opening him up for criminal charges. That he went to her flat is undoubtedly true, and grounds for dismissal. As for the rest of it…

We get perhaps our clearest picture of what happened that night between James and Hayley when the now disgraced and jobless reporter gets mad fucked up at a pub into which who of all people should stumble but our old friend Rishi.

Rishi, we learn, works as a drug dealer when he’s not serving as Harper’s private investigator. (James realizes Rishi burglarized his apartment under these auspices.) He’s emotionally reeling from surrendering in a completely one-sided custody battle for his son with the parents of his murdered wife; “Does he know who I am?” he asks his former mother-in-law plaintively. He then relapses into drug addiction with his new reporter friend — and with their new friend, some fiftysomething bloke (Dez Watkins, perfect in this small but crucial role) who scares off a scammer and winds up partying with the pair all night long.

While that guy blasts Gen X electronic-music touchstones at an increasingly blaring volume, finally maxxing it out during Ultravox’s stone fucking masterpiece “Vienna,” the ever more intoxicated James and Rishi hash out their own woes and the woes of the world at large. Unchecked access to pornography, schizophrenic wife murderers, capitalism’s ability to absorb and market all criticism of itself, suicide, a “world [that] gives us what we want but not what we want to want” — it’s all out on the table, along with copious amounts of blow.

But after Rishi excuses himself to the restroom for a surreptitious toot from his allegedly tapped stash, he returns to find the older guy gone — he went out for beers — and James OD’ing. Just then the cops bang on the door due to the noise complaints. (You really can’t blast “Vienna” at all hours. It’s unfair to people who are trying to sleep and/or yearn in the privacy of their own homes.) 

Already famous enough for his role in his wife’s murder, and blaming himself for it 100% as well he might and should, Rishi opts out of getting caught in a drug den with a potentially dead journalist and leaps to his death from the balcony.

But he doesn’t die at all. He merely shatters his ankles so badly that his feet are more or less severed. Even so, the cops handcuff him as he pitifully tries to drag himself away. Is he a flight risk, officers?

But before all that happens, James lets us in on what actually took place that fateful night. He was in the middle of going down on Hayley when she passed out. It doesn’t seem like he continued afterwards — I’m not sure what the point would be — but he’s not a saint who stopped short of temptation. As his editor puts it, he knew full well the risk he was taking by flirting with Hayley and going home with her, and he did it anyway.

James, whom I hope is still alive, emerges as a complicated and fascinating figure. A father from a one-night stand, he is both sincerely dedicated to his work as a muckraker and dangerously emotionally addicted to it. When it’s taken away from him, he reveals a that his whole personality is addictive. He hoovers up blow like Tony Montana and compares his joylessly compulsive pornography consumption to Rishi’s dissociative reaction to watching his wife get murdered in front of him. Even before the overdose, this is not a healthy man.

Elsewhere, Pierpoint — the old haunt of Harper and Yasmin, already dumped by its new Egyptian owners — returns in zombie form as a partner in Tender. Using Harper’s intel, James nearly exposes Whit’s sketchy “satellite offices” where random dudes launder Tender’s money. Whit heavily implies that he knows the exact nature of Yasmin, Henry, and Hayley’s sexual encounter, but how is anyone’s guess. Sweetpea uncovers an associate of Whit’s named Tony Day, a three-time loser who’s inexplicably Tender’s sham CFO for Africa, and pumps the ever-horny Jonah, Whit’s ex-partner, for information. “Bury him deep enough that his kind don’t respawn,” Jonah tells her.

When you put it all together, Industry is a portrait of nightmarishly dysfunctional people imposing their own bleak, transactional worldview onto, well, the world — all of us, everywhere. What Tony Soprano did to the people surrounding his New Jersey family, what Don Draper did by selling an ideal of capitalist happiness to the country, what Lenny Belardo did by twisting the Catholic Church into his image, people like Whit and Yasmin and Harper do by ensuring their zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, master-and-servant approach to life is replicated in economic form until the wheels fall off. What a skeleton for a show, and what a magnificent musculature has been constructed around it. I’ll watch this thing run until the legs fall off.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.