It was right around the time that his beautiful wife engineered a threesome with his equally beautiful assistant that I started to feel bad for Henry Muck. I watched this peer of the realm joylessly slam his marble-carved body into Hayley, an eager, gorgeous woman 15 years his junior. I watched his wife Yasmin — who made it happen, then oversaw it all with approval while languidly smoking a cigarette — order Hayley to spread her legs so Yasmin could suck “something that belongs to my husband, and therefore to me” directly out of her body. I watched all that, and I thought this poor bastard.
I’m exaggerating of course, but only slightly. The ménage takes place during an an excursion to Vienna, where Whit Halberstram and the other Tender higher-ups, who now include not only CEO Henry but his “paid consultant” wife Yasmin. They’re attempting to convince a family of actual Nazis (Sid Phoenix and Susanne Wuest) — no, seriously, they own original Hitler artwork — who have ownership stake in an Austrian bank to get on board with being bought out so that Tender can acquire a banking license.
Henry, who’s well aware of his own aristocratic family’s history of racist rapine across the globe, really fucking hates all this, to put it mildly. As we’ve discussed, he may not be a very good or nice person in practice, but he is both in theory — it would be hard for him to be able to win over so many different kinds of people the way he has throughout his career if he didn’t actually connect with them on some level. Henry actually, sincerely believes fascism is bad. Unfortunately, he’s married to someone who doesn’t sincerely believe anything. Hayley is provided to him more or less as a toy to calm his nerves.
But it’s not a toy he wants to play with. That’s clear in his every word, action, and facial expression — all of which ought to be clues to a dominant that their sub is uncomfortable in a way that needs to be heeded. Now if you put a couple of sexy women in front of a man wearing only a towel and one of them grabs his dick, as Yasmin does, that man is gonna do it, that’s like a 95% certainty. But he won’t enjoy it. He won’t feel good about it after. If he’s Henry, he’ll in fact compare it to enabling his addictions.
He’s not wrong. Yasmin exhibits classic abuser behavior here, and their conversation back at the office the next day couldn’t make it clearer. “You wanted her, Henry, so you fucked her. I was just bold enough to know what to give you.” Shhhh, I know what you want — that’s what Yasmin, of all people, is going with?
It’s clear at this point, if it wasn’t already, that Yasmin’s sexually dominant behavior over the years is less about either enjoying herself or self-actualization than it is about feeling the power she perceives that her abusive father felt — the power to get people to do intimate things because you want them to, not because they want to.
What Yasmin and Henry did with Hayley was much more about Yasmin than it was about Henry; the fact that he calls off a second date with Hayley that Yasmin’s in the middle of arranging is proof enough of that. That’s not the action of someone who wanted what happened to happen. After he narrowly escapes humiliation with the Labour ministers, it all seems to come to a head in the conversation mentioned above. “Who the fuck did I marry?” he wonders aloud, a look of consternation on his face. “You should know that, darling,” Yasmin half-purrs, half-sneers. Whether he likes it or not is incidental.
By this point, the merger has gone through, after Yasmin gets the Nazi an opinion column in one of Henry’s uncle’s papers. (“The Case for a Benevolent Dictatorship” reads the headline of his opening salvo; Henry, to his credit, is horrified, while Yasmin, to her discredit, is not.) At a closed door meeting with Labour officials, Henry is nearly shocked into catatonia when his past failures are brought up by an old political nemesis (Chloe Pirrie) who calls him a charlatan, but the timely intervention of the Labour prime minister’s slimy assistant (Andrew Sheridan) shuts down the inquiry and puts Tender on a glide path to their U.K. banking license.
Tender remains in the crosshairs of multiple shooters, however. Journalist Jack, ambitious and at least semi-ethical — Hayley has every chance to end his career by telling Yasmin he had sex with her while she was under the influence, but to his credit he didn’t, so to her credit she doesn’t — is still on the trail of Tender’s dirty deeds.
In his pursuit, Jack keeps feeding intel to Harper, knowing she can use it to engineer a big short for her new mom-and-pop firm with Eric, Stern Tao. In exchange, she provides him her own information to back up his story, but only after she ascertains that he’s really in it for the story, not to make money off some rival company’s stock. (Apparently he’s been burned by the market before.)
With the help of her once and future colleague, the enterprising, take-no-shit Sweetpea Golightly, Harper gets to the truth about Tender. After enduring a Chair Company–esque journey through hours and hours of hold music and phone trees and call centers, she finds out that Tender, a massive company, is using a handful of randos scattered around Europe to launder illegal transactions, burying them by sorting them according to dollar amount rather than the nature of the expense. (Or something like that. This is all basically magic to me. They might as well be speaking High Valyrian.)
As Sweetpea notes, even if Tender doesn’t get busted legally, the market will be forced to adjust to account for all the unlisted, off-limits revenue. But when Jack’s story breaks, it doesn’t spark the collapse in value that Harper, Eric, and Sweetpea had hoped for when they positioned themselves for the short. Unless they can back up the theory that Tender is running an elaborate but surprisingly low-rent money-laundering operation in a way that isn’t legally actionable, and until they rally investors to their side with a better story than the one Tender is telling, they can’t tank the stock and collect on the short they’re counting on to make them players.
But they’re facing personnel issues right out the gate. Harper feels Eric is distracted by his post-retirement attempt to be a halfway decent dad and less of a workaholic. Sweetpea wants nothing to do with Harper’s P.I. and fixer, Rishi, whom she calls a murderer for his role in the death of his wife. Harper’s having a hard time figuring out where she stands with/on Kwabena, her ex co-worker and fuckbuddy turned new co-worker and boyfriend, maybe? Question mark?
Some of the episode’s highlights — the very explicit yet somehow nudity-free threesome in that chamber of horrors in the Nazi castle, for example — are obvious. Others are more subtle. It’s fascinating to follow Eric this episode: We’ve seen him be a “changed man” several times before, but never one who espoused — gasp — work-life balance. He’s trying to be a good dad, for one thing; he even apologizes to their old colleague Kenny (Conor MacNeill) for firing the poor guy at a terrible time. (They need him to approve a loan or something, but still.) Eric’s advice to Harper that both all work and all play make traders dull boys is actually pretty sound if you’re addressing someone who has to go 100mph at all times or else they’ll feel like they’re drowning.
“It starts and ends with work and with being proven fucking right,” Harper says, in the middle of a rant triggered by Eric using the word “triggered.” (“Sounds like you’re a little triggered,” he says when she finishes in the laugh line of the night.) She’s just explained how her trauma didn’t make her stronger, it just traumatized her; the kind of work she does makes her feel strong, in the face of a world that made her feel week. If she had literally any other values whatsoever it would almost be inspiring.
35:34 SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE A LITTLE TRIGGERED, CAPTIONED PLEASE
That’s the thing with the characters on this show. Like The Sopranos and Mad Men before it, Industry is a story about functionaries in a fundamentally immoral enterprise who are sexy, charismatic, and complex. The question the show asks is Okay, how far does that get you? Very near to the top, as it turns out — to a castle in the clouds, in fact. But once you’re inside, you’ll find yourself taking sexual advantage of an employee in a room with Adolf Hitler’s paintings on the wall. The likes of Yasmin and Harper may be able to blind themselves to it, but Industry sees it all as clear as day.
Great “Orinoco Flow” needledrop too, from the show with the best music supervision on television. What a treat it is for this show to arrive on our screens every week, reminding us how beautifully horrible life is for a while.
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.
