"Industry" Season 4: "Everybody we love has already started the process of going away"

There was a time when spotting the resemblance of “Industry’”s corruption-adjacent characters to their real-life counterparts was more of a challenge. But with the current eight episodes of Season 4 fully unveiled, there’s now full overlap as global decay grows on both fronts. The Trump family business—er, the Presidency—has now more than matched the HBO TV series, so that almost no daylight shows between the practices of the real and fictional schemers.

In each case, if we might adopt the madcap capital letters of  Trump’s Truth Social orthography, GREED equals STUPIDITY. In a moment when a nelly little turd like Lindsey Graham can mandate U.S., policy  by whispering in Bibi Netanyahu’s ear exactly what he should whisper in The Donald’s ear, who could cook up something more ridiculous?

Anybody with draft-age offspring already feels the laugh catching in their throat.  

When they march the caskets of the sons whose locations were handed as targets to Iran by Trump’s great friend Putin, will Trump still be wearing an oversize gimme hat to keep his spun-up hair(s) in place?

Spring is coming—would you bet the price of a fill-up of $7-a-gallon gas that we won’t be seeing simultaneous feeds of dignified transfers alongside shots of Trump on the fairways at Mar-a-Lago? 

The manipulations of Russian state operatives in Industry’s current season feels personal—they’ve got the kompromat on a main character—but hardly more personal than J.D. Vance and Trump yelling at President Zelensky on national TV.  Late last year Trump finally stood aside to permit Ukraine to buy some Tomahawk missiles—which would make them the only country, except allies like Japan, the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands, to own these weapons that can strike from 1600 miles away. He has probably never been more repellent than he was in the past week of so helping Hegseth try to brush away the death of 165 souls in a primary school--mostly schoolgirls aged 7 to 12..

Her simply does not care. They wouldn't be his first choice, as Trump might put it.

There are only a few names in history whose bad deeds have dogged every waking moment of our entire human civilization. And can we still wonder why two smart show runners from “Industry” would churn all this into their productions?

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, though they met in the privileged environs of Oxford University some ten years ago (they’re now both mid-Thirties in age), both have immigrant mothers and both undertook careers in The City—England’s finance district—only to quickly bounce out. 

Even as their show migrated from all but ignored at first to its current and still-growing popularity, it has inched closer to an hour per episode and simultaneously, full-on hurried into greater political relevance. 

So here we go. Please be warned that from here on through this post the plot points will be as plain to see as the latest grift-y deal handed to Eric and Don Jr. by Sheik Bone Saw and other Gulf billionaires.

Coming up will be spoilers– plot points and reveals as unavoidable as the eruptions of scabrous flesh on The Donald’s puffy surface area. 

One such reveal would be the moment in the season finale, Episode 8, when the oligarchical Otto Mostyn welcomes the entire story’s chief whipping boy, Henry Muck (Kit Harington, a/k/a/ Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones”) to a lunchtime strategy session. 

Quaffing wine with vulgar savor, showing a bossy bellicosity to the waiters, Otto demurs when Henry scrabbles for a path back to the high ground of a lordship’s privilege. “You’ve got your fall guy,” Otto advises, quite cogently, schooling Muck to sell out the choice target that is his deeply corrupt partner, Max Minghella’s sociopathic Whitney. (Without delving into deep detail, the foundering company they share responsibility for is a Russkie-manipulated, highly illegal Tender.) “You no longer exist,” the cold-blooded sometime colleague Ferdinand advises in a moment that unveils how real his role is in enforcing the Russian infiltrators’ will, “outside their tolerance.”

Minghella, in a complex role opposite love interest Elizabeth Moss across six seasons of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” herewith adds a near-satanic charm to his acting kit. And yet we somehow care for him, as we do Henry. 

The anti-heroes of “Industry” can typically flash their skill set when it’s time to slop the hogs, as Ken Leung ‘s riveting turn as boss man’s Eric demonstrates on a TV panel show when his hedge fund is under fire. But still more convincing is Minghella when Whit meets a crucial moment with a marvelously hypocritical if brief oration to an initially skeptical crowd he must win over.. 

It's a scene where the show runners, having admitted they were nervous about “strapping a thriller”  to the previous fare of dialog-driven characters fears and neurosis of their troubled characters, now go large. Online comments have compared Whit’s speech to Michael Douglas’s “Greed is good”  declamation in Wall Street, and the scene, we find Whit in his own pool of light, handling a wireless mic like a pistol. When cover of “Heroes” plays under the scene indeed it feels like a Daddy Warbucks version of a rap battle. 

Whitney shrugs off jibes from the preppy Yank small-timers (with. But a “Fake news”, no less) as he extols the inborn drive that “Every industrialist has sewn into their souls, from railroads to the internet.”  These capitalist mandates have been undercut and “pockmarked with disinformation,” he warns, But  the quest (for his Tender enterprises as it seeks to gin up capital, also broadly stoke the transatlantic economy) is simply  this: “Speed –scale-- certainty—[a pause for the clinching gravitas and nod to Uncle Sam]  --America”. 

They go for it; they go for it like Howard Lutnick might sign on for lunch on Epstein Islan. Still as the applause dies, in the wake of being frog-marched to a car for the Russians to scold him, the energy gutters out of him and it’s time to board the private jet back to England and an uncertain fate.”The institutions that waved us through,” asserts Whit, “are looking for their fall guy.”

 There’s enough sexualized kompromat sitting on various adversaries’ mobile phones or Russkie surveillance devices to start a Friends of Jeffrey and the Younger Side support group, but Whit’s problems are polonium-cocktail level.

Sullen partner Muck has just weathered the clinically-delivered news from Marisa Abela’s Yasmin— “I don’t love you anymore, Henry”—when Whit summons him to a private jet meant to soar them and their new fake passports out of the Russians’ reach. He’s already rubbished Henry as “a child” lacking  “emotional regulation”; Henry’s riposte is wild anger at being in the room with a “reptile”: “You fucking mooch…there’s a dignity in knowing your place.”

When Henry opens his phone that’s blown up with their company’s ugly front-page death he takes no comfort from the direness of Whit’s counsel: “Everybody we love is already going away.”  Henry flips a proffered fake passport, quick as a Ricky Jay card trick, straight into Whit’s eye. We’ll see the endangered Whit in a fleetingly glimpse as the season slips towards an ungainly exit, but the oddly golden moment of the episode comes as Henry, who in due course has copped a plea (ratting out Whit) as to his financial shenanigans at Tender.

Even tracked with an ankle bracelet, he rusticates in a manner appropriate to his social ranking –boating on a pond at a country retreat, snagging a fish even as he washes down his meds with a beer.

Underscoring this oddly frolicsome moment, which sets Henry to wooing big time—is the rollicking if sardonically nationalistic oompah of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “For He is an Englishman”, as he’s re-united with Uncle Alexander Norton. By now they’ve had a sad, tender (yes) hug of mutual forgiveness. In a show whose governing emotional regulation seems to assert “why be sad when you can be bitter”  it’s a poke in the eye reminding us of the scene where Alex and Yasmin agree to sandbag Tender, and thus Henry,  in a maneuver  about which Alex sighs, “Henry won’t survive this.”

In fact, said maneuver played out as my favorite few minutes in the show’s four seasons of sneers, snarls, overdoses, and betrayals. As Yasmin and Alex agree on the need to bring down Tender, and with it her husband and his nominally beloved nephew, they connive to publish an account of Tender’ s financial malfeasance. The just-right organ for this would be a Norton publication called The Patriot, the New York Post-style tabloid (dubbed ‘the red-top) that’s part of the family print dynasty.

“Kevin’s the man for the job,” vouches Alex, and soon they’re in a conference room with said editor in chief of the scandal sheet and a supplicating Jenni Bevan, a cabinet aide for  the political party in power who needs to knife her boss to herself escape the taint of underregulating (there’s that word again) Tender.  In the person of seasoned character actor Pip Tebbins, Kevin is the very picture of a careworn, dyspeptic yellow-journalism editor in chief. “These women are hilarious,” says Kevin, not pleasantly, to Alex, when Jenni balks. “What were you hoping,” he asks her, “would happen in here?”

In a show that is not only reflective but sometime predictive of how democracies can cheat the electorate as well as any monarchy, there is time for us to glance at a vintage, framed front page on the wall: IRAQ WAR LIES EXPOSED. Not much changes in global politics, it seems. 

With the precision of a taxidermist, except the subject is alive, Yazmin plots a deceptive shuffle in which a relative obscure publication (one that formerly boasted a striving investigative ace rudely eliminated by the Russians) could be just the credulous outlet to be fed lightly fictionalized bad stuff about Tender. 

After Yasmin has laid out the plot, in her curiously sunny if also feral way, and exited with, “Leave it with me,” Kevin gives way to a lupine grin. “Hard fucking bird,” he notes to Alex.

How did we get this far without mentioning Harper? A product of indifferent family wealth and credentials (in fact, her college degree is phony), raised from the pool of fresh traders into protégé status with Eric, she’s crucially involved in bringing down Tender to get rich shorting the stock. (I once met a short seller resembling her at a weekend ski resort event for some one-percenters. “Yeah,” he said, making my query into a compliment, “They call me the Angel of Death.”)

Harper, who in Myha’la’s intensely watchable performance can go from charmante to She-Wolf-of-the-S.S. in a heartbeat, seizes upon the return to  fond if transactional relations with sometime bestie Yasmin. (Those of you who have persisted through this typhoon of spoilers will fondly recall how Harper de-pants’ed a chirpy, moronic star trader who profoundly dissed Yaz at an office dinner.) 

Somehow, to the same melody of Whit’s caution that  everybody we love is going away,  we’ve watched what may be the two girls’  last  substance-huffing night out, and  in a lassitudinous echo of the good old days, as they cuddle to smoke their fags, we hear Harper intone, “We’re here forever, even if we can’t be.”

Cut to the series’ most unappetizing, not to say polarizing, set piece, a gathering in Paris involving a repeat hang with some blowhard filthy-rich racist Nazis has been arranged as Yasmin and Alex move to support a fast-rising,  right-wing political phenom.  

Yasman carelessly seats Harper, who’s defanged many a racist back in New York and lately in London, with a mother/daughter pair who spout off to her with wicked condescension. The ghastly dinner ends and now a trio of young women, recruited with the same appalling casualness as might happen in certain New York Palm Beach County circles where Ghioslaine Maxwell held sway, are conspicuously there to, a couple shots suggest, “socialize” with the gruff old farts in attendance.

 Alongside the two naïve young Brit dollies is Yasmin’s prize new protégé Hayley, played by KiernanShipka, the onetime Sally Draper o “Mad Men.”  Shipak’s affect is expertly attuned, all swanky lolling and sex-positive with an underbelly of menace She will bear watching and no doubt be doing folks dirty in the final Season 5. 

Deserving mention as well is here is newly cast Toheeb Jimoh as Kwabena Bannerman, a hyper-skilled fintech functionary who’s been a co-worker and friend with benefits to Harper. Smelling out from the guest list the technocrat/unreconstructed Third Reich vibe, Kwabena had declined to attend: “I don’t want to sit next to some Lockheed Martin exec talking about I injecting peptides in his ass.”   

Harper takes a shot at separating Yas from this bleak cabal, even essaying a hand grapple to remove her frenemy from the very scene she’s created, disputing Yas’s protestations: “It’s not your voice.”

But alas, and here the show runners deserve rich credit for sticking by the  emotional profit and loss tallies they promised us as the show matured, this is the only voice Yasmin has left to her; circumstances keep unearthing childhood traumas that got a shattering update when she quite literally abandoned her abusive dad.  She has only ever wanted to forego all that her beauty has brought her and simply feel important. But Harper’s plaints are too late, as Yas reminds her what Harper first identified as the path. Only true lessons to heed. It’s so simple: “The world is showing you what it is.”

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Earlier this week I posted an updated take on the show's first three seasons: https://www.dogtown.press