Strap into Your Strap-On, Industry Season 4 is Back!!

“Without economic function, society buries you before you’re dead”—in the world of Industry, this means that losing your economic usefulness erases your significance. Worse than death here is losing power, because in this universe, power is everything, defining both your identity and survival. Power is paramount.

Strap into your strap-on, Industry season 4 is back, and bolder than ever before. The first episode left me breathless—Harper’s pace and power hit like a drug, and I needed another fix. Thankfully, one week later, we got episode two, which somehow satisfied that hunger through Yasmin and her haunted husband, Sir Henry Muck. There’s something so entertaining about watching two dynamic, dominating women engage in this power play, and yet still at the helm is a distressed, deadbeat. This is television at its most theatrical—ruthlessly peeling back the intersections of wealth, patriarchy, trauma, sex, and power to reveal how each character cracks under different circumstances.

Season 4 kicks off with two new characters, played by Kiernan Shipka and Charlie Heaton, laying the foundation for later connecting us back to our original cast and a main focus of this season: Tender. What appears to be nonlinear writing at first turns out to be the greatest story structure I’ve seen in recent TV, bringing us right up to the present and connecting the dots between the season 3 ending and everything that occurred in between, with a coke-fueled club scene and a conversation about journalistic ethics.

Harper Stern is back, and her on-screen entrance alone could send a person into shock, let alone a transient ischemic attack. Right where she belongs, or so she believes, managing a short-only fund at Mosytn Asset Management. Harper has a whole new look, new hair, a new wardrobe that office-sirens on the internet can only dream of, followed by a newfound sense of power- that is, until the bubble of bliss she’s been living in is busted by Otto when she realises that she is just a pawn in a much bigger, and far more dangerous game tying us back to Tender, which leads us directly back to Yasmin and the mess that is the Muck family.

In a recent article from Deadline, they explain, “The first episode sets its stakes around the passage of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which has come into effect over the last year and created a new duty of care for online platforms, like payment processors, when it comes to their association with illegal or ethically dubious content. Enter Tender, a splashy new payment processing company that makes a chunk of its revenue working with gambling and porn sites — particularly one called Siren. That is, at least, when audiences meet CEO and co-founder Jay Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn) and his co-founding partner and Tender’s CFO Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) at the beginning of the episode.”

Like Harper and Yasmin, these two men clearly have their own interpersonal battle for power and presence at their respective companies. There is a clear shift in the show and its approach to depicting present-day society and culture; we see this in both Otto’s and Jonah’s use of offensive language in the workplace. We also see this in Kiernan Shipka’s character, Hayley, who makes it clear that her boyfriend is “big and black”. The attention to race, identity, and lack of politically correct language perfectly represents that shift backwards in culture we have experienced over the past few years, with the rise in conservative values. Enter Yasmin and her proximity to power: after marrying into the Muck family, she loses her Hanani wealth and titles and is forced to find that same safety elsewhere to ensure power. Luckily for her, Sir Henry Muck is not too involved with anything other than his own inner demons, so she is free to control the room where things happen, bringing together the Harpers, Whits, and Brevans (Jennifer Brevan of the Labor Party who Yasmin keeps close in her corner) of the world to engage in private politics.

Thanks to Yasmin’s affinity for high society, we get to see Harper sink her teeth into her newest prey, Whitney, over a perfectly curated and place-set dinner. Their cat-and-mouse game ends with the two going home together, inevitably hooking up and creating more conflict for themselves. However, the introduction of one particular sex toy shifts the tone of the episode’s ending and the remainder of season 4. Whitney’s large, black strap-on isn’t just a sexual fantasy—it’s a power imbalance made literal. He needs domination to function; Harper needs to dominate to survive. We’ve watched her conquer boardrooms and bedrooms alike for three seasons, and here she seizes another opening. But this isn’t just about controlling Whitney or positioning herself against Tender—it’s Harper claiming power for its own sake. She doesn’t just play the game. She hungers for it.

This exchange between Whitney and Harper provides context for the final scene, where Whitney corners Jonah, pushing him out of the company as CEO and essentially taking over his role to fulfil his dream of creating the world’s first bank killer. This scene is so intimate and painful as you watch Jonah beg for Whitney to look him in the eye. This shot is strategically framed to allow the audience to see just how small Jonah is in comparison to Whitney’s ego. We pull back into the boardroom and see a man being castrated by his peers; it’s incredible acting and even better staging, not only for the scence, but for the entire season to unfold.

Our returning players were introduced in a very nonchalant, supporting-character fashion to explain their relationship to Harper and their loose ties to the Industry they once viewed as their lifeline. Eric is deep-seated in retirement, yet he can’t resist the call to work, or calls from Harper. Rishi is struggling to cope with the loss of his estranged wife and also finds himself in the business of shining Harper’s shoes, helping her to get ahead of the passage of the UK’s Online Safety Act. Sweetpea not only works closely with Harper but within the confines of sex work, emphasizing the fact that these characters and their pursuits of power are far more connected than they first appear. Not only does everyone have ties to Harper, but they also have ties to Tender, which naturally binds them to Yasmin and, again, the Muck family. There is a clear tier of tyranny in this show, and it all leads back to old versus new money and power, and trust me, those circles are small.

The sesquipedalian dialogue is an indicator not only of good writing but also of theatrics. To be candid, keeping up with the elevated financial and political jargon is a challenge, which is why I rely so heavily on the production design to answer my questions within the plot. The attention to detail in every aspect of the show is almost unthinkable. From the tailoring to the textures, each frame, each line read- it’s so specific, it’s powerful. The camera movements and pacing are so sharp, this is peak theatre—only it’s streaming.

In the Deadline article, Down says, “I’m actually not going to ruin it, but it’s about whether they can endure a professional battle, because that’s what the season is. It really is about Harper being on one side of a transactional trade and Yasmin being on the other, and their interests being totally misaligned and what that looks like for their relationship, personally.” The stage is set: new money versus old, Harper versus Yasmin, survival versus status. For three seasons, Harper has clawed her way toward wealth she’ll never inherit. But none of that matters now. What will destroy them isn’t the market or the trade—it’s that Harper and Yasmin have never learned to separate business from intimacy, ambition from loyalty. Their greatest weakness isn’t economic. It’s each other.

I have never been more invested in a show about investments, but here we are, and if you thought episode one was crazy, just wait, because my review of episode two will be out later this week. Till next time, stay flirty, stay thirsty! Watch more shows together. Make more shows together.

Cin Cin,

Paige Bulera