In its fourth season on HBO, the slippery Industry is many things — a cynical treatise on the corrupting influences of corporate greed and status-driven power, a reminder that moneyed aristocrats use the world as a playpen rather than an avenue for noblesse oblige — but it is rarely a picture of altruism and good faith.
However, in its second episode, dedicated to the limitations of Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and Yasmin’s (Marisa Abela) newfound marital bliss, the financial drama ruminates on generational trauma and the grace partners afford each other in times of crisis.
“The Commander and the Grey Lady” opens with Muck’s MP loss to the eager and no-nonsense Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly), a newly promoted Labour Party minister. Ten weeks on from being unseated, and Muck is spiraling amid a depressive episode: relapsing with drug use, feeling adrift in his sexless marriage and shouting expletives at a group of touring schoolchildren while clad in an ornate robe. In a bid to rekindle the couple’s honeymoon phase, Yasmin troubleshoots by wheedling a chief executive role for him at payment processing company Tender (run by Max Minghella‘s inscrutable puppet-master Whitney Halberstram), and throwing her husband a lavish costume party for his 40th birthday.
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“He was a really good MP, like he was a really conscious, conscientious, moral, good, conservative MP — the sort of MP you would want — and it speaks to the good, the kind of sympathetic side of him that he wants to do good, actually,” Harington tells Deadline about his character’s dogged pursuit in making something of himself, his wealth and his birthright. “He wants to do well by people; he realizes, on some level, he’s privileged and that he can give back. He’s just so wrapped up in self that he makes these big mistakes and errors along the way.”
The undercurrent of the episode pulses with the specter of Henry’s father’s suicide, which took place on his 40th birthday and which the noble-born sire witnessed as a child. In the present day, Muck crashes his dinner party with lewd outbursts and runs off with an old friend (Jack Farthing), who is later revealed to be a mirage of his late father. After hitting rock bottom by beating a local pub attendee to a pulp, Henry resolves to kill himself via car exhaust-induced asphyxiation — before being pulled back from the brink by auditory hallucinations of Yasmin calling out to him.
“We learn about his trauma; it’s one of the deepest traumas you could have, is seeing your father kill [himself], like no one should go through [that],” Harington continues. “I’ve always quite liked him as a person, faulty he is and a deeply difficult character when it comes to women and things, but there is something good, and I think that I got to investigate that a lot of the season, and that was satisfying to me. It would have been really unsatisfying with just making him the villain of the piece in some way. He needs to be likable and needs empathizing.”
Despite a blowout, resentment-filled row between Yasmin and Henry during the installment’s crescendo, the two miraculously reconnect — physically and emotionally — by episode’s end. It feels like a small miracle for these freaks, if not the most mentally sound declaration of undying love, as they go to town atop the luxury vintage vehicle that, mere moments ago, was sounding Henry’s death knell.
“I think it is an act of love,” Abela says of Yasmin orchestrating Henry’s CEO role at Tender, “that’s how she intends it to be. But I also think it’s an act of survival, not to re-secure her status, but I think she genuinely believes that Henry will die if he has no purpose, and this is how I’m giving him purpose. I think that, genuinely, the beginning of Season 4 is the most altruistic version of Yasmin that we’re ever going to see, like she is genuinely trying; she knows that her happiness kind of now hinges on her husband’s ability to feel happiness and experience happiness and be an active participant in the world and all of these things, like bringing Jennifer Bevan into the house; she’s trying to create a hub of activity around her husband, whether that’s helpful or not — throwing an addict a big 40th birthday party, probably not the best idea, but this is what she does. She brings people around, she creates buzz, she creates energy. And she doesn’t quite know how to deal with this sort of, like, big sinkhole in the middle of her life that is Henry. So she’s just trying to fill it with things.”
In an interview last week, co-creator Konrad Kay teased that Harington’s character will have “the great tragic arc of the season in some way. We gave it in microcosm in [Episode] 2 and then we expanded it over eight hours, and just every beat — blackly comic, the despair, the pride, the arrogance, the little boy in him, the god complex — it was all there all the time in all of his performance.”
Industry airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and streams on HBO Max.