Look, there are a lot of folks who get a little volatile on the occasion of their 40th birthday! This manifests differently for us all. Some wallow. Some organize logistically complicated weekends resembling bachelorette parties (except with more sleep masks and less abandon). Many deploy the hashtag #ThisIs40. Others publicly pine for the womb.
And if you’re Reginald Henry Ferrers de Chartley Norton Muck—better known to viewers of HBO’s investments-and-iniquities drama Industry as Sir Henry Muck—turning 40 means tripping balls, beating some mouthy lad to a pulp, and revving the engine on a vintage powder-blue Jaguar E-type … in more ways than one.
In “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” the second episode of Industry’s fourth season, most of the chaos centers on Henry’s haunted country manse, where he lives with his wife, Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and his judgy uncle, Lord Norton. The episode plays like a novella, surfacing themes of legacy, betrayal, partnership … and the ghosts down the hall. There is nary a Bloomberg terminal in sight. But trades and negotiations are constantly taking place.
“The Commander and the Grey Lady” features bloody knuckles and a claw-foot tub. It is fueled by scorching fights and chilling lore and defined by intergenerational trauma. Now this? #ThisIs40.
The Bottom Line
So, what happened in this episode?
We begin the episode with a flashback to some disappointing election results, with Henry losing his seat in Parliament after less than a year in office. The newlyweds aren’t happy about this, but they handle the disappointment lovingly: with Margaret Thatcher sex jokes, set to the tune of CSNY’s “Our House.” Fast-forward about 10 or so weeks later, however, and their house no longer feels like a home.
A bored Yasmin sometimes spends nights at a four-figure hotel in London. Henry has regressed to full robe-goblin mode, sleeping in so late that he threatens to “miss elevenses” and snapping at Yasmin to just let the hired help “fulfill her function.” Later, when Yasmin gives Henry a present—his late dad Reggie’s watch, which she had serviced—Henry excuses himself, walks to the well-stocked family armory, and fondles a shotgun.
This is concerning: In the Season 3 episode “It,” Henry had told Yasmin that his dad died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (“The black dog,” Lord Norton once called the father’s and son’s congenital bouts of melancholia.) When an employee walks in, Henry lets him “fulfill his function” and take the gun—and also asks him to change the armory locks.
Lord Norton has had it with his nephew’s “listlessness” and treatment of Yasmin, and he lets him know it in an extremely repressed-Brit manner: “No one expects you to be uxorious,” Norton scolds—I had to look that word up, and wow, it literally means being a wife guy, who knew!—“but you’re being callous.” Burn. What’s the path out of this, Norton asks? Henry snarks that it’s probably either a pharmaceutical cocktail or “some other arsehole telling me to make sure my eyes see sunlight first thing.” I bet Henry listens to Andrew Huberman but kind of scoffs a lot while he does.
More on ‘Industry’ Season 4
The two men argue back and forth; spittle flies. Norton gives Henry more keep-calm-and-carry-on-style advice: “The dislocation you feel isn’t going anywhere,” he says. “Ignore it, numb it, drown it out, or integrate it into your life.” As Norton walks away, we see his chosen way of coping—a flask he keeps on his person.
Later, Henry lolls in a tub while a neglected Yas, who misses being desired by her man, rolls up her sleeve and thinks of England. Not to be all “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes” here, but this scene is half Saltburn vibes, half Marie in Breaking Bad servicing Hank in the hospital. Henry tells her to stop and that she’s free to hook up with other guys; she tells him he has a 2 p.m. meeting with Whit (Max Minghella) and to get it together.
We circle back to the scene that ended Episode 1: Henry in his robe at the harpsichord, doing drugs and plinking away at the “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary: March” (a version of which is also the theme song for A Clockwork Orange). He curses out a tour guide who is telling a group of schoolkids about the mansion’s most famous ghost, “the Grey Lady.” “I’m here to ask you one simple thing,” Whit tells Henry when he arrives for his 2 p.m. meeting. “What do you want to do next?” They go back and forth for a bit: Henry moping about how much of a fuckup he is—I’m gonna need to know more about the 72 days he spent as prison minister?!—and Whit puffing him back up. “I’m a fraud touched by success,” Henry posits. “You’re just telling the wrong story,” Whit responds. But any self-confidence Henry derives from this conversation is erased when he tries on his rococo Elton John outfit for the birthday party while his wife, dressed like Kirsten Dunst’s version of Marie Antoinette, stands up in her tall shoes and towers above him.
Here’s an incomplete list of the haps at one of the weirder combination 40th birthday–Christmas parties I’ve ever witnessed:
- Yasmin’s horny aunt Cordelia, played by Claire Forlani (Brandi?!), tells her niece about her affair with a much younger man and lectures Yas about marriage: “It doesn’t matter how much a man says he loves you; you never give them unconditional love,” Cordelia says. “They fuck all their fears into us, and then they kill us. It is the historical denominator.” Seems healthy!
- Norton, Yasmin, and Jenny Bevan have a sub-rosa meeting down in the kitchen about politics and the media. More interestingly, we learn that Lord Norton “abhors” cranberry sauce. Monster.
- Henry and Whit meet again, in front of a giant J.M.W. Turner painting, Fishermen at Sea. Whit suggests that there’s an opening for Tender CEO and also explains why he and Henry could make a good team: “You want something you don’t have. I want everything you have already.”
- Henry and Yasmin have one of the great fights in all of Industry history, which is a really high bar! It’s on the level of Tom and Shiv on the balcony in Succession—except with the added panache of Yasmin being in full period costume (very Real Housewives of Salt Lake City coded) and Henry not wearing pants. (Last time we saw Yas in a wig, she was partying after hours with Eric.) Topics covered include Henry’s “suicide as poetry bullshit” and “sad boy self-regard,” the terms of their prenup, Henry’s drug use, and whether Yasmin has been unfaithful. (She hasn’t, she says: just unfulfilled.)
- Henry takes some sort of drug—LSD? Molly? Exactly how square do I sound right now?—and finally makes quite the cameo at his own birthday dinner. He plants a big smooch on Jenny Bevan, à la Tom Hanks kissing the bus driver in A League of Their Own. He apologizes to his wife and uncle in a way that creates a need for a new apology. And he gets bear-hugged by an old chap who goes by “the Commander,” who asks whether he’d like to blow this popsicle stand and hit up the bar. Henry’s response is to chant Elysium!, which in this case means yes.
Ah, the Commander—what a knockout portrayal (by Jack Farthing) of one’s dear mate, one’s enabler, one’s crook-of-elbow tour guide through the sketchy alleys of life! Bawdy and jaded, the Commander is a walking after-party. He knows more and cares less than he puts on. In his presence, Henry has a woozy and increasingly aggro night at the pub, where other patrons include his chambermaid, Molly, and his family’s longtime parish priest. When a drunkard gleefully shares lewd gossip about Yasmin, it’s the Commander who compels Henry to engage. “Shine ya shoes, boy,” he encourages, and Henry pummels the guy until he’s nearly (?) dead and Henry is wrist deep in his blood.
Back inside the house, everything is beginning to curdle. In between lines, Harper picks at Yasmin like a scab: “All this stuff is not gonna get you the respect that you think you deserve,” she says. Not not true, but rude! “Clearly you’re lonely,” Harper presses. “Clearly you’re lonely!” Yas fires back. I’m reminded of Whit’s pickup line to Harper in Episode 1: “You ever feel alone in a crowd?” And later in this episode, Harper and Whitney get to chatting again. There are no strap-ons this time, just a conversation about how to optimize funerals.
Here’s the rest of the night from Yasmin’s perspective: First, she walks in on her aunt Cordelia pleasuring Otto and hears him say to her: “You’ve got a better mouth than your brother.” Next, she instructs the household help to remove Cordelia’s belongings and set them outside in the cold. Then, she confronts her aunt about a great many things, such as the fact that she must have known about Charles Hanani’s proclivities or even dallied with him herself. (Remember, all of this is happening in 18th-century costume.) “Your father told me that he was going to terminate you,” Cordelia snaps, “until he found out you were a girl.” I can’t think of a more chilling line that’s ever been said on the show. As a weary Yasmin goes up to bed, she encounters Hayley (Kiernan Shipka), Whit’s assistant, wearing a Northwestern sweatshirt and sleeping on a hallway bench. It’s a crackling scene, from Hayley’s awkward curtsy to Yasmin’s combination of being down for whatever and also so, so exhausted. Finally, Yasmin crawls into bed, alone.
Here’s the rest of the night from Henry’s perspective: He is told by the bartender not to worry about the half-dead (?) guy he wailed on; everyone knows it was self-defense. He chats with the priest about his dead dad. He goes outside, sees the Commander, and tells him: “I could do with never seeing you again.” The Commander asks: “Will you let me show you where it hurts?” As Henry pulls back his sweater to reveal a violently bloodied neck, it all comes together: The Commander is Henry’s father, haunting and thrilling and egging him on, either from within or from some great beyond. The flashbacks begin: Henry as a kid at the same table where he now sits for elevenses, his dad telling him to “shine ya shoes, boy.” Henry looking out the window as Reggie walks out toward a tree. Earlier in the episode, we learn that Henry’s dad didn’t shoot himself, as he’d told Yas—he hanged himself, and Henry saw. Now Henry, fighting daylight, climbs into his father’s Jaguar inside a garage, starts the engine, revs it, closes his eyes, and breathes in the fumes. The priest’s words echo in his head: The first person the coward deserts is himself. Yasmin’s voice echoes in his head, too: Henry, Henry.
In the end, he decides not to end things. Crawling and coughing, he gets out into the fresh air and back to the house, yelling for his wife, lifting her into his arms and onto the top of the car like when they were newlyweds. The blood from the guy at the pub is still on his hands, and now it’s on Yasmin’s lips, too. He tells her that he’s outlived his father by a sunrise and that he’s going to take Whitney’s offer at Tender. They drive away as Pet Shop Boys plays, and Henry says: “Maybe we should try for a child!” At this, Yasmin looks a lot like she’s gonna hurl.
Turns of Leverage
On Industry, characters love borrowing trouble—and are always up to double down. Whose bets are paying off big time this week, and who is in the midst of a downward spiral?
Leveling up: It feels a little weird to give Yasmin the nod here—she’s lonely and angry (and I’m going to guess probably hungry and tired, too—the full, dreaded HALT). Henry humiliated her in a dining room full of people, and in the span of a couple of hours, she fought with her husband, her best frenemy Harper, and her aunt Cordelia.
Yet! Yas has been pretty laser focused on one key objective—getting Henry back in the mix with a key role at Tender—and it seems as though that notion is gathering momentum. Plus, she’s in Lord Norton’s good graces, thanks to her glad-handing with Jenny Bevan and her al fresco schtupping.
Credit crunched? This week, it’s a consortium: one goon (I don’t think that loudmouthed bloke at the pub will be earning a paycheck anytime soon), one ghoul (while it remains to be seen whether Reggie’s ghost will manage to hang around, there are signs that Henry could exorcise his worst influence), and one gal. (Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord and/or whoever else split ya, Aunt Cordelia! I don’t think she’ll be getting the invite for Henry’s 41st.)
On the watch list: Whit? On the one hand, he sure seemed to enchant Henry this episode. On the other, any shred of a spell he may have had over Harper has absolutely worn off. There’s no ick quite like the “talkin’ cremation margins” ick.
Tender Offers
Is that a “private banker in your pocket,” or are you just happy to see me? Here’s the latest haps at Tender, the most ambitious “bank killer” in Canary Wharf.
While we don’t visit the Tender offices in this episode, we get a few snippets of the company’s past (the recently deposed Jonah was one hell of a fundraiser back in the day!) and future. “I'm building a one-stop shop, an in-your-pocket, democratic financial institution for everyone from the working man to the wealthiest bureaucrat, inclusive,” Whit tells Henry. “To call it a bank would be to undersell it. It's a bank killer. And I need a partner.”
Mergers and Acquisitions
Activist investor? I hardly know’r! This is a judgment-free zone to discuss emerging corporate synergies in Industry and do our due diligence on who’s doin’ it.
Ranking Episode 2’s dalliances and/or flirtations from least to most alluring:
10. Aunt Cordelia’s “bohemian childhood.”
9. Aunt Cordelia being offered a mint from Otto Mostyn (I’m too proper of a lady to quote him explaining what for).
8. The Commander describing what “tickles my reptilian brain” and “lands perfectly on the nexus of arousal and disgust.”
7. Yas rolling up her sleeve to attempt a tub-side handy.
6. Whit asking Harper: “You going to tuck me in?” and Harper noping right out of that one.
5. Aunt Cordelia having an affair with some 29-year-old whose dirty talk is “better than any one of my children being born.”
4. Yasmin joking about how the upside of losing the election is that she can ditch the frumpy Tory clothes so that Henry no longer has to “fuck Margaret Thatcher,” and Henry responding: “I'm an omnivore. I liked fucking Maggie T!”
3. Henry ravishing Yasmin on the hood of a Jag while Lord Norton locks eyes with his niece-in-law and nods in patrician approval.
2. Maybe this is Heated Rivalry brain in overdrive, but: Whit saying things to Henry like, “And what great man has lived a life without friction?” and “I want you to come finish it with me …”
1. That one brief, shining moment when I thought that Haley and Yas were about to snuggle up (and started wondering who the big spoon would be).
Watch Watch
Time is a flat circle, ideally powered by quartz. Here, we examine Industry’s tick-tocking timepiece(s) of the week.
The late Reggie Muck’s watch that Yasmin finds, services, and gives to Henry for his birthday looks to be an old Rolex Datejust. Later in the episode, when Henry and the Commander are at the pub—but before it’s revealed exactly who this drinking buddy is—we see that the Commander is wearing … an old Rolex Datejust! Man, I haven’t studied watches this closely across temporal planes since Severance …
Bonus fun fact(s): While this particular watch has a leather strap, there is another iteration of the Datejust that (according to this extremely informative essay on the watch website Hodinkee) some timepiece heads refer to as “the Bateman.” That’s because (a) in the novel American Psycho, narrator Patrick Bateman uses the word Rolex 26 times and (b) in the movie American Psycho, he looks to be wearing a Datejust.
However! Because Rolex did not wish to associate its brand with a cinematic psycho, the watch in the movie turns out to not actually be a Datejust if you look hard enough—it’s a Seiko that looks super-similar. Anyway, I mention all of this because it’s not the first American Psycho reference to pop up in this season of Industry so far! Whitney’s last name, Halberstram, is also the last name of the character Marcus Halberstram, a colleague of Bateman’s who is often mistaken for the man himself. What can it mean? Watch this space, I guess?
Get Me the Comps!
On the one hand, past performance neither guarantees nor predicts future results, as the SEC requires investment firms to remind clients. On the other hand, plus ça change! Here are some of the real-world stories that might be relevant to Industry’s fictional realm.
On Industry: Up onstage as the MP election results are read, one of Henry’s fellow losing candidates is “Count Binface from the Count Binface Party,” a person dressed like a garbage can who earned 309 votes.
IRL: Far be it from me to mock the political process of another country while we sure are going through it on this side of the pond. But I enjoyed seeing Count Binface because one of the only things I know about British politics is that they love throwing votes to randos in costumes. Like Elmo! Or Mr. Fishfinger! (The latter earned … 309 votes in 2017.) And because every true religion needs a schism, you’ll be happy to know that due to a copyright dispute in 2019, a man trying to run in an election as the character Lord Buckethead was forced to change his moniker. His new name? Why, Count Binface, natch.
On Industry: The parish priest who baptized Henry and married his parents back in the day whispers some intense bons mots to Henry: “Long before morning, you will know that what you are seeking to discover was a thing you had known all along. The first person the coward deserts is himself.”
Shortly afterward, he adds: “We choose to be ruined rather than change. We would rather die afraid than be present for a single second, kill our illusions, and live.” What is this, some kinda sermon?
IRL: The priest is paraphrasing passages from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and W.H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety.
On Industry: Whit freaks Harper out when he discusses one of his early business ventures: buying up mom-and-pop funeral homes and slashing anything that doesn’t efficiently scale. (That includes embalming and flowers.) “It’s a volume play,” he tells a weirded-out Harper, adding that the profit margins are more attractive when you burn the bodies than when you bury them.
IRL: It will probably not surprise anyone to know that this kind of thing is happening all over the world. I’m just going to drop a couple of lines from that second article and run away screaming:
- “The funeral industry is not just about digging holes," says Thierry Guissereau, founder and CEO of Funecap. "It's an infrastructure game."
- “Meanwhile, cash flows in this sector are predictable—people have to die.”
- “Another source of income that is considered more controversial is the sale of metal scraps left over from the cremation of human bodies. Many people have gold teeth, artificial hips or knee joints containing titanium, cobalt or chromium.”
Open Interest
What are we left wondering?
- Is Yasmin destined to one day become the next infamous “Grey Lady” ghost who haunts the Norton estate? Cordelia did warn her about getting murdered. Then the guy at the pub described Yasmin as “float[ing] around the house all sad and angry.” She strikes me as someone more likely to kill than be killed, but I’ll be monitoring this situation.
- Will we ever see Molly the maid again, or will she need to find new employment after that row in the pub?
- What will be the, ah, nature of Whit and Henry’s working relationship going forward? Henry did call himself an omnivore …
- This is more of a comment than a question: Given Max Minghella’s role in The Social Network, I enjoyed Whitney’s reference to “move fast and break things” in this episode!
- Uh, is that guy Henry beat up gonna, like … live? Is this a “No Real Person Involved” situation?
- Finally, what was Yasmin thinking when Henry proposed procreation during their joy ride? I asked Marisa Abela what she thought. “They’re driving away and she thinks, like, Finally, I've got him back,” Abela said. “A cloud is lifted. He is going to function in some way. And he turns around, after this hellish night, and says: ‘We should try for a baby!’ And she realizes he's completely delusional, and is not doing all of this from a place of clarity, but doing all of this from a place of extreme mania. And I think from that moment, she thinks, OK, I'm never going to be safe with this man.”
Well, dang! See you back here next week to discuss whatever must be coming down the pike after that.
