Throughout “Eyes Without a Face,” the most recent episode of Industry, the useful information tends to be hidden behind closed doors.
Sometimes this looks like the episode’s very first scene, when a dreamy facade—a gleaming Porsche parked in the circular drive of a lush and stony British boarding school—is but a front for the nightmare within: two estranged parents bickering over why their “fucked in the head” teen daughter just got expelled. (“This is what happens when a child is never left wanting,” hisses Eric Tao, played by Ken Leung. “You give her everything except what she needs,” his ex retorts.) Sometimes it looks like the episode’s very last scene, in which the enterprising analyst Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) can finally let down her guard.
But mostly it takes the form of the improbable journey that unfolds in between, as two SternTao colleagues—Sweetpea and trader Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh)—look to prove that the hotshot fintech company they’re betting against, Tender, is in fact a house built on lies. Traveling from London to Accra, Ghana, they knock on (and sneak through) all sorts of doors to see what’s on the other side. The result? Lots of dusty, empty warehouses; several dissembling smooth talkers; one knuckle sandwich; mounting evidence of corporate fraud; and even some sparks of chemistry.
“We love these ‘away days’ in Industry,” series cocreator Mickey Down told me in December. “We love taking two characters, especially that we haven’t really spent much time with, and going under the hood with them, and making them feel a connection that we haven’t yet seen.” (Also, “I’ve been trying to get Ghana into the show for a while,” added Down, whose mother is Ghanian.)
But while “Eyes Without a Face” is a destination episode, it also feels like a point of takeoff, a threshold to the second half of Industry’s fourth season. “The thing is nothing!” Sweetpea exclaims about her Tender-related discoveries in Accra. If true, she’s just uncovered some information that could wind up being worth a lot.
The Bottom Line
So, what happened in this episode?
At SternTao’s hotel suite HQ, Eric is quickly distracted from his faildaughter. Kenny from Deutsche Bank is on the phone: Tender stock is up “another 7 percent” based on better than expected usage numbers for its new app, which is bad news for SternTao’s big bet against Tender. Deutsche’s risk department is requiring SternTao to pony up additional collateral on its $250 million trading loan. If it doesn’t, and soon, Deutsche Bank will have to liquidate the firm’s other equity positions—the ones Kwabena is overseeing, and “the only ones in our book making any fuckin’ money,” he fumes—to maintain required reserves of cash.
Sweetpea lobbies to go lay eyes on some of Tender’s business operations in Ghana, and her boss Harper (My’hala) says she’ll join her. We learn a little bit about the aftermath of Episode 4’s coked-up and violent conclusion: Journalist Jim Dycker is indeed dead, and so is his Sunderland article. Rishi is facing manslaughter charges.
Harper gets a phone call that leaves her shaken up enough—we don’t yet know why—to decide that Kwabena should accompany Sweetpea to Ghana instead.
As Sweetpea and Kwabena embark on their trip, Harper and Eric go on an extended journey of their own right there in the hotel suite. They clash over their crashing-and-burning operation. They speak heart-to-heart about their broken capacities for love and their destructive ambition. They bluster and parry and ache and cry. For Industry viewers who’ve been craving some classic Harper-Eric evil-protégé energy, it’s an all-you-can-eat hotel buffet indeed.
Some memorable aspects of their conversations:
- Harper, acting like a cornered animal, wants to triple down on her Tender play, telling Eric he’s become “too timid” and is “not useful” to her. Her ideas range from taking out a different line of credit to, ah, doctoring bogus financials. Yikes.
- Eric—who is in the midst of watching his $10 million nest egg disappear—floats the idea of just liquidating everything and finding “the least painful way of boarding this whole thing up.”
- “You think if you leave your girls some money, they’re going to love you,” says Harper, a real slap-in-the-face remark that’s reminiscent of when she told Yasmin (Marisa Abela) in Episode 2: “All this stuff is not gonna get you the respect that you think you deserve.” (Who is this gal, Maggy the Frog?!)
- Eric rightly points out that Harper is a shitty boss to Kwabena.
- Eventually, an emotional Harper confides in Eric about the phone call she received. Her estranged mother—whose controlling energy split up their family and turned her into the woman she is today—has died after a freak accident. Harper cycles through being numb and angry and sobbing and strident.
- Eric, in the bathrobe again—can someone buy this man some Vuori?—confesses to some family wounds of his own. For example: His daughter was expelled for cruelly catfishing a fellow student into showing up for a date and then taking photos of the poor “child dressed like a hooker, waiting.” And also: Instead of feeling love toward his kids, Eric mostly feels … nothing. “I’m an animal that works on attention, and you don’t hold mine” is how he describes what goes through his mind when he looks at his daughter.
- Eric just wants to (but doesn’t) “feel substantial,” he says.
- Harper reveals that all she ever wanted was for her mean mother to finally perceive her as “undeniable.” Eric assures her: “You are undeniable.”
And then finally that scene ends, and I have never in my life been more relieved, because OMG YOU GUYS, I WAS SO TERRIFIED THAT THEY WERE GOING TO VERY UNHAPPILY AND ANGRILY HOOK UP. Holy moly, was that ever nerve-racking. Maybe this means these two are gonna make it after all.
Meanwhile, Sweetpea and Kwabena arrive in Ghana, where she has a thoughtful itinerary of site visits and meetings set up and he mostly just ribs her about the Erin Brockovich of it all. Sweetpea is a woman on a mission, someone who won’t take no for an answer. She bribes a security guard to get information on a payment processor purchased by Tender, outwaits an attempted stonewall by the mysterious Tender employee Tony Day, and lies about her employer—Mostyn Asset Management one minute (ha!) and Merger Market magazine the next—and her intentions to get a foot in several doors. Along the way, she confirms that no one involved with Tender’s presence in Ghana (including a lawyer named Lawyer) seems to be on the up-and-up.
As for Kwabena? At first, he contributes mostly awkward jokes, devil’s advocacy, and a very relaxed posture. “Everybody else is so obsessed with work, and Kwabena kind of … isn't,” Jimoh told me when we chatted in January. “He's really, like, separated church and state: I'm here for a good time, not a long time; let me cash my check and bounce.”
“Being as glib as you are is actually charmless,” Sweetpea scolds him as they unwind and strategize at an oceanfront bar called Auntie Freda’s and he asks why any of this even matters. “I have given this my full fucking attention, and that is a finite resource. That is why the outcome matters.”
One of the reasons Sweetpea is giving this so much attention is that she needs Tender to be lying. She’s had a hard time finding work ever since her old nudes got associated with her name and occupation. (She believes that Rishi was the one who leaked the info.) “Pink-faced, fat-necked losers laughing at me,” she huffs, but it turns out that the more upsetting reaction isn’t the mockery from strangers; it’s the silence from her mom. She and her mother are best friends, she tells Kwabena; they’ve always discussed everything. Well, everything except that. Which “just, like, broke my heart,” she says.
Kwabena is unable to fight the lure of karaoke. But while he’s singing, Sweetpea gets a phone call: It’s Tony Day, who has looked her up and has some questions. Such as: “Are you a compulsive liar, or is this a one-off?” He knows she’s not at Mostyn’s fund. She knows his business is full of shit. Day suggests that FinDigest’s Dycker was supposed to visit him and maybe help him, too; Sweetpea mentions that he’s dead. “It’s not a violent city,” he warns Sweetpea about where she’s standing, “but the beach can get quite dangerous at night.”
Can it ever! As Kwabena warbles the lyrics to the Billy Idol song “Eyes Without a Face,” Sweetpea heads to the loo—where she gets her face menacingly licked, and then brutally punched, by an intruder. It’s a terrible scene, with a broken mirror and dripping blood, but by some miracle her lovely nose remains structurally intact. Later, back at the hotel and all hopped up on the adrenaline of the situation, she quizzes her bewildered colleague about his porn habits and invites him into her bed.
“Let’s just forget that happened,” they agree the following morning.
This time, Kwabena surprises Sweetpea with his initiative: He’s done some digging on SwiftGC and has realized that he knows someone who knows someone whose family company sold the business to Tender. They pay a visit to a “Mrs. Mensah,” who laughs out loud when they mention the sale price of $50 million, written on the photo they’d seen of Tony Day holding a giant novelty check. “You can write whatever nonsense you want on them,” Mrs. Mensah says. “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”
From there, the two SternTao investigators visit what is supposedly SwiftGC. They find a busted-out building under the constant intrusion of squatters. “The thing is nothing!” Sweetpea squeals when she reaches Harper on the phone with her findings. “The thing is nothing!”
Her theory: All of Tender’s braggadocious claims about its rocket ship growth will eventually leave cooler minds (and auditors) wondering: OK, so where’s all this cash money you’ve made? And Tender’s solution? To have already spent it all on far-flung acquisitions marked up to big, dumb, fake round-number prices. A “feedback loop of fakery,” basically.
Harper wants to present these findings at an upcoming women-in-finance conference where SternTao’s lead investor, Pierre, has asked her to speak. Sweetpea wants to beef up her evidence by getting Tony Day to blow the whistle on the record. She gets on the phone with Edward Burgess, the FinDigest editor—who is walking one hell of a dog. She also goes back to confront a paranoid-seeming Day at his office and try to convince him that he’s being held captive in his own life.
Later, blessedly back in London, Sweetpea finally gets some alone time to truly take in all the events of her journey. The adrenaline has worn off, and the enormity is sinking in, and as the episode ends, all she can do is cry.
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: Sweetpea—both the character and Petche’s performance—is the star of this episode. She’s ambitious, wily, and resourceful; black-eyed and bushy-tailed; a real piece of work, epitomized by her breathless line to Harper: “Well guess what, I knocked on the fuckin’ door, bitch!!” First she dug into Tender’s annual statements. Then she pounded the pavement both in England and in Ghana. Getting punched in the face? Not great, but we’ll write it off as the cost of doing business. Sweetpea is a rarity in Industry: She’s steely but hasn’t been totally hardened yet.
“I always murder sports analogies,” co-showrunner Konrad Kay told me in December, but Petche’s work made him feel like the coach of a team. “You watch someone play, and then you’re just like, OK, how quickly can we give them the ball?” As Sweetpea, Petche takes that ball and spikes it. “She really genuinely actually cares about this, like, from within her,” Petche told me about her character. “And there are few things that will stop her.”
Credit crunched? Oh, Eric. While he may have made some good points in his chats with Harper—ones that even briefly made him seem like an adult in the room—he’s still unable to be even a father figure, let alone a good dad, to his fracturing family. Near the end of “Eyes Without a Face,” Eric turns lewdly to some hired help—listed in his phone as “Dolly Hotel Girl”—to repair his relationship with himself. But the more substantial he tries to feel, the tinier he grows.
On the watch list: I still can’t get a read on Tony Day and how many plates he’s got spinning. Is this guy a tool? A mole? An undercover agent? A local kingpin? Just laughing all the way to the bank? (I sure hope he’s been selling into strength some of that $80 million in Tender stock!) Is he baiting SternTao into a trap or feeling trapped himself? Is his expression when Sweetpea tells him that Dycker passed away one of insider information—or actual fear? I look forward to hopefully learning more from, and about, this scar-faced regional manager after dark.
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.
Since we never check in at Tender HQ this episode, I can only wonder what’s going on over there. Like, what was Yasmin’s reaction to the Rishi-Dycker news? (Some abhorrent remark, for sure.) Is Hayley laying low or making waves? (She’s almost certainly playing the long game.) Has company management appeared on any lifestyle podcasts yet? (Henry, go on Smartless!)
Whatever they’re up to over there, Sweetpea and Kwabena have now found evidence that Tender’s business isn’t usual, that there is actually less than meets the eye. The growth rates, the international expansion, the phone numbers, the giant goofy checks: fake, fake, fake, fake. How might Whitney and his minions spin this straw back into gold before it all unravels around them?
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.
Well, I lied in the section description above. I am judging Eric for hiring “Dolly Hotel Bar” to make him “feel big” and call him Daddy on the same night that he’s hosting his ex-wife and their troubled teen daughter—who is wearing a Pierpoint & Co sweatshirt, sob!—back in his room. Come on, man, can you just wait one day? (The silver lining of all this is Kwabena, who doesn’t even know the half of it, gesturing around their workspace/crash pad and telling Harper: “This whole setup? Needs a rethink.”) I’m just glad Eric didn’t manage to broadcast his proclivities directly into his daughter’s AirPods or something, like when Yasmin had that Bluetooth speaker moaning snafu in the middle of Season 1.
Anyway, compared to the extremely low bar of Eric skulking around hotel hallways, Sweetpea and Kwabena’s drunken coupling at their Accra lodging was comparatively … wholesome, by Industry standards? Sure, it did involve a violently bloody nose, the blurring of workplace boundaries, vulnerability borne out of trauma, the truly cursed phrase “premium calcium,” and a (consensually!) yanked ponytail. But at least these two mostly seemed to handle their horny work-trip outburst like two grown-ups—grown-ups who sometimes “like to be held.”
Watch Watch
Time is a flat circle, ideally powered by quartz. Here, we examine Industry’s tick-tocking timepiece(s) of the week.
I quite appreciate Sweetpea’s two-tone travel watch, the “Esther” by Breda, which in my opinion lends her just the right dash of, like, 1980s masculinity (but on a practical budget!) to help her complete her objectives in Accra.
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: Kwabena, whose last name is Bannerman, grew up visiting family in Ghana multiple times a year but has grown disconnected from the area. “Quietly, in the back of the episode,” Jimoh told me, “is a guy reconciling with the fact that he doesn’t really know this place.”
IRL: Mickey Down told me in December that Bannerman is a family name related to his mother’s side. “It's a weird mix of things and cultures,” he said of its history. “It's, like, 18th-century Scottish, but then Ghanaian.” (One Bannerman—James, born 1790—was the son of a Scottish colonel/trader and a woman from Africa’s Gold Coast; he eventually became lieutenant governor.)
On Industry: Sweetpea and Kwabena’s trip abroad uncovers what are essentially empty shell operations where alleged $50 million companies are supposed to be. They find a “Potemkin Village” and “an ouroboros,” as Kwabena says—a facade and a snake fueled by its own tail.
IRL: During the Financial Times’ investigation into Wirecard, which was discussed in this space last week, reporter Stefania Palma traveled to the Philippines and found that one entity associated with the business, PayEasy, was “located” within a tour bus company depot. And another, ConePay, had a listed address that “led to a private home in a remote village surrounded by rice paddies” where “Palma was greeted by two Filipino men, who were grooming a small white poodle and a Pomeranian,” according to The New Yorker. “Neither of them had heard of ConePay.”
On Industry: Kwabena uses some quick thinking and vague local knowledge to bullshit Tony Day that he and Sweetpea are also interested in investing in the local consumer staples company Fan Milk.
IRL: The dairy-treats company Fan Milk was one of the first to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange, with the ticker symbol FML. (Hey, that’s what most Industry characters always seem to be thinking!) These days, it’s owned by the conglomerate Danone, which bought out joint owner The Abraaj Group.
Open Interest
What are we left wondering?
- When Eric (again in the robe) looks at Sweetpea’s nudes, they are in an email titled “CITY TART” sent by someone named “Daniel Miller.” Who’s he?
- NOT the point, I know, but I’m super curious what was in the Amazon package that Harper’s mom fatally fell down the stairs while running for! And wait—it wasn’t until I typed out the words “fell down the stairs” that I’m suddenly wondering whether she actually tripped all on her own …
- I’m kind of curious about the surveillance setup inside Tony Day’s office. He doesn’t want to talk at his desk … but he’ll turn the TV to a medium volume and kind of powwow off to the side? (Sweetpea wasn’t keeping her voice down.) I also kept getting distracted by how they were standing right next to an air vent. (It would have been funny if it cut to Whit listening in on everything from the room above Tony’s office.) And if someone is monitoring the situation that closely, wouldn’t they have put two and two together during Sweetpea and Kwabena’s initial visit and sprung into action? Unless they already have.
- No but seriously, how was Sweetpea’s nose not broken???
- Sweetpea immediately tells Harper of her night with Kwabena—whereas he refrains from mentioning it to his boss with benefits. Both of them, though, are clear about telling Harper what they need going forward. (“I want to be paid,” Sweetpea says. “Don’t liquidate my positions again,” says Kwabena. “I’m not some boy.”) How will these two ways of handling information and self-advocating reverberate through the close quarters at SternTao?
It’s not unusual for a fast-growing business like Tender to have to reckon with a few skeletons in its closet. But what Sweetpea and Kwabena walk in on in Ghana looked more like a whole foundation built on bones. As “Eyes Without a Face” ends, everyone at SternTao looks and sounds deeply exhausted, even as the real battles are only about to begin.
The original version of this post stated that "Eyes Without a Face" is by David Bowie. It is by Billy Idol, not David Bowie.
