“I feel like I’m in a room with a reptile,” sneers Henry Muck (Kit Harington) to his fellow fintech executive Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) near the start of Industry’s most recent episode, “Points of Emphasis.” It’s an apt remark. Over the course of four seasons of HBO’s lowlifes-of-high-finance drama, plenty of ruthless schemers and selfish dreamers have made a name for themselves. But it’s Whitney who stands out as being particularly cold-blooded and evasive, capable of disappearing through cracks, camouflaging his presence, or dropping a tail. Whatever it takes to survive.
Henry isn’t the only one who gets the heebie-jeebies from Whitney. Minghella himself has perceived his character as something of a lizard man right from the start. “With Whitney, he's really a foreign entity to any human being,” Minghella told Men’s Health earlier this month. “He’s such an alien person.” In a Zoom conversation with The Ringer a week and a half ago, Minghella told me that the character on paper felt so unknowable to him that when Industry’s showrunners first said they would love for him to play Whitney, his reaction was: Why?
“That was a really honest and exciting conversation where I sort of outlined a lot of my fears around the part and my excitement around the role,” Minghella said about the manipulative, charming Tender COO with icy ambition and unclear provenance. “I was really intimidated by it and how far away I felt from this character.” Even as he shot Industry, Minghella still wasn’t always sure what Whitney was all about, an insecurity that wound up infusing the performance in unexpected ways. Scenes that he felt he’d played as sincere often later struck him as shifty on-screen. Scenes where he was trying to appear “purely Machiavellian” instead had “some real humanity and sensitivity,” Minghella thought. “It wasn’t really, honestly, until I watched the show that I started to have a sense of Whitney’s truth,” he said.
In “Points of Emphasis,” though, truth is a toxic asset, not just to Whitney but also to pretty much everyone else. Time and again in the episode—in boardrooms and bedrooms, on private planes and over the phone—characters either insist or are forced to admit that artifice makes for a better investment.
Whitney, beginning to flail against Tender’s certain doom, tells the Pierpoint executive Wilhelmina Fassbinder (Georgina Rich) that if she doesn’t let him speak at their annual meeting, he’ll simply warn Wall Street about “the undeclared sovereign wealth” propping up her institution. “Well, me saying it is almost as bad as it existing,” he threatens when she protests that no such funding exists.
Later, in a cordial but crackling convo between old Pierpoint colleagues Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and Harper Stern (Myha’la), Yasmin notes she was “a lone dissenting voice” within Tender who had tried to speak up about the legacy management’s shenanigans. “You weren’t though, right?” Harper asks. “What difference does it make?” Yasmin coos. She has a similar exchange when the politician Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly) decides she’s not comfortable saving her bacon by feeding the media lies about her mentor, Lisa Dearn (Chloe Pirrie). Upon hearing the word lies, Yasmin corrects Jennifer: “points of emphasis,” she says.
Elsewhere in this season’s penultimate episode, Harper helps Yasmin launder conjecture into headlines—helping herself, too. Dearn’s governmental career is unceremoniously derailed in spite of the truth. Even the foreign assets carrying out a kidnapping in a hotel parking garage fit the episode’s theme: “Just act like the great lie of your life is not that different from its only truth,” Tender infiltrator Ferdinand Schwarzwald (Nico Rogner) growls at Whitney. The “or else” is implied.
The next morning, Whitney tries spinning garbage into gab with his passionate, last-stand oratory about why Tender should purchase Pierpoint. “Your company is falling apart!” someone heckles, and for a moment, I wondered whether we were about to see Whitney laughed out of the room, for reality to prevail.
Instead, he dodges the facts with a simple “fake news!” and keeps on fibbing on for a little bit longer. One might think that sunlight makes the best disinfectant, as the old saying goes. But one thing about reptiles is that they love to bask in the heat.
The Bottom Line
So, what happened in this episode?
“Points of Emphasis” kicks off in Henry and Yasmin’s cursed Tender-owned bedroom. Does “Tender-owned” mean it’s bugged? Probably, and I do like envisioning some big bad minion tasked with surveilling Mr. and Mrs. Muck’s marital spats. In this one, Yasmin and Henry fret about Whitney’s menacing “guru terrorist manifesto.” Who knew what, and when? What the hell to do now? “I’m not guilty,” pleads Henry. “I don't think that matters anymore, does it, Henry?” Yasmin snaps.
We learn that Henry has spent the bulk of their fortune not on drugs—though probably also not not on drugs—but on Tender stock. As Yasmin panics about what that means for their future and Henry moans that society doesn’t understand that he’s a good person striving to be better, dammit, the song “The Promise” by When in Rome plays. I’m sorry, but I’m just thinking of the right words to say, it goes.
Henry heads to Tender HQ, where he calls Whitney a reptile and asks why he shouldn’t go to the authorities. Whitney hatches a plan: All they have to do is buy Pierpoint in a hostile takeover, find new accountants, and presto chango: The “transformational merger” can help hide all of Tender’s malarkey under the cover of a bigger, better balance sheet. If you say so! Henry doesn’t buy it, but unfortunately, he also can’t resist the lure of Whitney saying: “Believe in us. One more time.” At a board meeting, the two sweet-talk the room into agreeing, and Whitney concludes with a “Thank you, everyone” that I swear is in the exact same cadence as “Thank you, mommy” from Episode 4, when Haley (Kiernan Shipka) flashes her ass at Yasmin.
Whitney and Henry fly to New York for the meeting, calling Wilhelmina en route to tell her that they intend to take over her enterprise. (I like her bathrobe, and I also like how Whitney defaults to threatening her while Henry’s chosen tack is all: “Al-Miraj never loved you and had no idea what to do with you.” So tender! Pun not intended, but acknowledged!)
That night, as Henry tosses and turns in his hotel room, Whitney packs a sensible duffel (footage of his passport’s POV here) and tries to get the heck outta dodge. Instead, he’s grabbed by the scruff of his neck by—hey, wait, isn’t that the drifter that Rishi (Sagar Radia) and Dycker (Charlie Heaton) regrettably brought home from the pub?! The plot thickens! It thickens even more when Whit is taken into an SUV to get reamed out, on behalf of Cozy Bear and Co., by the drifter dude (Dez is his name), as well as none other than … Ferdinand.
It’s one of the first times, if not the first time, in Industry that we’ve seen Whitney whimpering at the mercy of others. All he wants to do is escape, but all that his handlers want him to do is seal the deal so their overlords back in the motherland can worm their way into Pierpoint’s data on top of everything else. (Not the first time, and won’t be the last!) “I think there's joy in seeing Whitney crumble,” Minghella told me. “There's joy in seeing him cowardly. I have a real chuckle when Whitney, after he's kidnapped in New York, steps out of that Suburban and just looks so pathetic.”
Whitney also looks pathetic the next day, at the Pierpoint meeting. Watching the episode, I jotted down: “Whitney = clammy AF!” It’s jarring to see such a smooth operator hyperventilate, but Henry knows how to soothe him: “You need to fucking perform,” he hisses. “Do that thing you do.” (It's interesting to compare this with the pep talk Eric, played by Ken Leung, gave Harper in the last episode, in which he basically told her not to fuck up. She needs a chip on her shoulder to get things done, whereas Whitney requires an ego massage.) Whitney’s speech is tryhard, cocky, and somehow effective—at least in the moment. He seems to grow more confident with every word, leeching power from the attention of an audience.
Minghella told me that he had initially assumed he’d get a little bit of a break after last week’s Whitney-heavy episode, “Dear Henry.” Quite the opposite. “I do remember being quite surprised that Whitney had so much juicy stuff in Episode 7,” he said. “And I think what was great about that episode is Whitney is so exhausted at that point and is cracked completely. And Max also was so exhausted that I had cracked completely. … You can see it in the performance, I think.”
While all of this is taking place, Yasmin—desperate in her own way—has been busy building a Rube Goldberg machine out of any and all levers of power within reach: newspapers, politicians, even Harper. There’s a lot of media-and-politics stuff in this episode. Too much, I say! So I’ll relegate it all to some bullet points:
- The various political operatives—Lisa, Jennifer, and our boy Ricky Martyn with a y (Andrew Sheridan)—argue over who ought to take the blame for the government’s involvement in Tender.
- Jennifer visits Yasmin, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), and a real weasel of a tabloid editor named Kevin Rawle (Pip Torrens) for a strategy session on how to best shiv her mentor, Lisa, via the press. It goes poorly—Jennifer ultimately doesn’t want to lie but plants some seeds for Yasmin. She may not have found any smoking-gun memo, but that needn’t be the end of her story.
- Yasmin visits Harper at the hundo-thousand-a-month hotel suite formerly known as SternTao HQ. “Lonely?” Yasmin asks. “Always,” Harper says.
- A game of telephone ensues: Yasmin mentions to Harper that she heard rumors that a cautionary memo about Tender was suppressed by a high-ranking minister. Harper doesn’t seem to believe her, but she does need a negative catalyst for her anti-Tender trade …
- And so Harper meets Edward Burgess (David Wilmot), the FinDigest editor, at a pub to encourage him to float the allegation—even if it’s in a just-asking-questions sort of way. This scene is memorable for three reasons: Burgess lamenting journo Jim Dycker’s death as “the saddest thing in the world—unfulfilled potential,” Burgess calling Harper out for her bullshit, and Burgess pounding a lot of Guinness while Harper’s pint glass remains full (and a dude fiddles with his fly in the background). (Whitney-esque!)
- The “red-top” tabloid uses FinDigest’s article as the premise for running a more inflammatory one of its own. And just like that, Dearn is officially scapegoated and forced to resign. It’s never a good sign when one finds oneself quoting Anne Boleyn at the guillotine while at one’s place of business.
- Yasmin has a tearful phone call with Henry’s uncle (who is sitting at his desk beneath a portrait of himself, as one does) in which they agree that this will all be devastating for Henry but that it’s for the best. “He’s lived his entire life without any consequences,” argues Yasmin. “We did everything we can for him.”
On the plane back from New York, Henry has nightmares about his father leaving. “Everyone we love has already started the process of going away” is Whitney’s helpful response. The negative Tender headlines have just hit the press, and Henry panics at Whitney’s calm: “You can’t construct a universe where nothing’s real!” he rages. “No one can really live like that!” Whitney glowers at Henry. “Do you know why you can’t regulate your emotions?” he says. “Because you’re a fucking child.”
As the Flock of Seagulls song “I Ran (So Far Away)” kicks in, more scenes of chaotic conflict unfold. Jennifer receives a delivery of dozens of red roses, their petals already beginning to decay, with a note from Lisa calling her a Tory. Henry returns to the Tender offices, where a temp tells him that his wife resigned earlier that day and that Whitney has been “in and out.” He gets a phone call from Wilhelmina informing him that Whitney is a charlatan and that Pierpoint used Tender’s offer to land a different sale of her company, OKbye! And Jennifer calls out Yasmin for a multitude of behaviors, ranging from her little media blitz to her mistreatment of Henry. The phrase “marriage of convenience” is used.
As the episode ends, Harper, Sweetpea (Miriam Petche), and Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh) celebrate Tender’s imminent downfall before Harper and Yasmin meet up for a big night out and a lot of drunken confessions. So many things in “Points of Emphasis” are premised on lies, but when the two of them sit at the bar saying things like “I’m so fucking soft” (Yasmin) and “I really resented you for being a breathing example of how I was less” (Harper), it feels like nothing but the truth.
Turns of Leverage
On Industry, characters love borrowing trouble—and are always up to double down. Whose bets are paying off this week, and who is in the midst of a downward spiral?
Leveling up: Harper has a lot to celebrate now that her fund’s biggest/only investment idea is finally really paying off. But the smoothest operator in “Points of Emphasis” has to be Wilhelmina. Whitney may have helped bring down Eric, but between last season and this one, Wilhelmina has now officially pulled the rug out on both men. She is here to outwit swindlers and chow down on McDonald's—and now she’s all out of swindlers.
Credit crunched? One of my favorite elements of this season has been Henry’s subtle facial expressions, from his aristocratic, tight, “Who the fuck is this guy?” smile toward Moritz-Hunter Bauer (Sid Phoenix) in Episode 3 to his increasingly furrowed “This seems sus” looks during the auditor dinner last week. Henry has at times shown himself to be no fool—no one else has roasted both Yasmin and Whitney the way he has!—yet he is also repeatedly played for one.
“I think he looks to Whitney, in a sense, like a big brother or father,” Harington told me during a press day at the start of the season. “Someone who's successful that has done the thing that he wants to do, being a titan of business, and pulls him out of his failure loop, and he sees as a kind of savior. And then he is thrown under the bus and betrayed.” Near the end of “Points of Interest,” the look on Henry’s face just says: Welp, I’m fucked.
On the watch list: Yasmin, that “hard bird,” certainly keeps herself busy this episode, ticking off a lot of the items on her to-do list: Call Alexander! Bully Jennifer! Take down her husband! Smooch Harper! But with her marital nest egg scrambled by Tender, it’s unclear how or whether those efforts will hatch.
Last week, during Harper and Whitney’s phone conversation, it had felt for a time like those two were deeply simpatico. But this week, it’s Yasmin who keeps reminding me of the reptile man, both of them cornered animals with silver tongues. Just as Whitney talks up his fake offshore entities and his grandiose plans for a transformational merger, Yasmin fabricates the notion of a damning memo that goes all the way to the top. The smugness on her face as she tells Harper “No, I think this is the story” chilled me to the bone.
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.
Day is done, gone the sun? While Tender had a brief dead-cat bounce at the start of the episode thanks to Tony Day’s appearance on CNN, the political headlines have the stock down 77 percent as “Points of Emphasis” winds to a close. And whether or not the news has hit the tape yet, Pierpoint’s agreement to sell to another institution is the nail in the coffin. Speaking of coffins, something tells me the Russians won’t be happy about how that played out.
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.
Most characters were too busy covering their asses in this episode to get any action. But there were still two financial-sexual story lines of note.
First, at the Pierpoint annual meeting, we get to see—and see Henry clock—one tangible outcome of the Abu Dhabi romp/kompromat op that Hayley mentioned last week to Yasmin. “Mr. Halberstram’s offer must be heard,” says a compromised Al-Miraj bigwig, pointedly quieting the restless room so that Whitney can better peddle his empty promises. That’s one mission accomplished.
Second were those final scenes of “Points of Interest,” sure to pique interest. Harper and Yasmin banter at the bar to Enya, make out on a dance floor to Daft Punk (just a tiny bit, to our knowledge), and plop down on some dirty ground to rip cigs in ripped pantyhose and whisper sweet nothings like: “You have no idea how good I feel right now.” Girls, same.
Watch Watch
Time is a flat circle, ideally powered by quartz. Here, we examine Industry’s tick-tocking timepiece(s) of the week.
By day, Harper has been wearing a baby-blue-faced TAG Hueur Link Date lately. “That was a new one to this season, which I love,” Myha’la told me a couple of weeks ago. “But I also have Harper's watch from, I want to say, Season 2. It's just, like, a pretty simple Cartier, leather band. That's her nighttime going-out watch, but that's the one I remember. That's the one she's had the longest.” Two fine choices! Still, one tiny detail I enjoyed about “Points of Emphasis” is that when Harper and Yasmin decide to look after one another and go party like 17-year-olds in a Lorde song, neither of them needs a watch at all to have a good time.
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: At the start of the episode, Tender stock is actually up 10 percent despite Harper’s public outing of the company’s shady practices.
IRL: Lately I’ve enjoyed following the saga of Carvana, which short-sellers have been banging the drum about for years but whose stock price is only just now beginning to fall back to earth. (I sure hope this guy was patient/solvent!) I won’t digress into the details too much, other than to say that (a) Hindenburg Research’s takedown is a fun adventure and (b) that adventure involves … Dan Quayle?
On Industry: Tender tries to buy Pierpoint Al-Miraj.
IRL: Wirecard tried to buy Deutsche Bank in 2019.
On Industry: Various politicians try to pass the buck about who was bullish on Tender from the start.
IRL: While it doesn’t map as neatly onto the Industry plot as the Wirecard scandal has, the ongoing story of Rachel Reeves, the U.K.’s “chancellor of the exchequer” (all-time job title?), and her dogged support of the fintech company Revolut contains a lot to ponder, from the phrase “a boot on the neck of business” to a visit to HQ to a Russian-born, kitesurfing CEO.
On Industry: The Russians note that Whitney made a payment of $120,000 to “Sunpath Living Residential Solutions, the johatsu disappearing company in Saitama Prefecture.”
IRL: Lines like this one are why having captions on while watching Industry is an absolute must. Anyway, TIL that in Japan, there are “night-moving” companies that can help a person “evaporate.” If Whitney had managed to pull this off, I’d have no doubt in my mind that in a few years we’d be getting a sequel to People Who Eat Darkness.
On Industry: In his speech at the Pierpoint Al-Miraj annual meeting, Whitney compares Tender to the greats: “Railroad to the internet, the history of industry in this country is pockmarked by a slew of disinformation from those who don't stand to benefit from radical thought or the displacement of worn-out structures.”
IRL: During a Disney shareholder meeting in Philadelphia in 2004, one member of a consortium seeking to oust then-CEO Michael Eisner got up and began: “It’s fitting that we’re meeting in a city they call ‘the cradle of liberty.’ After all, what we’re involved in here is a fight for our rights—a fight against the tyranny of a dysfunctional management and an ineffectual board.”
On Industry: Pierpoint leverages Tender’s offer to close a sale to Temasek instead.
IRL: Well if this isn’t Industry-core, I don’t know what is.
Open Interest
What are we left wondering?
- I was intrigued by Yasmin’s reference to Henry hating his mom—not to mention Whitney’s colorful invocation of Henry suckling at her teat—because I’ve been wondering for a while: What is/was her deal? I probably need to comb back through the lore with a finer-toothed comb, but as far as I can remember, we haven’t learned much about Ma Muck throughout Henry’s two seasons. During one big blowout fight in Episode 2, Yasmin mentions that Lord Norton told her, about Henry’s father, that “he frittered everything away and lived here under his brother-in-law's charity.” So is Henry’s mother Norton’s sister? Which brings me to my next question …
- Why is Norton doing all this? In “Points of Emphasis,” I don’t quite understand his motivations for always being up to help do Yasmin’s bidding (especially behind Henry’s back). Is this all inheritance and/or prenup related, or something more?
- Did Whitney finally flee, or did he get neck-walked into an elevator by Dez and Ferdinand for the last time? It seems meaningful that Whitney told Henry early in the episode that “if you ever see me without [my phone], you can assume I’m dead” and that one of the final scenes is Henry staring at … the abandoned phone. On the other hand, it also seems meaningful that Whitney has multiple devices, so.
- Early in the episode, we see the return of a right-wing politician named Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft), previously glimpsed in the season premiere. Will we see him again in the finale?
What else might we see in the finale? Eagle-eyed observers have noted that Adam Levy, who played Yasmin’s father, Charles Hanani, is in the cast list, which can’t be good—especially considering the way Yasmin teared up while telling Harper that she grew up “at someone’s mercy.” Something more must be brewing with Jennifer Bevan, even if [lowers voice to a whisper] I don’t care. (What I do care about: Sweetpea being shown her dollars.) We’re also due for a little visit from my favorite chaos agent, Hayley. And Yasmin and Henry haven’t crossed paths in a while. “I don't think Yasmin is equipped to be anyone's carer,” Abela told me at the start of the season. “You know, she's vindictive.” Wherever Industry’s story goes, that’s the truth.
