Industry Just Aired a Masterpiece Homage to Gothic Horror That Puts Saltburn to Shame

This article discusses, in detail, the events of Industry Season 4, Episode 2.

Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have, over the course of four seasons, upgraded their HBO drama about young finance employees in London from smart soap to somehow-even-more-entertaining laboratory for the dissection of capitalism. While Season 3 mixed beakers labeled ethics and money, with explosive results, this year’s arc puts love and sex under the profit-motive microscope. If there was ever any doubt that Down and Kay were bearish on the combination, it was dispelled within the opening scenes of the premiere, which paired characters played by two famous former child actors—Kiernan Shipka, a.k.a. Mad Men’s Sally Draper, and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton—for a tawdry, deceptive, disastrous hookup. Industry is where innocence goes to die, choked out in bed by various personifications of greed.

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In keeping with that central theme, the season has a cast now entirely liberated from the Pierpoint & Co. trading floor circling a payment processing startup called Tender as it cuts ties with an OnlyFans-esque platform, Siren, in a play to become a mainstream “bank killer.” But in its second episode, which aired on Sunday—and is, in my estimation, the show’s greatest hour yet—Industry takes a detour from the London rat race. From the entry-level pairing of Shipka’s Type A executive assistant character and Heaton’s sweaty finance reporter, we ascend the class ladder to the country estate of Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and his bride, the disgraced heiress and Pierpoint castoff formerly known as Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela). Down and Kay, who directed as well as wrote the episode, make inspired use of this setting as a backdrop for a contemporary reimagining of Gothic tropes that makes Saltburn look lazy. (It is!)

Titled “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” it opens with Henry losing his MP race to a stiff Labour candidate, Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly). We revisit the depressive baronet, who, last season, humiliated himself with a catastrophic green-energy IPO, sometime later, as he mopes about his estate—a literal museum, where Henry growls at tour groups while playing an antique piano in his dressing gown. It’s his 40th birthday, an occasion that has made him even more miserable than usual, and Yas is throwing him a party. Also on hand to scold him out of his funk is Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), a newspaper publisher of waning influence. He already knows just about everything we’ll discover by the end of the episode: that Henry’s father killed himself on his own 40th birthday, that young Henry witnessed the suicide. “This family hates birthdays,” Norton drawls, much later, in an understatement so grim, it’s funny.

For her part, Yas has come to see her new marriage—like her family and career—as a failure. Henry hasn’t just lost his ambition; he’s lost his libido, going so far as to advise her to sleep with other people. Stymied in her own professional endeavors but ever resourceful, Yas has invited both Bevan and Tender’s co-founder and acting CEO, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), to the party in hopes of shoring up his prospects. “I’m a spectator and a caregiver,” she laments to her aunt, Cordelia (Claire Forlani), that night. The older woman’s romantic advice is as ruthless and transactional as any MBA’s negotiation strategy. “You cannot be too afraid of what you’ll lose,” she says, referring to Yas’ fear of losing the wealth, status, and protection of Henry’s family. “You’ll become too pliant, and then you will lose it. It doesn’t matter how much a man tells you he loves you. You never give them unconditional love because they will weaponize it.” In conclusion: “Get off your knees.” It’s a knockout monologue—one that sets up Yas’ Emmy-worthy tirade when she finds Henry holed up in his room doing drugs, and that draws out the Dangerous Liaisons undertones of the party’s powdered-wig-and-corset dress code. 

The 18th century theme resonates on a few levels. I couldn’t look at this manor full of sloshed nobles without thinking of the aristocrats who got guillotined in the French Revolution. Concurrent with all this decadence was the rise of Gothic literature. The ancient estate and Henry’s melancholic mien put us deep into the tropes of that genre before the plot even gets moving. Then, halfway through the episode, a ghost appears—though we can’t be certain until much later that that’s what the mysterious guest known as the Commander (Jack Farthing) is. 

He arrives at exactly the right time. A chaotic scene is unfolding as Henry rejoins the party in the dining room, a pharmacy’s worth of intoxicants coursing through his veins, and lays into Bevan. Suddenly, the Commander is at his side. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Henry greets him. The latecomer could be an old school chum; the two men appear to be the same age. What we know immediately is that he’s an enabler, hustling Henry off to the pub in pursuit of “a spit-and-sawdust tryst with a local type.” What they actually get is a baronet-walks-into-a-bar joke: there’s the priest who baptized Henry (Roy Sampson), the chambermaid Yas chewed out that morning (Esther O’Casey), and her irreverent suitor (Nye Occomore), who gleefully informs Henry of the vicious gossip circulating about his wife. In sharp contrast to the social mobility happening in the tech and finance industries, here is a place where centuries-old class snobbery is so entrenched, the commoners sneer at a noble marrying a woman who talks like a “North London git.” Henry clocks the guy, proving that his passion for Yas—and for life in general—hasn’t fully run dry. “I bet that’s the best you’ve felt in ages,” cheers the Commander.

Just about everyone in Industry has a horrible parent, is a horrible parent, or both. But the intertwined storylines of “The Commander and the Grey Lady” underscore the awfulness of both Henry’s and Yasmin’s late fathers, and suggest how that shared pain has forged a bond strong enough to survive his spoiled blueblood’s midlife crisis. There’s a real love-is-dead moment when Yas spots Cordelia, who was just rhapsodizing about the purity of her romance with a younger man, literally on her knees before a stubby, old rich guy. Yas kicks her out, but not before hearing her defend Yas’ abusive “bon vivant” dad—and, shockingly, fail to deny that anything incestuous transpired between the siblings during their “very bohemian childhood.” Is this Lady Muck finally freeing herself from the corrosive influence of the Hanani family?

Though suspicion regarding the Commander’s identity mounts throughout the second half of the episode, as the ghost interacts only with the deliriously high Henry, it isn’t confirmed until he bares his bloody, slit throat in the predawn gloam. “You’ll see me soon,” he promises his son. Henry recalls words of wisdom that the priest whispered in his ear hours earlier: “Long before morning, you will know that what you have seemed to discover was a thing that you had known all along.” Henry seems to interpret this as a reinforcement of the Commander’s prophecy—that he, too, is fated to kill himself on his 40th birthday. Before sunrise, he creeps into the garage where the antique car he associates with his father’s suicide is parked and starts to inhale fumes. But at the last second, he imagines Yasmin’s voice calling to him and escapes. Maybe the thing he’d known all along was that she was worth living for. How’s that for Gothic romance?

If there’s anything keeping “The Commander” from perfection, it’s an unnecessarily expository flashback to Henry’s childhood late in the episode, when we already know or can guess all the relevant backstory, complete with a shot in which we see the young boy replaced by Harington. But the hour is a masterpiece regardless, dense with deft dialogue, brilliant performances (especially by Abela and guest star Farthing, who was great as a dissipated upper-cruster in Rain Dogs), and perceptive character development. In the background of the love story and the ghost story, Down and Key do a lot to connect this field trip to the season-long arc. When Henry meets Whit, we see that each has what the latter needs: “Longevity in Britain is about access,” the Gatsby-like American tells the aristocrat he’s courting to be the face of Tender. “I need a partner. A native partner.” One Harper Stern (Myha’la) makes a cameo; she and Bevan, both women excelling in their careers, challenge Yas’ relegation to helpmate. (“All of this stuff is not going to get you the respect you think you deserve,” says Harper, and that you think is doing a lot of work.) Shipka’s Hayley Clay shows up, too, in an intriguing quasi-flirtation with Yas.

The final moments of the episode are like a mad lightning round. Instead of using his father’s car to kill himself, Henry pulls up to his manor, a frantic Yas runs out to meet him, and they have sex on the hood. Always hyperconscious of Industry’s place in pop culture, and particularly its connection to other shows where its cast has appeared, Down and Kay have Norton look on, from a high window, and proclaim: “Spring is coming.” (Does Yasmin lock eyes with him? Of course she does.) You bet your dragons that this is a Game of Thrones triple entendre, one that sends up Harington’s whole Jon Snow character arc. It’s a pretty broad scene, but I laughed.

But Industry wouldn’t be Industry if it ended on a purely happy note. In the car, Henry unburdens himself by telling Yas the full truth about his father’s death. Now, they realize, he’s survived the old man by a day. Psychologically, this frees him from the curse of the suicidally idle rich. He’s ready to take Whit’s job offer: “A man needs work. I think that’s why I’m here after all: to do good work.” Where does that leave Yas, whose skills at forging connections and manipulating men have afforded him this opportunity? “Maybe we should try for a child,” Henry calls out as they speed away from the home that represents his past. Yasmin says nothing, but even with sunglasses on, we can read her expression: what the hell? Her reward for enabling Henry to “do good work” will, apparently, be indefinite relegation to the domestic sphere. While we’re talking about references to other HBO prestige dramas, this coda reminded me of Tom and Shiv in the backseat of a chauffered SUV at the end of Succession, she having just defeated her brothers by handing control of the family empire to her sycophant husband, whose abilities are no match for her own. Less a ripoff than a reminder that smart women have faced similar fates since time immemorial, the twist is almost as brutal on this show as it was on that one.