'Industry': Avengers Assemble!

It’s still early in Industry’s fourth season, but I feel ready to call it: this is shaping up to be their best season yet. Every episode so far has been an absolute banger, like a clinical depression-themed, drug-addled rollercoaster ride through the modern horrors of the financial system. The action slows down a little in “Habseligkeiten” to set the table for what seems like the central conflict of the season: investigating the payment app Tender as it tries to pivot into international banking. Harper (Myha’la), an anti-hero on her noblest day, has a hunch that Tender is ripe for a big short-sell. It’s entirely expected that everyone’s favorite Terminator trader would pounce this way. Still, Industry has a pleasant surprise up its sleeve: Harper puts together the Avengers, if the Avengers were a pack of venal bankers who would give their left eyes for a decent stock market tip.

At their most heroic, the average Industry character is a shark in varying shades of self-interest and sociopathy. Watching Harper reforge her relationship with Eric (Ken Leung) to create Stern Tao and short-sell unscrupulous companies for great profits does represent some measure of justice, albeit with major ulterior motives. Harper is almost certainly more interested in proving the value of an all-shorts firm than she is in doing undiluted good. Her decision to go after Tender is played as a last-minute move to keep investors interested. It doesn’t hurt that Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Henry (Kit Harrington) are getting into bed with Tender. Harper’s rivalry with Yas is that toxic and runs that deep. For Eric’s part, he seems to be going along with Harper’s plans rather than having an equal hand in them. His motivations aren’t the purest either: the man desperately wants to prove himself outside Pierpoint (RIP), and he knows that, for as chaotic as Harper can be, her chaos is frequently lucrative.

The Avengers of it all doesn’t really take shape until Stern Tao pulls in a couple more recruits. Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) hops on board from her work at Mostyn’s firm and is more than eager to sleuth out Tender’s very sketchy business dealings in Ghana. She joins Stern Tao after Rishi (Sagar Radia) told their office all about her OnlyFans. Is every man on Industry bound to be a sludge pile of macho toxicity? It felt that way, but then our old friend Kenny (Connor MacNeill) came back! Viewers might recall that Kenny was Yas’s monster of a boss back in season 1. He went away to work on himself and go to rehab before returning in season 2 as a changed man. A character changing for the better is pretty rare on Industry. Of course, Kenny is in it to make money, but of all of Stern Tao, he has some of the cleanest hands.

Harper’s superteam wouldn’t resonate as much if they didn’t have hateable opponents that make Stern Tao seem noble in comparison. It’s telling that while Harper and Eric assemble their team, Tender is making overtures to some of the worst people they can find. Whitney (Max Minghella), Henry, and Yasmin head to Austria to put the finishing touches on a deal to take over a 300-year-old bank owned by the Bauers. Johanna and Mortiz Bauer are moldering ghouls whose family financially supported Hitler and proudly display his pedestrian art. They’re contemptuous of Tender, and antisemitically snipe at Whitney, but they ultimately need Tender’s money. Like Hydra, the Bauers are diet Nazi villains that are easy to hate. Perfectly foul foils for Stern Tao.

Industry has no interest in heroes or in rehabilitating villains, so comparisons to The Avengers or any Marvel movie can go only so far. If anything, it’s more likely for someone at Stern Tao to defect if the price is good enough. All the same, it was exciting to see Harper’s supergroup of finance fiends come together, and I can’t wait to see how messy their fight against Tender gets.