Industry
Points of Emphasis
Season 4
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
Yasmin and Harper are finally on the same side again, and God help anyone in their way.
Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO
“Other people let this happen,” Yasmin tells Henry as the couple mourns their collective future. For a brief moment, they seemed destined to have it all. They’d pass the weeks in a lavish Notting Hill townhouse, which would be not so anonymously featured in House & Garden. (How gauche.) Most weekends, they’d head out to the estate, at least until their sons — I imagined three with three dogs to match — were old enough to ship off to Winchester. Boarding school has been making Muck boys into ugly, priggish little men for generations.
If only you could short a marriage! Suddenly, Mr. and Mrs. Muck are the face of a consumer-fraud scandal and a government-corruption scandal at the same time. At least it’s not their fault: “Other people let this happen.” It may be the most telling and evocative dialogue between them this season, because they somehow both believe it. Henry reads Whitney’s menacing letter aloud to his wife, and what they hear is that someone else is to blame for all this — as if greed and gross negligence don’t carry a degree of culpability.
Henry and Yasmin are crashing down in the same room at the top of “Points of Emphasis,” but they have different worries. Yasmin wants to know how she will continue to live (the life she is accustomed to) with nothing (except the continued generosity of Lord Alexander and Otto Mostyn). To Henry, the only meaningful thing at stake is the public’s perception of his morality. Not the man’s actual morality, of course, because it’s simply bad luck to be at the center of a government bailout and then, shortly after, a massive fraud. “I am a good person, and the world shall tell that back to me; otherwise, what am I doing here?” Henry screams at his wife from such close proximity that I could feel his spittle on my face. “You’re right,” she agrees, which calms him down. At first, I wondered if she somehow found Henry’s self-righteous piffle convincing, but that’s not how Yasmin works. She doesn’t live by a code. Her operating mode is the mental gymnastics of a person who does what she needs to justify what she wants.
When Henry is done sleeping off his adulterous bender, he gets up and goes to work, because that’s what a Good Person does. Despite reading Whitney’s letter at least twice, Henry — a narcissist — seems baffled that Whitney is not more contrite. Meanwhile, Whitney — a sociopath — can’t believe Henry is not at least a little appreciative that he’s built him a banking empire, at least on paper. Afraid of being implicated, Henry decides not to go to the authorities, but the moral distinction he insists on drawing between himself and Whitney is as facile as it is exhausting. Whitney perpetrated a fraud; Henry is perpetuating it. That Henry felt a little reluctant for a few days isn’t going to matter much to the customers they swindled or, God willing, a jury of his peers.
Henry may be back on message, but he already fired Jacob last week. A new audit with a new accountant is inevitable. For Tender to survive, Whitney and Henry need to delay it. Complicate it. Make their books so impenetrable that, by the time anyone finds the holes in Accra, the bank is an indomitable force, too big to fail. Back when Tender borrowed a billion off Pierpoint, Whitney says he took Henry’s suggestion; as a hedge against their call provision, he’s been quietly buying up a stake in Pierpoint. So Whitney suggests a hostile takeover of the once golden investment firm. A big acquisition will fuel the story that Tender is a winner, and, bonus, it will muddy the jurisdictional waters for the audit. “You’re lucky you have me,” Whit tells Henry, who looks ready to curl up in a ball under his desk.
Whitney proposes Tender’s pivot back to the U.S. market to the board, which mostly agrees that attempting a takeover is a better play than waiting around to be buried. The TenderBoyz hop on a Gulfstream to New York to crash Pierpoint’s annual general meeting and announce their nefarious plan, with Whilimena’s grudging assistance. Everyone knows that al-Miraj is desperate to dump the bank; recalcitrant Whitney threatens to tank the deal by leaking misinformation unless she cedes the mic to him at tomorrow’s summit. Henry is shell-shocked through all of these machinations, but his Mr. Ripley is more alive than ever now that he’s inside this secret with the object of his infatuation. And Max Minghella, hard-eyed but soft-spoken, makes a giddy villain.
Like most sharks, though, Whitney hunts alone. In actuality, he has no plans of attending the AGM and no plans for saving Tender, and, thereby, no plans for saving Henry. Later in the episode, we’ll learn that he never even bought the stake in Pierpoint. New York is nothing more than a connecting city on his defection route. Dressed in the international disguise of a black baseball cap, he picks up his duffel bag and exits his hotel room in the dark of night. He even makes it a few hundred feet before he’s stopped by Ferdinand, who has been on to Whitney the whole time. He knows about the money he wired to a Jōhatsu company, but this isn’t a bad marriage or personal bankruptcy. You can’t outrun the FSB. And as much as Russia liked Tender, they love the idea of a Pierpoint merger. Just imagine the data set.
Whitney’s understandably nervy when he gets to the AGM, but the time to run was yesterday. “Do the fucking thing you do,” Henry tells him, which is enough of a pep talk. Though it takes him a beat to get into his usual gear of arrogance and smarm, eventually Whitney makes an offer of 1.9 times Pierpoint’s book value because Tender is serious about getting back into the U.S. dollar business. Why such an insane premium? Because the deal is 90 percent stock and Tender’s value right now is, well, volatile. The crowd is near booing, but the al-Miraj rep that Whitney has blackmailed with Hayley-furnished sex tapes lets him keep the floor a minute longer.
While Whitney and Henry crisscross the Atlantic trying to save their ship, Harper and Sweetpea are consumed with how to sink it. In the days after Harper’s speech and Eric’s CNN appearance, Tender’s stock price starts to boomerang. In fact, for all everyone on Industry has been hollering about the importance of narrative, the only place where the story of Tender’s failure is having any actual consequences is No. 10. Jenni and Lisa are called in to see the PM’s chief of staff, who wants to know how this travesty of governance happened. Lisa defends her junior in the meeting, but she overplays her hand in private. Jenni was the one at Henry’s 40th, and it’s Jenni’s signature in the Tender visitors’ log. But it’s Jenni who, thanks to her gal-pal Yas, has the Norton media apparatus on speed dial.
Luckily for her, Yasmin, who has a genuine talent for getting men to do what she wants, has already poisoned Lord Norton against his nephew and against Tender. To me, the argument isn’t very convincing, but her logic goes something like this: giving Henry the world hasn’t helped your nephew stay sober, so let’s try destroying his world. Which, to be fair to Henry, has already happened to him more than once, when he sank Lumi, and again when he lost his seat. Rock bottom is not, in and of itself, a cure for addiction.
When Jenni calls, Yasmin thinks she finally has a story that will sell: an anonymous junior minister willing to come forward and say that calls for caution regarding Tender were ignored by Labour’s higher-ups. It’s red meat to tabloid readers. But Jenni, in a last-minute reversal, refuses to throw Lisa under the bus. Only on Industry can listening to one’s conscience come off as prissy and weak. If you don’t have what it takes to implicate an innocent and dedicated public servant as the mastermind in a scandal, do you really have what it takes to run a country one day, Jenni? (And is Lisa really so innocent? an appropriately self-serving pol might ask. She let Jenni and the PM lean on her.)
Anyway, the plan B that Yasmin and Uncle Alex immediately come up with is so stupidly easy to execute that you almost have to wonder why it wasn’t plan A. Fabricating Jenni’s anonymous allegations against Lisa would take some legwork on the newspaper’s part; there could be documents to forge and interviews to invent. But if another outlet ran the story first, they could simply amplify it. After weeks of squabbling, our best girls are finally on the same side again. Yas calls Harper to feed her the bogus story that Lisa Dearn suppressed a memo that would have endangered Tender’s application with the banking regulator. Harper doesn’t care that Yasmin is embarrassingly transparent or that the rumor isn’t remotely true. Because it gets at something true: Tender is bad, and Harper knew it first.
Without hesitation, she brings the allegations to Jim’s old boss, Ed, who runs a small story in Fin Digest. Why does he, after espousing the ethics of journalism all season, do something so blatantly unethical? The narrative cannot pause for conscientious objectors who may turn out to have a story-driving purpose later on. Tell yourself he did it for Jim’s sake; maybe it was a quiet week and he needed the clicks. Lord Norton’s rag will pick up the story overnight, and the PM will be happy to run with the allegations against Lisa, because she has always been a bit snappish anyway. By the time news of Lisa’s corruption reaches Lisa, her resignation will be a fait accompli. Sure, the story will ruin Tender, too, but Yasmin has convinced Lord Norton that ruining Tender is the tender thing to do. Surprisingly, they both cry over it. Norton cries for his boy; Yasmin, darkly, for what she’s becoming.
Before Whilimena can accept Tender’s offer, Henry learns that Lisa is out, which he perceives as the first domino on his way to utter ruin. He throws an honest-to-God tantrum trying to get the jet’s satellite phone to work ASAP so that Yasmin will stop his uncle from publishing. He can’t imagine that, given how abysmally he’s treated her, Yasmin could have her own agenda. “You are too selfish to conceptualize a world without you in it,” Jim once unfairly said to Rishi. But Henry? Henry is a megalomaniac and a complete wuss. It was almost satisfying to see Whitney’s infatuation with him dissipate so quickly across “Points of Emphasis.” That man has a foreign power’s murderous security apparatus at his neck, and Henry can’t cope with a little tough love.
When Whilimena does finally call back, it’s not to accept Tender’s deal. In fact, she used Whitney’s offer to leverage an existing offer. Plus, there never could be a hostile takeover, because Whitney didn’t actually buy up a stake in Pierpoint. That was the story he told to get himself to New York, where he failed to lose his FSB-issued ankle monitor. But when Henry next calls Whitney, he hears Whitney’s phone ringing from inside his own desk drawer. “If you ever see me without it, you can assume I’m dead,” Whitney told him earlier in the episode. I wonder what feelings flood Henry when he hears that ringtone. Is it panic? Is it relief?
Harper, Sweetpea, and Kwabena celebrate. Given recent headlines, there’s going to be an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, and there’s going to be a new audit. Of course, no one gives a shit about the new audit and its findings. This whole thing — Yasmin’s treachery, Harper’s ruthlessness, Ed’s heel turn, Lisa’s demise — is about the idea of an audit. Tender will be dead in the water before anyone gets an invoice from Price Waterhouse Coopers.
Yasmin and Harper celebrate, too. They meet for a drink and a state of the union. Now that Eric has deserted Harper and Yasmin has effectively filed for divorce, they’re all each other has left. Again. They sit at the bar and tell each other what they want to hear. Harper admits to preferring the world when she’s on top and Yasmin isn’t; Yasmin is so pathetic that she’s happy just to have been in someone’s consideration. They’re relationship started with jealousy, and jealousy continues to drive it. These are two of the most conniving, merciless people on television, and they’re bonded by the twin desire to be more like the other. Harper wants to walk around London in Yasmin’s skin and watch the world open up. Yasmin wants to be necessary, like her friend Harper, who is necessary to no one except Yasmin.
They go out and they dance, hug, and agree to look after each other, but it all feels like a good-bye. Even if it’s all true and they mean everything to each other, Yasmin and Harper are stone-cold instrumentalists. They sit on the floor of the smoking area and say they’re eternal, but they’re not. They’re speculators and they’re survivors. If they have anything in common at all, at this point, it’s a refusal to imagine themselves very far into the future, where they might actually have to answer for their sins.
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