The Industry season four finale really went there. As things drew to a close, we were left with a disturbing vision of girls being served to rich men on a platter at a far-right fundraising dinner.
Presiding above it all? Yasmin (Marisa Abela), now morphed into a twisted version of Ghislaine Maxwell, telling Harper (Kiernan Shipka) that her decision to become a high-class madam to society’s most powerful was “necessary.”
Oof. Industry’s decision to tackle Epstein has been a bold gamble, and one that’s defied the naysayers who argued the show should never have left the confines of Pierpoint & Co, the English bank setting for the first three seasons.
What was Industry without Pierpoint? Was the pivot too big? As it turns out, no, because Pierpoint was never what showrunners Konrad Kay and Mickey Down were interested in. They were always interested in power, and what happens when power intersects with money: namely, abuse.
So with that in mind, its desire to examine the Jeffrey Epstein saga makes total sense.
“If you look at the scale of the Epstein files, it feels like the world of conspiracy theory but actually made real,” Kay told The Cut. “The level of the density of the emails and the evil of it is almost too hard to compute. It’s the ultimate behavior of unchecked power — the type that moves with impunity because it’s under a rock. Industry has always been interested in lifting that rock up.”
Industry is a show that’s been eerily on the nose when it comes to exploring (and in some cases, anticipating) topical events: in addition to tackling Epstein, season four has focused heavily on Fintech and tech fraud, drawing strong parallels with the Wirecard scandal that rocked the industry in 2020.
From there, we’ve peered into the right wing’s increasing fascination with fascism – here demonstrated via the loathsome Austrian Hitler sympathisers Moritz-Hunter Bauer (Sid Phoenix) and his mother, Johanna (Susanne Wuest), who end up attending a fundraising party for Industry’s version of Reform UK – and even touched on the spectre of Russian influence trying to destabilise the West.
All of these are issues that feel very real – which is the point. “The show was inevitably going to become about how capitalism and fascism intersect because of the time in which we’re writing it,” Kay said, “We knew that if we kept following the money, if we kept talking about the feedback loop between politics and media and finance, then that was always going to happen.”
Still, Epstein feels like the most compelling rock for the show to peer under, simply because of how toxic an issue it is. The myth of the Epstein saga has grown with every drop of redacted emails, revealing just how many people were snared in his web – and just how many powerful people would (as per Yasmin), “swim through sewage to cum.”
For those who have been following Industry for a while, the breadcrumbs have always been there, especially in Yasmin’s narrative, which the showrunners have been seemingly nurturing since season three, and which have drawn increasingly obvious parallels to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s de-facto madam and procurer of underage girls.
Damaged nepo-baby whose father may or may not have abused her? Check. Said father going missing at a young age amid murky circumstances – both from their multi-million pound yachts? Check – Robert Maxwell’s yacht was named the Lady Ghislaine; unsurprisingly, Charles Hanani’s is called the Lady Yasmin.
After the death of the patriarch, the family money dries up overnight, forcing both women to find alternate means of supporting themselves. And like Ghislaine, Yasmin finds it as a fixer: bringing together groups of powerful men for intimate dinners where extremist and unsavoury views can be freely expressed.
Because money and power inevitably also mean sex, the show also takes time to explore Yasmin’s twisted relationship with sexuality.
Yasmin only wants sex when she’s in control; at one point, she orders Hayley to pleasure her husband and lights a cigarette as she watches. In that moment, she’s both voyeur and string-puller, a role you suspect suits her perfectly, and that’s reminiscent of Maxwell instructing young girls how to pleasure Epstein, before standing back and watching them do it.
This final, explicit transformation from victim to madam, aided and abetted by Hayley, merely feels like the natural endpoint to Yasmin’s journey: the point where the implicit becomes explicit. But bravo to the show for having the patience to show us her gradual descent into hell – as well as refusing to play this as a story of ‘good or bad’, or even of straightforward victims.
“Yasmin is latching on to the ascendant force,” Down said to The Cut. “She’s doing what will feather her nest and allow her to survive.”
Forever looked down on and dismissed – by her father, her boss, her friends and would-be lovers – Yasmin is a victim, but one that’s finally found a way to claim some agency, by embracing the system and making it work for her.
The show’s willingness to say the unsayable – as well as hooking itself to one of the dirtiest, most toxic stories of our times – does risk tainting it, or indeed dating it. But it does also lay bare society’s obsession with money, and willingness to turn a blind eye when money is involved: just look at Henry Muck (Kit Harington), convicted of serious fraud offences and yet finishing the show fishing and drinking in his countryside estate, with only an ankle monitor to show for his crimes.
This season has definitely not been perfect. It’s veered off course, and indulged itself with too many subplots – Rishi, the Labour Party’s incompetence – when it should have focused in on its central story.
But it has the guts to say the unsayable, at a time when everybody else would prefer to forget it existed entirely. That, surely, is worthy of praise. And it’s very Industry.
Industry Season 4 is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
