Paypal of Bukkake
Season 4
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Harper Stern is back, expensively cocooned in gray suiting and capable of almost anything.
Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO
A few years ago, people started signaling they were fans of the BBC/HBO sleeper hit Industry by wearing purple hoodies emblazoned with Pierpoint & Co., the firm that brings the series’ mishmash of finance grunts together in season one. In season four, after a misstep in the direction of “ethical investing,” the firm’s London trading floor is no longer. The show that began as a bottom-up look at the cutthroat world of finance has metamorphosed into something more dismal. Harper is the head of her own fund by 30. Newlywed Yasmin is pulling strings among the peerage. With every season, the duo seems less like coltish rivals in a workplace drama and more like twisted reflections in a cracked mirror — the tortured love story at the center of a show that has more incisive things to say about class and money and image and desire than it ever did about banking.
When we first meet Harper again, she’s emerging from a chauffeured Range, expensively cocooned in layers of gray suiting. As she strides through the office she runs at Mostyn Asset Management, everyone appears afraid of her. Or perhaps afraid for her. She was hired by Henry’s godfather to run a shorts-only fund, but her ascent through London’s finance elite has clearly stalled between seasons. Her team can’t outperform the market. Her investors are skittish. And Sir Otto has assigned her a pipsqueak babysitter who registers his objections via rhetorical questions. Even Harper’s closest deputies — Pierpoint alum Sweetpea and Kwabena, a season-four newcomer played by Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh — have moved beyond quietly doubting her strategy. They openly challenge her.
Industry continues to treat U.K. headline news as a jumping-off point for its characters’ scheming, to the twin effect of making both the show and the actual world feel more dire. In “Paypal of Bukkake,” the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the general election is less than a hundred days old, and the new government has proposed a nebulous if potentially far-reaching Online Safety Bill with the hope of making a big splash. Safety from what, exactly? The legislation may or may not doom porn aggregators like OnlyFans and its more successful (fictional) rival Siren. Harper’s decision to short Siren — the company formerly d.b.a. “Colonel Creampie” — is unpopular internally. Kwabena deems it unseemly. Thanks to Rishi, we know that a bet against “online subscription services” is kind of a hedge for Sweetpea, but she frets the move looks more like a spontaneous day trade than step one in a brilliant master plan.
Harper, for her part, struggles to publicly defend a market position that’s based on a hunch and backed up by espionage. I hoped we’d never ever see Rishi Ramdani’s drawn face again after his wife was murdered over his gambling debts in the season-three finale. I mean, where exactly does a character down so low have left to go? That the narrative leaves no one behind is emerging as an Industry calling card. So long as a person is willing to subject himself to the abuse of the City, the City will find new and worse ways to abuse him. He can’t pass a background check for a proper job, but Harper hires Rishi to sidle up to a Labour SpAd in the pub and steal his phone, which contains the contents of a speech that new Labour minister Jenni Bevan (Coronation Street alum Amy James-Kelly) is set to deliver to Parliament concerning the Online Safety Bill. Bevan’s intending to call Siren out by name. (The SpAd, for his part, immediately shows Rishi a porn clip of a woman he suspects is his female colleague, seemingly to prove the point that every single person interested in power is revolting.)
Harper waits until Bevan opens her remarks before she kicks off her shorting strategy. Industry has been alternately so vicious and so generous to Harper’s ruthlessness that it’s impossible to guess if she’ll be punished or rewarded for handing a gambling addict an envelope of cash in exchange for breaking into the phone of a government official at a funeral. But Bevan doesn’t let our girl down. The Online Safety Bill isn’t anti–free speech. It’s anti-abuse. It’s a bill about taking down pornographers who pretend to be aggregators. She cites Siren and then keeps going. It’s not just the sex sites that should be worried. Labour is coming for the fintech companies that enable these predatory sites in the first place.
Which brings us to season four’s second theater: Welcome to the glass-walled Canary Wharf offices of Tender, a payment-processing company I respect for resisting the temptation to drop the E’s from its name. Tender is run by two more season-four newcomers: the brashly American Jonah (Kal Penn) and his more refined co-founder, Whitney (Max Minghella doing an American accent). Until now, Siren has been Tender’s most profitable customer, and, despite the new regulations, Jonah doesn’t see a looming problem. So long as bedrooms have doors, teenage boys will figure out how to buy porn.
Whitney’s doubts about Tender’s long-term growth predate Bevan’s disastrous speech. He’s been quietly diversifying their portfolio, buying up businesses in Ghana and who knows where else. But major players in socially conservative markets like Africa and Asia don’t want to be in bed with the guys who swipe credit cards for pornographers (even if it’s just feet stuff). Whitney thinks Tender can be a monster neobank — a (fictional) rival to Monzo, I guess? He proposes his grand vision to his old Stanford buddy, who vapes through Whit’s presentation with no shoes on. When Jonah refuses to sign on to the new direction, Whitney starts making unilateral moves. He cancels Tender’s contracts with Siren, along with Tender’s other clients in the “alternative merchant” space — or, as Jonah affectionately calls it, “the sucking, fucking, rolling the dice” space.
Whitney’s comments about Jonah’s slovenliness and lewdness are so insistent that it’s implausible that Jonah wouldn’t suspect the changing weather, except for the fact, I suppose, that he’s always drunk or hung-over. Before the episode is through, Whit and the board will use behavioral clauses in Jonah’s contract to terminate him. Out of respect for their long friendship, Jonah gets to keep all his future interests and his pension, but he has nowhere to go in the mornings. And he’s already told us that he has no reason to go home in the evenings. “Without an economic function, society buries you before you’re dead,” Harper tells Rishi early in the episode, just after letting him know she paid off his rehab tab. Where exactly does a character down so low as Jonah have left to go from here? Maybe the Priory; definitely to court.
Part of Industry’s cynical appeal is that no one’s ever really winning, not even when they’re in the black. Harper is having sex with Kwabena when she gets the bad news that despite the day’s solid gains, some fund called Lily Lara wants its money back. The scene is Industry at its chaotic best, Harper at her self-destructive worst. Ten seconds ago, this American girl with no degree was fucking her underling — a British public-school boy with the nonchalance only growing up rich can provide. Now, he’s naked in her bed, transcribing her enraged email. Against Kwabena’s advice, she sends a clientwide alert that she’s gating the fund; all investor requests to get their own money back are preemptively denied. It’s so obviously a terrible idea, but Harper’s such a well and consistently written character that it’s believable when she does it. Why does season four pick up its story on this day of all days? Because today is the day Harper Stern finally gets fed up enough to burn down her own house. Harper Stern isn’t happy unless she’s the only person on her own side.
Investors don’t like the email (no duh). James Ashford, who last season got screwed by Henry and his bogus energy start-up Lumi, is so incensed that he has a stroke in Harper’s office. Not before he imparts crucial information about Otto Mostyn, though. Otto’s been recently elevated to the House of Lords, a promotion that comes with scrutiny. He doesn’t want to be smeared by Harper’s porn bets, and he doesn’t want his friends on the boards of Britain’s public utilities inconvenienced by the other short strategies she’s cooked up. After the gating email, Otto hauls Harper in for a talking-to. Last year, it was good PR to install an enterprising young Black woman in a position of power; this year, it’s cool to say “retard” again. Harper’s so cunning that it’s hard to swallow that she wouldn’t suspect Otto’s real reasons for handcuffing her fund, but I guess the point is this: No matter how much power an enterprising young Black woman is handed, the real moves are still being made in rooms she’ll never be invited into.
Cue Yasmin Kara-Hanani, who now goes by the pitch-perfect Dickensian name Lady Muck. When Whitney wants to meet with Jenni Bevan, he doesn’t call her office. He calls his old friend, who agrees to play matchmaker between them at her next dinner party. For two seasons, we were under the impression that the men and women who wear suits to the City were running Britain. In season three, we realized it was the old-money aristos putting their thumbs on the market all along. And behind every man with a good name and a crumbling pile, there’s a wife shrewdly attending to the seating plan. She’ll “perch” Whitney next to the Labour minister, fine. In exchange, Yas wants Whitney to bring Sir Muck onboard at Tender. After the Lumi implosion, Henry remade himself as an MP in the last gasp of Tory rule — a seat he lost to Jenni in the general. Now, he needs a new gig. The landed gentry have more lives than cats.
Yasmin is also good enough to invite her old friend Harper, who, for all her financial savvy and social climbing, still can’t get comfortable in a room full of toffs. It’s unclear if she talks to anyone but Whitney, who takes her home and asks her to peg him with a considerable Black dildo. She obliges, of course, but the scene has less to do with Whitney’s kink than what turns Harper on. It ends with Harper admiring herself in the mirror, maybe fantasizing about how much less bullshit she’d have to put up with if she didn’t need a strap-on. “Paypal of Bukkake” references race as much, if not more, than all eight hours of season three did. There are comments about Harper being an angry Black woman, which she happens to be a lot of the time. Whit warns Jonah when he mentions his preference for Black-on-Black porn in the office. The episode doesn’t have much to say about race, but Industry seems to be planting a flag here.
The other theme — which somehow receives an even less subtle introduction than Harper stroking the giant cock she’s wearing — is the power of controlling the story. That’s the sage advice Jonah gave to Whitney back in their Palo Alto days: “In America, your story starts when you begin telling it.” It’s the same advice Eric gives to Harper when she eventually calls him — partly to shout at him for Lily Lara’s redemption request (the fund is named for his estranged daughters), and partly because the man who more than once tried to end her career is the closest thing she has to a mentor. Eric tells her to stop blaming people, find a short she believes in, and sell the story to her investors. Harper, who has never thrived in a partnership before, suggests that this is something they might pursue together, if Eric’s willing to come out of retirement and leave his young — and conspicuously Black (see: theme No. 1) — girlfriend in Westchester. Tao Stern has a ring to it. No, Stern Tao.
By the time Eric’s plane lands in London the following morning, Harper has a target in mind, compliments of a professional story finder. “Paypal of Bukkake” opens with financial journalist Jim Dycker (Stranger Things’s Charlie Heaton, who has apparently been secretly British this whole time) stalking Whitney’s young PA — Kiernan Shipka as Hayley, who is just as profane and debauched as the Pierpoint grads we met in season one. He follows her into a nightclub where she hangs from the DJ’s Perspex booth like it’s a life raft. Jim gropes her on the dance floor, and in the morning, when they wake up, he wants to know what happened to the woman who had her job before her. Once she learns who he is, Hayley justifiably kicks Jim out of her flat, then threatens that her Black boyfriend will be home any minute (see: theme No. 1).
Much later in the episode, when someone leaks Harper’s gating email to Jim, he calls her for comment while letting slip that Siren is the tip of the iceberg. If you’re looking to short a nefarious tech company, what about the guys who’ve been taking Siren’s payments? Harper’s still dressing in Whitney’s bedroom as Jim mentions Tender: “I think these people are capable of almost anything to stop people looking too closely.” Whitney, who maybe notices a shift in Harper, asks if everything’s okay, and she tells him “never better” — a line Myha’la delivers in the placid tone she reserves for her character at her most sociopathic. Jim may be worried that Whitney Halberstram is a dangerous man, but he’s never met Harper Stern before.
Industry has already proven it can reinvent itself, but here it feels poised to change more than the terrain. It’s changing its tone. If the series ever had a fatal flaw, it’s that nothing matters very much. Whether Harper comes up big or not, whether Pierpoint & Co. gets shuttered by the Arabs or not, nothing happens in the real world. It’s all decimal points on balance sheets and whose name is on the office door. But when Jim pursues Hayley onto the dance floor, it’s shot more like a thriller than a hectic drama. And in just four words, his character rewrites the show’s stakes, too: “Capable of almost anything.”
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