The key to understanding the HBO show and its complicated relationships.

The fourth season of Industry, HBO’s series set in the high-stakes and scandal-ridden world of finance, starts with a couple of people hooking up in a London flat. Their rendezvous is cut short when the man reveals to the woman that he’s a reporter for a financial magazine and he’s looking into the company where the woman works as an executive assistant. The young lady (played by a much-older-now Kiernan Shipka, the Mad Men child star) is furious at the revelation and threatens that an imaginary boyfriend of hers—he’s Black, she says—will soon be home to deal with him. Ideally, a reporter doesn’t use sex to get close to a source. (Can you imagine?) But, watching along, I felt a bit of sympathy for the guy, who couldn’t seem to sort out whether he was really on a recon mission or whether he actually just liked the girl. That’s par for the course for Industry, a show that does not ask what the difference is between intimacy and transaction. It just assumes they are the same thing, as the characters screw each other literally and metaphorically.

I have been an Industry fan since its first season in the grim fall of 2020. I’ve felt validated as the cult hit has gotten renewed again and again, rising to new heights of popularity and depravity each time. The show remains one of the best on television and has always stood apart for two reasons. One, it works great Wall Street capers into the plot, stories that sound too ridiculous to be true but then stack up pretty reasonably against the real-world events of the past five years. Two, the characters are all chasing a big sack of returns on investment, but they are mainly worried about not drowning. To keep their careers (and thus their lives) on track, they betray each other with a shocking casualness. Money doesn’t corrupt relationships in Industry so much as form them out of whole cloth, but the series is special because its characters don’t quite admit that transactionalism to themselves. If you’re a hungry twentysomething in London, you might want to make a lot of money and have friends, right? The fourth season of the show makes no bones about what a charade that is, even taking it one step further by asking more-interesting questions, such as: If everyone knows that their relationships are built solely on the pound, are there any victims when everything breaks?

The plot of this season, which premiered in January, pits the series’ two leads, Marisa Abela’s Yasmin and Myha’la’s Harper, in a familiar adversarial position. Harper, a sharp but frequently reckless young woman, has launched her own short-selling-focused hedge fund, betting on the downfall of companies she thinks will fail. She and her business partner and sometimes-mentor Eric (Ken Leung) become fixated on Tender, a deeply sketchy payment platform that makes a lot of its money from processing card transactions on porn sites—“the PayPal of bukkake,” as the company is called internally. Henry (Kit Harington), Yasmin’s new husband and a member of the British gentry, joins the company as an investor and executive, and Yasmin also gets an office. The couple hope it’ll be a redemption tour after the disastrous flameout of Henry’s former business in Season 3. This is the battleground on which the characters will try to ruin each other’s lives this season.

By the season’s fourth episode, which aired Sunday, it’s clear that the sexual liaison that opened the season was barely a side dish in a season of transactional intimacy. Season 4 finds Rishi (Sagar Radia), the ex–market maker at the investment bank where the series was once set, in dire straits. Last season, he spiraled out of control as his bookies chased him down over unpaid gambling debts, eventually executing his wife in front of him. This time around, Rishi is stealing inside information from people who might help Harper and Eric’s shorts. They’re paying him with envelopes full of cash, but Rishi is still barely hanging on. Harper and Eric pass off an idea to themselves that they’re just throwing an old buddy some work, rather than paying him scraps to implicate himself in their lucrative conspiracy.

Eric’s personal life is in shambles too. He’s a terrible father and husband, now split up from his wife after years of picking work over his family. In Sunday’s episode, he embarks on what Harper calls “Operation Normal Guy,” giving an unconvincing performance of what one might deem normal fatherly behavior. He brings his daughter to the fund’s office, a swanky hotel suite, but pays her zero attention beyond offering whatever material luxuries she might want. Wherever this goes, we sense it won’t be good.

Meanwhile, Yasmin arranges a sexual encounter between herself, her husband, and Shipka’s executive-assistant character, Hayley. Yasmin’s father sexually abused her as a child and remained an emotional abuser until she let him drown off the railing of his own yacht in Season 3. But now it’s Yasmin with all the power: Hayley has fessed up that she inadvertently let a journalist investigating the company into her home, hoping that Yasmin will protect her. Yasmin feigns feminism and tells her, “I hate when men try to take something that isn’t theirs.” She then coaxes her into her and Henry’s hotel room and instructs her to perform oral sex on Henry as Yasmin watches and directs her poses. Hayley is essentially being trafficked by her superiors at the company—one of the running observations about Yasmin’s arc this season is that she has more or less become a Ghislaine Maxwell figure—but afterward, the assistant expresses a certain calmness about the whole thing. She gets Yasmin to acknowledge that the encounter wasn’t consensual, then hikes up her shirt to reveal lingerie and tells Yasmin, “Thank you, Mommy.” It turns out everyone’s blackmailing everyone—such is the Industry way.

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This warped vision of human relationships plays out against a backdrop of a fun financial story. Industry takes good care not to be too fantastical in its world-building. Harper and Eric are on to something with their short position, it’s clear, but they repeatedly run into trouble getting the rest of the financial sector to believe them. “Can we prove it? And then can we be loud enough?” Eric asks Harper. The work of shorting companies is “ugly,” “anti-power,” and “anti-establishment”—Harper doesn’t understand why any of that should be a problem for the two of them, and sets about demonstrating why not as she takes on her friend and foil. Harper and Yasmin are mirrors of each other, one a financial genius who comes from nothing and the other a mediocre worker who comes from everything. But their love story (maybe platonic, maybe not) is always the center of Industry.

This season, however, they’re on opposite sides of Harper’s big trade. Yas is making plans to try to ruin Harper via a media smear campaign to save Tender, the company now employing both her and her husband. And, somehow, none of this even feels as if it’s at odds with their friendship. Industry posits that once you reach a certain threshold of honesty with another person, you can’t exactly betray them. You can only disappoint them for a while before running back into each other’s arms, then doing it again.

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