Africa is not a country, but in the minds of the overwhelmingly white Euro-American financial and investment community it may as well be. That’s what Whit Halberstram is counting on. In this episode we find out just what exactly his fast-moving fintech company Tender has been up to on the continent, and how it relies on “the Africa of it,” as Kwabena Bannerman memorably puts it, helps conceal their wrongdoing from people who don’t particularly want to look close enough to see it.
Kwabena’s riding shotgun on a recon mission to Accra, the capital of the coastal West African country of Ghana, led by his colleague Sweetpea Golightly. Tender and their CEO for African operations, a man named Tony Day (Stephen Campbell Moore), have been making big-money moves down there, acquiring local companies for sums as large as $50 million…which they’re photographed presenting to the sellers as gigantic novelty checks for some reason, a bizarrely chintzy flourish for such a significant transaction.
Sweetpea, who Kwabena lightly mocks as being on her Erin Brockovich shit, is completely convinced something nefarious is going. Her conviction is so convincing that she gets Harper’s permission to make the investigative trip, as a last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to salvage their firm’s short position on Tender.
It takes a lot of shoe-leather digging and a little light deception. It takes Tony Day revealing that he was the source that put the reporter Jim Dycker — who died of his drug overdose (!!!), leading to manslaughter charges for Rishi and raising suspicions that he was fed a hot dose on purpose by Tender’s minions — on the trail of Tender to begin with. Sweetpea fields Day’s call at sunset on the beach, a scene shot seemingly for the sheer loveliness of it all.
It takes Sweetpea getting assaulted in the ladies’ room, punched in the face, and nearly knocked out cold when her head snaps back and shatters a mirror, thanks to an assailant likely sent by Day himself to scare them off. It takes sex with Kwabena following a provocative and hot conversation about their tastes in pornography (they’re both addicted, they say, as much as any guy or girl who grew up with the internet) to let off the requisite steam.
But our intrepid heroine’s private-dick routine, along with some clutch research by Kwabena, leads her to the answer. It’s straight out of Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s The Chair Company. Tender’s office is an empty room, guarded by comic-relief security officers to keep away squatters. The men manually transfer calls to Tender’s far-away call center if anyone calls the numbers listed for their local subsidiaries.
And those subsidiaries simply do not exist. The pair learn from one of the heirs of a local magnate that the company Tender bought from them probably sold for pennies on the dollar, nowhere near that $50 million figure. Now repeat that story countless times across the countless acquisitions and transactions and user-base explosions that have juiced Tender’s reputation, and you’ve figured out their secret. They aren’t buying anything, because they have no money to buy it with. They’re simply making it look like they are to convince the world they’re a hot company when they’re actually just hot air.
“The thing is nothing,” Sweetpea frantically repeats to Eric and Harper on a conference call as Kwabena listens in. “The thing is nothing!” As Kwabena puts it, Whit Halberstram has been counting on everyone being too lazy to knock on the door and find out what’s really happening. “Well, guess what?” gushes an ecstatic Sweetpea, “I knocked on the fucking door, bitch!” When Harper tells her this is amazing work, Sweetpea replies “Yeah, I quite agree.” She’s not bragging, she’s just telling it like it is. The music, the camera, the performances all seem to spiral up in this beautifully lit moment of victory like effervescence in a glass of champagne.
When Sweetpea and Kwabena confront Day about his misdeeds, he says he’ll consider their offer to travel to London and spill the beans in exchange for protection and immunity. It’s not an offer they can make — they have in fact been told by the late Jim’s editor, Burgess, not to offer it — but as he demurs anyway, it’s not yet clear what will come of it.
Then our intrepid pair head back to London, where Harper and Eric have been weathering storms of their own. Harper has received news that her emotionally abusive mother has died — received it from her estranged brother, no less. She has no idea how to process her feelings about the death of the person who made her, in every sense.
Eric, meanwhile, has learned that one of his daughters has been expelled from school for cruelly catfishing and humiliating a less popular classmate. “Imagine swallowing such cut-and-dry evidence of your failure as a father,” he says to Harper. The problem is that he just does’t like his children. Oh, he cares about them, as evidenced by his devastation over his daughter’s situation, but not enough to overcome his sense that in some way they make him less of a man by removing him from the center of attention.
The dysfunctional pair bond over their respective emotional limitations. Harper confides in Eric that in her heart of hearts, she’d long imagined her mom “begging forgiveness, because I have come fucking undeniable.”
“You are undeniable,” Eric says. Harper cries.
It’s a moving moment, all the more so because neither person is denying their own shortcomings and how they led them to this point. But really listen to it for a moment. Harper’s credo, as expressed here, amounts to I’LL SHOW THEM, I’LL SHOW THEM ALL. Eric, her mentor, heartily agrees. Is this any different from a conversation Anakin Skywalker would have with Chancellor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith?
The episode ends with Sweetpea at the center once again. Back in London, her face beat to shit during her sexualized attack, she’s greeted by a genuinely sympathetic Harper, who regrets having sent Sweetpea to Accra in the first place. But Sweetpea — who is also still dealing with the fallout of having her old OnlyFans account leaked by, she suspects, Rishi — largely rebuffs Harper’s kindness. She first comes clean about sleeping with Harper’s fuckbuddy Kwabena. (Harper is gracious enough to thank her for her honesty.) She accepts Harper’s hug of apology and comfort, but she says what she really wants as compensation for the attack is hazard pay.
Then, while all her coworkers deal with their shortcomings in their own maladaptive ways — Eric avoiding his ex-wife and daughter, who’ve crashed in his hotel suite, in favor of a blowjob from an escort he asks to “make me feel big”; Kwabena covering up the infidelity Harper already knows about; Harper refusing all phone calls rather, presumably, than make arrangements to return to the States for her mother’s funeral — Sweetpea sits in her apartment and sobs.
In this sense, and only this sense, may the assault in that ladies’ room have been good for her: It gave her pain a physical analog. Being exposed and humiliated among one’s social class and coworkers as she was is awful, but the pain is entirely within her thoughts, her emotions. Kwabena admits to seeing the nudes she took as a 19 year old looking to make a quick buck, and she fucks him anyway. We actually see Eric looking at them, coincidentally, the following morning. All of this Sweetpea just has to sort of soldier through.
Getting grabbed by the throat, licked on the cheek, and punched in the nose when you fight back is ghastly and traumatizing. Could it also have been cathartic, like having sex with Kwabena was afterwards? Now Sweetpea has been violated physically as well as emotionally. The results are tangible, indisputable, visible with the naked eye. They give all her unresolved, unnameable feelings about her OnlyFans leak a physical expression. The psychological logic is akin to that of self-harm. In those final seconds, as Billy Idol’s gorgeous “Eyes Without a Face” plays on the soundtrack, Sweetpea’s grief comes out at last, and it’s staggering.
There’s always the risk of overpraising a current show you’re very excited by. Critics especially are given to hyperbole in order to convey that excitement to their readers, and I know I’m no exception. Nevertheless, the one season of television I keep thinking of while watching Industry Season 4 is Mad Men Season 5, a string of back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back masterpieces representing the show, and the entire medium of television, at its absolute best. Industry feels very much as if it’s on the same kind of run right now. I eagerly anticipate, and deeply dread, everything to come.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.