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Industry<\/a><\/p>\n Paypal of Bukkake<\/p>\n \n Season 4<\/p>\n Episode 1\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 4 stars<\/p>\n ****\n <\/p>\n \n Harper Stern is back, expensively cocooned in gray suiting and capable of almost anything. 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\u2019 mishmash of finance grunts together in season one. In season four, after a misstep in the direction of \u201cethical investing,\u201d the firm\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n When we first meet Harper again, she\u2019s 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\u2019s godfather to run a shorts-only fund, but her ascent through London\u2019s finance elite has clearly stalled between seasons. Her team can\u2019t 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\u2019s closest deputies \u2014 Pierpoint alum Sweetpea and Kwabena, a season-four newcomer played by Ted Lasso\u2019s Toheeb Jimoh \u2014 have moved beyond quietly doubting her strategy. They openly challenge her.<\/p>\n Industry continues to treat U.K. headline news as a jumping-off point for its characters\u2019 scheming, to the twin effect of making both the show and the actual world feel more dire. In \u201cPaypal of Bukkake,\u201d the Labour Party\u2019s 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\u2019s decision to short Siren \u2014 the company formerly d.b.a. \u201cColonel Creampie\u201d \u2014 is unpopular internally. Kwabena deems it unseemly. Thanks to Rishi<\/a>, we know that a bet against \u201conline subscription services\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Harper, for her part, struggles to publicly defend a market position that\u2019s based on a hunch and backed up by espionage. I hoped we\u2019d never ever see Rishi Ramdani\u2019s drawn face again after his wife was murdered over his gambling debts in the season-three finale<\/a>. 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s ruthlessness that it\u2019s impossible to guess if she\u2019ll 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\u2019t let our girl down. The Online Safety Bill isn\u2019t anti\u2013free speech. It\u2019s anti-abuse. It\u2019s a bill about taking down pornographers who pretend to be aggregators. She cites Siren and then keeps going. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Which brings us to season four\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s most profitable customer, and, despite the new regulations, Jonah doesn\u2019t see a looming problem. So long as bedrooms have doors, teenage boys will figure out how to buy porn.<\/p>\n Whitney\u2019s doubts about Tender\u2019s long-term growth predate Bevan\u2019s disastrous speech. He\u2019s 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\u2019t want to be in bed with the guys who swipe credit cards for pornographers (even if it\u2019s just feet stuff). Whitney thinks Tender can be a monster neobank \u2014 a (fictional) rival to Monzo, I guess? He proposes his grand vision to his old Stanford buddy, who vapes through Whit\u2019s presentation with no shoes on. When Jonah refuses to sign on to the new direction, Whitney starts making unilateral moves. He cancels Tender\u2019s contracts with Siren, along with Tender\u2019s other clients in the \u201calternative merchant\u201d space \u2014 or, as Jonah affectionately calls it, \u201cthe sucking, fucking, rolling the dice\u201d space.<\/p>\n Whitney\u2019s comments about Jonah\u2019s slovenliness and lewdness are so insistent that it\u2019s implausible that Jonah wouldn\u2019t suspect the changing weather, except for the fact, I suppose, that he\u2019s always drunk or hung-over. Before the episode is through, Whit and the board will use behavioral clauses in Jonah\u2019s 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\u2019s already told us that he has no reason to go home in the evenings. \u201cWithout an economic function, society buries you before you\u2019re dead,\u201d 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<\/a>; definitely to court.<\/p>\n Part of Industry\u2019s cynical appeal is that no one\u2019s ever really winning, not even when they\u2019re in the black. Harper is having sex with Kwabena when she gets the bad news that despite the day\u2019s 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 \u2014 a British public-school boy with the nonchalance only growing up rich can provide. Now, he\u2019s naked in her bed, transcribing her enraged email. Against Kwabena\u2019s advice, she sends a clientwide alert that she\u2019s gating the fund; all investor requests to get their own money back are preemptively denied. It\u2019s so obviously a terrible idea, but Harper\u2019s such a well and consistently written character that it\u2019s 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\u2019t happy unless she\u2019s the only person on her own side.<\/p>\n Investors don\u2019t 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\u2019s office. Not before he imparts crucial information about Otto Mostyn, though. Otto\u2019s been recently elevated to the House of Lords, a promotion that comes with scrutiny. He doesn\u2019t want to be smeared by Harper\u2019s porn bets, and he doesn\u2019t want his friends on the boards of Britain\u2019s public utilities inconvenienced by the other short strategies she\u2019s 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\u2019s cool to say \u201cretard\u201d again. Harper\u2019s so cunning that it\u2019s hard to swallow that she wouldn\u2019t suspect Otto\u2019s 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\u2019ll never be invited into.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s a wife shrewdly attending to the seating plan. She\u2019ll \u201cperch\u201d 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 \u2014 a seat he lost to Jenni in the general. Now, he needs a new gig. The landed gentry have more lives than cats.<\/p>\n Yasmin is also good enough to invite her old friend Harper, who, for all her financial savvy and social climbing, still can\u2019t get comfortable in a room full of toffs. It\u2019s 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\u2019s kink than what turns Harper on. It ends with Harper admiring herself in the mirror, maybe fantasizing about how much less bullshit she\u2019d have to put up with if she didn\u2019t need a strap-on. \u201cPaypal of Bukkake\u201d 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\u2019t have much to say about race, but Industry seems to be planting a flag here.<\/p>\n The other theme \u2014 which somehow receives an even less subtle introduction than Harper stroking the giant cock she\u2019s wearing \u2014 is the power of controlling the story. That\u2019s the sage advice Jonah gave to Whitney back in their Palo Alto days: \u201cIn America, your story starts when you begin telling it.\u201d It\u2019s the same advice Eric gives to Harper when she eventually calls him \u2014 partly to shout at him for Lily Lara\u2019s 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\u2019s willing to come out of retirement and leave his young \u2014 and conspicuously Black (see: theme No. 1) \u2014 girlfriend in Westchester. Tao Stern has a ring to it. No, Stern Tao.<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Simon Ridgway\/HBO\n <\/p>\n