Industry Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: Business or Pleasure?

I worry this phrase is overused in relation to Industry specifically, but opening this season’s third episode with Harper and Eric both tag-teaming business on the phone in the early scrappy days of their new joint operation, SternTao, makes me want to say it anyway: We are so back!

SternTao is working in close quarters out of a swanky hotel room, and predictably, patience is already running thin as Harper and Eric hit each other with a few signature jabs. (“This isn’t the deadbeat dad club.”). At a breakfast, SternTao attempts to woo a group of potential investors, but they aren’t having the best showing. Harper pitches Tender as an underrated “dead man walking” equity opportunity, which seems to pique some interest, but it’s a high-risk investment—and we already saw how unpopular shorting Siren was at her last job. (If you’re still confused about the mechanics of a short, this tweet offers a hilariously effective explanation.)

Harper loops Eric in about her connection with Jim Dyker over at FinDigest, and together, they strategize around what to do about that particular (deeply unethical) relationship. Harper also meets Eric’s daughter, Lily (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss). We haven’t really gotten to see Eric as a father much; we mostly see him engaging in very non-father behavior. But before the SternTao namesakes get too deep into their respective family lore, they get a visit from Sweetpea Golightly.

Sweetpea is unhappy at Mostyn Asset Management—which sounds like a very misogynistic workplace—especially after her Siren account was leaked. Harper defends Sweetpea (nonjudgemental icon!) and, as it turns out, Sweetpea has been doing a little research on Tender. Specifically, she’s been exploring how the shift in Tender’s financial strategy—away from porn and gambling—isn’t reflected in their financial projections. Thus, there may indeed be some illegal payments happening at Tender, but the company itself is still well-positioned in the market. Rishi also walks in with some stolen files, and Sweetpea does not react well to his unexpected appearance. (She calls him a “pathological degenerate” and a murderer). She leaves, making it clear to Harper she will not share a room with him. Oof.

Later, rustling through boxes of Tender-related paperwork and smoking a cigarette, Harper gives her best workaholic queen as she sits on perpetual hold, attempting to reach one of the four payment processors Tender has acquired in Africa. Eric says one of the attendees at their breakfast, Pierre Womack (Philippe Spall), is interested in the Tender deal and is willing to go in on their fund, as long as Eric serves as guarantor to a sum of $10 million (which equals the sum of his life savings, essentially). Is he really willing to put it all on the line for Harper?

Eric finally convinces her to leave the office (i.e. their hotel room) for a few hours, and she heads out to meet Kwabena. He’s 15 minutes late for their dinner, which does not land well with Harper, and she immediately tells him she slept with someone else. (Whatever happened to “Hello? How are you?”) He attempts to smooth over the tension between them, but soon enough she storms out—while mentioning she was going to offer him a job.

When she gets back to the hotel, Eric is sitting around in a robe, and they get right back to talking about Tender, though the dinner’s bitterness is still affecting Harper’s mood. She accuses Eric of treating their new venture as recreational, while, for her, it’s all or nothing. Then, she blows up at his use of the word “triggered,” but…she really is triggered. It’s a great scene for our duo. (Myha’la, we will get you that Emmy nomination!) Things cool down when Eric discovers a juicy clue: an address listed on all of Tender’s transaction pages, leading to a house of no significance in Sunderland. Time for a field trip!

Harper and Sweetpea head out to Sunderland, where they pose as workers for the Office of National Statistics. As they soon learn, Jeffrey Stoddart (Dave Hart), who lives at the Sunderland address listed on Tender’s transaction pages and works from home, processes the payments via an email inbox. He collates and tags them based on transaction amount. Sweetpea’s theory is that “gorgeous Jeffrey”—and others like him—are coding by price and not by service, which is how Tender is able to masquerade the transaction and strip its original source (i.e. porn or gambling). This is a pretty big bombshell, and it could tank Tender’s valuation. In the wake of this revelation, Harper convinces Sweetpea to join SternTao, and promises she won’t leave her out to dry the way she did Petra (in season 3) and Otto.

Over at Tender, the honeymoon is back on between Yasmin and Henry. They’ve got an office now, and they’re nearly caught dirty talking when Hayley walks in. Yas makes plans to kickstart the “Muck Renaissance”—at least, in Jennifer Bevan’s eyes—ahead of the MP’s visit to the office. But Henry fears a personal narrative might distract from Serious Business™. When Jennifer arrives, Henry apologizes for that disastrous dinner party last episode. (Apparently, he also wrote her a letter. Jennifer’s super chill about it all and mentions an alcoholic brother. She might be the most well-adjusted character on this show.) The real reason for her visit, though, is a merger: Tender is trying to buy a European bank, and the government needs to make sure the deal is above board. Henry accuses Jenny’s Labour government of being overly regulated, and he makes an impassioned speech to push things forward.

Later, with Whitney and the other Tender executives, Henry tries to hash out a plan for their upcoming meeting with the government regulators, from whom they hope to get a banking license amidst some opposition (and concerns about data safety) from an Austrian board member of IBN Bauer, the bank they hope to acquire. There’s a moment where Henry has to defend Yasmin’s presence at the meeting; she’s apparently a paid consultant, though that’s a bit suspect, given her lack of expertise. They conclude they need to fly to Vienna and deal with the board member personally.

As they walk out of the office, Henry reads out some pre-publication questions he’s received from Jim Dyker at FinDigest: The questions are about illicit gambling and pornography transactions in African jurisdictions. Whitney brushes these inquiries off as attention-seeking behavior, though we know he indeed has some dubious business affairs in Africa. Yas suggests a bland denial statement, should anything come out. Hayley then pulls Yas aside to tell her about her night out with Jim, which we saw in the premiere. “I hate when men try to take something that isn’t theirs,” Yas says in response. I’m suddenly very invested in this dynamic.

We soon arrive at Tender’s emergency in-person mission in Austria, set within a stunning castle. (I suddenly realized I don’t miss the Pierpoint offices that much, at least not if these are the settings we’re getting in their place. And there’s incredible costuming to match: Yasmin is wearing one of the most stunning red trench coats I’ve ever seen.) Anyway, together the Tender team meets with Princess Johanna Bauer (Susanne Wuest) and her son Moritz (Sid Phoenix) and get settled into their rooms.

The princess visits Yasmin in her lavish bedroom, and they exchange a bit of German. (Remember, Yasmin speaks seven fucking languages, as she yelled at her dad last season shortly before he drowned.) Johanna tells her the room is full of “Habseligkeiten,” or possessions close to your soul. It’s sort of the opposite of Yas’s mansion back home, where she’s swallowed up by possessions close to another family’s soul.

At dinner, Moritz waxes poetic about Western liberalism and history, and the failure of short-term policies driven to win elections. He writes a newsletter about it all. (I need a screenshot of Yasmin saying, “I read your Substack.”) He threatens re-engaging Austrian regulators and over-enunciates Whitney’s last name, which Henry later calls out as thinly veiled antisemitism. Yasmin offers to stay and smooth things over while the others fly out the next morning to meet with the regulator back in London.

Before bed, Hayley knocks on Yas and Henry’s door with some drafted FinDigest rebuttal statements. Yasmin decides to proposition Hayley for a threesome—and we get a Tei Shi needle-drop as things get hot and heavy. Yasmin watches, smoking a cigarette, as “Calabasas,” Yas’s nickname for Hayley, goes down on Henry. “Good,” she instructs. “Now spit on it.” And the crowd goes wild! After Henry finishes inside of Hayley, Yas herself goes down on Hayley, and we get a diabolical cut right to Yas slurping oysters the next day. Oh my God. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that depicted on television before. It feels graphic enough just to write this recap! This scene felt like a harkening back to Rob licking his own jizz off the mirror in season 1. I can already see the tweets.

On a less squelchy walk the next day in the forest, Yas and Johanna take the dogs out. Yas suggests leveraging her legacy media connections to commission Moritz to write a column, thus getting his “views” out to a wider audience. Back at the castle, Yas notices a painting of the German 19th-century palace Neuschwanstein, painted and signed by Adolf Hitler (which he did actually paint; it sold for €100,000 in 2015). Well, that tells us everything we need to know about the family’s aforementioned “views.” Not that it was hard to read between the lines already.

Finally, the meeting with the regulator is upon us. Henry and Whitney meet with a few Ministers and try to convince them to let Tender’s bank merger deal go through. The tone isn’t great, and Henry’s presence actually tips the meeting toward the negative when business minister Lisa Dearn (Chloe Pirrie) begins to focus on his business legacy: She was ruthless on the committee that questioned his involvement with Lumi last season.

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff Ricky Martyn (Andrew Sheridan) steps in with the newspaper, fronting an article about Jennifer Bevan’s rise as the potential next leader of the Labour party. It looks as though the PM’s office is actually on Tender’s side of things, in spite of Lisa’s objections, and the banking license is approved. Turns out, it was actually Moritz Bauer’s opinion piece, “The case for a benevolent dictatorship,” that tipped the scales. Yikes. Henry isn’t pleased about this when he talks to Yas later, and he also equates their threesome to enabling his addiction. They have an awkward chat with Hayley back at the office and she almost joins them for oyster-slurping round two before Henry shuts it down. Henry is sort of stunned by Yas grabbing the driver’s wheel, so to speak—but that’s the Yas we know and love.

At the offices of FinDigest, Jim and his editor discuss their drafted exposé of Tender. The company hasn’t responded to a request for statement, and, apparently, FinDigest’s lawyers want to remove large chunks of the piece since it can’t be verified by an insider. Jim is in a rush to get the story published, and thus the FinTech piece is eventually released…but it’s not anywhere as juicy or impactful as it seemed pre-lawyer intervention.

In the episode’s final moments, we meet back up with Eric and Harper. We learn Eric ultimately chose to put his money toward their venture, and thus SternTao can begin in earnest. The new partners have a quick chat about the status of their working relationship: While Eric seems to want more (platonic) intimacy and trust between them, Harper draws a boundary. The look on Eric’s face here broke my heart: I think he wants to be closer to Harper, in a paternal sort of way, but she’s shutting him out.

Finally, Kenny (Conor MacNeill) shows up! Oh, how I’ve missed this reformed version of Kenny. (He even earns a little apology from Eric after what happened between them last season.) Right at the last minute, Kwabena runs in—late once again, but clearly reconciled with Harper. Phew. They all board an elevator together to a new investment bank, where they can start working on this new fund as a team. After last week, a splash of optimism is what we needed this week—though, inevitably, it will all come crashing down. We’ll see how long the good tidings last.