Spoilers below.
Finance is not known for being a particularly introspective career path. Soul-searching isn’t often capitalism’s thing, no matter how many yoga retreats or self-help seminars its evangelists care to frequent. That’s why it’s all the more hilarious—and fitting—that tonight’s Industry episode sets its penultimate moments at an ayahuasca retreat, where a devil-may-care Muck deposits a jaded Rob for one profoundly messed-up trip. Muck is the one in supposed pursuit of deeper meaning, but it’s Rob who experiences the actual revelation.
But before we unpack such a rich psychoactive episode, let’s lay the groundwork. “Company Man” hinges mainly on the British select committee targeting the government’s 2-billion-pound bailout of Lumi and Pierpoint’s involvement as the IPO’s underwriter. At the Pierpoint offices, most of Rob’s colleagues are in costumes—Sweetpea as Ginger Spice, Yas as Princess Diana, Eric as a fitting Henry VIII—for the company’s Childrens Investment Trust Charity Day. But as “Pierpoint’s whipping boy” for the select committee, Rob’s costume is a suit, a Tory-blue tie, and a pair of glasses. Never mind that he has good eyesight; the Pierpoint lawyers are concerned only about the optics. Glasses = smart, capable, non-threatening.
Pierpoint’s goal is for Rob to pivot the government’s finger-pointing away from the bank and toward Lumi—and, specifically, toward Muck himself. But Rob doesn’t like the smell of the situation, as it becomes increasingly obvious he’s meant to be the company scapegoat rather than the “company man” Eric claims. As Eric later tells the lawyer when they’re alone, Rob is expendable. After the catastrophe at COP in episode 3, Eric wants someone else on the desk to take the blame for Lumi’s implosion. Rob’s “a young man, early in his career,” Eric says. “He’ll recover.”
Meanwhile, Eric attempts to persuade Yasmin into taking a personal day to keep her out of the spotlight; there are a lot of cameras floating around Childrens Investment Trust Charity Day, and no one wants to see “Childrens Investment Trust” and the scandalized Hanani name in the papers together. But Yas has a job to do, and that includes introducing the charity’s portfolio manager to Leviathan Alpha, Harper and Petra’s new (horrendously named) fund.
For all her claims about staying focused at work, Yas seems all too eager to indulge in distractions. Her relationship with Muck has evolved to the point that she’s now peeing on him in the shower, per his request. (“I’m not a pervert,” he claims. “I’m practical. This is the one situation where I get to control my helplessness.”) That will come back to haunt her later in the episode, when an intoxicated Muck mentions his fetish—and her participation—loudly enough for his friends to hear.
But, first, the select committee. Unsurprisingly, it does not go well. The razor-sharp Lisa Dearn does the questioning, and she’s ruthless with Rob as well as with Muck, soon revealing that an unnamed female Lumi employee was a victim of Muck’s “predation.” Rob infers that this employee was Caedi McFarlane (Eliot Salt), a small but important character in earlier episodes this season. Muck promises Rob her accusations won’t lead to any charges because “nothing’s there,” but when Dearn mentions Muck is currently dating a Pierpoint employee—which will be “of great interest to the regulators”—panic begins to set in. Muck, in his own testimony, tries to throw the whole thing at his bankers’ feet: “If there is a predatory side to capitalism, they are on it. We are not.”
Then, in one hell of a deus ex machina, the Cabinet Minister and Energy Secretary Aurore Adekunle (Faith Alabi) strolls in. While testifying, she tosses a wicked wild card to the committee: She and her department will claim full responsibility for Lumi’s collapse and the subsequent taxpayer-funded bailout. “I still believe in accountability in politics,” she tells Dearn. “Which is why I have come from Number 10, where I tendered my resignation to the prime minister.”
The immediate outcry shields Muck, Pierpoint, and Rob from the worst of the heat—but Adekunle has another surprise in store. You might recall that when we last saw the Energy Secretary earlier this season, she was cozying up to Lord Norton and Otto Mostyn at COP. So should it really come as a surprise that she’s working with them now? When Muck shuttles Rob over to the St. James’s Street club after the committee breaks, Aurore enters their private room like a champion boxer.
“Well, if it isn’t our future prime minister!” Otto cheers as he embraces her in greeting. A confused Rob soon realizes what’s happened: Adekunle has willingly taken the fall for Muck. In return, Muck, Mostyn, and Norton will help her win the election for prime minister, in part by spinning her in the Norton-owned media as a champion for transparency in government.
But that’s far from the only deception going down in “Company Man.” At Pierpoint, Sweetpea has stumbled upon something serious. She demands a meeting with Eric, where she unfurls a discovery so loaded with financial jargon that I needed it explained to me on two separate occasions. I’ll do my best to translate.
In short, Pierpoint is approaching dire financial straits. In a Hail-Mary bid to get back on the upswing, the company recently pivoted its focus to ESG. Around the same time, the bank issued “a fuck-ton” of senior secured debt. (Basically, Pierpoint acquired investors in the bank itself, thereby receiving an immediate infusion of cash.) But Pierpoint’s pivot to ESG has been disastrous, and now that the senior secured debt is nearing maturity (i.e. it needs to be paid back, plus interest), Pierpoint doesn’t have the money to cover it, nor is anyone interested in taking it off their hands.
To make matters worse, Pierpoint invested a percentage of its own money into these now-failing ESG companies, doing so to coax the businesses into trusting their IPOs with the bank. But now that the valuations of these companies have “completely collapsed,” Pierpoint is losing money on two fronts: the fees it would have earned from underwriting the IPOs, and its return on investment should the IPOs have succeeded. As Sweetpea puts it to Eric: Is it possible Pierpoint has put too many chips into ESG, in a bet that will cost them everything? Eric dismisses Sweetpea’s concerns as a “little conspiracy,” but the terror in his eyes is evident.
Later, in an encounter that requires some serious suspension of disbelief, Yasmin walks in on Sweetpea crying in the bathroom—at the same time that Harper, in the office for her Childrens Trust meeting, is using one of the stalls. Sweetpea reveals to Yas the “balance-sheet motherlode” she shared with Eric, but Yas is equally dismissive. “Don’t let the geezers get you down,” she says, her smile so pathetically condescending I almost laughed. But Harper is smart enough to take Sweetpea’s theories seriously. And now the ex-Pierpoint employee has a flamethrower in her arsenal.
Eric—also smart enough to recognize Sweetpea’s on to something—calls Bill Adler and asks him to come by the office, where the latter tells the former that the Pierpoint CEO is stepping down. (Not the mark of a healthy company!) They meet later to discuss the drama in private, and Bill shares two huge secrets: 1) Sweetpea was right, Pierpoint is in serious trouble, and the incoming CEO seems all but guaranteed to gut the company, and 2) Bill has brain cancer. He hasn’t told anyone at the bank; he doesn’t want his colleagues to think he’s “in any way incapacitated.” In a rare display of shock and despair, Eric bursts into tears. Bill consoles him with Eric’s own trademark relentlessness: “Remember, we grew up in this bank. We’re lifers. And I’m happy we made that trade, but only if we act like we know its soul and we’re prepared to fight for it. Because the next few weeks are gonna be a fight.”
Speaking of souls, Muck doesn’t seem to have one, much as he’s keen to talk “vulnerability” and “helplessness” with Yasmin. At the St. James’s Street club, he complains about how his privilege always gets in the way of his romantic relationships; he can only “fuck down,” from a social-status perspective. (A real empath, this man is.) He then mentions the morning’s pee incident aloud, and Yasmin flips a table before storming outside. “What am I doing involving myself with someone like him?” she asks Rob. “Like, what is actually wrong with me?” (Oh, babe, where do we begin?)
Finally, Muck drags Rob to the ayahuasca retreat, where Rob reluctantly participates. “You’re here now,” Muck tells him. “Do you really have a choice?”
As it turns out, Rob does have a choice. After the bonkers trip, rife with Easter eggs from past Industry episodes, Rob and Muck stumble their way back to Muck’s car. “I had a very nasty experience in the loo just now,” Muck confesses, brow furrowed. “I saw a monster. Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror.” Muck means this literally, of course, but Harington’s delivery of the line is as absurd as it is loaded. When Rob finally returns to his house in London, that’s exactly what he does: He stares at his own reflection, and he realizes Yasmin is wrong. It does matter “where the money comes from.” And Rob isn’t sure he wants to do any more drinking from a tainted spring.
In one doozy of a final scene, Yas crawls into bed with Rob and asks what she should do should she lose her job at Pierpoint. Rob tells her not to worry; Henry will be sure to look after her. Laughing, Yasmin agrees: “My fate is predetermined.” “Yeah,” Rob replies. “You’re destined to marry your dad.”
Staring at the ceiling, grinning too widely for comfort, Yasmin then drops the episode’s final secret: “That would be impossible. Because I killed him.”
And roll credits, baby!!!
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.