Spoiler Alert: This story contains plot details from Season 4, Episode 2 of HBO’s “Industry,” “The Commander and the Gray Lady,” now streaming on HBO Max.
All is not well in the House of Mooks.
After highlighting his failed entrepreneurial career in Season 3, Industry creators Mickey Down and Conrad Kaye bring silver-spoon aristocrat Henry Mack (Kit Harington) to a dramatic rock bottom in the second episode of Season 4. In the first few scenes alone, we see him humiliated on a local election stage to become a Conservative MP, and then back to the vast countryside. His relatively new marriage to Yasmin (Marisa Abella) unravels loudly as he lies hungover in a four-poster bed, walks around in a silk gown feeling sorry for himself, and surrenders his sexual desires in exchange for a sip of coke (or whatever).
But that’s not all. At an extravagant birthday party held for Henry by Yasmine (dressed like Marie Antoinette), he ups his drug intake with LSD and, upon slipping out of the party, embarks on a violent adventure with the visitors. After getting into a fist fight with one of the locals in a pub, the audience learns that the friend Henry is with is a figment of his imagination: the ghost of his late father, a man with growing mental health issues. Henry then returns to the mansion and attempts to end everything for good in the garage (his father had also taken his own life).
For Harington, who just arrived on the “industry” scene in Season 3, this episode, set almost entirely on Mac’s vast estate, was an opportunity to give Henry a much more complete and complex character than we’d seen before, warts and all.
“What was important to me was to see the guy I’ve known for a long time as a real, fully-rounded human being, not just some villain who just comes in and steals girls, but someone who actually has a very traumatized past and is struggling at the core of wanting to do good,” he told Variety. “And I thought, if we could see all of that ugliness, maybe we could empathize with him.”
For all its upper-class perversity, Henry’s Inheritance also raises the topic of male suicide, which Harrington says is “an important topic to talk about.” “No matter how privileged you are, no matter how lowly you are, no one should have to go through that.”
Industry watchers will note that this episode is the show’s most daring departure from its origins to date. Season 4 itself acts as a mini-reboot for the series, expanding the story away from its financial roots and into new and ambitious pastures. But this dark tale directed by Down and Kaye is clearly the furthest thing from Pierpoint, with the ghostly elements also dragging the drama into new genre territory. “It’s a neo-Gothic historical drama about a big house,” Kei said in Variety magazine.
“One thing we know about Mickey and Conrad is that they’re not afraid to take bold swings and land them,” Harrington says. “And I think it worked because it’s all in Henry’s mind. We’re seeing it primarily from his perspective. So it’s supernatural, but Henry just popped acid. And we also set it up as a very weird, weird, surreal episode in the placement of this house. I think they did that very cleverly.”
Despite adding many layers to Henry, he actually appears somewhat rejuvenated in episode two, with a refreshed relationship with Yasmin after a quick shake on the hood of a sports car, but his opinion of the character hasn’t changed.
“You know, I still think he’s a selfish nightmare and completely self-possessed,” he says. “But deep down, I really like him.”
