“The Commander and the Grey Lady”

When presented with a banquet, an absolute feast of an episode like this one, the temptation is to try to swallow it all in one go. The challenge is to resist that temptation. An episode like “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” the second in Industry’s fourth season, is a meal you can return to for seconds, thirds, and leftovers. Once again written and directed by series co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, it’s the kind of episode that makes you ask the host for the recipe — or the help, as the case may be. Best to sample a few delicacies at a time rather than try to gobble it all down.

It’s Sir Henry Muck’s 40th birthday. He’s been dreading it all his life, let alone since a recent electoral defeat — to a familiar face, Labour minister Jennifer Bevan — ended his nascent political career. (At least he beat “Count Binface, of the Count Binface Party.”) His father killed himself on his own 40th birthday, and Henry is badly depressed as it is.

Yasmin plays hostess at the decadent birthday affair, a costume party in which everyone is dressed as 19th century aristocracy. (It’s as tasteless as you’d imagine.) She keeps busy dealing with various well-intended but deeply problematic family members, such as Henry’s publishing-magnate uncle Alexander (Andrew Havill), or her own aunt Cordelia (Claire Forlani), sister of Yasmin’s abusive sex-criminal father Charles. You remember, the father she murdered last season by leaving him to drown in the Mediterranean, covering it up with Harper’s help? 

Meanwhile, Henry is alternately despondent, raging, and increasingly fucked up on a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs. He makes an absolute spectacle of himself at dinner, kissing Jennifer (she’s a decent sport about it) and turning an apology to his uncle and Yasmin for disappointing them into a vulgar reference to his total lack of libido in the marital bed. Only the timely arrival of an old school chum, “the Commander” (Jack Farthing), breaks up the scene. 

Reunited, the two men hit the nearby pub, slumming it with the peasantry. The Commander is an even more loathsome aristocrat than anyone at the party, the type who calls employment “a bourgeois pursuit” and talks about having sex with local woman like they’re a stupid but exotic alien species. In the process of trying to pick up Molly (Esther O’Casey), one of his chambermaids out for a drink on a cold Christmastime night, he winds up beating the living daylights out of her would-be boyfriend (Nye Occomore) when he tells him the gossip about him and Yasmin among the help, making demeaning and racist claims about Yasmin in particular. No cops are called, of course, not on a man from the big house. 

Only when the local priest (Roy Sampson) tries to give Henry advice does he realize his friend isn’t there at all. “Edward” is in fact a hallucination of his own father, who hanged himself bloodily from a tree, knowing full well his young son was watching him do it. Henry then attempts to kill himself by running his car in the sealed garage, but he hears Yasmin whisper his name and bursts out of the car and through the door to live again. Renewed, he fucks Yasmin on top of his car. (She makes eye contact with his approving uncle through a window the whole time.) 

As they drive away, the Pet Shop Boys’s magnificently arch mashup of “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” plays on the soundtrack, the blood from his beatdown still on her lips, he announces he might like to have a baby. With that, whatever illusions Yasmin may have had about this turnaround being permanent appear to fly right out of the ragtop and blow away. She knows that a turnaround this rapid and complete may as well be a hallucination itself.

In other news, Yasmin catches her aunt blowing the loathsome Otto Mostyn, who tells her she gives better head than her brother did. The reminder of how, uh, close Cordelia and Charles used to be leads Yasmin to throw her aunt right out into the cold in the middle of the night; given that Cordelia defends even Charles’s sexual abuse of herself as the product of “a bohemian childhood — it was a different time,” this seems like the right call. Cordelia’s parting shot is that Charles would have had her aborted, but kept her alive so he could have a daughter of his very own. (Jesus.) 

On the way to bed, Yasmin very nearly takes Haley, the beleaguered and abandoned assistant of Tender honcho Whit Halberstram, to bed with her. (They both do one of those “haha jk…unless…” things.) Whit is at the party to invite Henry to be Tender’s new figurehead CEO, with praise so disingenuous he might as well be holding a sign that says “I’M FULL OF SHIT.” He also explains to Harper that he made his first fortune with a no-frills funeral service. “Simple volume play,” he explains. “The margins are better burning bodies than burying them.” Confronted with this inhuman arch-capitalism, Harper doesn’t seem to know whether to be disgusted or aroused, though with Harper that may be a distinction without a difference.

Where to start with all that? How about Henry’s depression. Sir Henry Muck is not a good person. He’s not even a nice person, though he sometimes tries to be: When Yasmin, whose cruelty towards the help as a general rule has been well-documented at this point, yells at Molly, Henry defends the woman by pleading with his wife to “let her fulfill her function.” Not “do her job,” which would be a reasonable, maybe even welcome thing to say: fulfill her function, serve the purpose she was born into this world to serve, which is adjusting the curtains for House Muck. He doesn’t even hear how condescending he sounds.

So he’s not good, and he’s not nice, but he is definitely a clinically depressed, a trait he inherited from his father, who died of it. (Recall that Yasmin only married him as part of a deal: In exchange for Alexander’s help exposing her father’s crimes in the tabloids, she’d make it her life’s work to cheer Henry up.) The problem, which he alone seems even capable of understanding, is that you can’t yell at or jerk off a person until they’re not depressed anymore. You can’t tell them to put on their big boy clothes like you’re dealing with a truculent child. You can’t offer them a new gig and expect that to be the magic bullet. Actor Kit Harington builds a crescendoing sense of a man trying to make other people see something only he can, like a character from It: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists you can’t tough your way out of major depression. He’s right! Despite my every instinct, I feel for him here. I in fact know how he feels.

The person who comes closest to offering Henry wisdom about getting out from under things is, of all people, the Viscount Norton. Alexander oversees a right-wing media empire, albeit one that’s losing influence as young people turn away from legacy media, and he’s zealous about guarding and enforcing his power. But when you pick apart the personal advice he gives Henry and Yasmin over the course of the past season and change, it’s usually not just good, but nuanced, observant, thoughtful. He winds up telling Henry that if he can’t drug or drown out the sorrow, then he can “integrate it” into his life, a little at a time, until he’s found his way to the other side. A therapist might use different jargon, but the plan would be more or less the same.

In other words, all three of these bastards, Yasmin and Henry and Alexander, are interesting, complex people. You can never just wave your hand at them and brush them away, much as you might like to. Which raises a question: Is that being too generous to the rich and powerful? After all, if there’s one thing this past year has taught us, it’s that our self-appointed overlords are almost embarrassingly easy to understand: They’re sadistic perverts driven insane by their phones who like making money best when they’re stealing it out of our pockets. Do writers need to rethink how they portray villains, given our hard-earned insight into real-world villainy?

After episodes like this, I almost consider Down and Kay supervillains themselves. Under their direction, Industry continuously pushes the envelope of just how mean it can be. Cordelia’s brutal, horrifying kiss-off to Yasmin, the scene where young Henry’s dad sees the boy watching him prepare to kill himself and does it anyway, the ghost-father’s grotesque comments about women and the working class, the out-of-nowhere burst of anti-Semitism from the local guy who badmouths Yasmin, Whit’s straight-up Nazi comments about how much cheaper it is to burn bodies than bury them if you’re moving corpses in volume — time and again, this episode shocked me.

Its audacity extended to the works it’s willing to reference. After last episode’s A Clockwork Orange needledrop, this ep plays instantly recongizable Shostakovich theme from Eyes Wide Shut — during a Christmas party for rich freaks, while the camera does Kubrick zooms almost constantly. The beatdown in the bar is an extended GoodFellas homage, from the low-angled camera on Henry as he pounds the guy’s face in to the 1960s Christmas music and accompanying festive lights. 

Drugs, meanwhile, serve as a means for Industry characters to touch a plane of reality beyond the everyday. Henry’s experience with his illusory friend/father is in fact so surreal that I thought he might be a representation of the literal Devil. The local priest’s Scottish voice is like the voice of God after we’ve spent time with that dark spirit.

The dialogue, throughout, is absolutely scorching, maybe nowhere more so than the knock-down drag-out that Henry and Yasmin have in his room during the party. Beside herself with a combination of terror, rage, and disappointment, Yasmin pleads with Henry to understand that suicide is not romantic or macho and that oblivion will be small and boring, the way you’d scream at a child who’s flunking out of high school. Her exchange with Cordelia is equally incendiary, two badly damaged women damaging each other further in lieu of the abuser who’s no longer there. 

This is the kind of episode where there’s so much to talk about, the things you forget could sustain entire conversations. If this is a sign for the future of Season 4 — and given this show’s track record of constant improvement, there’s little reason to doubt that — we’re in for some truly great television. We’ve gotten some already.

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.