“A true honour to show off my serious journalistic skills in the new 10/10 series of @industryhbo,” Dimoldenberg wrote on Instagram.
We need to talk about Rishi’s storyline.
Rishi (Sagar Radia) had an extremely dramatic arc this season. Season 3 saw Rishi dealing with gambling debts, which escalated to the point that his wife, Diana, was shot in their home by brutal loan shark Vinay.
In season 4 things only got worse for Rishi. For one thing, he is a suspect in Diana’s murder. For another, even more people start turning up dead—after a night of drug use, Jim (Charlie Heaton), dies of an overdose. Rishi attempts to flee the scene by escaping from the balcony. When the police enter the room, he jumps—only to survive the fall with two broken ankles. He ends up being arrested, broken ankles and all.
As Radia told Variety, Rishi’s shocking arc is all about guilt, survival, and self-destruction. “It’s surviving financially, it’s surviving emotionally, it’s surviving psychologically,” he said. “There’s so many different things going through his head. He swings between numb detachment into bursts of self-destructive behavior, whether that’s drinking or moral disengagement. Ultimately, I think he’s just punishing himself more than anything else.”
Hayley’s storyline opened up some interesting conversations about consent and power dynamics.
We were also introduced to Kiernan Shipka’s Hayley Clay, a calculating executive assistant whose complicated relationship with Whitney and his app opened up some fascinating conversations about consent and workplace power dynamics. We eventually discovered that Hayley was in fact originally hired from an escort service. And her role with Tender included committing extortion by setting up compromising situations involving both herself and other escorts with powerful men. After forging an alliance with Yasmin, Hayley seems to be ready to take charge of things in some very unexpected, very satisfying ways. Although Hayley is being used, she finds ways to wrestle some power for herself. “She’s not in a position of power, technically, but she finds it. She gets it. And that, I think, is kind of astonishing on her part,” Shipka told Deadline.
Eric Tao’s Industry journey seems to have come to a shocking end.
Eric Tao (Ken Leung) made a dramatic mid-season exit after having been filmed having sex with an underage escort and being blackmailed by Whitney. In a shocking twist, Eric hands over his portion of the fund to his prodigy Harper and walks off, vanishing into the ether as Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” plays mournfully.
Fans were shocked when Leung confirmed that his character was leaving Industry for good. “As far as I know, it’s our last scene. So there was that in it. And even though we’re friends and remain friends, and hopefully we’ll be friends forever, to have what we created the past six years come to an endpoint, it’s very poignant. It’s not just sad. There’s a celebration in it. It’s everything. It’s beautiful,” Leung said to TV Insider of his final scene.
Sweetpea Golightly became Industry’s surprising star.
Things also got complicated for Sweetpea (Miriam Petche), the finance influencer, who, once merely the butt of Pierpoint’s jokes, found herself embroiled a nude photo scandal after her OnlyFans side hustle was uncovered. The leak, naturally, has some pretty serious ramifications for Sweetpea’s career in finance. Harper, in a moment of sisterly generosity, offers her a job at SternTao, her new fund. Despite being the laughing stock of the industry, Sweetpea proved time and time again that she is strong, smart and just as success-driven as her male counterparts. She refused to let herself be defined by stereotypes—and became the unlikely emotional center of the season.
What will happen next in Industry?
Clearly, Harper isn’t done yet. And the good news is, season 5 is officially happening. The bad news is, it will be the show’s final outing.