Industry
Dear Henry
Season 4
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
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Whitney Halberstram's fabricated persona is finally unraveling, and he's determined to bring everyone down with him.
<span class="credit">Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO</span>
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<p class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="www.vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/cmljsf9cq00120ibz4izzdyk5@published" data-word-count="73">Throughout my early years, the primary antagonists were always the Russians. Later, it became Arabs threatening the Western way of life. More recently, the ultra-rich—with their internal family conflicts and lavish, often distasteful, dining—emerged as the popular villains. However, trends are cyclical. Padded shoulders and shrimp cocktails are making a comeback. Greed is now fashionable, cocaine is stylish, and in the world of <em>Industry</em>, the ultimate adversary has reverted to the original antagonist: Mother Russia.</p>Roughly halfway through “Dear Henry,” Whitney Halberstram reaches his nadir. Due to Harper’s disruptive statements at the ALPHA Conference, Tender’s stock value is plummeting. Hayley—revealed to be a sex worker who also handles administrative tasks, not an executive assistant with occasional threesomes—is extorting him for $750,000. Henry has disappeared. Even Jonah won’t pause from tipping strippers to take Whitney’s call for old times’ sake. Whitney stares blankly, considering an escape on a Lithuanian passport, when Ferdinand shatters the reality of season four.
I can readily accept that Russia has a strategic interest in supporting foreign businesses, especially financial institutions that could yield compromising client information. (Having watched 80 percent of No Way Out, I’m aware of the Kremlin’s capabilities.) Yet, if Ferdinand’s account is accurate, the FSB is so deeply involved with Tender that they would assassinate Tony Day—a British citizen on British soil—to prevent his whistleblowing. And I do trust Ferdy, who confessed that the SVR facilitated his rise to the IBN C-suite in exchange for some early career credential theft. Is this an overtly wild plot twist? Yes, undoubtedly. If you’re inclined to stop watching Industry now, I won’t object. Personally, though, I’m quite intrigued. Perhaps the Lithuanian passport Whitney retrieves from his desk isn’t counterfeit. Maybe Whitney Halberstram truly is an elaborate fabrication, as his critics have always suggested. (A complete Kevin Costner, if you will.)
Yasmin, Tender’s short-lived head of communications, is the first of Whitney’s subordinates to turn against him. Early in the episode, Harper pays her an unwelcome visit, sowing seeds of doubt in Yasmin’s impressionable mind. Did she trust Whitney too quickly? Was Yasmin so desperate to help Henry recover that she failed to scrutinize the source of his support? The implication is that Yasmin would not have championed Tender—to the press, government, or her husband—if she had known about the underlying financial fraud. However, I remain unconvinced. This is the same woman who endorsed Moritz and consistently prioritizes the security that money provides. She cares little for the ethical implications of how wealth is acquired.
Nevertheless, persuasion is a potent tool. Yasmin openly dismisses Harper as a contemptible mercenary, but soon finds herself echoing Harper’s concerns to Henry and asking Hayley to investigate Whitney’s schedule. Her outrage peaks when she discovers Whitney watching her husband in their home shower. Henry is unaware of Whitney’s gaze as he heartily sings distorted Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics while lathering himself excessively, yet he doesn’t seem to mind. “You can be gay at school,” he snaps at his wife, who dares to ask if his past boarding school experiences mean he’s now interested in Whitney. While I find the sexual aspect of Whitney’s fixation on Henry profoundly disturbing, I don’t see it as central. Yasmin, maintain your focus. Is your distress over your husband being framed for a market-shattering financial crime, or because someone is pursuing your boyfriend, who isn’t even kind to you?
The Mucks’ marriage appears to be collapsing even faster than Tender itself. By now, I struggle to recall a time Henry spoke to Yasmin without belittling her. He has resumed drinking, and she correctly suspects Whitney encouraged the first drink. In a defensive and arrogant outburst, Henry suggests Yasmin prefers him being out of control because it gives her otherwise purposeless life a sense of meaning. “I cannot create a role for you in this world,” he tells her in a subdued tone meant to convey concern. I, for one, hope Yasmin heeds the wise voice whispering, *Take everything and depart.*
A satisfying sequence of preliminary conflicts unfolds in “Dear Henry.” Yasmin initially rebuffs Harper, then relays her accusations to Henry. Henry dismisses Yasmin but can’t shake the persistent feeling that his wife isn’t entirely mistaken. That evening, as he joins Whitney and Tender’s external accountant, Jacob, for dinner, it becomes evident that Whitney’s charm offensive secured the almost-clean audit presented to banking regulators. Did Jacob identify financial inconsistencies on Tender’s balance sheet? Of course. But, he assures Henry, these are merely “rounding errors” inherent in conducting business in Africa. He then joins the “TenderBoyz” in consuming the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu—one he couldn’t afford for himself, not even on his birthday.
Several hours later, the TenderBoyz, without Jacob, arrive at a gay club. Whitney guides a heavily intoxicated Henry from the lively dance floor to a glory hole, presumably to let the Industry FX team showcase their prowess. The sound of an unseen mouth on the other side of the wall is distinctly audible. While Henry is receiving anonymous oral sex, Whitney strokes Henry’s hair and whispers what his CEO needs to hear: “Everyone desires you.” Afterward, Whitney, still perfectly sober, abandons Henry on the docks in the early hours, heading to Accra to handle his Tony Day issue. However, Henry’s night is far from over. When next we see him, he will be in a hotel room with at least two sex workers.
Meanwhile, Harper addresses the ALPHA conference to present SternTao’s findings on Tender in Africa. It’s an unusual scene. The audience meticulously takes notes as she speaks. Eric appears proud, Yasmin looks infuriated, and Pierre nods along. Yet, Harper’s speech is a mishmash of meaningless words, offering no empirical evidence for SternTao’s short position; it’s pure corporate jargon. Perhaps this is the satirical point? We anticipated Harper would deliver an analysis demonstrating how the market misjudged Tender’s risk profile; instead, she merely rehashes phrases and confidently clicks through slides. She advocates for a new audit, akin to the one that exposed Enron’s fraud and supposedly ushered in an era of more effective auditing, which is laughable. Her remarks, to my untrained ear, sound inconsequential, but delivered with conviction, they are sufficient to cause Tender’s stock price to plummet 28 percent in a single trading day.
Tender’s end seems inevitable. Swiping a billion dollars from Pierpoint is one thing, but stealing from ordinary people’s paychecks is another entirely. I cannot fathom how the bank will survive this. Tender 2.0 is a failure. Whitney is a failure. He will never become Henry Muck, yet he refuses to acknowledge the undeniable truth. He cannot engage with the board’s discussions about bridge loans or layoffs, because if Tender ceases to exist, so does Whitney. He reassures everyone that this is merely a narrative problem, suggesting a television appearance to recalibrate the story for jittery traders. There is seemingly no challenge this man believes he cannot overcome with showmanship and, of course, compromising information.
In an attempt to intimidate SternTao into silence, Whitney sends Eric the video he had commissioned of Eric receiving oral sex from a 14-year-old in “Eyes Without a Face.” However, the strategy backfires because only those intimately familiar with Eric and Harper can comprehend the unique blend of ambition and self-destructiveness that drives them. Instead of retreating, Eric defiantly arranges to appear on the same CNN morning show, sharing the same desk with Whitney. Eric gazes into those intense eyes and reiterates the only message that truly matters: “New audit now.”
SternTao is defunct. Long live Stern Management. Eric declines to disclose what he is fleeing from, but following his masterful morning-show performance, he transfers the company to Harper. He declares it his all-time favorite day in finance, seeking only the $10 million he initially invested. Harper pleads for them to find a solution together, but Eric rejects her assistance, and thankfully so. She believes she wants to know what Eric is shielding her from, but Harper absolutely does not want to know the contents of that tape. At the episode’s conclusion, Eric is seen walking through leafy Westchester—as clear a farewell as any character on Industry has received. He doesn’t require a share of the profits. Harper has already compensated him, he states. He has learned from her that he can feel pride for someone other than himself, a feeling that will, presumably, sustain him through the latter part of his life. Earlier, Harper admitted to Whitney that she missed her mother’s funeral, but she will mourn Eric’s abandonment. There is no one left in the world to be proud of her. If she were to call Yasmin now, would Yasmin even answer?
We enter the world alone. We depart it alone. Isolation is the ultimate fate to which all Industry characters inevitably return. Whitney’s mind is reeling so intensely as Tender’s stock price plummets that he calls Harper—his adversary—for solace. “Do you have a favorite piece of classical music?” he inquires. A student newspaper posed the same somewhat pretentious question when he was starting out, and he still lacks an answer. (Though, to me, a perfectly reasonable response he could have given all this time is, “No, not really.”) I can’t tolerate this man for another moment. It truly is frustrating not to have been born into wealth; I understand that. In fact, approximately 99 percent of the global population comprehends this precise frustration, so why is the individual who just took a private jet to Accra the one who incessantly complains about it? Whitney’s core issue is his desire to be retroactively affluent—he yearns for a childhood home where BBC Radio 3 was constantly playing and meals were served in multiple courses.
Regarding this, I believe Henry actually understands Whitney quite well. It’s perfectly fine to be middle class, he reassures him; there’s no need for a tragic Dickensian backstory. “A minor deception about one’s character is acceptable as long as your intentions are pure,” Henry adds, a sentiment I largely concur with. But what happens when your heart is utterly dark and your conscience is absent? After witnessing Whitney’s grandstanding on CNN, Henry dismisses Jacob, their compromised accountant. The threat is now originating from within the organization: NEW AUDIT! Surely it’s too late for such a move, old chap. Henry needs to resign immediately. He must be able to credibly claim he became aware of this fraud at the same moment Harper informed the rest of the world.
It is evident that Whitney will not let him go without a struggle. This episode derives its title, “Dear Henry,” from a letter Whitney has been drafting and revising throughout the hour. Here is a brief selection of Whitney’s erratic opening lines: “Dear Henry, What if I don’t embody complexity.” Or “To those who possess everything, more shall be given. But from those who possess nothing, even what little they have shall be taken away.” Or perhaps, “Dear Henry, we are inherently driven to survive.” It is all incoherent nonsense, the desperate outbursts of a mind corrupted by avarice, desire, and a deep-seated fear of Moscow.
Ultimately, Whitney personally delivers an exceptionally substantial letter that clearly outlines the consequences for Henry Muck. He is no longer merely the public face of the company. Improbably, for the second time in his life, he finds himself at the forefront of one of the largest financial frauds ever perpetrated against the British populace.
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