The Mucks Are at Their Lowest on ‘Industry’

Runner-Up: Yasmin’s Aunt

When Yasmin’s aunt first enters the episode, she feels like comic relief, being glamorous, chatty, and refreshingly candid about dating a man decades younger than her. She’s buzzing with the thrill of it.

“Bend over so I can see it,” he instructs her. 

“Just having this 29-year-old giving me these orders, it’s better than any of my children being born,” she says, quickly noting it was a joke, though the delivery suggests otherwise. For a brief moment, she reads as the cool elder who’s messy, self-aware, and unexpectedly insightful, imparting some wise words to Yasmin (Marisa Abela). 

“Doesn’t matter how much a man tells you he loves you,” she says. “You never give them unconditional love because they will weaponize it.” 

No notes. It’s the kind of hard-earned wisdom that makes you lean in and think, OK, maybe this woman has survived enough to know exactly what she’s talking about.

And then, just as quickly, the illusion shatters. Yasmin overhears her aunt in a compromising situation with Otto Mostyn (“You’ve got a better mouth than your brother”), arguably the worst person in the room, as we noted in last week’s ranking, and suddenly all that feminist-sounding clarity curdles into something far uglier. When Yasmin confronts her and kicks her out into the night, there’s the chilling revelation that her aunt may have enabled, protected, or at least empowered her brother’s predatory behavior.

“Your father told me that he was going to terminate you until he found out you were a girl."

The final blow is the cruelest.

Runner-Up: Yasmin’s Never Voted

Midway through Henry’s already-teetering birthday party, Yasmin and Henry (Kit Harington) retreat into a fight. Henry is still nursing the wound of losing his political race, spiraling between self-pity and substances, while Yasmin meets his sulk with a brutal lack of sympathy. What unfolds is two people talking at each other, not to each other, each line sharper and more hurtful than the last.

“Why did we buy that shed in Wakefield if you didn’t even vote for me?” Sir Henry asks. 

“Oh, grow up. I’ve never voted. What fucking difference would my vote make?”

Like, we knew the girl was privileged, but DAMN. 

Runner-Up: Sir Henry’s Spiral

If sheer volume of mess were the only metric, Sir Henry would’ve walked away with the crown with no competition. Over the course of the night, he drops acid, sees his dead father in a hallucination, relives the trauma of watching him die, lashes out at his wife’s family and belittles them over their financial standing after last season’s embezzlement scandal, and violently assaults his housemaid’s friend at a bar. Just when you think he’s hit bottom, the dead-dad visions come roaring back, culminating in an attempted suicide. It’s a relentless spiral, ugly and exhausting to watch.

And yet this is the rare Industry meltdown that feels needed. Every outburst, every act of of cruelty, every act of self-destruction is soaked in unresolved grief. Henry is haunted. Literally. His father’s presence hanging over the entire episode. 

That context is what ultimately keeps him from the number-one spot this week. As Yasmin observes at the end of the episode, Henry has now lived past the age his father died at. He’s survived his 40th birthday, something his father didn’t, even if just by one day, and that realization lands heavier than any drug-induced hallucination.

Winner: The Last Scene of These Three 

What is it about Industry that makes sex feel aggressively unsexy? Just when the episode seems ready to close on something resembling tenderness, the show reminds us it has zero interest in giving viewers a reasonable ending.

By morning, Sir Henry, newly recommitted to life, drives back to his estate (calling it a mansion feels incorrect; “castle” is more appropriate). He’s resolute and ready to give Yasmin everything he’s got, emotionally and otherwise. In another universe, this could’ve been a soft, charged reunion between two people who’ve clearly been out of sync for a while. Vulnerable. Intimate. Maybe even hot.

But this is Industry, so of course that shit was never going to happen. 

Enter the lurker known as Sir Henry’s uncle, Viscount Alexander Norton (Andrew Havill), materializing from an upstairs window. As Yasmin and Henry reconnect, he watches. 

Then, just to make sure the moment is fully ruined, he delivers the line that seals this scene’s place at the top of the unhinged rankings. 

“Spring is coming,” he says. 

Bro, what?? You know what? That’s enough Industry for tonight.