- - We Need to Talk About Henry and Yasmin in 'Industry' Season 4

Michel GhanemJanuary 19, 2026 at 4:00 AM

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Industry Season 4, Episode 2 Recap HBO

Spoilers below.

Depression is a black hole. It consumes anyone and everything it touches. A black hole doesn’t concern itself with what is happening outside its radius; it is inherently self-concerned and often equally self-destructive. The emptiness (and seeming endlessness) of that black hole is exactly what makes Henry’s journey in this week’s episode of Industry so hard to watch, as we circle back to learn why he was found sadly strumming a harpsichord at the end of the premiere. And wow—if this episode’s stunning arc is a sign of things to come, we’re really in for it this season.

We begin episode 2 before the events of the premiere, with Henry on stage, where he anxiously awaits the results of his political campaign as a conservative Member of Parliament. As we already know from episode 1, Jennifer Bevan is the eventual winner here; Henry loses the race by a considerable margin. Yasmin watches on empathetically from the audience as he receives the bad news and, later, has a little cry on her (fabulous) blazer. This isn’t Sir Muck’s first public failure after his company Lumi flopped last season, and thus the consecutive losses spiral him into a deep depression.

We leap forward to the day of Henry’s 40th birthday, set during the Christmas season. Amidst a likely hangover, Henry can now barely get out of bed. In his room, Yasmin snaps at the maid Molly (Esther O’Casey), who’s just trying to draw the curtains to coax Henry from the realm of the dreaming. Yas is not happy with the current state of affairs at the Muck household. Over a very plentiful breakfast (how many sausages are on that plate?!) with Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), Yasmin informs them she’s invited “Jenny” Bevan to Henry’s birthday, in order to recruit her help conjuring a new, more forward-thinking perspective on the Muck name and legacy media. (It would seem Yas has been clocking in to work on her husband’s behalf lately, which should come as no surprise.) For Henry’s birthday, Yas gifts him his late father’s watch, which she had repaired, but the appearance of this tainted artifact doesn’t seem to land well with him. Instead, Henry heads to the armory to examine his guns. He asks his staff to change the lock on the armory, which should immediately raise a red flag—he may not trust his inebriated self with a weapon.

Out shooting game, Henry’s uncle gives his nephew some tough love, hoping to snap him out of his current state. Norton basically argues that Henry’s attitude and apathy toward life (and, by extension, his wife) are unacceptable, and that he needs to integrate depression into his life, step by step, rather than numb it altogether. (Henry is deeply and profoundly depressed, though, so I’m not sure that advice is helpful.) Henry lists out all remedies he’s tried—SSRIs and CBT and an unsuccessful trial with lithium. He’s been through it. The relatives also also discuss Henry’s father, who Henry found dead by suicide when he was young. “Fuck my father and his genetic inheritance,” the younger Muck proclaims.

Henry winds down from that confrontation with a bath and some champagne whilst listening to Penny & The Quarters’s “You and Me,” a song that became popular after the 2010 film Blue Valentine. His mansion (castle?) is insanely opulent, by the way: Henry’s tub is set on a rug in the middle of the room, splayed beside a fireplace. Yasmin gently interrupts his bath time to inform him that her aunt Cordelia Hanani-Spyrka (Claire Forlani) is coming to his party that evening. She also expresses her desire for them to rekindle things sexually, and even attempts to give him an unsuccessful underwater handjob. (The squelching noises as she rubs reminds me of how revoltingly good Industry’s sound design has always been, especially when it comes to sex.) Dejected, Henry gives his wife permission to sleep with other men to make up for his inability to perform; she looks at him stunned and insulted before leaving the room.

Later, in the lavish robe we saw him in at the end of the premiere episode, Henry snaps at a ghost tour group wandering through his house as he attempts to smash some pills down to dust with his boot. His sad strumming of the harpsichord is interrupted by a meeting with Whitney, set up by “Lady Muck,” a.k.a. Yasmin. (So she did change her name after all!). Whitney tries to reassure Henry about his recent election loss—he had high approval ratings, Whitney argues, but he was undermined by the Prime Minister’s decision to call an early election. To Henry, there’s nowhere else to go after these multiple failures, especially after failing upwards already.

That evening, the birthday bash is in full swing. And, apparently, it’s something of a Marie Antoinette-inspired costume event, with Yasmin dressed in a hilariously enormous blonde wig and shoes that make her much taller than Henry. The party itself is bustling with corsets, champagne flutes, and puffy skirts. There, Cordelia tells Yas about how her new sex-capades with a 29-year-old are giving her a new lease on life. As for her own early months of marriage with Henry, Yas has only this to say: “I’m a spectator and a caregiver.” Cordelia offers her niece a foreboding pep talk about the way men treat women, encouraging her to stand up to Henry before he steps all over her.

Meanwhile, after clearing out the busy kitchen, Norton and Jenny discuss headlines from his City & Capital newspaper on the Labour party’s “anti-business” tax plan. She worries about the fear-mongering tone of the reporting, and Yas, also present, defends the new government for not kissing the ring of industry. This episode is feeling quite Succession, isn’t it? It specifically reminds me of Shiv and Tom’s wedding episode from the first season…Not a sign of good things to come for the newlywed Mucks.

While the adults are discussing business, Henry and Whitney bond over an extravagant collection of Romantic-era paintings that cover the walls of his stairway. They’re looking specifically at Fishermen at Sea, J.M.W. Turner’s 1796 oil painting that depicts fishermen trying to navigate through choppy waters with just the moonlight as a guide. “Life wasn’t a romance then, and it isn’t a romance now,” Henry observes. The era’s paintings were right at the turn of the Industrial Revolution, which Whitney points out was something like the end of community and the beginning of a new wealthy business class. Fittingly, Whitney himself wants to recruit Henry and his resources to really grow Tender beyond its current capacity.

Later on, Yas finds Henry half-dressed and snorting coke in the bedroom, where a massive fight ensues. We get a great monologue here from Yas, who calls out Henry’s endless romanticization of his own depression and would-be suicide: His death would be mundane, not cinematic or grand, she argues. When she threatens to leave the marriage if he doesn’t get his act together, Henry brings up their prenuptial agreement, but it apparently isn’t valid if he’s on drugs. Yas makes her husband pull up his sleeve to reveal significant bruising at his elbow, suggesting heroin use. He claps back by accusing her of adultery, another common prenup clause. At this point, Yas comes close to actually hitting him. Despite being sexually unfulfilled, she promises she’s been faithful. (But she didn’t vote for him?! Huh, okay…) Instead of striking him, she aggressively grabs his crotch, frustrated that his drug use and depression have prevented them from being intimate. Finally, he takes what looks like a strip of LSD before returning to the party.

Stumbling into the stunning dining room (my God, where was my invite to this party?), Henry is severely inebriated. High beyond reproach, he loudly accuses Jenny of sleeping with his uncle before he forces a kiss onto her. (Ick.) He’s belligerent and embarrassing himself until a mystery man (the episode names him “the Commander,” played by Jack Farthing) whisks him out of the party and to the pub.

Still at the house, Norton apologizes to the party on Henry’s behalf: “This family hates birthdays,” he says by way of explanation. Across the table from each other, Harper and Yas exchange a priceless look, Harper offering her friend something between sympathy and pity.

Over at the (very festive) pub, Henry and the Commander discuss the slippery slope of idle hands. Like a little devil on his shoulder, the Commander encourages Henry to sleep around to get his libido back, during which Henry notices a familiar woman at the pub. As it turns out, the woman in question is actually Molly, the curtain-fiddling maid from earlier, and another man at her table is the parish priest (Roy Sampson), who baptized Henry and buried his father. Small-town serendipity! Another bloke at the table, who keeps hitting on Molly, tells Henry that Yas is referred to as “stable girl” by the lads of the house, apparently because she’s of a lower class status than Henry himself, and because she likes “horse cock.” This insult to his wife, predictably, ends with Henry beating the man to a pulp. Ouch.

Outside the pub, the mystery man (a.k.a Commander) is revealed to be a figment of Henry’s own imagination, an unusually supernatural turn for Industry—and one I honestly did not see coming. Not only that, but the Commander is actually an apparition of Henry’s father: His throat is slashed, and he’s wearing the wristwatch Yas had restored for Henry’s birthday present. Henry’s father died quite young, clearly of suicide, so casting Farthing works well here. It’s a chilling scene. Kit Harington is absolutely killing this season’s performance; he has really made Henry his own since he first joined the show last season. It’s a complete departure from his iconic Game of Thrones performance as Jon Snow.

Back at the house, Yas and Harper debrief privately about what has changed between Yas and Henry’s happy wedding and this night’s particular disaster. Harper throws out an accidental jab—the kind of thing you say when you think you’re being helpful—by telling Yas she can’t win respect through accumulated luxury. Yas doesn’t take this particular piece of advice very well, and she’s keen to attack back. The frenemies meet halfway in their mutual loneliness. These are truly the kinds of no-filter squabbles that siblings (or lovers…) have, another reminder of the shared history between the former Pierpoint colleagues.

Harper leaves right as Jenny appears. She’s shaken up by Henry’s outburst at dinner but ultimately more worried about Yas herself. Jenny seems to leave the party on good-enough terms, and is probably the only character on this show to have ever refused a line of cocaine. (“I haven’t boffed a line since uni,” she admits).

By the extravagant Christmas tree, Harper asks Whitney for advice as to how he’s created “healthy” working relationships. (Ha!). Whitney reveals he grew up poor, then shares the venture that he used to launch his career: a funeral service with no frills. I can’t totally tell Harper’s read on this confession, but she definitely seems unsettled, either by Whitney’s lack of generational wealth or by his previous career profiting off of dead bodies.

After catching Cordelia giving Otto a blowjob—this is Industry, after all!—Yas confronts her aunt for not coming to her father Charles Hanani’s funeral. Cordelia argues that Charles, her brother, didn’t care for boundaries, and claims that they had a “bohemian childhood,” which seems to imply there was incest between them. (As if the Hanani sexual abuse allegations couldn’t get any worse…) Before Yas has the chance to kick her out, Cordelia tells her niece that she was going to be terminated before her birth—that is, until Charles found out she was a girl. So creepy. Yas isn’t phased to learn this, though. God only knows she’s heard worse.

Before the night comes to a close, Yas stumbles upon Hayley upstairs, napping in her Northwestern hoodie. Has she been there this whole time, once again?! Now that’s a dedicated assistant. Hayley jokes that the two of them could shack up for the night, and Yas seems down. Perhaps a hint of things to come?

Dusk turns to dawn, and Henry stops by the house’s garage, seemingly having decided to die by suicide. He closes the garage doors and revs his car’s engine, closing his eyes for an onslaught of flashbacks from his youth, including one of his father telling him to shine his shoes over breakfast. The score is beautiful here; it’s heartbreaking to watch him get to this point. Before Henry runs out of oxygen, he hears Yasmin’s voice and, as if a storm has broken, he suddenly bolts awake. He lets out a laugh and drives to the the house’s front door, where Yas rushes out to meet him—and to have sex with him on top of the car, the pub-brawl blood on his outfit barely dry. It seems Henry’s LSD-fueled trip has helped him excise his demons and navigate his way out of a depression that was informed by traumas of the past—at least for now. I don’t know if I believe such an overnight 180 can last.

As the episode comes to a close, Henry opens up to Yas about what’s actually going on: His father killed himself on the morning of his own 40th birthday, meaning his son has officially outlived him. And, Henry says, he’s going to take Whitney’s offer to work with him at Tender. As they drive out onto the open road, Henry tells Yas they should try for a child. Yas doesn’t respond, but I’m sure she’s thinking something along the lines of, My husband’s already enough of a child to take care of. Harington’s performance, Marisa Abela’s performance, the costume design, the sets…all the elements of this episode made for an emotional roller coaster and an absolute visual treat. I can’t wait to see what’s in store next week.

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