By Rifan Muazin 
Become necessary in hell and you have made yourself into a demon. This chilling sentiment serves as the spiritual anchor for the fourth season finale of HBO’s Industry, titled “Both, And.” In their final exchange of the season, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) delivers the word “necessary” to Harper Stern (Myha’la) with the cold finality of a settled invoice. Throughout the series, Harper—the "world-eater," the prodigy, the bandit, and now the financial oracle—has frequently reminded Yasmin of her perceived uselessness. To Harper, Yasmin was the "unnecessary" one, the "fool," and eventually, the "whore." Yet, by the close of the season, Yasmin has found a dark utility that secures her place in the global hierarchy, albeit at the cost of her soul.
Yasmin’s decision to organize a high-end sex trade for the elite is not portrayed as a Miltonic rise to power. She does not rule this hell; she has merely accepted the position of its head janitor. She has become the facilitator for the sexual and political appetites of the global 0.01%, transforming herself from a person into a piece of the furniture within the rooms where the world’s most powerful men congregate. When Harper, in a rare moment of genuine concern or perhaps lingering nostalgia, beseeches Yasmin to leave a room filled with neo-reactionaries and girls who are either trafficked or presented as such, Yasmin refuses. She has found her "economic function," and in the brutal world of Industry, to be without a function is to be buried before you are dead.
This transformation mirrors a specific sociological phenomenon observed in real-world political landscapes over the last decade. We have seen countless profiles of once-legible political actors—elected officials, judges, and media figures—who have abandoned their previous identities to throw their lot in with the resurgent far-right. Their backstories often follow a predictable rubric: childhood shame, professional mistreatment, and a feeling of being left behind by the cultural zeitgeist. This leads to a spiral into irrelevance, eventually blooming into a bitter nostalgia for an era where they imagine they would have been respected.
Think of the media-constructed narratives surrounding figures like Tucker Carlson or Justice Samuel Alito. Carlson’s mother left him at a young age; Alito famously loathed the counter-culture "longhairs" at Princeton in the late sixties. These are the "prematurely aged, brutally intelligent" boys who transform their personal grievances into legal and cultural handmaidens for authoritarianism. Yasmin fits this rubric perfectly. She was sexually abused by her father, professionally belittled by her first boss at Pierpoint, and treated as a sexual commodity by every mentor she encountered. When she finally marries for wealth, she ends up with Henry Muck (Kit Harington), a "maudlin little twerp" of the landed gentry who lacks the backbone to support her or himself. Their final arguments in the finale lack the raw, truth-telling energy of Tony and Carmela Soprano’s legendary "Whitecaps" fight; instead, they feel like the hollow squabbles of a dying aristocracy.
Marisa Abela’s performance this season has been a masterclass in subtlety, using the darkening and lightening of her expressions to signal Yasmin’s hardening shell. When she and Lord Norton (Andrew Havill) systematically demolish Henry in the press, we see the emergence of a new Yasmin. She finds a kindred spirit in Hayley (Kiernan Shipka), who admitted to using "every inch of her body" to climb the social ladder. In recognizing each other, they become the show’s new "One True Pairing"—two women who, having once been objects, have now become agents within the highest rungs of the sex trade.
The fourth season of Industry was not without its flaws. The narrative occasionally felt overstuffed, with a Labour Party subplot that failed to generate the same tension as the financial maneuvering. The dialogue, while often brilliant in its use of non-sequiturs—such as Sweetpea ordering room service or the "Forgive me, Dr. Umar" reference—sometimes devolved into reductive, on-the-nose speeches. Harper’s dialogue in the final scene, suggesting that the "real alpha" was the analysts they met along the way, felt like a rare moment of the show winking too hard at the audience.
However, the season’s fearlessness in mapping the "sinister geopolitical Morse code" of our time deserves immense praise. Industry successfully captured the self-loathing bluster of Silicon Valley’s "anti-human" tech moguls, channeling the energies of figures like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. It explored the looming specter of Russian intelligence agencies destabilizing the "bargain-basement democracies" of the US and UK, while tracing the tendrils of corruption from hollow Ghanaian warehouses to the impoverished streets of Sunderland.
The most unavoidable influence on the season, however, was the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein. Critics and viewers alike have noted the parallels between Yasmin’s arc and the life of Ghislaine Maxwell. Abela herself has confirmed that Maxwell was a primary inspiration for her performance. The show posits a stomach-churning idea: that the sex trade, as exemplified by Epstein, might be the strongest connective tissue between the disparate worlds of government, finance, academia, and media. In the world of Industry, a "Davos roster" of power—Harvard professors, heads of state, and finance titans—is united by a willingness to "swim through sewage to cum," as Yasmin bluntly puts it.
While other contemporary media projects like Sound of Freedom or True Detective center on "avenging angels" who rescue victims from trafficking, Industry takes a more courageous and disturbing path. It spent four seasons showing us the gradual moral erosion that leads a person to become a procurer. The show avoids the "Orientalist fever dreams" of films like Taken or the puerile exploitation of The Scary of Sixty-First. Instead, it delivers a patient psychological drama that illustrates how someone who was initially "OK" can eventually choose to serve in hell. There is a bravery in the show’s refusal to grant Yasmin unearned empathy; as she gains executive control over the sex lives of others, the audience is forced to judge her rather than pity her.
On the other side of the finale’s ledger is Harper Stern’s ascent. Her journey through Season 4 was mediated by the machinery of legacy media—journalists, conferences, and televised interviews. The show emphasizes the obsession with "controlling the narrative." Whitney Halberstram’s entire existence is dedicated to churning out "sophistry and bullshit" to shape public perception. Eric Tao’s final testament on CNN provided Harper with the proxy parental validation she has sought since the series began. Even the editor of FinDigest (David Wilmot) cuts through Harper’s emotional defenses, noting that she is trying to trick her own "physiognomy" into believing she cares about the ethics of her trades.
The season’s final scene places Harper at the absolute peak of upmarket journalism. She is on a private jet, being interviewed by Patrick Radden Keefe—played by the real-life New Yorker writer known for his investigations into the Sackler family and the IRA. Keefe’s presence is a brilliant meta-commentary; he is a man who made his career writing about how white-collar and blue-collar crime weave into the fabric of contemporary life. By having him interview Harper, the show suggests that she has finally "made it"—not just as a trader, but as a historical figure of the financial age, a person whose "crimes" are now the subject of prestige long-form journalism.
The soundtrack for the finale also provided a significant clue to Harper’s future. As her fund, SternTao, closes its position on "Tender" and nets a $100 million profit, the song “Tu y Tu Mirar…Yo y Mi Canción” by Los Angeles Negros plays. This track was famously sampled by Jay-Z for “My 1st Song,” the closing track on The Black Album. At the time, Jay-Z intended for that album to be his retirement, a moment where he ceded his fame to focus on his business empire. It was a turning point where the artist became the mogul.
With the announcement that Industry will return for a fifth and final season, the stakes for Harper are clear. She has made the Forbes list and keynoted the conferences. She has the fortune. The question remains whether she can say goodbye to the fame and the "world-eating" hunger that brought her there. Deng Xiaoping once famously said that “to get rich is glorious.” Whether that glory can satisfy Harper Stern is the question that will define the show’s conclusion. As her plane descends at the end of the finale, Harper is returning to "the disheveled place we call home," a world caught somewhere between the high-flying clouds of the elite and the moral underworld where Yasmin now resides.