After a more focused episode of HBO‘s Industry where Henry Muck (Kit Harington) was really going through it — versus his usual easygoing demeanor — we’re back to normal on Season 4, Episode 3 “Habseligkeiten.” And by “normal” I mean “off the wall bonkers.”
We’ll get to the craziest, most unhinged moments in a second — and spoiler warning past this point — but in case you’re curious, “Habseligkeiten” is roughly translated as “belongings.” Or more specifically, personal belongings, items you have an attachment to. Here’s a longer explanation from a German word-of-the-day site:
“The word doesn’t signify ownership or wealth of a person. However, it does refer to his possessions and does it in a friendly and compassionate way. Typical for those with these kinds of possessions would be a six-year-old child who empties his pockets to take joy in what he has collected. Or the word can be seen from a more pitiful side. It can express the few belongings that someone who has lost his home has and how he has to transport them to whatever shelter available.”
So you can see how the folks on everyone’s favorite banking drama could have interest in wealth and ownership, as well as what it means to them personally, and that’s what plays out in this episode. It’s not an unhinged moment, it’s just a fun fact!
Enough of that, though. Let’s get to the wildest moments in the episode, from threesomes to the reveal of a signature so wild it somehow tops everything the show has done so far. And beyond the spoiler warning, also a warning about content here… This is Industry, so while this site is usually safe for work, this post is uncensored and ready to go.
1. Stern-Tao Rising
Perhaps not that shocking given how the season premiere ended, but as we open on Episode 3, Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Eric Tao (Ken Leung) are in a hotel suite actually working together. But it still is shocking to see these two people, who have frequently destroyed each other’s lives, and occasionally gleefully, in the same place working not at cross-purposes.
Granted, Eric is wooing clients with expensive liquor and Harper is chatting with intrepid fintech journalist Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton) and giving him incendiary quotes about pursuing Tender for a short in order to destabilize the market in her favor, so it’s not like we’re in a brand new world or anything.
But still, seeing these two happily breathe the same air is… Weird, at the very least. And unsettling. “I think this might be too intimate a space to be working together,” says Harper after shooting out a barb about Eric bonding with a potential client about both being in the “deadbeat dad’s club.” So yeah, even Harper and Eric are aware this isn’t ideal.
2. Paging HR
If you found that first scene a little too tame, don’t worry, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Henry have got your back. After making a deal with Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) last episode, Henry is now working at banking app Tender as CEO, and Yasmin is also there in an unofficial capacity. She’s also there to make out with Henry, and say things like, “When you fuck my mouth with your tongue like that, I know I’ve got you back.”
Ah, young love.
They get interrupted by Hayley (Kiernan Shipka), with Henry noting, “You can’t talk like that here,” and Yasmin firing back, “I can. And I will.”
Given Jay Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn) was fired for misconduct in the first episode for less than what Yas said above… Uh, maybe not?
3. Harper Harper’s Up A Meeting
Oh, Harper, you just can’t help yourself. In an introductory “friends and family” meeting held by Stern-Tao to help drum up investors, things are going south — mostly thanks to Harper’s involvement. She’s got a rep for destruction, you see, and though Eric is trying to play things slow and careful, it’s not connecting with the investors they’ve gathered. So naturally, Harper goes rogue.
“You’ve either got a short that puts the cat inside the pigeon, or you don’t,” says one of the investors, Pierre, to which Harper, the words dragging out of her, says, “Who says I don’t have that idea?”
Eric, silent, but pissed, sits there as Harper does her thing, teasing that her “real passion lies with finding dead men walking.” She’s talking, of course, about Tender.
The table is silent. Shocked. “The market is treating that as a growth stock,” another investor says, breaking the silence. “What exactly is your thesis?”
The thing is, we the viewer know that Harper doesn’t have anything other than a curious journalist and a hunch. The folks at the introductory breakfast are also sure Harper doesn’t have anything. But Harper plays it as she always does, flying by the seat of her pants while you can see Eric crapping his right next to her.
“Pierre, anyone who wants to place money with us, will have full access to our researched view above and beyond cursory remarks at an introductory breakfast,” Harper says, chuckling.
A scene like this shows off the beauty of Industry, that in essence Harper and Eric are our heroes, the center of the show. But it’s impossible to watch a scene like this without feeling your heart drop into your stomach… It’s not even Day One of Stern-Tao, and already Harper is playing out the same old mistakes, ready to burn down the house when they haven’t even built the framework.
4. Paging HR, Part 2
Did we mention Tender really needs an HR department? Because they do. Dycker sends his pre-publish questions to Tender, which sends Henry in a tizzy, only to be calmed down by Halberstram and Yas… With the latter getting pulled aside by Hayley.
She tells Yas that she nearly slept with Dycker. She has a fuzzy memory of the night, and is worried that Dycker might have looked through some documents around the apartment they hooked up in — which, of note, is Halberstram’s apartment — though Yas immediately jumps to Hayley possibly having been raped.
“Did you fuck him?” Yas asks, followed by “Did you answer any of his questions.” So, her priorities are pretty clear in terms of order of importance. While Hayley says no to both, Yas sighs and adds, “I hate when men try and take something that isn’t theirs.”
They then share a look that follows up on the heat between them last episode, and Yas then blathers some corporate speak about liking the “transparency” and that it’ll stay between them — which seems like, in my uninformed opinion, the wrong thing to do.
5. Sweetpea V. Rishi: Dawn Of Justice
In order to expand the staff of Stern-Tao beyond two people, Harper brings in Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) for a meeting, and Sweetpea’s Siren (the show’s version of OnlyFans) leak comes up, noting that at her job sometimes she feels like “Cherry pie left on the windowsill?” offers Harper with a laugh.
Sweetpea laughs too, though she says, “Well, it’s my own fault, so…”
“Hey,” says Harper. “No, it’s not. No it’s not. That Siren leak was not your fault. You did something for you, and some asshole made it.. Not for you, and I hope he fucking suffers for it.”
That’s nice and all, but there’s one problem: that asshole is probably Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), who is currently working in an investigative capacity for Harper. Granted, Rishi has already suffered quite a bit, like, for example, when he watched his wife get shot in the head in front of him in their kitchen in the Season 3 finale. But when Rishi enters with some research in the midst of Harper offering Sweetpea a full-time job, the conversation — which included some surprising info about how Tender may be built on a throne of lies — goes off the rails.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” asks Sweetpea, jumping to her feet. And when Rishi goes to apologize, she shouts, “No, genuinely, stay the fuck away from me… This guy is a fucking psychotic liar, a fucking pathological degenerate.”
Granted, that could describe half the characters on the show, but Sweetpea isn’t wrong about Rishi… No matter how ashamed he looks, and how much Harper and Eric protest, Rishi is a disgusting monster.
“If you put me in a room with this cunt again, you will never hear from me again, okay?” Sweetpea tells Harper, basically making an ultimatum between her and Rishi. Guess who will win out?
6. How The Sausage Is Made
Henry, Yas, Whitney, and Hayley all head to Vienna to woo Moritz Hunter-Bauer (Sid Phoenix), the head of IBN Bauer, which is being acquired by Tender. Moritz makes his character very clear in the first minute when he tells the assemblage he attended Harrow for school, with the side note that, “For every genuine homosexual, nine are created by British boarding schools.”
Everyone awkwardly laughs, and alongside his uncomfortably close mother Princess Johanna (Susanne Wuest), it’s pretty clear not everything is okay in the Hunter-Bauer house. But the wurst is yet to come.
Over dinner, Moritz explains that his idol is Louis XIV, aka The Sun King, to which Henry explains he doesn’t think he’s ever heard anyway say that. But that’s just the tip of the crazyberg over the course of dinner, as Moritz waxes philosophical about politics in a way that dances around and then leans into outright fascism and monarchy. Oh and anti-semitism. So, you know, lots going on there.
My two cents? Any adult who lives alone in a castle with his doting mother should probably not be trusted and/or spoken to in any way. Sorry, that’s just how I call ’em.
7. Operation Normal Girl
One of the runners this episode is Eric and Harper trying to, for once, not act like erratic money robots but instead normal people, under the heading Operation Normal Guy and Operation Normal Girl. While Eric wrestles with connecting with his teen daughter, and whether he should sell his twins’ inheritance to set Stern-Tao up for potential success (he does), Harper goes out on a date with Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh). Guess how successful this particular operation is?
After showing up 15 minutes late, Kwabena makes jokes (“whole civilizations have risen and fallen in 15 minutes”) but Harper isn’t having any of it, and clearly tries to shake Kwabena out of his light casualness.
“I might as well tell you I fucked someone else,” she says, to which he thinks for a second and then responds, “Okay.”
Harper is completely thrown off her throwing other people off their game, game, by this, and Kwabena continues to joke, asking whether she slept with someone else in the past 15 minutes. Kwabena eventually wins Harper over, but she can’t turn it off, and neither can he, his easygoing, calm style clashing with her always on mentality. Specifically, she uses his joke about them both coming to the date for “biodynamic sake and maybe some mutual fellatio” as an excuse to say she was really there to offer him a job, not suck him off.
She stalks off, leaving him there. Operation Normal Girl? An utter failure.
8. Harper Stern: Triggered?
Coming soon to Netflix: Harper Stern’s extremely unfunny and downright uncomfortable stand-up comedy special, inspired by the time Eric Tao asked her if she’s triggered.
“Sorry, triggered?” Harper says when a bathrobe clad Eric merely asks her how her date went and what he should buy for his 14-year-old daughter. “Who the fuck uses that word, seriously? Are you kidding me? Shit that people fucking say, ‘My trauma made me stronger.’ No, no! My trauma traumatized me. And it made me fucking weak. And I have had to deal with consequences that were not my fault. And it has nothing to do with that I am doing right now! Do you know why I do this? Because I enjoy it, and I’m fucking good at it! It starts and ends with work and being proven fucking right. This is life or death for me. You used to act like it too.”
Beyond being a powerhouse monologue, it’s a fascinating one because while Harper is clearly ignoring the hurt and pain and lack of connection that drives her, she’s also correct: as always on Industry, it’s about work. And Eric proves that by making a joke about her seeming to be a little triggered, but following that by switching into work mode, explaining that if she comes to a meeting he spent days “wrangling” she needs “ideas that aren’t half-baked.”
This is the language they know how to talk to each other in, the language of money and meetings — not dates and gifts. Operation Normal Guy is also a failure because that’s just not how Eric and Harper are wired. And it’s a testament to their evolving relationship that not only does Eric calmly lay all this out, but Harper accepts it. Back in the day Eric would have gone nuts with a baseball bat and Harper would have destroyed his family. Now? They’re meeting on the even ground they know so well, in a messy hotel suite office.
There’s one more detail here: Harper asks if Eric knows she’s a twin. “Uh, no, because you’ve never mentioned it?” Eric says… And then it’s back to work.
9. Threesome
This is what you came here for, right? After one and a half whole episodes of simmering tensions, Hayley comes to Yas and Henry’s bedroom door with some questions from Dycker, and Yas immediately starts teasing her about the slim pickings on Raya in Vienna. Henry, clad only in a towel, enters, and Yas notes that “Calabasas here just tried and failed to get laid.”
Good thing Yas has her back, telling Henry that Hayley is “very frustrated” and offering a solution: Henry.
“Do you like him?” Yas asks Hayley, reaching down to stroke Henry’s erection.
And as the sexy music kicks in, everyone gives their consent. Henry kisses Hayley while Yas watches, and it’s clear she’s feeling conflicting emotions. Sure she made this happen, but she’s holding in her own frustration and anger… She’s giving Henry what he wants, aka Hayley, but you merely need to reference the previous Yas/Hayley scene where the former said, “I hate when men try and take something that isn’t theirs.” Henry didn’t take, exactly, but Yas is giving him what she thinks he wants, not what she wants.
So she retreats to the cuck chair to smoke and watch while Hayley goes down on Henry, turning around to command, “Good. Now spit on it.” The scene is also a masterclass of directing as the camera focuses on Yas — not Henry and Hayley — letting us see her go through wave after wave of emotions, ultimately attempting to exert control verbally because she has lost it in every other aspect of her life.
Don’t worry, things get wilder after Henry ejaculates inside Hayley, with Yas commanding him to get off the assistant. He rolls to the back of the bed, hiding himself with a towel, and Yas licks her lips.
“Now turn around on the bed, open your legs, and show me your cunt,” Yas tells Hayley. She complies, turning around and sitting spread eagle on the bed, at which point Yas approaches. “I believe you have something that belongs to my husband,” Yas says. “And therefore to me.”
As Yas bends down to eat out Hayley, the scene cuts to Yas slurping an oyster with Johanna and burping, the second most hilarious thing that happens in the hour.
10. If Only He Had Been A Successful Painter
Earlier in the episode, Johanna told Yas that the room she put Yas and Henry in was her favorite in the castle, which is where the term “Habseligkeiten” pops up. Johanna explained to Yas that the word, roughly translated, means “possessions closest to your soul.” And uh, we find out which possession is closest to Johanna’s soul in the most laugh out loud bannana-pants moment the show has delivered, maybe ever.
Though Whitney and Henry have already left the castle, Yas is still there packing up their things, as “Horst Wessel Lied” plays on the soundtrack. That’s when Yas notices a painting on the wall in the room, of the very castle they’re staying in: Neuschwanstein Castle. She looks at it closer, scanning the turrets and sees even the window of the room she’s staying in.
And then she notices the signature. Which reads “A. Hitler.”
Another masterclass from Abela, this time as she slowly realizes she’s staying in a room with an authentic painting by Adolf Hitler, in a castle he painted, that is clearly occupied currently by Nazis. Reader, I have watched this scene five times and devolved into unhinged cackling each and every time.
In case you’re curious, yes, this is a real painting from Hitler. Titled “Schloss Neuschwanstein,” it was painted in 1908 using watercolor. And the cherry on top? “Horst Wessel Lied” was a Nazi anthem, in case you missed exactly what was going on here.
Anyway, not a bad painting?
11. Love Me Tender
I haven’t talked too much about the financial thriller going on in the background of the episode, as Sweetpea and Harper look into exactly what’s going on with Tender. And as it turns out, it’s all pretty wild… Tracing the call center for the company, the duo find a random house on the outskirts of England, with one guy who lives with his mother (and does not seem to be a Nazi) routing all the transactions to Africa. Specifically, low-level transactions are getting routed by random dudes… And despite Whitney making big moves in the premiere to eliminate porn from the public facing company, it’s still there.
Sweetpea lays it out, that they’re coding smaller transactions by price, not by service. “If you buy hardcore porn, or flowers for your nan, or you piss away your money at roulette, it is all categorized the same,” Sweetpea explains. “I mean, as long as it roughly costs the same, it’s just like one big bucket of slop called ‘consumables’.”
Why is this bad? Well, we don’t completely know yet, but the thrilled Sweetpea and Harper see it as the beginnings of a thread they can pull on to potentially unravel Tender entirely. And just throwing it out there because I may not be a money guy, but I have seen a TV show or two in my time: yeah, there’s probably worse things to come with the little banking app that could.
And even worse? Following up on that, the Tender brass meet with the British government, with the Prime Minister’s office noting they’re all in on Tender’s vision of making Britain the fintech capital of the world. If Tender is built on a house of cards, what does that mean for Britain?
12. Yas In Charge
Henry is feeling regrets about Hayley, but Yas is hearing none of it. She explains that she knew what Henry wanted, and gave it to him. Hayley enters to tell Henry his dinner plans, with Yas asking if Hayley wants to meet them for a nightcap. Henry waves Hayley off, and Yas gives her a shrug of “maybe next time, what can you do?”
“Who the fuck did I marry?” Henry asks.
“Shouldn’t you know that, darling?” Yas says, sitting back in the captain’s chair.
The capper on this one is the soundtrack plays “Sail Away,” which is pretty darkly comic if you remember that Yas effectively killed her father by letting him drown while she waited nearby on his yacht.
13. All Together Now
Just to wrap things up here, let’s point out another moment that isn’t crazy, but it is thrilling. The episode started with just Harper and Eric, but now they’re joined by Sweetpea and Kwabena. The final piece of the puzzle? Kenny Kilbane (Conor MacNeill), who seems calmer than usual and is there to assist the team as well.
While it’s been a slow burn, seeing the whole team together riding in an elevator together is awesome, even if it ends on an ominous note. After failing to reach out to Harper on a human level, Eric tells Kenny he’s sorry — likely for awfully and irrationally firing him in Season 3’s premiere episode. “Well, it’s not the worst thing anyone’s ever done,” Kenny says as the elevator door closes. Uhoh.
Industry Season 4 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of Industry premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max at 9 p.m. ET. Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in Industry Season 4 with premiere dates.
- Sunday, January 11, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 1 – “PayPal of Bukkake”
- Sunday, January 18, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 2 – “The Commander and The Grey Lady”
- Sunday, January 25, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 3 – “Habseligkeiten”
- Sunday, February 1, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 4 – “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn”
- Sunday, February 8, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 5 – “Eyes Without a Face”
- Sunday, February 15, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 6 – “Dear Henry”
- Sunday, February 22, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 7 – “Points of Emphasis”
- Sunday, March 1, 2026: Industry, Season 4, Episode 8 – “Both, And” *Season Finale*
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