After last week’s off-the-wall episode of Industry on HBO, it’s time for another jaw-dropper this week on Episode 4, “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn.” And spoilers past this point, not everyone makes it out alive.
In fact, even more than Henry Muck’s (Kit Harington) LSD-induced long journey of the soul in Episode 2, this week’s hour was an utter nightmare, ending in two tragedies that, at least speaking for myself, will haunt viewers long after the episode ends. It’s actually impressive how this series ramps up the horror for its characters every week, even though said characters probably don’t feel the same way. Can’t imagine they’re like “more tragedy, please!”
We’ll get to all that in a moment, though, as we work our way through all the bonkers moments that go down this week, from Henry going off-script to Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) revealing she might out-crazy even Yasmin (Marisa Abela). With that in mind, let’s get to it — and a content note, this is Industry so while we usually censor naughty words around here, we’re not doing that below. Be warned!
1. 1000 Yoots
In case you’re curious about the origin of half of the title of the episode, we get the theme introduced right in the first scene as fintech journalist James Dycker (Charlie Heaton) walks home with his ex (well, sort of, they only “fucked once”), who he has a kid with. She’s describing an article she’s writing about “dating discourse. You know, like, body count. ‘She’s a four, but maybe six after five pints.'” She, by the way, is Elaine Jordan, played by Amy-Leigh Hickman — Nadia from Netflix’s YOU among other roles.
Dycker is a little distracted by a car that’s been outside his house for two days, but Elaine keeps going, talking about “that girl who fucks 1,000 guys in 24 hours for content?” She’s talking about Bonnie Blue, by the way, an OnlyFans model who claimed to have sex with 1,057 guys in 12 hours. That itself was a steep escalation from Lily Phillips, the subject of the “documentary” about having sex with 100 men in 24 hours, who then beat Blue’s record by having sex with 1,113 in 12 hours. All of this, by the way, is extremely unsafe. Don’t do this!
“She wasn’t fucking a person, she was fucking a number,” Elaine continues. “I mean, her spirit was dominated, well gang-raped, almost by market logic, essentially.”
Dycker is a little distracted (we’ll get to that in a second), but it’s pretty efficient how this boils down a lot of Industry: the interplay and exchange between money and sex, and how they are often interchangeable. After all, they’re both transactions, right? And in this scene alone, Dycker and Elaine don’t even really have a relationship, so much as a business partnership joined by a baby they happened to have together.
2. Bringing The Heat(on)
Dycker, as mentioned, is barely paying attention: someone has “fucking jimmied the window,” his keys are gone, and he’s definitely losing it. The good news? His first article about Tender — the banking app at the center of this season — got a too strong response from the company, with Dycker’s boss telling him to cut ties with SternTao before his second article hits, as the potential downside is it would look like Dycker is involved in market manipulation.
So hepped up on this news and too little sleep, Dycker runs out front and yells at the guy in the car in front of his house, thinking he’s a spy for Tender. He’s not. The dude is just smoking joints and waiting for his girlfriend, and immediately takes the steam out of Dycker by calling him a “pussyhole faggot” and spitting on his feet. As we’ll see throughout this episode, this isn’t the time of Dycker’s triumph, it’s the beginning of his fall.
3. Guess Who’s Back? Pierpoint’s Back
Maybe not unhinged, but worth noting as a surprise: Pierpoint is back. Or rather, Al-Mi’raj-Pierpoint thanks to Tender’s new app, which is Tender powered by Pierpoint. Or maybe Pierpoint powered by Tender. Lots of branding going on there, and that’s the point… Like with the 1,000+ men who have sex with an OnlyFans model, this episode is all about branding and positioning. Who goes first? Does it really matter? Given Pierpoint seems to be back in a power position here… Yes.
Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) doesn’t seem to agree, though. “You know it’s an open secret that Al-Mi’raj is divesting Pierpoint back to the market piecemeal. Pierpoiint’s a fucking legacy name. It’s sun-bleached font on signage. Gym bags on eBay. Ironic Fincore. Tombstones for a once great thing now dead.”
Is Halberstram right? We’ll see.
4. Get A Load Of This
Yas is making some big flexes this episode, including pushing for a bigger role in the comms department of Tender as the guy in charge — Robin Williamson (Jonjo O’Neill) — isn’t interested in pushing Henry to the forefront of the upcoming app launch. But her biggest, most uncomfortable move? Using Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) as a chess piece.
It’s not unexpected, necessarily, but Yas previously told Hayley that she would keep her tryst with Dycker in confidence, and then instigated a threesome with her and Henry which ended with Yasmin slurping Henry’s ejaculate out of her “cunt.” And now she all but tells Halberstram about Hayley and Dycker in order to promote the assistant, without her permission. Halberstram swerves — “bright young things attract bright young things,” he quips — but the seed is there.
Speaking of seed, while Whitney heads to Accra in Ghana for a quick “hand-holding” mission, he assigns Hayley to assist Yas with the launch of the app. Yas is confused: doesn’t Whitney need her in Ghana?
“She’s supposed to split the load of Henry, so let her take… half of his load… off you?” Whitney says as he exits the room, probably to high fives from everyone else in the office for his masterful pun.
Once again: where is the Tender HR department?
5. What’s The Deal, With Rishi
Thought things were going poorly with Dycker? Wait until you see what’s up with Rishi (Sagar Radia). While Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) made it a prerequisite of her employment that Harper (Myha’la) cut all ties with the former Pierpoint associate and current scumbag, that’s not exactly what’s happening, of course.
But first, we see him in a car, dealing drugs — specifically, coke — with a blonde drug addict. “No, don’t fucking touch it yet,” Rishi tells her when he sees her idly fondling the drugs. “I told you.”
“Please,” she says. “Please… Daddy.”
…and then smash cut to the woman blowing Rishi, while he films her on his phone. “If you want more treats, you’ll say it,” says Rishi, gasping.
“I’m a good little whore for Papi,” says the woman, somehow, without removing her mouth from his dick.
By the way, while this is going on they’re listening to “All Of My Tomorrows” by Anders Gunnar Kampe and Robert Lundgren on the car radio, which is objectively hilarious and makes the whole thing that much sadder.
Don’t worry, it gets worse. Rishi’s blowjob gets interrupted by a call from Mary (Melissa Knatchbull), the mother of Rishi’s wife Diana (Emily Barber in Season 3), who was shot dead in front of him in the Season 3 finale. He excitedly takes it, as they want him to meet with his son, Hugo, as they need to get “a few things in order before–” Rishi cuts her off before she can explain further.
Hanging up, Rishi tells the druggie. “They took my kid away from me,” to which she responds, “Maybe they’ve got their reasons.”
“You ever tried shutting the fuck up?” shoots back Rishi. Though, uh, she’s right, as we’ll soon find out.
Later, Rishi meets with Mary in a public place, and is told not only are they changing Hugo’s last name, but he’ll never get to meet with his son alone. Rishi completely gives up, and signs the terms… He has no power in this situation, and Hugo doesn’t even know his name. He’s just any one of a number (you get it) of men in the café.
6. Atterbury At Da Club
Because we weren’t loaded up (sorry, Whitney) on scumbags this episode, Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn), the ousted CEO of Tender makes his return. He’s clearly been catfished by Sweetpea, who he thinks he’s gonna have a little hook-up with while he’s hanging at a strip club, but gets side-swiped when she reveals her true motive: she wants info on Tender.
Sweetpea keeps him on the phone, and baits the wasted Atterbury by playing on his feelings for Halberstram. While Atterbury heads off for a private dance, Sweetpea manages, with very little encouragement, to get him to send her “gigs of data” that Atterbury is using in his suit against Halberstram, though everything pertaining to Atterbury is redacted.
What’s more interesting is Atterbury’s estimation of Halberstram, and how he seems to have a similar manic-depressive temperament to Henry Muck… Which perhaps explains why the lackluster lord ended up as new CEO. Atterbury also lays out that he never saw Halberstram having sex or drunk, while for “clients, investors, auditors, he’d drown them in Cristal… ‘Oh boy, that boy from Tender parties like a pre-crisis Florida realtor.'”
Sweetpea is on a high after manipulating Atterbury, but same as how he’s in the middle of a transaction with a stripper, he knows what he’s paying for with Sweetpea. “Listen, do me a favor, if you’re going to play me like this, do me the courtesy of burying him deep enough that his kind don’t respawn.”
That may be the last we see of Atterbury this season, but don’t say he doesn’t know what he was doing.
7. Rockin’ Robin
One of the running threads this episode is Yas taking on Robin (can we briefly talk about how it’s weird his name is “Robin Williamson” yet he’s the least funny character of all time?) for control of the comms department. And midway through the episode, she makes a big move, bringing in Henry’s Uncle Alex (Andrew Havill), starting a meeting without Robin to manage the blowback from Dycker’s article. Robin storms in, explains Whitney wouldn’t want any of this…
…But Whitney is on the phone while flying to Ghana, and tells Robin not to speak for him. Ouch! And double ouch when he dismisses Robin from the meeting, tells Yas that Robin isn’t aggressive enough, and that he has photographic evidence of Harper and Dycker colluding to pass along to Alex’s tabloid. And frankly, while we could have seen this coming, it’s fascinating to see this chessboard be set up as Yas versus Harper. But particularly with Whitney manipulating things, it seems like Yas might be the sacrificable Queen, rather than the all-powerful one she sees herself as.
“Morality might as well be fucking Latin to her,” Yas says, but is she talking about Harper? Or herself, who just colluded with a tabloid to protect her own husband, all while making an aggressive move to take over Tender’s comms department?
Later, we find out just how successful Yas’s manipulation has been. Halberstram calls Robin and Yas into his office, and tells them they’ll be co-running the comms team going forward. Robin refuses to share the post with someone so “ill-qualified.”
Halberstram anticipated this, though. “Yas, if you’d like to do the honors,” he says. Yas is confused, but he explains this is her “first task as my new head of communications… Let him go. Fire him. Dismiss him.”
Yas accepts the post, even extends a half-hearted olive branch to Robin saying they can work together, but he doesn’t think they can. “Right,” Yas says. “So, I guess you’re dismissed then.”
Robin is stunned, but Halberstram explains, “You’re a little bit… Trad… For what we want to do next.”
“This isn’t a start-up,” Robin says, storming out. “You should Google the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Good luck.”
Here, let me Google that for you: “The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skill in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also drives those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, leading them to underestimate their abilities.”
Gonna take a wild stab and say Robin is referring to the first part, not the second.
8. Trauma Mama
Yas clearly isn’t here to make friends this episode… Backstage at the Tender app launch (by the way, on the numbers theme notice that the first shot is them pulling a large Tender logo display off-stage, with only “Ten” in frame), Hayley approaches her boss, nervous about Dycker being in the audience. Yas suggests if she suffer from anxiety Hayley try magnesium. But that’s not the issue.
Instead, Hayley is concerned about what happened with her, Yas, and Henry, aka the Nazi castle threesome last episode. “Well, we’re all consenting adults,” says Yas, who I will remind you is technically her boss, and Henry is definitely her boss. “And… You enjoyed it. So it can’t be that that’s making you uneasy?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get the sense that the Pierpoint trading floor may not have been the healthiest training ground for Yas, at least in terms of morality and ethics of working in a business. Don’t worry though, it gets worse.
“Calabasas,” Yas says, “I mean, you’re the one that instigated it, right?”
No, that was Yas. But Yas continues, “The way you’ve looked at me since we met. Maybe you’re sublimating experiences, making a good thing bad.”
Yas then frames it as it’s Hayley traumatized by Dycker coming “into your house under false pretenses” in the first episode of the season, but it’s hard not to read this as Yas slipping into the mode of her other teachable moment: her father, who repeatedly raped her and others as a child. While we’ve never had that verbally confirmed, it almost definitely did happen. And while we’ve only heard snippets of how Yas’ dad talked to her, it’s impossible to hear her mockingly tell Hayley, “The price of his action is your trauma. You can’t let him take away your agency as well” and not think this is the sort of deflection she learned at a very, very young age at her father’s knee.
“It was assault,” Yas says, holding Hayley and kissing her on the head. And it seems that Hayley has been mind-wiped by Yas, but that’s not actually what’s happening at all, as we’ll find out later.
9. #HalberMuck Rising
When Henry and Halberstram first met, I noted that they were filmed incredibly close to each other, even kissing range. And while Atterbury said that he never saw Halberstram have sex, we have — specifically, getting pegged by Harper earlier this season. Before the Tender speech, Halberstram talks to Henry in his dressing room, grabbing his arm intimately, and then once again they talk within kissing range as Halberstram gives Lord Muck a pep talk about his upcoming speech. The whole thing is delivered in intimate whispers that would be as appropriate on pillows as they are in this dressing room. And in fact their mouths are about two inches apart as Halberstram tells Henry he is incapable of lying to him or manipulating him, something Henry expressed frustration about with Yas earlier in the episode.
So is this sexual? Yes, it’s Industry, and we’ve already noted the whole episode — heck, the whole damn show — is about the interplay between sex and money. But the bigger question is: is this romantic? Because Halberstram does seem to actually have feelings for Henry, and Henry seems to be falling for Halberstram. Whether that’s its own manipulation? Well… Probably because see above re: “it’s Industry.” But given Henry ends his triumphant Tender speech later hugging Halberstram instead of Yas — and ever later in the Tender offices, Halberstram does a “you, me, same” type speech to Henry, and looks at him fondly… We’ll see.
10. Going Off Script
If I had a nickel for every time someone in a TV show or movie went off-script reading off a TelePrompter, well, I’d be rich enough to do the messed up crap everyone does on this TV show. And sure enough, after awkwardly reading the speech that was prepared for him, Henry goes rogue, talking about his own personal issues, and how Tender ties into that… Or more specifically about how the new app can make finance simple for everyone, whether you’re a rich lord or the little guy just trying to buy some porn or whatever.
And it works, of course. You know it works because everyone claps and the music becomes triumphant as Henry talks through the app, even if Henry looks like he wants to crawl out of his skin the entire time.
Afterwards, Dycker tries to corner Henry in a scrum, and it ends in a bit of a draw: Halberstram is boisterous, and shuts down most of his line of questioning; but there is a potent pause when Dycker asks about the outpost in Sunderland we explored last episode, aka one guy in a dilapidated house, hiding less than savory transactions in an obscured bucket of spreadsheets.
But when it comes to Henry? He did it! Yeah! Take that, speech writers everywhere.
11. “Thank You, Mommy”
After Halberstram promotes Yas and tells her that Hayley’s “yours if you want her” though she, Henry, and he “ride together, die together,” Yas and Hayley take an elevator ride together where Yas explains that she’s been given the green light to promote her to the Comms department.
“You okay?” Yas asks about the moment at the Tender launch.
“Oh yeah,” Hayley says. “It’s not like I haven’t been sexually harassed before. I was a child model for fuck’s sake.”
Yas, as usual, could write a hundred books with her silent look, where she keeps razor focused on the elevator door instead of looking at Hayley, realizing quickly that she’s been out-maneuvered by the former assistant.
“You’re promoting me because you really rate me, right?” Hayley says.
“Yeah, of course,” Yas responds, earnestly.
“Thought it was because of how good I sucked your husband’s cock,” Hayley offers back. “I wonder, why did it feel like it was your cock in my mouth? I liked that.”
Yas continues to be silent… What exactly did she sign up for? “An ex-boss told me an anxiety relief thing once,” Hayley continues.
“Breathing exercises?” asks Yas, clearly starting to panic. Maybe time to get some magnesium?
“No, no,” Hayley says, grimly smiling. “No, he said, ‘Hayley, baby, when it all gets too much, just remember, not a single one of us gets out of this alive.'”
The camera then cuts to Yas looking like she’s about to be murdered in the elevator. But don’t worry, she’s not. The doors open, Hayley exits, lifts up her skirt to reveal her barely clothed butt. Then turns around and coquettishly says, “Thank you, Mommy.”
It’s hard not to parallel this with Rishi’s drug moll earlier, and her calling him “daddy.” Whether it’s in the elevators of a billion dollar banking app or a car under a bridge selling drugs, the manipulation is the same… And it’s not the people who think they hold the power who are really in control. Yas and Rishi are essentially in the same position, thinking they’re in charge — until they very much are not.
11. The Dycker Breaks
That little hiccup in Halberstram’s plans is the last triumphant moment for James Dycker. The article Alex and Yas put together gets released, and it is damning, with Dycker breaking (see what I did there? Dams? Dikes? Eh, you get it). Unfortunately for James, his boss knows about Hayley, he knows he’s been “cavorting” with Harper, and though the boss gives some good advice about how he himself lied earlier in his career and then got better once he stopped lying, it’s impossible not to begin an internal investigation and terminate Dycker’s employment.
12. The Assassination Of James Dycker By The Coward Rishi Ramdani
The final 12 or so minutes of the episode are an absolute nightmare. Fired from his job, Dycker immediately goes back on drugs in a dirty bar bathroom… And who shows up in the urinal next to him, but Rishi. Is it a set-up? Coincidence? Certainly seems to be the latter, but given we’ve already seen Rishi manipulate events before working for Harper, everything has a level of ominous questioning as it goes.
The two of them talk, Dycker knows who Rishi is, and what happened to him. It seems like they might be able to lift each other up together, but things get weirder once a random guy scares away a man asking for a smoke outside the pub. The rando — he’s credited as Dez Watkins (Martin Hancock) — tells them that the “urchin” gets people hepped up on “some fucking spooky PCP or some shit. It’ll fuck you up, then he’ll take you round the corner, and he’ll turn you over for your wallet and your watch.”
Look, to jump ahead here, while we get zero confirmation of this, it sure seems like Dez is doing some variation of what he accuses the other guy of doing, particularly since he starts partying hardcore with Dycker and Rishi after that. Is he working for Halberstram? Someone else? Really just a random guy on the street? Unknown. Whatever it is, this dude’s inclusion makes Dycker and Rishi’s Big Adventure go so, so much worse than it could have gone.
The three of them get too many pints, then head to Rishi’s apartment where they’re doing coke while Dez pumps the volume of the CD player to uncomfortably high volumes. The drugged out Dycker says he’s going to fly to Accra to investigate just what Halberstram has going on in Africa, and can still self-publish. Rishi admits that he was following Dycker for Harper until that “cunt ghosted me” — at the urging of Sweetpea, though he doesn’t know that — and we discover it was Rishi who broke into Dycker’s house way back at the beginning of the episode.
It’s all okay, though, they’re way too high to care about any of this. They talk about Hayley, and Dycker does admit he went down on her, even though he saw she was passed out. Again, paralleling the beginning of the episode, Dycker goes on a rant about how he’s sick of the forced discourse between the sexes: “Not everything needs to be a fucking minefield these days. I mean, she gave me her fucking consent, man.” Again, nicely (or horribly) tying up to the conversations Yas and Hayley have been having about consent and transactions.
But then as Dez pumps the volume to 90, Dycker asks a jaw-dropping question: what was it like for Rishi to watch his wife die in front of him? Rishi is stunned, but Dycker, high off his gourd, is in reporter mode, and offers up that Rishi probably “dissociated,” and then segues into talking about watching a girl getting “DP’ed on my feed the other day.” Rishi isn’t listening, though, he’s thinking about his wife, and staring out the window, also thinking about jumping.
Meanwhile, Dez turns the volume up to max while “Vienna” by Ultravox fills the soundtrack, moving the dialogue to the back-burner. “This means nothing to me,” the singer sadly sings as Dez disassociates, Rishi pictures his wife’s final moments, and Dycker rambles about how we’re all “passive spectators.”
And that’s pointed at us, right? We’re the passive spectators as two men hit rock bottom, two people both contemplate death by suicide. Or rather, Rishi contemplates while Dycker rants, and gives us the other half of our episode title. “They’d be lucky enough to meet one Marilyn-class type lady in the flesh in their lives,” he blathers, referring to Marilyn Monroe in case it wasn’t clear. “But us, man, we fucking jerk off to a dozen gang-banging squirting Marilyns before dawn, and we wonder why we don’t have the get-up-and-go to go die in a war.”
Yes, there’s a certain level where Dycker is squirting utter nonsense himself, but he is coming (no pun intended) around to a point here. “Nothing has depth. Nothing has traction. Nothing’s fucking serious, right? We’re just steam on a mirror.” And that gets to the crux of it… All the manipulations and machinations they go through on Industry, all the sexual one-upsmanship and monetary maneuvers don’t actually matter because what actually matters the most in this scene right now is what Rishi is feeling. He’s been wandering through his life in a daze ignoring the death of his wife, which was due to his own actions, giving up his son, wandering from pub to pub and meeting random people. But here, in this scene, he feels it all for the first time, and it hurts,
Dycker, meanwhile, is just talking. In the mess, he hits on something real, but he’s high on cocaine and going a mile a minute, unable to hitch onto an idea. That’s where we found him in the first scene (minus the cocaine), and he’s still just an observer by the end, and he knows it. “We’ve built an interface with the world which gives us what we want, but not what we want to want,” Dycker says, and Dez goes to get some more beers. Rishi offers Dycker more drugs, and… Well, that’s the last we see of Dycker, because now he’s dead.
Yes, seriously. After the warning of PCP-laced drugs, it seems that it was Rishi’s stash — not some dude on the street — that kills Dycker. The last we see of him, he’s still ranting as Rishi goes into the bathroom to recenter himself.
13. Rishi Ignores Queen, Tries Suicide
As if that wasn’t all horrifying enough, while “Set You Free” by N-Trance plays on the blasting radio, Rishi discovers the dead body of Dycker. There’s a banging at the door, and sure enough, it’s the police, who are there for a complaint about the noise.
Rishi looks over the scene — the drugs, the drinks, the dead Dycker — and heads to the balcony. Gasping, scared, and shoeless, Rishi brings himself to the balcony. The cops burst through the door, find Dycker… And Rishi jumps.
“…Can set you free,” go the lyrics, as Rishi thrusts himself off the balcony, and drops with a bloody crunch just off screen.
Horrifyingly…. Rishi managed to screw up killing himself. Instead, he broke both of his legs, and is lying there on the ground, sobbing and trying to crawl away as “Forever Young” by Alphaville plays, a last little twist of the knife. The cops arrest him, handcuff him, and our final shot of Rishi is him lying on the ground, finally getting the punishment he knows he deserves.
“She wasn’t fucking a person, she was fucking a number,” Elaine said earlier in the episode. “I mean, her spirit was dominated, well gang-raped, almost by market logic, essentially.”
That’s essentially what Rishi was, right? A number, gang-raped by market logic, left hollow, lying on the ground, broken, nothing left in his life. Not a single one of us gets out of this alive, as Hayley noted — but Rishi, at least, needs to live with what he did for a while longer.
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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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Amazing insightful review.
Thanks Rip!