Of course, there is little doubt through the first half of Industry season 3 that this will all go to shit. The dramatic tension comes not from determining if Henry Muck is a charlatan but rather anticipating how Pierpont will come to realize it. It’s to the show’s immense credit that it decides to pull that ripcord early on. Lumi as a public entity doesn’t even make it through the third episode. The market quickly realizes that Lumi is a paper tiger, its stock plummets, and Muck is pretty much over the whole green CEO schtick within 48 hours of launch. All that’s left are some public hearings about boring topics like “defrauding the British government” and “receiving a sizable bailout so Lumi energy consumers don’t freeze to death in their homes.”
The best part of Industry season 3, and perhaps the entire series thus far, has been watching how effortlessly Sir Henry Muck retreats into the role of douchebag aristocrat once his perfunctory attempt at being a visionary fails. Episode 5 “Company Man” takes place during those aforementioned public hearings, in which the shadow Energy secretary grills Spearing and Muck about the rotten cultures at Pierpoint and Lumi that led to such a ruinous failure in the first place.
Though audiences logically knew Muck was a scumbag to begin with, it’s still bracing how quickly all of his behavior from the first four episodes is recontextualized. His awkward interactions with Caedi McFarlane (Eliot Salt) didn’t arise from nerdy misunderstandings but sexually exploitative behavior. His fudging of the IPO numbers in episode 1 wasn’t a bumbling oversight, but rather a brazen attempt to cover up that Lumi was barely a green company in the first place.
Even the one aspect of Muck’s behavior that reads as submissive and meek – his very memeable piss fetish – is revealed to be predatory. Early on in episode 5, he successfully brings Yazmin closer into his romantic web by politely requesting that she urinate on him in the shower. It’s not a fetish thing like she may have heard, he assures her. It’s more of a trust thing – one simulated indignity that he can control in a world full of market-moving events he cannot. In truth, it turns out to be neither a fetish thing nor a trust thing but yet another power play, as he drunkenly reveals to his wrinkly white aristocratic cronies that he got another poor girl to piss on him.
There’s nothing narratively revelatory about the billionaire turning out to be bad in the precise ways you’d expect him to be, but truth be told Industry isn’t aiming for anything novel or new. The show is often dismissed as a more jargon-y Succession set in England as if that were a slight. Industry isn’t attempting to delve into complicated darkness of the human soul like its HBO cousin because few shows can. That doesn’t mean that Industry‘s depiction of all the old sins: avarice, lust, and pride, don’t hold tremendous dramatic weight.
It certainly helps that the show tapped one of our generation’s most Lawful Good-coded actors in Kit Harington to play this very mundanely awful person. The Game of Thrones star who grew up amid outrageous, ancient wealth was a fan of the show and pitched himself to show runners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay as a season 3 guest star. Harington has undoubtedly met a Henry Muck or two in his time and tapping into those experiences has unlocked a beautifully sleazy performance.