Industry Season 4, episode 6 should have been a victory lap for Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Eric Tao (Ken Leung). Instead, it was a heart-wrenching parting of ways.
The episode, titled “Dear Henry,” saw Harper present SternTao’s findings on Tender’s scam activity, kicking off a large-scale short on the fraudulent fintech giant. Eric declares their win his “favorite day in finance.”
However, that all comes crashing down when Eric receives a text from an unknown number. It’s a video recording of his tryst with escort Dolly (Skye Lucia Degruttola), from earlier in the season. A photo of her passport soon follows, revealing that she was born in 2011.
It’s a nauseating discovery, one that leaves Eric shell-shocked. Making matters worse is the fact that one of his teenage daughters, Lily (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss), is in the room when he receives the text. (She’s just told Eric how much she loves him, a huge step in their otherwise-distant relationship, and he’s simply unable to respond.)
Turns out, this is Whitney Halberstram’s (Max Minghella) playbook at work. He hires escorts like Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) to get opponents in compromising sexual situations, then he blackmails them with the footage. Eric doesn’t back down right away, though. He takes Whit head-on in a CNN interview, then transfers the entirety of his partnership in SternTao to Harper.
“It’s yours, not mine,” he tells her.
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Their goodbye scene is shattering. So often a toxic mentor-mentee, father-daughter relationship, Harper and Eric have somehow managed to find more of an equilibrium in Season 4. Now, it all comes crashing down, but for Leung, Eric’s sacrificing of his place at SternTao “is his ultimate show of love.”
“It’s his version of the highest love that he can give, the surrendering of self to protect [Harper],” Leung told Mashable in a video interview. “[He’s thinking,] ‘I’m going to kill myself to protect you.'”
Eric’s protectiveness revolves around his complicated relationship with his daughters: Both his twins, Lily and Lara (Isla Bonner), as well his daughter figure in Harper. This season has seen him grow far closer to the latter, even pouring the Lily Lara Fund he’d established for his twins into SternTao.
But even as Eric has been estranged from Lily and Lara, he’s had to face some uncomfortable truths about them. First, as he says in episode 5, he doesn’t feel a “celestial” bond to them — more of a transactional one. Second, he’s realizing that they have a similar capacity for ruthlessness as he does in the finance world. Lily was expelled from school for catfishing a classmate.
“In the professional sphere, Harper has come to take on a form that resembles [Eric], in his mind,” Leung explained. “In the personal sphere, his daughter has become a version of him in her being a monster at school, getting kicked out of school. In one world, he can speak the language, and in the other world, he doesn’t know how to, and I think for this season, Eric is trying to learn how to [get through] to his daughter through the world that he knows.”
In the end, that internal struggle culminates in Eric’s decision to give SternTao entirely up to Harper.
“It’s what he’s always wanted to do, tried to do, dreamt of doing as a dad, and could never [do],” Leung said. “But in this world, he can, and so that’s what he does.”
New episodes of Industry Season 4 premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
