The fourth season of HBO’s “Industry” has been a gruesome one for the show’s fan favorites (spoilers ahead!), with one character, Rishi, breaking both his ankles after a coke-fuelled jump off a balcony, and another, Eric, exiling himself from public life after a corporate sting catches him on tape with a sex worker who turned out to be underage. But neither man suffers as stomach-lurching a fall as Yasmin does on Sunday’s outstanding finale episode, in which she ends her marriage to the silver-spooned Henry and embarks on a horrifying reinvention. Midway through the finale, we get the first glimpse of Yasmin’s newfound calling. In a dark-panelled meeting room, she sits with Henry’s uncle, Alexander, a conservative tabloid publisher whose scandal sheets once targeted Yasmin herself, and Stefanowicz, a far-right politician who represents a base that Alexander describes as “young, murderous, undersexed men.” To Yasmin’s surprise, Stefanowicz expresses disapproval of her divorce; he considers it “an affront to God.” But for the audience the scariest revelation in the conversation isn’t his dogmatism. Rather, it’s that the least principled of the three is actually Yasmin, whose climb back into the upper class after her father’s mismanagement of the family fortune has been accompanied by her recurring exasperation that others still hold any scruples at all.

Yasmin’s remaining scenes play out like a horror movie. She invites Harper, her eternal frenemy since their first days at Pierpoint, to a party in Paris for Stefanowicz’s supporters, where Harper gradually realizes that she’s been seated next to literal Nazis who mistake her for one of their own. Then young women stroll in, some in shiny pink and gold frocks that emphasize how out of place they are in the dimly lit hotel suite. Yasmin herself wears a minimalist black dress—a chicer variation on the sort often seen on Ghislaine Maxwell. (The series hasn’t been subtle in detailing Yasmin’s parallels to the former Jeffrey Epstein associate—both have shady media-mogul fathers who named yachts after their daughters and died in strange circumstances amid financial ruin.) Asked by Harper to explain her abrupt turn as a madam for the wealthy and deplorable, Yasmin gives a villain’s speech, a rationalization that boils down to “Why not?” The world is harsh and men are animals, so it stands to reason that she would take advantage of the state of affairs. She’s profiting from the women she recruited for the event—including Molly, who until recently worked at Henry’s estate for minimum wage—but she’s giving them opportunities, too. In a bid to convince Harper of the supposed unremarkableness of the increasing creepiness around them, Yasmin shows Harper a video of Eric, their former boss, receiving oral sex from a minor and tells her, falsely, that he engaged in such services knowingly. It’s the exact clip that Eric, a father of two, who arguably came to love Harper even more than his actual daughters, had hoped she would never see when he fled their partnership earlier in the season.

Yasmin’s latest moral descent cements her fate as “Industry” ’s greatest and most compelling tragedy; she is the character to whom the worst things have happened, and the one who took from her traumas the most cynical lessons possible. “We both know that this world will own you if you don’t harden up,” she tells Harper at the Stefanowicz gathering, spinning her degeneracy as a mark of maturity. But Harper spent the fourth season finding a socially constructive outlet for her cold-bloodedness—shorting unethical companies—and even the hapless Henry, who was the final C.E.O. of the fintech startup Tender before its demise, decided to face the humiliation of his latest public failure rather than flee the country. Henry’s and Harper’s final scenes this year show them with loved ones—him with his oligarchic protectors; her with her glib but emotionally grounded lover, Kwabena. But Yasmin, in her final scene, is alone once more, suffering a panic attack while compulsively replaying a voice mail from her deceased father.

“Industry,” which was created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, began, in part, as an exploration of the difficulties of reforming poisonous systems. The first season exhibits a skepticism toward optics-focussed D.E.I. initiatives, and the third season casts doubt on the banking business’s attempts to whitewash its practices through E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investing. The young people ushered into the system—like Harper, who’s sexually harassed by a client early in the show—quickly figure out that there’s more to be gained by going along with the workings of an institution than by challenging them. But Yasmin has been fascinating to watch because of her willingness to embrace the rot. She’s governed by a particular combination of entitlement and eschewed responsibility—a product, one assumes, of her childhood, during which she enjoyed every imaginable material privilege but, thanks to her volatile father, rarely a sense of stability or control. As an adult, she has no regard for what the world looks like, as long she’s on top. She has never bothered casting a ballot, despite a brief career as a politician’s wife, and her philosophy toward the media, over which she now exerts a modicum of influence through her dealings with Alexander, is “Who cares, as long as people are clicking?” The rise of the Reform Party in the fourth season’s backdrop isn’t just the show’s bid for relevance; it poses the question of who, other than the relatively few dedicated fascists in the U.K., would thrive amid their ascent. The answer is people like Yasmin, who’s so devoid of actual values that she characterizes this frightening new era as a simple pendulum swing from the left to the right, “achieving nothing but perpetual campaigning.”

On a different show, such self-serving nihilism might render a character irredeemably repellent. But Yasmin remains enthralling because she relentlessly pursues power over others, even when it forecloses on her own opportunities for happiness and connection. In the third season, she chooses the wealthy and connected Henry, who confesses that he may be too selfish to love her, over her on-off fling Robert, who opens his home to her when her father, Charles, locks her out of his. Her alliance with Stefanowicz and his ilk means ignoring the obvious fact that they most likely consider her part of the hordes of outsiders invading Europe (she’s a British-raised woman with Israeli and Libyan roots), leading to what they denounce as the “erosion of our culture.” Yasmin’s desperate wish to become untouchably powerful like Harper, whom she calls “a breathing example of how I can be more” in last week’s episode, ironically drives her into even more insecurity. Her decision to team up with Hayley, an assistant at Tender, in the scheme to secretly videotape johns as future blackmail material, after it had been done to her and Henry, is another instance in which Yasmin adopts the tools used to hurt her to injure others. But it’s a particularly shortsighted move, since she can’t trust that Hayley won’t one day blackmail her as well.

Yasmin’s closing scene echoes that of the previous season, when, as a newlywed in Henry’s ancestral manor, she is given devastating news about her father by Alondra, his former employee and lover: on his boat, the Lady Yasmin, Charles and his friends preyed on girls as young as twelve. Alondra expresses sympathy in the case that Yasmin was sexually assaulted by Charles, too, leading to an outsized reaction on Yasmin’s part that suggests Alondra was right to suspect such a transgression. In the latest finale, in another baronially decorated room—Yasmin’s hotel suite in Paris—Molly enters, tearful about something that seems to have gone wrong at the party the night before, but hesitant to spell it out. Before Molly can confide in her, Yasmin shuts her down with a professional smile and a disingenuous ode to resilience: “She is tossed by the waves, but she does not sink.” Only after she’s left alone does Yasmin allow herself to drop to the ground while tearfully listening to her dad’s voice on repeat. Defenseless against her own memories, she seems overwhelmed by a flood of remembrances of Charles—and, perhaps, to be grappling with the inescapable fact that she’s one step closer to becoming the man who made her a monster. ♦