Last Shot, Whitney Flash Frame Explained

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Industry” Season 4, Episode 8, “Both, And.”]

In the “Industry” Season 4 finale, after Harper (Myha’la) completes her interview and reflects on taking down Tender, there’s a sense she doesn’t know what’s next. Flying on a private jet, she’s achieved the wealth and recognition that drove her as a nascent trader. Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh) sits across the aisle, reminding her she’s no longer a lone wolf; she has a team she cares about, and she’s even making an attempt at real relationships. Have the events of the season changed her?

Then a flight attendant interrupts Harper’s introspective daze, asking if she would like another gin and tonic.

“Are you done?” the flight attendant asks, to which Harper responds by ever-so-slowly looking up, with a knowing look.

“Industry” creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down borrowed the final image of Season 4 from the last shot of “Mad Men‘s” Season 5 finale, a series that has had a tremendous influence on their young TV careers as well as their hit HBO series.

“It was like the ‘Mad Men’ ending where the woman walks up to Don [Jon Hamm] in the bar — and he’s tried not be a philanderer that season — and she says, ‘Are you alone?’ And he looks up, and it’s like, of course, there’s more. Of course, the loop is going to start again. It was that kind of ending,” Kay said when he and Down were guests on the Toolkit podcast in an episode available March 2.

It’s a very different ending than Seasons 2 and 3, which Kay and Down have acknowledged as being concerted efforts to tie up storylines in case “Industry” was not renewed. But having signed a big overall deal with HBO heading into Season 4, Wednesday’s announcement that the series was being renewed for a fifth (and final) season was expected.

“To be honest, we wrote [Season] 3 as a definitive ending,” Kay said. “And that look — the ‘Are you done’ and Harper looking up the camera — was a bit of a nod to continuation.”

After Harper’s Don Draper moment, there’s a cut to black, followed by the distinctive “Industry” logo, but before the credits roll, you might have noticed a flash frame. It’s a quick blip, so if you noticed it at all, you may have assumed it was a streaming glitch.

But it wasn’t.

“After the ‘Industry’ flash at the end of the episode, there’s a single frame.  It’s intentional, it’s deliberate,” Kay said, adding it came from a deleted scene. “We shot a whole three-minute sequence, which we cut for time, which was kind of beautiful, actually.”

Rewind to pause on the single frame, and you might be able to make out that it’s Whitney (Max Minghella) enclosed in a circular border.

“It’s Whitney looking through a glory hole,” Down said. “We shot this entire scene of him in Lithuania, having escaped, where he is talking to a man at the bar, the implication being: Is that man a potential lover, or is it someone that’s going to be a threat? And you leave him on this moment where he follows the guy into the bathroom, and the guy says, ‘Come in here,’ and there’s a glory hole, and we shot Whitney through it. If you are eagle-eyed, you’ll see that we used one frame of it basically.”

The glory hole hearkens back to Episode 6, when Whitney brings Henry (Kit Harrington) to a gay night club and leads him to a glory hole. As Down had told IndieWire before, it was his hope that Judy Collins’ song “Both Sides Now,” which closed that episode as Eric (Ken Leung) walks away, would also have been used as Whitney watches Henry at the glory hole. But the song’s rights holder wouldn’t allow it.

“I wanted to put that Judy Collins’ song over that moment as well because he’s forcing and grooming Henry into that moment. He’s pushing him into a glory hole, he’s whispering in his ear, saying, ‘You are worthwhile, everything about you is worthwhile, you are valid,’” Down said. “And I felt like that was some nice circularity of [Whitney] looking at that glory hole [in Episode 8] thinking, ‘Am I valid? Am I worthwhile? Is this going to kill me or fuck me?’”

To hear Kay and Down’s full interview on March 2, after the season finale, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.