You know when a party is winding down and everyone knows they need to go home but you all wind up staying another hour because you don’t want to break the spell of a perfect evening? Welcome to the defining mood of the Derry Girls series finale. Grab your tissues and get ready to laugh till you cry and cry till you laugh again just one more time.
A series finale always has a lot of work to do, what with wrapping up various plotlines and giving viewers a sense of where our characters are headed after the final credits roll. In addition, it needs to maintain the same overall tone of the series as a whole while showing us how the characters have grown and changed (or not!) over the course of previous seasons. It’s a graduation day — especially fitting for a teen comedy.
Fortunately, Lisa McGee is up to these many overlapping tasks. This finale reminds us of everything we love about Derry Girls — the humor, exasperation, and love, all shot through with the weight of both national and personal history — while gently shutting the door on the last guests to leave.
The opening montage is a recap of moments and visuals going all the way back to the pilot — the sign announcing our entrance to Free Derry, the flaming shots, Granda Joe’s small shoulder squeeze of concern for Gerry, everyone racing for the train to Portrush, “Rock the Boat,†Sean’s funeral procession — segueing neatly into character-specific summaries of where everyone is one year later.
Orla, having just turned 18, lightheartedly dances her way through town to City Hall to register to vote. James is editing his documentary short, and considering how many close-ups of Erin he’s including, we can safely assume he’s still holding that torch aloft. Michelle seems to be working at Dennis’s shop, Clare has moved about 20 minutes down the road to Strabane and is attending a new school, and Erin is struggling a bit with getting into and understanding Hamlet until she (wisely) picks up a simplified guide to Shakespeare. That’s a good approach to a complex text because she’ll surely need to rely on the official voter’s guide to the Good Friday Agreement for an explanation of what it all means and to decide how to vote in the upcoming referendum to ratify the historic agreement.
The efficiency of the expository bits provides plenty of time to transform Orla’s civic-responsibility adventure into a dreamy, fun, and moving dance sequence. Sure, it’s a little indulgent to include a scene featuring Orla surrounded by a phalanx of tiny step dancers dancing to Dario G’s hopeful, elegiac “Sunchyme,†but it’s also one of the most memorable moments of the entire episode.
Writing about these scenes in retrospect, I’m a little bit dazzled at how sprightly they are. Thanks to the time jump and the historical importance of the series’ final act, McGee has packed a ton of exposition into this episode without turning it into a slog. I feel like a figure-skating judge, awarding extra points for the episode’s degree of complexity.
Way back in the season premiere, Michelle loudly exclaimed that she was “fuckin’ sick of peace!†It was another example of Derry Girls using loudmouthed silliness to obscure messy feelings, and now we finally learn what’s been at the root of it: Michelle’s brother, Niall, an ex-paramilitary, is in prison for killing a man some years ago. Their Ma won’t talk about it, let alone allow Michelle or anyone else in the family to visit him, and if the referendum passes, he’ll be released from prison along with many of his former Republican colleagues and their Loyalist counterparts.
Erin’s disapproval of this provision of the agreement puts her at such profound odds with Michelle that it threatens to end their friendship. In an echo of Michelle’s prediction/threat upon seeing Erin and James locking lips, she storms out of the parish hall the wains are decorating for Erin and Orla’s upcoming 18th birthday party, then storms back in to summon James. His rueful “I’m sorry but, you know, family†drives home the severity of the situation. This could be a permanent rift.
Clare’s attempts to broker a solution to the Troubles writ very small — via the dubious magic of call waiting on her hamburger phone — only worsen the conflict. Michelle and Erin both being so certain each of them is in the right while also being two of the stubbornest people alive doesn’t help. Each refuses to accept any part of the other’s perspective, each has hurt the other terribly, and neither is willing to budge.
While the wains are struggling to square this impossible circle, the Quinn family adults are working on getting their heads around the Agreement as a whole. Fortunately, Granda Joe has created an explanatory cork board with memorable visual aids. It veers between being helpfully informative and lightly unhinged, in keeping with the Granda way of things. I did collapse into giggles when he used bags of crisps — one cheese and onion, one salt and vinegar — to represent “both flavors†of paramilitaries who will be released from prison. Talk about a text-to-life connection!
Although the big issue at the heart of the finale is the Good Friday Referendum, most of the episode is devoted to finding acceptable solutions to small-c conflicts. Erin and Orla’s 18th birthday party shrinks ever smaller in scope and significance, eventually becoming entirely overshadowed by Jenny Joyce’s own lavish birthday party and by their parish’s First Holy Communion reception. Gerry struggles to convince the infuriating long-term houseguest Cousin Eammon to speed up the process of moving back home, and Sister Michael resists heeding her bishop’s orders by insisting on retaining her position as headmistress of Lady Immaculate College.
Of these, the biggest and best resolution comes courtesy of the unlikely pairing of Jenny and Clare. Arriving at Jenny’s party after the other wains have bailed to go hang out on the city walls, Clare threatens to cause a blackout at Jenny’s house unless she agrees to pick up her party — Jennywood sign, caricature artist, Champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and all — and relocate it to the parish hall so that everyone, including Orla and Erin, can have a wonderful celebratory evening together. Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea, is not rejoining her high-school friend group with Mary, Sarah, and Deirdre, but her daughter may yet improve on her record in the end.
Cousin Eammon — whom even Uncle Colm finds a dreary bore — is a tougher nut to crack, but by the time the party’s live entertainment, the Commitment (Bronagh Gallagher, the one who can really sing, is enjoying a successful solo career!), launches into the raucous conclusion of “Proud Mary,†things seem to be on the upswing. Eammon shows Colm how to roll up his slacks so they’re more like his own snazzy Bermuda shorts, and the two of them (with Gerry!) hurl themselves around the dance floor with joyful abandon.
Sister Michael is of course triumphant in her campaign to stay at Lady Immaculate. Could that place ever manage without its hilarious, deeply committed tyrant-in-chief? She’s as much of an institution as the school itself!
Now that Erin and Michelle are reconciled, Erin reengages with the puzzle of how to vote in the referendum. The significance of it and the uncertainty of its consequences are weighing heavily on her, but when she asks Granda Joe what he thinks, he gently redirects her to think about it as her choice, one she’ll make for her future and for the future of wains to come. What if it doesn’t work? But what if it does? Then “it’ll be a ghost story you’ll tell to your wains one day, a ghost story they’ll hardly believe.â€
The closing cast montage of the wains, their parents, an agonized Dennis, and even an uncertain DCI Liam Neeson all casting their ballots is a powerful reminder that all we can ever do is our best with the knowledge and understanding we have in each moment of our lives. It’s easy to be generous when your side wins — the referendum passed in Northern Ireland with a whopping 71 percent of voters voting yes — but Derry Girls has always been maximally humane and openhearted in its embrace of what makes every person so strange and so beloved to their community. A pretty good role model for us all, I think.
Best of Dennis’s Pick-and-Mix:
• Sister Michael goes out on a high note: triumphant, sharing a whiskey of grudging mutual almost-respect with Father Peter, while resplendent in her off-duty ensemble of brocade dressing gown and silk ascot. Perfection.
• Erin and James check-in: Based on their affectionate body language in several scenes, I think they’re secretly together or are on the cusp of becoming so. If Erin and Michelle can reconcile after their near-breakup over Niall, they can manage the tricky business of remaining friends regardless of how Erin and James’s relationship pans out.
• It’s a stretch to believe that Dennis picked out his snazzy glasses from the NHS offerings, but I do love to see a man rocking a clear tribute to Sally Jessy Raphael.
• The final scene, in which Chelsea Clinton receives the letter from Erin, Orla, Clare, Michelle, and James welcoming her to Derry and praising her lovely curly hair, isn’t at all necessary. I’d have been perfectly happy and tear-streaked with the fade to black as Granda Joe and Baby Anna (who I don’t think has spoken a single word on-camera over the course of 19 episodes) jump happily out of the polling station. On the other hand, it’s an undeniable, earnest feel-good moment, and don’t we deserve as many of those as we can get?