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Derry Girls Season-Premiere Recap: Let’s Go, Girls

Season 3 Episode 1 Editor’s Rating5 stars *****

Photo: Channel 4/Netflix

Welcome, gentle readers, to the third and final season of Derry Girls. If you’re already a fan, you know that we’re in for a yabba-doo time of joke-dense hilarity and glimpses of the centuries of colonialism and covert civil war that transform humor into a daily practice of life-affirming defiance. If this absolute banger of a sitcom is new to you, I encourage you to fire up the pilot before proceeding further. But if you’re impatient and enjoy living on the edge (no, not like that), then let’s go!

Season three opens just before the start of the 1997–98 school year in Derry. Thanks to a cease-fire called in July, a substantial peace negotiation is underway — indeed, from our historical vantage point, we can see the Good Friday Agreement referendum on the horizon — but such historic moments get only the most fleeting glance of attention in this episode, as our intergenerational ensemble of highly strung darlings has bigger fish to fry. That’s not to say everyone is footloose and fancy-free; the girls are anxiously awaiting exam results that will determine the course of their lives forevermore, while Gerry and Granda Joe embark on an errand that teeters on a knife edge between silly and grim. In both plots, Troubles-inflected hijinks ensue.

The wains have spent the summer holidays indulging James’s attempts to become Northern Ireland’s foremost youth documentarian, dragooning the girls into helping him create a short film he’s certain will be awards bait. The result is exactly what you’d expect in a debut by a 17-year-old would-be auteur: lots of artsy, haute-’90s footage of Erin, Clare, Orla, and Michelle affecting an air of being carefree but still slightly haunted, interspersed with famous, harrowing images of the Troubles. Oh, and all of it includes Erin’s florid narration in voice-over.

Unfortunately, even their crabby sniping about the artistically dubious project can’t distract them for long. As Clare — famously Derry’s chillest resident — reminds them, they’ll receive their GSCE exam results the following morning, and she’s beside herself with worry that they’ll have failed. (The GCSE is the U.K.’s rough equivalent of a high-school diploma in the U.S., and good results are required for students to attend an extra year of high school in preparation for A-level exams. Good A-level results are in turn required for university admissions.)

She’s not worried about her own results, mind you, and her concern isn’t related to any sympathy for the bad educational and career consequences her friends would face if they failed but for her own social life. If the girls fail and aren’t permitted to attend their A-levels year, she’ll have no friends at school, and she absolutely does not have the bandwidth to attempt to make new ones. If they fail, they’ll have ruined her life. The nerve!

To try to take their minds off the whole thing for a few hours, they ask to borrow Gerry’s movie-rental card. He agrees, but only on the condition that they don’t rent something as naughty as their previous selection, American Gigolo. As the wains deny any knowledge whatsoever of American Gigolo, the camera pushes in on Mary and Sarah, looking very guilty in the background. I love getting little glimpses into Mary and Sarah’s activities while the wains are at school and hope we get more throughout the season.

While browsing the racks at the video-rental shop, the wains pester Dennis about how it’s possible for him to work there and at the sweetshop until he finally exclaims “Jesus Christ, I was asked less questions when I was interned!” Let’s hit pause here to admire one of the best and most quintessentially Derry Girls lines of the episode. This is a joke written by and for some of the world’s greatest connoisseurs of pitch-black humor, Catholics from Northern Ireland. It’ll sting some English viewers (as intended) and will likely sail right past viewers elsewhere.

Accordingly, some context: Internment (1971–75) was the practice of arresting and imprisoning without trial hundreds of suspected Republican paramilitaries, particularly IRA members. Some of those arrested were brought in on the basis of out-of-date or simply wrong information, and many interned prisoners were tortured. The policy backfired spectacularly, triggering a wave of retaliation so fierce that 1972 was the most violent year of the Troubles. Dennis’s casual zinger calls to mind Elora Danan’s suggestion of using “1491” as a security code in the season finale of Reservation Dogs. Both genuinely LOL-worthy, near-throwaway jokes about the agony caused by centuries of colonial violence are rare as hen’s teeth and will fall flat if their funny-to-bleak proportions are off. When you’re daring the audience to laugh at something awful, the execution has to be perfect. This one is.

Back to the scene: They’re all yammering away at and over each other until Sr. Michael arrives. Dennis has a much more solicitous approach for her, noting that he’s set aside “the new Scorsese” for her (title unspecified, but it’s likely either 1995’s Casino or an earlier work that hadn’t been released on VHS previously). Unlike the girls, she’s supremely unbothered about their GCSE results because the school has already received them for all students, “and also, I don’t care.” Rather than provide specifics, she advises the wains to enjoy what time they have left. This pack of sweet goobers immediately rocket into an even greater state of agitation than they were in before.

They instantly conclude that they’ve failed, leading Clare to catastrophize that they’ll never get into university, never get jobs, and basically their lives are over. Michelle points out that if they’ve failed, they won’t even get to the point of not being admitted to university because their mothers will kill them and “dead people don’t need jobs.” After very briefly considering running away (Orla, ever attentive to the crucial details: “If this is running away bad, I’m afraid I’m going to need my snorkel back, James”), they need a different plan. Clearly something must be done, but it won’t be James’s sensible suggestion that they just wait and see what their scores actually are. Why get some sleep and mental clarity when they could instead leap into a (half-baked and overcomplicated) scheme powered by adrenaline and dread of death by ma? Hang the consequences, it’s time for an exam-results heist!

Entering the school at night leads the girls to help out two nice fellas who are moving brand-new computer equipment from the school to somewhere else. That is, they inadvertently help two thieves move all of the school’s new computers to their van, which the thieves drive away, destination unknown. The second the truth dawns on the wains, they are surrounded by a huge, heavily armed contingent of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (popularly known as the RUC, the much-loathed and distrusted majority-Protestant police force) and loaded into a van to be whisked away to the station. Of course, something their misadventure does not yield is their GCSE results. Once again, the wains are so hyperfixated on staying out of trouble that they get themselves neck-deep in the soup.

Upon arrival at the RUC station, they are — ahem — taken to be questioned by the detective chief inspector, played by Liam Neeson. This scene is the funny yet still sinister mirror image of Dennis’s experiences: They haven’t been informed of their right to remain silent or placed under arrest. They haven’t been charged, and there is no tape recorder capturing their responses to DCI Neeson’s questions.

The girls are taking this situation a lot harder than DCI Neeson. He doesn’t really think they’re burglars, and just wants to know if they can identify the real culprits, but he’s clueless as to the effect of the setting for this little chitchat. Ever helpful, Michelle can identify one of their butts, sadly a piece of information that doesn’t clear the bar as a rationale for a warrant. Rescue comes in the form of the peerlessly stultifying Uncle Colm, king of meandering anecdotes so dull that they have the power to wear down even the toughest coppers! The wains are duly released into Uncle Colm’s custody, so sweet, sweet freedom (and, they assume, no parental consequences) will be theirs! Phew!

In our other plotline, let us all bow our heads in silence as we pity poor Gerry Quinn. Derry Girls’ own Cassandra is cursed to see and understand reality and yet is unable to convince anyone around him of that reality. Just as bad, everyone else is invested in creating the most complicated, Baroque-ass solutions to life’s fairly straightforward problems. Which is how Gerry and Granda Joe wind up reenacting the grim cliché of paramilitaries driving way out into the countryside in the wee hours to bury a corpse. In this case, the corpse is Jim From Across the Road’s granddaughter Cara’s bunny rabbit, Fluffy, who has been murdered by Joe’s (supposedly now totally domesticated and gentle) feral cat Seamus.

By Gerry’s count, prior to executing the unfortunate Fluffy, Seamus was already responsible for the deaths of three pigeons, a frog, a mouse, and a shrew. But Joe argues that all evidence against Seamus is circumstantial, and furthermore, there’s a tabby cat a few blocks over who’s got a vendetta against Seamus and who is clearly orchestrating this campaign of terror to frame him. To what end, we will never know, because the ways of cats are too mysterious for us to fathom, but wake up, sheeple, the conspiracy is plain as day!

Anyway, when GCSE-results day dawns, what do you know, everyone has passed! A levels, here they come! Erin is horrified by Orla matching her own passing grades, but at least they’re all off scot-free as accidental accomplices to burglary! Except they’re not, because an RUC officer has found James’s video camera containing footage of last night’s adventures and the cat will shortly be out of the bag! Whoopsie-daisy! I sure did miss these girls.

Best of Dennis’s Pick & Mix

• It turns out that Sr. Michael’s full religious name is Sr. George Michael. I expect nothing less from one of TV’s true subversives.

• Liam Neeson’s presence here is a helpful reminder that Derry Girls’ closest analog is not another sitcom (not even Chris O’Dowd’s delightful and semi-autobiographical Moone Boy). Instead, the best episodes of Derry Girls are more akin to the most relentlessly escalating Key and Peele sketches, such as Continental Breakfast, Soul Food Restaurant, and the (obsessed with Liam Neesons [sic]) Fancy Restaurant Valets.

• Under the wains’ tables-turning close questioning during their own interrogation, the detectives estimate that there are exactly three Catholics in the whole of Derry’s RUC, a tally including the lovely Jewish fella down at the Ballymena station. As a Jew, I should probably find that offensive, but I’m still laughing too hard to summon any feeling beyond mirth.

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