There were two emotions that drove my decision not to immediately watch the finale of Lisa McGee’s beloved Derry Girls when it was finally released: fear and despair. Why fear? Because anyone who has truly loved a show, not just for the story, but for the brilliant craft behind its success, will know just how bitter a disastrous finale can taste. And despair? Because the end of this larger-than-life show had arrived and I hadn’t quite made my peace with it yet nor was I ready to be left in “pieces,” as Erin, the protagonist, says in her final monologue — a clever wordplay emphasizing Northern Ireland’s fragile state of peace. In short, at the centre of my not-ready-to-rip-the-bandage-off anxiety was a melting pot of adoration.
But boy did Lisa McGee deliver, and even knock the final episode, crafted around the passing of the Good Friday Agreement Referendum in 1998 in Northern Ireland, out of the park. The show’s perfectly crafted goodbye was confirmed as I felt the salty tears sprawling down my cheeks trickle into my grinning mouth as a result of a cathartic cocktail of emotions McGee expertly mixes.
Derry Girls is a coming-of-age dark comedy, aired on Channel 4, set in the 1990s during the Troubles conflict in a city called Derry. The eponymous show follows a catholic working-class family, and a tight-knit friendship group of girls: Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), her cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), Michelle (Jamie Lee O’Donnell), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), and one token boy, James (Daniel Llewellyn), who also happens to be Michelle’s cousin, the only boy attending the Catholic school Lady Immaculate College — oh and he’s also the only Brit.
Through the course of the show’s life, McGee reminded, or better yet, transformed the public’s perception of Derry, from the dark (for it was once predominantly renowned as the birthplace of the sectarian conflict and the grave of Bloody Sunday) to the 90s pop-bright and fun-loving place it was. History has a tendency to efface the multi-faceted personalities of peoples and territories in the face of tragedy, and it is with this acknowledgment that McGee injected Derry’s personality back into the public eye — warts and all.
The first five minutes of the final episode are constructed like a funeral march: with the use of montage, the show’s life flashes before our eyes, reminding us of the hilarious highs and the heart-wrenching lows. It’s edited against the slow and sombre chimes of church bells ringing, or funeral tolling, a Christian tradition to mark a death at a funeral or an impending death. Each evenly-paced, ecclesiastical chime is punctuated with a new recollection and is heightened by the absence of the flashback’s audio — the church tolling reverberates through the piercing quiet. Expansive, echoey, and far-reaching, the sound strikes just like it would if you were hearing the calls from a local church.
Brought up as a Catholic, I myself have experienced the sound of church bells on various occasions, and this is perhaps why this montage struck such a chord with me, because beyond the funeral tolling’s obvious multi-representational value: the death of the show, the commemoration of the lives lost to violence during the Troubles, but also the impending end of the war as the episode’s titular name tells us, the opening also felt both structurally and tonally, like a prayer.
Prayer, I used to find, invites your mind to conjure unexpected mental screenshots of your life in sequence much like the montage in the show. I have in the past been taken aback by the immediacy in which moments of tenderness, fear, heartbreak, and joy flash before my eyes whilst in prayer. Whether the flashbacks represent McGee’s inner subconscious or not, the montage is both a call to prayer and prayer in of itself. McGee acknowledges the show’s audience’s and her own grief head-on, beckoning us to grieve its loss together, as a community, and creates a fleeting moment of reflection to commemorate all the moments of the show that made it more than the sum of its parts: the girls’ farcical religious experience induced by an inanimate but “weeping” Virgin Mary, Grandpa Jo’s incongruent expression of compassion during news of a local car bombing, Clare’s first kiss, Erin and James’ first kiss, the gang’s Spice Girls recreation, and the unexpected loss of Clare’s father, a casualty not from political violence, but instead, nature’s course.
The sound of the final gong heralds the three-decade-long conflict troubling the Derry Girls’ ensemble cast and Northern Ireland. This symbolic step towards peace is also aptly represented in one of the show’s final closing shots, as both Grandpa Jo, (embodying the eldest generation whose living life endured through the conflict), and the adorable infant Anna, (Erin’s youngest sister, and the generation of the future who will speak of the Troubles as the ghost story Grandpa Jo wishes it to be), hop towards their bright and peaceful future away from the darkness of the polling station of the Good Friday Referendum.
But with a rapid gear shift, the lamenting opening scene is quickly forgotten as we are plunged into a soul-stirring dance montage, led by Orla, to the 1997’s hit “Sunchyme” by Dario G.
Zany, head-in-the-clouds Orla, whose eccentricity has shone through in the background of almost every shot of the Derry squad, is finally rewarded the front stage, her hair styled in child-like fashion, gleaming with mutli-coloured bom-boms, evokes a unique sense of fleeting innocence, destined to fade with age, as the sequence shows each Derry girl outside of the squad environment: Erin in a bookshop discombobulated by Shakespeare, a classic university text; Michelle barking at a wee fella in the sweet shop; Clare at her new school with another too tight for comfort blazer; and James lovingly editing footage of Erin at the school computer — the beats are an exuberant celebration of the girls’ individuality and the paths that lie ahead beyond the blanketing familiarity of the group.
It was hard to choke back the tears when a band of very cute young girls join in Orla’s jig, a moment undoubtedly celebrating girlhood, but also of joy because despite the atrocities of the political violence the girl’s resilience for joy is one of the most life-affirming aspects of the show.
As the tiny jiggers dance in concentric circles around Orla, you can’t help but notice the glaring age gap between them. With each twirl they make the show’s name out of date, as the Derry girls aren’t really girls anymore, they are in fact, young women. This is further reinforced by the fact that Orla is on the way to pick up her Good Friday Agreement booklet that lays out the voting process. Recently turned 18 Orla, and the rest of the crew, have all literally “come of age” and even exert their legal right to vote in this episode, a clear marker of burgeoning adulthood and a death knell to their adolescence.
But in Derry fashion, this uplifting moment is rudely interrupted by the confrontation of an English soldier forcing Orla to stop in her trails. This absurdist juxtaposition is a leitmotif throughout the series and is emblematic of the absurdist nature of war because all of the show’s feel-good hilarious magic bubbles away within the brutal reality of war — it is an unflinching portrait of social strength, and life carrying on. The series shows the meaninglessness of war, and the finale, the difficulty of righting the wrongs of a thorny, divided and politically complex past.
McGee explains the complexities of the Irish conflict by making a dispute between Michelle and Erin the episode’s central action. After all this time, we discover Michelle’s brother, a member of the IRA, was imprisoned for murder. The argument sparks after Michelle confronts Erin for her noticeably judgemental face whilst Michelle expressed hope for the possibility that her brother might be released as a condition to the passing of the Good Friday Agreement. In many ways, this revelation is pivotal to understanding why Michelle has always supported family (aka James) over friends in previous tiffs between the girls. Denied by her mother the right to even visit her brother, Michelle’s staunch support for James, or “family over friends,” comes from an incapacity to do so, and welds their familial bond even more together in this episode.
In the girls’ spat, Erin’s disapproval of Michelle’s hope characterizes the side of the Irish public that struggle to see justice in letting those who caused harm to walk free. But the losses from this war are not black and white, and peace-building even less so. Even today, the legacy of the Troubles lives on as Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary of state was recently up in the House of Commons, in Westminster, for the second reading of the Troubles Bill which seeks to protect veterans and deliver better outcomes for victims of conflict. That’s why the flashy cameo of Chelsea Clinton, reading out a long-lost letter authored by Erin, bringing the Derry girls back to the present day, is so pertinent, because although the Troubles’ physical conflict may have ended, Northern Ireland’s wounds are still raw.
Although the letter is politically resonant, its funny and naively arrogant tone, audaciously inviting the president of the Unites States of America’s daughter to come hang out with the girlies, and to use James to practice kissing for better boys, heart-wrenchingly reminds us that being a Derry girl isn’t about their jokes or glorious accents, it’s about the way they confront conflict together — “it’s a fucking state of mind.”
Soldiers in the background were used more to show how much a background part of life they were, in the first episode when armed soldiers board the bus the girls are bored, distracted, joking. James on the other hand is panicked, he is not used to armed men in any capacity.
The ‘Troubles bill’ was not to ‘protect veterans’ it was to make sure they could not be held accountable for the murder of innocent civilians marching for the simple right to vote.