Derry Girls: Season Three and Finale Special

I don’t think most of this season it’s as funny as the first two seasons but that might be me. And that’s not to say it’s not funny. I laughed, out loud despite being alone, at every episode usually several times. I took to watching from a recording because I frequently laughed so hard I couldn’t hear what was going on and I wanted to be able to pause/rewind easily. It’s not like it’s unfunny all of a sudden, I think it just slides off to a different place that doesn’t work for me. As usual the music is really on point and it was great to relive some of those tunes.

They play with the format of the show too: we have a flashback episode, a road trip episode and more. I don’t mind that but maybe that contributed a bit to my feeling of it not quite hitting the mark. Setting up the mechanics of the different episodes chewed into the time available for the cast to do their thing.

Then came the finale. An hour long special, set a year later building up to the referendum on the peace agreement. That’s a really tough watch in some ways as the DUP are doing their best to unravel the agreement; they’re essentially making Ulster ungovernable because they’re refusing to participate in the government because they don’t like the Brexit they helped create by supporting BoJo. (Being politicians they’re blaming BoJo, claiming they were betrayed, but more fool them for trusting the guy.) However, what we have in the show is a lot of the big issues of the debate of the time made personal. At one level this isn’t funny, it’s big, heavy issues that I remember to this day and it’s well handled. The fact that we’ve had 20+ episodes to get to know this lot makes it resonate and the humour isn’t about the situation, it arises from the characters. This episode goes overboard on the jokes, the music and has a string of cameos as well. Some of them aren’t that surprising, a couple are a real shock, especially the one right before the final credits. It’s sad to see it go but in so many ways it went out on an enormous high and at a great changing point in Irish history. Thank you Derry Girls.

Bechdel Test: Pass. The show centres around five girls talking to each other. It’s an easy pass. There are other characters, and there’s a boy in the core group too, but you can imagine it easily passes. They do talk about boys, but also about everything else under the sun.

Ko Test: Fail. I don’t know what the demographics of Derry are but this is very white.

Russo Test: Pass. I stopped and thought about this long and hard. Clare is still a lesbian (I wasn’t thinking she’d “get better” or anything) but really nothing is done with it. By and large it’s just about mentioned twice. That makes her feel a bit like the token gay (although the straight girls don’t mention boys more often to be fair). However, we have two kisses in the season that have any sexual meaning (I don’t think we have any parents and children kissing platonically but I’m not 100% sure) and Clare’s is one of those, so I think it’s a pass.