Derry Girls Recap: Teenage Kicks

A quick content warning for this episode: There’s a lot of food-and-eating talk, including extreme dieting, food restriction, and binge-eating; most of it takes place in the first ten minutes. 

It makes sense for a show whose dizzying heights of hilarity are rooted in the uncertainty, fear, and trauma of armed conflict to be obsessed with time and history. As the cliché goes, the English never remember and the Irish never forget. But we’re often only able to perceive the real lessons of our pasts in hindsight, and sometimes everyone needs to revisit the past to understand their present. All of which is to say: Strap in, girls, we’re switching between 1997 and 1977 — it’s a school-reunion episode!

In 1997, the entire Quinn household is swept up in excitement over Mary and Sarah’s school reunion. The two Mas are hewing to a strict, nonsensical diet of only oranges (Gerry: “That’s not a healthy eating plan, it’s a no-eating plan!”) in order to drop one dress size each by 8 p.m. that evening. Erin and Orla have done a bit of math(s) and cheerfully inform their Mas that if they keep up their current pace of getting in their steps, they can look forward to losing about one pound each by that evening. Not promising, but they carry on regardless, with Sarah brushing up on 20th-century Russian history. You know, to give her classmates the impression that she has robust intellectual interests outside of maintaining her figure and youthful looks.

Mary and Sarah’s behavior isn’t too far outside the bounds of normal for them, but Gerry wants to understand what’s driving them so hard. Who are they trying to impress? None other than Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea. Wait, Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea? Joyce, as in Mammy to the loathsome suck-up Jenny Joyce? Yep, that’s the one! Not only did Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea, attend school with Mary and Sarah; she was a core member of their friend group, along with Deirdre (Michelle’s Mammy & James’s Aunt) and Geraldine (Clare’s Mammy), until she started dating the young medical student she later married. Twenty years later, Mary is still nursing intense hurt feelings about the way Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea dropped her and the other OG Derry Girls, as if she were too good for them once she hitched her wagon to a future surgeon.

At least Mary can comfort herself with the fact that Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea attended the 1977 Leavers’ Disco (what we’d call a graduation dance in the U.S.) with the rest of the gang and therefore knows exactly what they all did that fateful evening. What they did exactly will not be revealed until the final minutes of this episode, so we’re all going to wait, along with the Daddies, who seem to be hearing about this dread secret for the first time and are slowly being driven around the bend wondering and guessing at what it could be.

While we’re all wondering and guessing — did they pull a Carrie on some poor wee girl? Tar and feather a boy who got too fresh? Cause the nuns to faint dead away when they did the hustle? — we’re also enjoying the way this episode segues smoothly between 1997 and 1977. Each period illuminates the other, and we’re never lost thanks to instantly recognizable character-driven costuming and the note-perfect casting of the young actors playing the Mas’ teen selves.

Longtime fans will recall a scene in the pilot episode where the girls learn their bus will have to take the long way to school due to a possible bomb discovery on the Craigarvon Bridge. It’s written and played for laughs and some eye-rolling about the inconvenience of it all. Over the course of the season, though, we come to see the fear and uncertainty roiling under the surface of the jokes. It all culminates in a season finale moment of abject terror for the Quinn family’s adults — who can do nothing but watch coverage of a bombing that may have injured or killed their wains — and joyful celebration for said wains, who have no idea anything is amiss. To set the scene in 1977, this episode includes two montages of footage from that era of The Troubles with instantly recognizable imagery: bombings, tanks, paramilitaries in balaclavas, and DUP and Army personnel carrying or dragging people away.

Da Joe is dropping off Mary and Sarah at Lady Immaculate College for the Leavers’ Dance, and after admonishing them to avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and above all, boys, puts the car in park and opens his newspaper. He’s just going to hang out for the next three hours, no biggie. It’s easier than going home and then having to turn around a bit later to come pick them up; he may as well be there “in case there’s any bother.” His tone is nonchalant, and his daughters glide past it in their excitement to hit the dance floor — a spot of bother in this context is not a traffic jam.

In both eras, the entire focus of Mary and Sarah’s evening is the scandalous Thing They Did. In both 1977 and 1997, Deirdre arrives with a foreign male cousin in tow (Rob, visiting Derry from Canada, which he patiently explains many times is not America). In 1997, Rob’s appearance jolts Mary’s memory that he was there in 1977, too! He’ll certainly remember how Deirdre showed up in full punk regalia, whispering conspiratorially to the other girls that she’s “brought the gear.” Okay, so will it be some kind of heist? A bit of lock-picking and light property damage? Whatever What They Did turns out to be, Geraldine and the late-arriving Janette (in 1977, presently O’Shea) now want to wriggle out of it.

I love that across both timelines, each generation has their wee [not-Irish] fella to love and tease. In 1997, Granda Joe (still attending his daughters’ school events, I notice) is delighted to learn that Rob is gay, and immediately drags him over to the full group to share the news. His enthusiasm for meeting another gay person — “What are the chances?!” — and keenness to make sure Clare’s parents know that their wee lesbian is not the only queer person in Derry are both very endearing.

Rob’s next notable move is planting a great big public kiss on Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea’s husband Richard. Not because he fancies Richard, but because Richard is silent by choice. Deirdre describes Janette as “living the dream” with a man who never makes a peep, and all the Das are so struck by his silence that they immediately set about trying to get him to crack. But not even Rob’s bold gambit is successful! We salute a silent king.

While Richard is inspiring respect among his fellow fellas, Janette is working Mary’s last nerve. The constant references to Richard being a surgeon she can handle. But when Janette bursts into uncontrollable, giddy laughter at Mary’s intention to study literature at university next year, that’s a bridge too far. It’s time to bring the social consequences hammer down on Janette Joyce, formerly O’Shea! Geraldine, every bit as high-strung as Clare, begs Mary to let the past stay buried, but Mary and Deirdre are implacable. They’re sick of the lies and shame! It’s time to head to the Fairy Tree to dig up and drag their sordid truth into the light.

As they race across campus, the band playing their reunion introduces a song they refer to as the national anthem. It’s not “God Save the Queen” (Traditional Version), or even “God Save the Queen” (Johnny Rotten’s Version). No, no, it’s better: “Teenage Kicks,” by Derry’s own Undertones. This slice of sonic heaven — all crunchy pop-punk guitars and almost wholesomely lusty lyrics, clocking in at a lean 2:26 — is such a significant piece of Derry musical history that this is actually the second time it appears in this episode. The message of “Teenage Kicks” is also a core part of Derry Girls’ DNA: a bunch of teenagers insisting on feeling and shouting about joy in terrible times.

Having dug up the time capsule of Polaroids, Mary and Deirdre show and tell everyone What They Did: In 1977, they all let Deirdre give them tiny, discreet stick-and-poke tattoos of skulls and crossbones. The shock they expect this revelation to prompt is nowhere in evidence. Everyone just shrugs. The tattoos are so small that several husbands haven’t even noticed them. Even Mary and Sarah’s late sainted mother had a tattoo! And based on the way Granda Joe is smiling about it, I think it was on her tush!

The tattoos themselves turn out not to mean much, but the Mas’ memories of them and that evening mean a great deal. As Mary puts it, the buried tin of Polaroids is proof that “We did something,” and they made a time capsule of them in the hopes that some similar group of friends down the years would find them and think, “Christ, but they must have been a bunch of bad bitches!” Setting aside my skepticism that any Catholic white girls from Derry even knew of the existence of the phrase “bad bitches” in 1977, I am enthusiastically pumping my fist in the air. Any activity that makes people feel alive, especially when they’re so wholesome and mildly rebellious, is a good thing.

In the end, the Polaroids turn out to feature some other group of girls. So what? It’s the memories, and what they mean to each of these women, that count. We cut to black and see the tribute they’ve all deserved for so long: For all the Mammies.

Best of Dennis’s Pick & Mix

• For those who want to learn more about the Troubles and some of their long-term consequences for both individuals and Northern Ireland as a whole, I recommend Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s not funny, but much like this episode, it moves backwards and forwards in time, allowing each period to illuminate the other. It’s a beautiful and engrossing piece of journalism, a must-read of the last five years.

• If “Teenage Kicks” struck a chord with you, you’ll probably also enjoy Good Vibrations, a film about Terri Hooley, the man who made sure that John Peel’s favorite song of all time got recorded.

• My favorite character beat of the episode is the young Mary bringing a tin of sandwiches to the Leavers’ Disco and then re-using the tin as the time capsule for the girls’ Polaroids. Free-floating motherliness and a bit of gentle rebellion all in one. I hope that Mary reads some Whitman in her literature courses, and when she does, she sees herself in his celebration of containing multitudes.

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