Nobody on Derry Girls would describe their day trip to a seaside amusement park by saying, “We’re going down the shore!” But I, a lifelong South Jersey girl, am in charge of this recap, and that’s indeed what they do in this episode. Ma Mary is packing snacks for the train journey to Portrush, and on the basis of sandwich quantity alone, you might be excused for thinking her preparations are for a weeklong sojourn. Gerry’s gentle reminder that the train journey is all of an hour backfires by leading her to decide to make another ten or 12 sandwiches. The cooks of armed forces everywhere nod approvingly, as does my late grandmother, a fellow Queen of BYO Refreshments and very clearly reused aluminum foil.
While everyone is waiting on Mary to complete her self-imposed catering order, the news has some updates about the ongoing peace process negotiations. The Democratic Unionist Party (a loyalist political party led by Reverend Ian Paisley) won’t negotiate with Sinn Féin (the political wing of the IRA, led by Gerry Adams) unless the IRA decommission its weapons. Sarah, holding an ice cube to her earlobe so she can do a casual repiercing before they head out for the day, hypothesizes that the IRA’s resistance to decommissioning its weapons is rooted in its having misplaced said weapons. Well, sure, who among us has not carefully packed up and put away some clutter we know will come in handy again one day only to have no idea where we put it some six months later? Let this be a lesson to us all not to do any Swedish death cleaning before entering a major project.
The Quinn family entourage just barely makes it out of town thanks to waiting for the train on the wrong platform and having to race to the right one at the last moment. They always seem to have a hard time with departures; remember season one and their near-disastrous attempts to leave Derry to avoid the Orangemen’s parade? Is Derry the municipal equivalent of the Hotel California, where you can check out anytime you like, but you can (almost) never leave? I’m going to need Lisa McGee to confirm or deny this hypothesis. Comment from Don Henley on this matter would also be welcome.
Once aboard, the wains choose to sit in a different carriage than the grown-ups, though Erin’s argument that they’re mature enough to have that bit of freedom from being looked after constantly is somewhat undercut by their having left Clare behind at the station. Clare takes this oversight with her characteristic good grace and lack of worry. Which is to say she shrieks her wee head off in panic as soon as she realizes she’s been left behind.
Fortunately, her wait for the next train will be only a brief 20 minutes, but those agonizing minutes flow past like molasses in January for both Clare and poor Sister Michael, who is also heading to Portrush for the day. The slight awkwardness of waiting together is ratcheted up to an 11 of second-hand mortification thanks to the woman staffing the ticket window, who is having a lengthy and detailed conversation with her soon-to-be-ex-husband about the many particulars of her dissatisfaction with their sex life. Clare and Sister Michael can hear every word, and they do.
I suspect Clare being left behind is primarily an accommodation of Nicola Coughlan’s Bridgerton shooting schedule. No matter: Both she and Siobhán McSweeney do a lovely job of being both awkward and funny together, and we get an eyeful of Sister Michael’s very jaunty country-and-western-themed travel getup. (A bolo tie in silver and turquoise and a fringed blouse, all while wearing her usual wimple!) She never shares an explanation about any of it, which makes it even more fun to think about.
Back on the train, Sarah and Mary manage to get in a scrape nearly identical in both stakes and consequences (minimal) and degree of emotional intensity (extreme) to the type of crisis the wains typically mire themselves in.
While a dustup with the petty martinet in charge of the snacks trolley lands the wains in a situation with a very suspicious backpack (contents: £1,000, a balaclava, a handgun, and a small bag of potato chips), Sarah and Mary find themselves holding a very warm conversation reminiscing with a woman who recognizes them from their youth. They don’t have a clue who she is, but she’s about to hop off at the next stop, so no harm, no foul. And that’s when the train grinds to a halt, leaving everyone stranded with their respective challenges.
I’m relishing the way this season is showing us just how honestly the wains come by their most amusing, unhinged qualities. It’s always been clear that Mary is clever and high strung while Sarah is a pretty chill luftmensch and that Erin and Orla hew pretty closely to their mothers’ ways. This season seems to be exploring those similarities in more depth, and that’s all to the good.
Orla’s chaotic contributions to the backpack situation include eating the packet of potato chips, using £500 to buy the Kit Kats that Fra the food-trolley guy refused to sell them earlier (they’re display-only Kit Kats, which is not even a thing, but as Orla says, everyone has their price), and ultimately threatening Fra with the spinning toothbrush from the backpack. He retaliates in kind by brandishing a banana at the girls, and I am now fully in mirth-tears over the silliness of this pickle.
The wains are extra worried about getting the money bac, because they’ve convinced themselves the backpack’s owner is the intimidating-looking guy who was sitting near them earlier. He’d stormed off in a fit of (completely reasonable) pique during their first absurd argument with Fra the snack-trolley guy. He must have taken James’s backpack by mistake, and they’d all very much prefer he never know about the little mix-up.
Up in the other train car, the mystery woman plunks herself down for a more in-depth chat. She keeps alluding to “past mistakes” and how she’s “been away” for the last pen years, but Mary and Sarah still can’t place her. Falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy, they continue to feign knowing and proceed to paint themselves into a conversational corner until they both claim to be having flare-ups of irritable-bowel syndrome to escape being found out.
While Sarah and Mary are regrouping and strategizing one car over, the mystery woman’s identity comes out during a round of Guess Who played with Gerry: She’s their girlhood neighbor Aideen, unrecognizable to the Quinns because she lost so much weight in prison. I really dislike the show building an entire plot around Aideen’s former fatness. Weight is not a plot point! You know what would be: Aideen’s crime and apparent rehabilitation! But we barely touch on that!
The bigger reveal turns out to be that the backpack belongs to Aideen — the tough-looking guy is actually quite friendly and was just looking after the bag for her. Her discovery that someone has eaten the packet of chips sets her off, though, and the full fellowship of Quinns are treated to a front-row view of Aideen bludgeoning the backpack sitter, whom she blames for the loss of her tasty, starchy, crunchy fried snack. So much for Aideen’s vow to make a difference in her community, I guess?
Show creator and writer Lisa McGee always ties her episodes up in neat narrative bows, and this one is a particularly funny one, stranding everyone at the apex of the roller coaster’s first drop because of a technical failure. And they thought being stuck on the train was bad!
Dennis’s Pick-and-Mix
• Fun fact about Gerry Adams: From 1988 to 1994, because of a sharp uptick in violence by various republican and unionist militias, the voices of members of those 11 organizations were banned from broadcast in Great Britain. The true primary target was Adams and Sinn Féin. Many broadcasters worked around the ban by hiring actors from Northern Ireland to record transcripts of Adams and broadcast them instead.
• The fellow minding the suspicious backpack is played by Packy Lee, who played Johnny Dogs in Peaky Blinders. I always love a “Hey! It’s that guy!” moment.
