Derry Girls – The Night Before Review

The Derry Girls are back for one final season. The new season sees the girls (and the Wee English Fella) deal with exam result stress in an extreme manner.

It’s the night before the gang gets their GCSE results. Claire is panicking because she fears the rest of the gang has failed, so she would be forced to make new friends. They set to break into the school and try and get their results early. The adults in the Quinn household must deal with the aftermath of their new cat’s bloodlust.

The new season of Derry Girls was highly anticipated. Channel 4 had been promoting it heavily, as well as its cast and creator Lisa McGee. When the new episode was being broadcasted many fans were live-tweeting. Even I was getting hyped for the series. Sadly, “The Night Before” doesn’t match the heights of previous episodes.

“The Night Before” relied on the gang being massive idiots. When they broke into the school they were met by two strange men who were robbing the place and the gang unwittingly helped them out. They didn’t realise they were participating in a burglary until the men left, despite it being really obvious what they were doing. It was like the whole gang turned into Orla.

In the episode “The Concert” the gang did cause a bomb scare by denying they owned a suitcase filled with booze. Yet they lived in 1990s Northern Ireland so they should have known better. But it could be argued that the gang was caught off guard because they were confronted by their headteacher and the whole sequence was incredibly funny.

A notable change in the episode was the treatment of James. James was bullied by the group because he had the audacity to be born and raised in England. At the end of Season Two the group showed how much they cared for James. This episode removed the sympathetic factor because he suffered from less bullying, and he ended up coming across as annoying at times. The worst example of this was when he complained to the police about not reading him his rights.

Orla was the funniest character in this sequence. She used her out-of-the-box style of thinking to get the gang into the school. Claire was the comedy star before the break-in since her good girl image disappeared because of her own self-interest. She tore her friends apart in a hilarious manner.

The episode picks up after the group got arrested. This led to a surprising cameo that blew up Twitter in the UK and Ireland. My jaw dropped when I saw who the show got. The surprise has now been reported on by numerous British and Irish outlets and even Channel 4 released a clip on their YouTube channel, but it wouldn’t be fair to international fans who wouldn’t have to reveal who the person was because they haven’t seen the episode yet.

The group did have an ingenious way of getting out of trouble. They brought in a character that was hilariously boring and it was entertaining to see how characters react to his soul-sucking skills.

The subplot involved Joe forcing Gerry into a scheme. This was like the subplot in “The President” where Joe made Gerry go to Donegal to find President Clinton. In “The Night Before” they had to depose a body in the countryside, a standard event in Northern Ireland. However, they were getting rid of a rabbit that Seamus the Cat had killed. This subplot tickled me for two reasons. The first it reminded me of an episode of Outnumbered where the Brockmans looked after a dog who liked to attack guinea pigs. The second reason was it involved a ginger cat which reminded me of my own ginger beast.

The general consensus about “The Night Before” from fans has been incredibly positive. There was no denying the cameo will go down as one of Derry Girls’ most memorable moments. But a starry appearance can’t mask a weaker plot and jokes from a usually excellent show.