Top 10 Best Derry Girls Moments

In the show’s second season, the girls (and James) are hellbent on going to see one of their favorite bands, Take That, play a concert in Belfast. Unfortunately, on the day of the show, a polar bear breaks loose from a Belfast zoo, so Erin’s mother forbids them from leaving because of the risk of being mauled. Of course, they head out anyway and get into a number of scrapes along the way, including running into Sister Michael on the bus, causing a false bomb alarm because of their hidden vodka, being chased by a band of Irish Travellers and hitching a ride with a drunk driver who kills a

In the first season, Mary notices her father winking in church, she decides to start an investigation to get to the bottom of what’s going on. She does some sleuthing and finds that he bought an unexpected pastry from the bakery and then turned up a street that he doesn’t usually frequent. He finally cracks and admits that he had a new lady friend name Maeve. Mary and Sarah are shocked that he would be dating again after their mother’s death (which happened many years earlier) and are absolute terrors when they meet the poor, sweet woman.

After spending a night studying intensely for an exam, the girls find themselves in a church where they begin to hallucinate that the statue of the Virgin Mary is smirking at them. The reason they ended up there is that they were chasing a dog who looked suspiciously like Toto, Erin’s family pet who recently passed away. Erin follows the dog upstairs where he begins to pee, and his urine leaks through the floorboards and drips onto the poor Virgin Mary’s face. The other girls believe the statue has begun to shed tears, and think they have witnessed a miracle.

When Erin brings all her friends to a family wedding, they of course get up to some antics, including dancing to “Rock the Boat”. In their fervor, they knock 50-year-old Eamonn out of the line and his mother Bridie has to come to his defense, giving Mary a hard time for what her daughter did. Things get heated, and they escalate to the point that Mary ends up telling her elderly aunt to “drop dead”. She falls to the floor dead in that very moment, and Mary gets a reputation for putting a curse on her. To be honest, she deserved it!

When Erin becomes editor of the school paper, she has a hard time coming up with content after the rest of the staff desert her. But when she finds a letter, written anonymously by a student from the school coming out of the closet, she decides to publish it, despite the dubious morality of the decision. Eventually, Clare confesses to Erin that she was the one who wrote the letter, which is why she was so strongly opposed to its publication. Erin is shockingly unsympathetic - and because the show is set in the ‘90s, her reaction seems incredibly dated. But it makes for a touching moment when the two girls finally reconcile.

The girls want to go on a school trip to Paris, but their parents won’t pay for it so they need to find a way to make some money. Realizing they need to find jobs, Michelle steals the notice board from the local fish and chips shop so that they can get all the good jobs before anyone else. Fionnula, who runs the shop, discovers what they’ve done and threatens to ban their families from eating there anymore. The compromise is that the girls have to clean the chippy, and they do a shockingly terrible job, eventually setting Fionnula’s apartment on fire.

There’s some discord in the group by the season finale of the first series, and when the school talent show comes up, the fault lines between the friends are obvious. But when Orla get up to do her step aerobics routine, the other students laugh at her and Erin and her friends realize they have to step in to help. Erin, Clare, Michelle, and James get up on stage to join her and end up having a silly dance of their own. The image of the friends goofing off on stage is juxtaposed with footage of Erin’s family watching news reports of a bombing, which puts into perspective the situation they’re all in.

The girls’ school is having a prom night, and at first Erin offers to go with Clare. But in typical Erin fashion, she backs out the second that she thinks she has a shot with the guy she’s into: John Paul. Meanwhile, James is skipping the dance altogether in favor of attending a Doctor Who convention. When prom night comes however, Erin squeezes herself into her dress and waits for John Paul to pick her up, but he never arrives. However, James does arrive in the nick of time (summoned by Mary) to be Erin’s date, and we couldn’t help but shed a tear. Second sweetest moment of this episode goes to Orla describing why she is taking her grandfather to the prom- and the adorable scene of them dancing together.

“Derry Girls” starts with a bang, and the very first episode of the series introduces us to all the characters and lets the audience know just how wacky things are going to get in this series. The entire gang finds themselves in detention for bullying a first-year student and things quickly go awry when Sister Declan, who is supervising them, seemingly falls asleep. Erin tries to escape through a window to go on her “date”, James pees into a bin, Clare steals the nun’s sandwich, and Michelle rifles through the Sister’s things to get her confiscated lipstick. Unfortunately, Sister Declan actually wasn’t sleeping, and had passed away instead, which only brings more trouble for the gang.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Exam Revision
"Episode Three"

Michelle Finding Fionnula's Booze
"Episode Two"

The Difference Between Catholics & Protestants
"Across the Barricade"

Friends Across the Barricade
"Across the Barricade"

In the finale of the second season, the friends are excited when they learn that American president Bill Clinton is coming to Derry. They skip school and wait all day to get a good spot for viewing his speech. At the same time however, James’s mother, who had sent him away to live in Derry, returns from London and asks him to come back with her. He says yes but Michelle gives him a piece of her mind, telling him that he’s a Derry Girl now and he can’t leave. He gets in the car anyway but later changes his mind, and the girls abandon their hard fought spots to embrace him.