Deary me we’ve got to the penultimate episode of the last ever series already? Better catch ourselves on then gang…
And we open on the unusual sight of Aunt Sarah reading this week. Even more unusually: reading about the Russian Revolution…
Da Gerry is of course questioning this. I mean Ma Mary reading Wuthering Heights in the middle of the day is probably one thing…
Weirder still is the fact that the fridge is bereft of food – although Ma Mary says there are plentiful oranges in supply. It turns out her and Aunt Sarah are trying to drop a dress size before their school reunion. That school reunion, of course, being the one that’s taking place about 24 hours hence.
Erin and Orla (but you mainly suspect the former) have been helpfully calculating how much weight their mammies can lose before then (a stone, as it turns out) and as you can imagine this is making Ma Mary half torn.
Orla then ponders how it must have been for them back when they were going to school…
Overall, it seems as though they’re looking forward to the reunion, but there is one touchy subject – and one which, as we see in this week’s episode, unites both mother and daughter…
Aunt Sarah says she changed when she started inventing With this established – and Erin in shock that her ma was friends with the ma of Jenny Joyce – we cut to the reunion the following evening: Aunt Sarah unable to tear herself away from the vol au vents, Ma Mary in a mint green two piece, and Da Gerry and pretty much every other da in Derry wearing the finest men’s sky blue two piece suit that Dunnes can buy.
One by one, their old gang start to turn up: Geraldine Devlin, Deirdre Mallon, and then Deirdre’s cousin from Canada, Rob. And that’s when we flashback through the mists of time twenty years ago, to 1977…
I mean. Serious props to both wardrobe and makeup departments for capturing Wee Ma Mary and Wee Aunt Sarah – and their equivalent of Sister Michael…
Wee Deirdre also appears – as her best 1977 goth self – having to explain away her Canadian cousin…
Meanwhile, back in 1997, Granda Joe has been making small talk with the fully grown Rob, and makes a startling discovery…
Meanwhile, Ma Mary, who has been anxiously waiting the arrival of Jeanette Joyce formerly O’Shea, finally clocks her with her husband, Richard the surgeon, who removed Orla’s tonsils (which explains why they are minted as anything). And she’s being point blank ignored…
Dierdre is discussing the benefits of Jeanette’s husband being largely silent…
Ma Mary eventually loses patience and yells Jeanette enough times for her to be beckoned over and introduce herself…
Da Gerry and the other das do their best to crack the enigma of Richard – to no avail. Jeanette then says it’s been lovely but Richard’s got an early start tomorrow so they need to circulate.
Ma Mary is by this point fuming, not least because she’s been laughed at for going to university, but also as she knows that Jeanette is hiding a secret from the night of their leaver’s party 20 years ago. The gang of two decades previously thus discuss their options in the toilets…
It’s at this point we cut back to the same toilets of 1977, with the gang from then having learnt from their headmistress that there’s been a roadblock by the RUC, meaning none of them can get home, meaning they were staying overnight in the school with the leaver’s party rapping early so they can be led in the Rosary (which Rob thinks is some sort of dance. Typical English heathens, says Dierdre). And despite fierce resistance from Geraldine, they all decide to do something wild and reckless to remember the night by for the rest of their lives…
Ma Mary eventually confronts Jeanette about what they all did on that night. Feigning ignorance, they eventually go marching off down the school fields, reaching the silver birch tree where they dug the remnants of their antics two decades previously.
Suddenly it all becomes clear; the gang all got DIY rose tattoos from Dierdre (because “it was a bit punk”) and took photographic evidence that they could look back on in years to come. Da Gerry had no knowledge of these tattoos, but then Ma Mary and Aunt Sarah have been trying to keep them hidden since 1977, after all.
And as old rifts heal as it becomes apparent Richard might be good at the surgery but not the talking (he never did mention to Jeanette that Ma Mary definitely invited her to her 18th birthday party), they stop to look at the photos.
They did alright, not knowing how bad things were gonna get. But it’s then they realise it’s not them in the photos. They got the wrong tree.
Next week: the finale…
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