Is God Backwards?

Everyone can relate to the adversities and curveballs that life throws at them. To the humor and the pain of the mundane. In stressful and hard times, a little laughter goes a long way. However, if you want a lot of laughter in your life, do not hesitate to watch Lisa McGee’s show Derry Girls. The series follows Erin and her four friends Michelle, Clare, Orla, and James as they embark on teenage adventures, shenanigans, and life struggles all during the tumultuous political, religious, and ethnic conflict between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant British people in Londonderry. Even through the violence and political uncertainties surrounding the Derry girls (yes, James is considered a Derry girl because EVERYONE is a Derry girl at heart), they always manage to find laughter and hope in any situation. That hope takes many forms, encompassing many heartfelt elements in the story like family, political rallies, and a dog. You heard correctly, a dog is a perfect symbol to capture the chaos yet unity of their friendship. So, to really understand Derry Girls, let’s get a glimpse into the Derry girls on one of their wild escapades, featuring Toto the dog.

In “Episode 3” of the comedic coming-of-age, the Derry girls are stressed about a history exam that none of them studied for. We have all been there before, cramming for tests the day or morning of, praying to anyone and anything to pass. As our Derry girls await their fate, they notice a dog that resembles Erin’s pet, Toto, who passed away. Intrigued by the Toto look-alike, the group calls out to the dog and starts chasing after it. As they run after the dog, they end up in a chapel. Upon entering the chapel, Erin continues with the quest to get her hands on the dog and follows it upstairs. Our other four Derry Girls stay on the first floor and gather around a statue of the Virgin Mary, praying to her to somehow pass the exam. With their hands folded, kneeling on the ground, begging and pleading with Mary to show them mercy, they see the statue of the Mother of Christ weeping before their eyes.  With this godly display, they take it as a sign that they should not take the exam. Wait a minute, where is Erin and our Toto doppelganger? During the others’ holy encounter, Erin is upstairs with the dog. As she is about to catch it, it does what most dogs yearn to do: pee inside. The dog starts peeing and it seeps through the floor, dripping down onto the ceiling of the floor below. And what is on the floor below the pissing dog? Our other Derry girls and the Mary statue! So, it was not tears coming from the statue but was in fact canine urine. At this point, Erin loses the dog and comes downstairs to see her friends praise this statue and the holy sight they think they just witnessed. 

The Derry girls eventually make it back to school and recount their unbelievable experience. As they attend a Catholic school,  (shoutout to my Catholics or people that have been traumatized by Catholic school) the faculty take their story very seriously and are curious to hear more about it. They call in Father Peter, a local priest who, if you can imagine Andrew Scott’s character from Fleabag, gives off the same vibe, to check out their story. While going through their testimony, the Derry girls talk about how they were only in the chapel because they were chasing a dog that looked exactly like Erin’s dead one. The very convinced priest believes that the animal has been resurrected to lead the group to the chapel and therefore to the miracle of the weeping statue of Mary. Now, at this point, Erin had already told the rest of her friends that it was dog piss on the statue. So, in order to keep up the hoax, they have to make it seem like the dog really was resurrected by uncovering the dead dog’s body and removing it from the grave in the backyard. As they go to dig up Toto’s grave, Father Peter rushes in and demands that the shoebox containing Toto’s body be opened. Apprehensive, Erin slowly opens the box, and what was revealed will shock you to your very core. There was no dead body in the box. Was the Toto look-a-like the real Toto? Was the dog resurrected to lead these kids to church? And most importantly, do they still have to take their exam? If you want to find out, watch this episode on Netflix because nobody likes a spoiler. Just know that the story gets crazier and funnier from here.

Don’t be afraid to be a Derry girl (boys, you too) and embrace the wild adventures, because you will never know if they will lead you to something amazing, like a resurrected dog.