Season One
Episode Six- The last episode of Season 1 closes with a playful scene of all five friends dancing to "Like A Prayer" at the school talent show - but it's intercut with the Quinns watching a news report of a fatal bombing in which twelve people were killed. Unlike other references to The Troubles, it's not played for comedy and the adults look on ashen-faced. Grandpa Joe even comforts Gerry. It just drives home that, while they were able to make light of the events, these people are growing up in the middle of a horrible time. The scene has "Dreams" by The Cranberries played over it - in honor of Dolores O'Riordan's passing a month before.
- The book "Erin's Diary" hammers this in. Erin writes in about having a fun time dancing with her friends at the talent show, only to discover about the bombing when arriving home.
Season Two
The Concert- When Ma Mary forbids the friends from going to a Take That concert in Belfast because of an escaped polar bear on the loose, she tries to deflect their outrage by saying 'there'll be other concerts'. Erin furiously retorts, 'No there won't! The fact this one's happening is a miracle! Nobody good ever comes here 'cause we keep killing each other!!!' It's another sobering reminder of how the friends are essentially growing up in a war zone.
- Erin being stood up by her date. She waits for about 90 minutes before giving up.
- James announcing that he's going back to England with his mother in the Season 2 finale. Orla just says "I don't understand", and Michelle is the one who tries to get him to stay. Thankfully it works.
- Said convincing by Michelle includes James saying he never felt at home in Derry and thinking his pleasant memories must be due to Stockholm Syndrome, and Michelle pointing out that James' mum will drop him like a hot potato again and in fact may have only come back for him to get him as "free labour" in the first place.
- When it appears Michelle's convincing hasn't worked and James insists he has to return home, Michelle, half-angrily, half-dejectedly finishes with:Michelle: Well, fuck off, then.
- While James being abandoned by his mother is generally played for laughs/black comedy, it's treated much more seriously in this episode, and acts as a reminder of how cruel her treatment of him was/is: she left her son in Derry without so much as saying goodbye to him, only to reappear months later because (as Michelle points out) he's become useful for her again. Despite this, James clearly loves his mother and is desperate to have a relationship with her, while she clearly does not feel the same way about him.
Season Three
Episode Six- Clare's father suffers an aneurysm and dies in a shocking twist on Halloween night, devastating our beloved nervous wreck moments after her first kiss with another girl.
- Made worse when one works out the parents ages (based on their graduation being in 1977 and it having been twenty years since then). Sean was only about thirty-eight years old.
Episode Seven/Series Finale
- Orla joyfully dances through the streets of Derry to Dario G.'s "Sunchyme"—only to be stopped short by an armed guard. The music briefly resumes after he lets her pass, but the cheerful mood is lost.
- Erin is averse to the Good Friday Agreement, because it means that all paramilitary prisoners on both sides will be released. One of those prisoners is Michelle's brother, Niall, who was involved in an IRA attack that caused a man's death, and the two girls get into a heated argument over it. Later at Jenny Joyce's party, Michelle sadly reveals that her mother doesn't even talk about Niall any more, and she hasn't been allowed to see him since his arrest, explaining why this is the first time he's ever been mentioned in the show. Even though the Agreement means he'll be released, it's unclear how he'll ever be able to reconnect with his family.Michelle: There is no right answer, is there?
- Over a montage of news reports about different atrocities during The Troubles, the police chief who arrested the girls earlier in the series is shown barely holding back tears as he votes on the Good Friday Agreement. Made especially poignant by the fact that the Good Friday Agreement replaced the heavily Protestant and notoriously sectarian RUC with the more diverse PSNI, so the chief ultimately had to decide whether to vote to disband his own police force. In taking off his hat as he votes, the officer may have been making his decision as a citizen of Northern Ireland rather than a member of the RUC, or silently contemplating the institutionalised discrimination in his police force and their failure to keep the peace and serve the people as they were supposed to.
- In another sartorial display, Sister Michael is shown wearing a Celtic penannular brooch alongside her nun's coif, a sign that she is balancing her identities as a Catholic and an Irishwoman. The person whose view of the Troubles in Season 1 was a flip "We're [i.e. Catholics] the goodies" is now preparing to endorse an accord that means something less than 100% victory for her "side", but which does mean an end to the violence and a way forward for Northern Ireland as a whole.
- Chelsea Clinton reads the girls' letter in the Distant Finale with such warmth and compassion towards those long-ago girls: adolescents growing up in a war zone who were concerned with parents and school and boys and what the other kids thought of their hairstyles, just like teenagers everywhere, and who'd reached out to a fellow adolescent out of empathy (and breathtaking naïveté). One imagines that the girls in the present would have cringed in mortal embarrassment if they’d known the fate of their letter, but the sympathy and good humor in Clinton’s voiceover makes it clear she’s accepting that long-ago kindness in the spirit it was given, and that the girls have no need to be embarrassed by the children they were. We don't get to see who the girls became, but we saw them safely to the threshold of adulthood, saw them and their community choose to try to build a better world... and then we got this one last snapshot of their common girlhood. They were awesome.
