Images: Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix
“We were trying to make a truly malevolent character.”
Hey, Pogues, if you don’t want any spoilers about anything that happens in Episode 10, “The Blue Crown,” please stop reading now.
If you have watched the Outer Banks Season 4 finale, we know you’re likely grieving — and we’re with you.
If you want to hear from Rudy Pankow; Outer Banks creators Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke; and the rest of the cast about JJ’s arc in the Season 4 finale, head here to read all about it. Read on to get into everything else that happens and what comes next in the fifth and final season, which the creators are already writing.
A quick teaser: The lore of the Blue Crown “should carry us through all the way to the end,” says Burke. Keep in mind though, the creators also already have an image of the final shot of the series, as they told Tudum last season. “We’ve always known from the beginning what the last scene would be,” said Josh Pate.
Ready to head back to Agapenta? Click on the Part 2 tab below now. And if you want to remember what happens in the first half of Season 4, click the Part 1 tab for a refresher.
P4L is the mentality of the Pogues in Outer Banks.
They live and die on their side of Kildare Island, taking care of each other, catching waves, and maybe going on a treasure hunt or two — even though Chase Stokes (who plays ringleader John B) would tell you that the Pogues are not avid treasure hunters. “It’s a combination of good luck, right place, right time, and a couple of good things happening,” he tells Tudum.
But what happens when one of your own finds out that all this time … they were actually born a Kook? Yeah, you read that right. At the end of the Outer Banks Season 4, Part 1 finale, JJ (Rudy Pankow), who is perhaps the Pogue-iest of the Pogues, learns that his drunken jailbird of a father, Luke (Gary Weeks), isn’t really his dad. And the woman he thought was his mom? Just one of Luke’s girlfriends. “It was a shock,” says Pankow. “Not a single thought” had ever crossed his mind that JJ might be a Kook. Until Season 4.
“That was the most extreme thing we could think of: That JJ’s actually a Kook,” Outer Banks co-creator Shannon Burke tells Tudum.
So who is JJ’s real daddy? And what’s the status on the Blackbeard treasure hunt that Wes Genrette (David Jensen) tapped the Pogues for way back in the Season 3 finale? Let’s hit rewind on “The Albatross” with the cast and creators to figure out how the hell we ended Part 1 with a full-blown parentage confession.
So exactly how does JJ figure out his dad’s not his dad?
Well, Wes Genrette’s the one who eventually put it together. And before he died (under mysterious circumstances) at the end of Episode 2, he wrote a letter to be delivered to “Master JJ Maybank” in case something happened. Well, good thing he did. The letter encouraged JJ to talk to his father and ask him about “Albatross.”
Well, what the heck is “Albatross”? And wasn’t Luke supposed to be far, far away from the OBX?
Turns out, Luke is hanging out not too far down the shoreline. He’s crashing at his pal Barracuda Mike’s (Justin Matthew Smith), making runs in and out. “Mostly out,” he tells JJ, explaining that he didn’t say he was back because he’s a wanted man and JJ could get in trouble.
At first, Luke plays dumb when JJ brings up “Albatross.” But after JJ helps Luke get away from the cops (yet again) on his boat, Luke loosens his lips and spills the beans that Albatross was the name of the boat Larissa Genrette died on years ago. And reveals that she was JJ’s real mom. That means JJ is the grandson of Wes Genrette and Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane) is his real dad. Talk about daddy issues.
Stokes says he always had “this weird thought in [his] brain” that JJ might be a Kook from the beginning. Why? Because “sometimes when people fight so hard for an image, there’s something behind it,” he tells Tudum. But Pankow is quick to add that JJ himself had no idea.
Stokes agrees. “But I always thought, ‘What is the backstory of Luke? Did he come from the other side? Is it like a Kiara (Madison Bailey) situation where her parents are on the other side of the tracks, but she wants so badly to be a part of this world?’ There’s something about that level of intensity of committing to the Pogue mentality.”
Pankow always chalked it up to “JJ coping with his shit hand,” he says.
Does JJ actually believe Luke is telling the truth? Luke has lied to him before.
“Well, you’re always trying to torture your characters, right?” co-creator Jonas Pate tells Tudum. “What would torture JJ the most? The revelation that he’s a Kook.”
All three creators think JJ isn’t handling the news well, but in different ways. Jonas Pate thinks he doesn’t believe it really, at first. “His dad has always been a bit of a scoundrel, and he just doesn’t accept it. He thinks there’s got to be an angle here. This can’t be real.” Josh Pate adds, “He’s in total denial.”
And Burke thinks “he probably knows it’s true. I just think that he believes it more than he’s totally in denial, overtly and consciously.”
Speaking of Kooks, who is this new Kook Ruthie (Mia Challis)? And did she actually run over those baby turtles?
“It’s the craziest thing anybody could ever do,” says the Pogues’ resident humanitarian, Bailey. “And then they pretended they couldn’t see!”
All Kiara wanted to do in the midst of their chill day at the beach was rally the Pogues to help a turtle hatchling reach the ocean. “It’s not even a big, grown turtle! They just got here. They just got here. Give them a chance!” says Bailey. Instead, Topper’s (Austin North) new, sort-of girlfriend Ruthie (Mia Challis) let her road rage override her judgment and charged for the little sea creatures, later calling their murders “the circle of life.” (She clearly didn’t understand The Lion King.)
But it wasn’t all awash at the Pogues’ swell day. Sarah (Madelyn Cline) finally caught a wave. Is she no longer a “noob” though? “She’s still a noob,” Cline tells Tudum. “Noob stands for newbie. She still doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s caught one wave, let’s everyone relax.”
OK, but what about Cleo? She’s been kidnapped!
Yes, Cleo (Carlacia Grant) is kidnapped by the mercenaries who are also after Blackbeard’s treasure — first an amulet, but, now more importantly, the Blue Crown. And the mercenaries have Cleo’s old father figure Terrance (Terence Rosemore) with them as a crew member-for-hire. “We were toying with bringing back Stubbs (Jontavious Johnson), too,” says Josh Pate. Burke says that they still might.
Terrance had no idea Cleo was mixed up in this treasure hunt — and thought she was likely dead. Now that he knows, he wants to protect her as best he can. “When they told me this was happening, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, great. I love Terence. I haven’t seen him since we were in Barbados,’ ” Grant tells Tudum. She was glad Cleo could reunite with a member of her original found family. “She still had feelings about it and wondered about him and cared about him and wanted to know that he was OK.”
But Lightner (Rigo Sanchez), perhaps the most ruthless of the mercenaries, doesn’t care for niceties. When he attacks Cleo in pursuit of the amulet, Terrance jumps in and dies at Lightner’s hand. Devastated and numb, Cleo and the Pogues lay Terrance to rest out at sea, and she vows, “I got you, boss.” She also bemoans how “everyone’s always sorry. Nothing ever happens.”
Grant teases that Cleo carries her pain throughout the rest of the season. “She keeps a lot of her feelings to herself, and she changes as a person.” Burke adds that Terrance’s death is part of Cleo’s “bigger arc.”
That’s another father figure gone, if you’re counting. So do the Pogues stop chasing Blackbeard’s treasure for a sec?
This is Outer Banks, what do you think? For one, Cleo wants to go after the guy that killed Terrance who’s also on the hunt for the treasure. And now Pope’s (Jonathan Daviss) figured out that the directions on Blackbeard’s amulet are pointing to a crypt underneath a cemetery in the heart of Charleston. So, to Charleston we go!
Right, so does John B spot a relative of his in the cemetery?
Oh, yeah. If you take a close look at the grave he stops at once they reach the cemetery, you’ll see the name “Routledge Taylor” written on the headstone. Then John B starts having flashbacks of his late dad Big John (Charles Halford).
So this Routledge is John B’s ancestor? Honestly, the creators just wanted to get him in the mindset of remembering his father, because, unlike something his dad would do, John B doesn’t shoot Lightner in cold blood.
But that doesn’t mean Taylor wasn’t his relative. Let’s put a pin in that one for now.
Hold up, John B was going to shoot someone?
Yup. After Lightner attacks Cleo (again), John B goes on the attack. But unlike his dad, who shot someone on a boat right in front of John B last season, John B thinks better of it and reins it in. Not turning into his treasure-obsessed dad is a fear weighing on the fatherless Pogue throughout Season 4.
“There’s a lot of hesitation in John B when it comes to pursuing anything treasure-oriented, and it’s because he’s really battling the fact that he didn’t get the time he wanted with his dad,” says Stokes. “And his memory of his dad is now enshrined in this big giant win of finding El Dorado. But he’s had the realization that his dad was kind of a shitty person. [And] he doesn’t want to go down that path.”
That’s tough. So, do the Pogues find Blackbeard’s treasure in the catacombs or what?
Pope and Sarah end up being the volunteers who go down into the dregs below the church. Lightner and his boss Dalia (Pollyanna McIntosh) are right on their heels, and prove successful in grabbing a secret scroll stowed away in the coffin of Blackbeard’s navigator.
But Pope and Sarah find something else a little more lively — rats! And we’re talking real rats, not just CGI ones. “It’s called ratacombs for a reason. Those rats are real,” says Daviss.
What? No. Those were real rats?!
Yeah. Production added some extras in post, but Daviss and Cline were swimming in the water with some small co-stars on those night shoots. “One crawled onto my shoulder and was nibbling at my ear at one point,” says Daviss. Cline would personally “like a barrier between me and rats,” she says. “I had a friend growing up who had rats and one of them bit me. So I’ve just been good since then.”
Cline remembers those days of filming before production went on Christmas break as “a nasty, nasty three days. The rats were as stressed as I was, I could tell,” says Cline. “So I didn’t blame them, I just didn’t want to be the one in the way.” Like his character, Daviss was as calming a presence for Cline as Pope was for Sarah in their scenes. “He has this way about him, he’s so good at leveling the situation and moods,” she says.
Daviss became a real rat wrangler. “The rats are trying to escape, and I’m like, ‘Come on, come here, buddy!’ giving them to the trainer, trying to be cool about it,” he says. Daviss also saw some of them in their cage before filming and got to hold them for a bit, which he thinks helped. “Shout-out to those rats!” he says.
OK, but do Pope and Sarah get out of the crypt?
Um, nope. They’re locked in with the water rising higher and higher. But while their characters are still stuck when the credits roll on Episode 5, Daviss and Cline at least got to go home and wash their matted hair. “The scenes ended up looking awesome,” says Cline. “And we were really, really proud of them at the end of the day — but at the end of the day, not in the middle of the day!”
Part 2
Did we really just watch Groff murder JJ?
We can’t believe it either. “Dude, Groff is a sociopath,” says co-creator Josh Pate. “I mean, we patterned him after a sociopath that we read about in a nonfiction book. Even when he’s lying, he lies to himself and thinks he’s telling the truth. We would go look up psychological profiles, [thinking,] ‘How can we make the most sociopathic character?’ Like sociopaths, he doesn’t really feel that kind of empathy. Everything’s just kind of a mask.”
Aside from stabbing his own son out of spite and greed, let’s think back on the entire season here. As far as we know, Groff’s racked up at least five (!) murders that we’ve seen on-screen or in flashback: Omar the mercenary, Wes Genrette, Larissa, Hollis, and, now, JJ. And we’re not even counting the attempted ones. While Groff is undeniably a “terrible person,” says Pankow, the actor who plays him, J. Anthony “Tony” Crane, “is just this lovely person, totally spirited,” says Jonas Pate. “We love having him around.”
All season long, you’ll notice that Groff is always messing around with a knife, which you could take as foreshadowing for his murder weapon. “And that knife plays all the way through, it stays intact,” says Jonas Pate. “It starts inside the hotel room. It stays at the well. You see it in the fight he has with Lightner. It keeps appearing, so you’re definitely aware of it.”
Did Groff ever care about JJ?
Doubtful. You’d think since he and JJ share so many similarities, reconnecting could have been a fresh start for them. They both speak fast when they lie, tap on the window of the Twinkie in a similar rhythm, and move their hair out of their faces in the same way. “The hair thing we made sure [of],” says Pankow. “But then we actually kept doing random things together that were like, ‘Oh, well, that plays.’ And, yes, we had in the back of our heads that the more things we do similarly, the better. But then a lot of random shit would happen, and we were like, ‘That works great!’ ”
While Pankow sees JJ wanting to bond with his real dad as the “only thing he has hope for,” the creators mainly see Groff using JJ as a means to an end. “He’s totally capable of killing him completely gratuitously for no reason after he gets everything he needs,” says Burke.
So Groff doesn’t feel any remorse for killing his son?
Burke likes to think that Groff cares a little, but “the main part of his personality overwhelms that.” If you take a look back at Groff’s final scene, he tosses his knife onto the ground and stares agape at his blood-stained hand with the Blue Crown in the other. So, maybe he does care, for a second, but then he moves on. “He can compartmentalize and rationalize his actions to himself in a way that always makes himself justified in doing it,” says Josh Pate. “We were trying to make a truly malevolent character.”
Adds Burke: “But he’s trying to justify it because there’s a tiny part of him that does feel remorse. He knows he’s terrible, and he knows he’s a bad person, but what makes it good is asking that remorse question and us arguing about it.”
Can we get one thing straight: What was Groff’s master plan? Did he marry Larissa just for the lens?
So, if you remember, Groff’s one of the Lupine Corsair mercenaries. But he wasn’t always. He grew up on the Cut, and his dad owned an inn. He was a downright Pogue and a social climber back in the day. Says Burke: “He has that line in the Twinkie where he says, ‘But then I married a Genrette and moved into Blackstone.’ You can feel him sort of mocking it, where he’s moved up in the world. But he kills Larissa, and then he’s just on the run.” The creators even had a more explicit backstory for Larissa’s murder, but “it wasn’t necessary at that point,” says Burke.
But much later on, after Groff’s lived a thousand lives, he realizes, “ ‘Oh, there’s something back there that I can get. I can use that,’ ” says Burke. So that’s when he ends up coming back to retrieve the lens. Not to reconnect with his son that he left. “It was more reacting to circumstances. It wasn’t a master plan when they got married.”
How the heck did Sarah and JJ survive that storm in Episode 9?
If you remember, JJ jumped into the water to save Sarah (Madelyn Cline). The rest of the Pogues (and Rafe) wash up on the shores of Morocco and are hoping and praying that they’ll see their friends again. And, somehow, they do. Chase Stokes (who plays John B) jokes that Sarah and JJ can breathe underwater. Pankow’s guess? He and Sarah took the East Australian Current from Finding Nemo. “We just went straight. Easy-peasy.”
As for Cline? She jokes that she doesn’t think they made it. “I think the rest of the episodes where they are surviving are some delusional dream sequence by one of the Pogues who’s dehydrated in the desert,” she says. “But if you’re really going to ask me, they have a life raft, so obviously they’re fine.”
Kidding aside, the creators know that it seems like the Pogues have nine lives at this point. “I think we’ve proven over time that they can handle some pretty extreme physical issues,” says Jonas Pate. While JJ and Sarah clung to an orange ring, Jonas Pate says they also tried to make it clear their boat wasn’t too far offshore during the storm. “Maybe they got pushed by the currents too and that helped them out a little bit.”
Is Sarah pregnant? What does it mean for the Pogues?
Yup, in Episode 7, Sarah takes two pregnancy tests at the local pharmacy to confirm she really is pregnant. And, after everything, we’ve gotta know: Are she and John B naming the baby after JJ? And will Kiara be the godmother? “I’ll be Auntie Kie-Kie!” says Bailey. JJ even suggests how gender-neutral the name is at the top of Episode 10, so it’s very versatile. “How could it be otherwise?” says Josh Pate. “Come on.”
While Cline wasn’t expecting the pregnancy storyline to come this early, she had a feeling that Sarah and John B would wind up having a baby. “I always knew that that was what our writers wanted for at least the end of the show,” she said. Since the core Pogue couples are currently all together without any love triangle elements, a pregnancy “just seemed like a natural evolution of a challenge that they would have to grapple with,” says Jonas Pate. Burke sees the pregnancy reveal as putting a natural timeline on their relationship. “We wanted to have them experience everything,” he says.
Both Stokes and Pankow are really proud of the scene where John B asks JJ to be the godfather in Episode 9. “I would say the majority of that scene was Rudy and me just walking through it, defining moments,” says Stokes. Adds Pankow, “And they kept it, which was amazing.” Cline was also glad that Kiara is the person Sarah confides in about her pregnancy in Episode 7. “To have that one moment with a friend is super, super vulnerable, and [her knowing] that that friend is going to love her no matter what is very, very lovely and important,” she says. “Even though it’s definitely not the direction I thought Sarah was going to go during the season, I was happy that that was the first moment she had after she found out.”
Adds Jonas Pate, “Sarah’s got this big hole in her life with her mother. So that’s something we’re thinking about going forward. We’re trying to pull in all those parental relationships and have it reflect on them potentially being parents, too.”
Is Rafe a Pogue now?
Look, Sarah’s brother Rafe (Drew Starkey) is an admitted killer. But he low-key pulls through for the Pogues the last few episodes. He snags a boat that’s sturdy enough for them to travel across the Atlantic, convinces Sheriff Shoupe (Cullen Moss) to let them go to Morocco to find Groff, and pushes Groff into a well when he tries to knife him in the Moroccan desert. “It’s funny because he does all these things out of selfishness in a way,” says Starkey. “This is his own pride taking over. He’s going to take back what’s his again.” Starkey also sees Rafe’s level-up as a culmination of revenge that’s built up over the past 18 months that he can take out on Groff.
But whatever way you slice it, Rafe and the Pogues really have gone through so many near-death experiences, including Sarah almost dying (again) in Episode 9. “In some way, yeah, there’s a bonding that happens,” says Starkey. “They’ve been in the trenches together. Whether he wants to be or not, it’s like we’re still on the same team in some way. It’s life or death.”
Stokes commends Starkey’s performance in Episodes 9 and 10 where you see Sarah’s supposed death weigh on Rafe within a group of people he doesn’t trust. “Rafe’s forced under the confines of it all to mourn the loss of another family member in a way that is confusing and odd because you’re seeing everybody else mourn around you as well,” says Stokes. “There’s a shared love for somebody in that space.”
Do Rafe and Sarah start to repair their relationship in the finale?
In the midst of their chase for the Blue Crown, Sarah and Rafe have a breakthrough moment in Agapenta. He finally listens to her when she explains that their father really died trying to save her, and they both realize they’re the only Camerons they have left. “She knows that Ward would want them to find some sort of truce,” says Cline. “That whole interaction means a lot to her. And that’s something that I have been hoping for, for a very long time. So I hope we get to explore that [in Season 5], for the Camerons to not all be just completely separate.”
Stokes thinks that John B is watching them thinking, “I want to do this,” with Rafe, too. “They have this mutual grief — both of their dads died with the idea of uplifting their kids,” says Stokes. “There’s a really cool, hopeful opportunity to explore that in the next season.”
The creators knew they wanted to redeem Rafe a little bit this season, especially in Sarah’s eyes. “We just thought, wouldn’t that be interesting, going into Season 5, if now they’re sort of aligned for the first time in an unlikely way, and how could we earn that? It actually is one of the things I’m most proud of, that somehow you buy that at the end, that they’re together on that,” says Jonas Pate.
In Season 5 the creators also wanted to take a character that they loved and have him more centered in the story. “We love Drew. I mean, who doesn’t love Drew on-screen?” says Josh Pate. “More Drew on-screen seems like a winning thing to do. He’s probably my favorite character to write, honestly. We’re super excited for where he can go from here.”
What about Pope shooting Lightner to save Cleo and avenge Terrance?
Pope (Jonathan Daviss) firing on Lightner (Rigo Sanchez) the mercenary is a big, full circle moment for him and Cleo (Carlacia Grant), since, in Season 3, Cleo’s the one who stops Pope from shooting at Rafe. “It was almost the same setup as when Pope almost shoots Rafe,” says Daviss. Because Cleo got shot in the arm, she isn’t able to shoot Lightner to avenge Terrance’s murder herself. Daviss knows it’s a tough decision for Pope, but he has to protect the people he loves. “It’s a crazy thing coming full circle, where it’s like, out of all the characters on this show who I thought would do that, Pope was probably the last one. The shock factor is insane.”
The weight of his choice will likely weigh heavily on him in Season 5. “Now he has to deal with the implications of that mentally for the rest of his life, and how that’s going to affect him in the future,” says Daviss. “It’s something I’ve been talking to the writers about, where that can go.” Burke sees Pope as the character that always had aspirations of being a coroner or a doctor, “and now he’s killed somebody. So that’s really going to knock him for a loop — and this idea that he killed someone on the same day JJ died at the same time and the same place.”
Pope avenging Terrance is a major moment in their relationship for Cleo. “She appreciates it, because this whole season you see her really feeling like the only person she had in this lifetime is gone,” says Grant. “So to see Pope step up in this way is incredibly beautiful to her.” She didn’t want Pope to have to shoot him, and only didn’t do it herself because of her injury. But now she trusts in him and their love even more. “It’s like Bonnie and Clyde, ride or die between them. So I think it’s absolutely a full circle moment.”
Burke shares that Terrance’s reappearance is part of a bigger story arc for Cleo that will continue in Season 5. “We feel like [for] both Pope and Cleo, we have really good hands to play,” he says.
So are the Pogues going to follow Groff to Portugal to get revenge in Season 5?
When the Pogues lay Terrance to rest at the end of Episode 5, Cleo says: “Everyone’s always sorry, nothing ever happens.” That won’t be the case in Season 5.
“They feel a duty to avenge JJ,” says Josh Pate. “If they don’t go after Groff, they’ll feel like they’ve let the spirit of JJ or their friendship down.” The season ends with Kiara vowing revenge. “This is going to rock my character’s world,” said Bailey. So, naturally, Josh Pate deems that “Kiara is the lead dog” on the hunt for Groff. “But I think they all feel it, like they have to do something. It’s almost to just ameliorate the grief they’re feeling.”
The funny thing is, the idea to spring into action actually comes from Rafe, who says, “I don’t know. If it was my friend, I’d probably go after the guy that just killed him.” He’s also the one who shares the intel that Groff has a buyer for the Blue Crown in Lisbon. In the script for the last two scenes, the creators actually had at least three different endings. “One of the reasons we liked Rafe [for the vengeance line] at the end is he’s the only one who could be actionable,” says Burke. “The only person who could say that is Rafe, because everybody else is so overwhelmed.”
One thing the creators will say about next season is that “from here it’s really personal,” says Jonas Pate. “They may end up getting treasure as part of their revenge, but it’s all about avenging JJ, and trying to get some solace or peace, and to move on from the grief they all feel.”
It doesn’t sit right with the Pogues that Groff is benefiting from JJ’s death. And, like JJ tells his father when he willingly hands the Blue Crown over to save Kiara, what they really want is a home where they can all be together. “Except, obviously, [that home] is not going to be exactly the same because JJ is gone,” says Jonas Pate. “A win for them, [at this point], will be to come back to almost where they were at the beginning.”
Adds Josh Pate, “ ‘We don’t want to be poor’ is a great motivator to go after treasure, but JJ’s death is [a] much more powerful motivation from here.”
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