For once in their lives, things finally turned out all right for the Pogues in Outer Banks.
The ride-or-die treasure-hunting crew — John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), Cleo (Carlacia Grant), and heck, even Rafe (Drew Starkey) — got its happy ending, to an extent.
The Royal Merchant gold is rightfully theirs in the finale of Outer Banks Season 5, and the gang celebrates John B and Sarah’s “official” wedding at the newly rebuilt Chateau surrounded by their loved ones — including their new baby, JJ.
Series creators Shannon Burke, Josh Pate, and Jonas Pate previously told Tudum when Season 3 premiered that they already had the series’ ending marked on their own private treasure map. “We’ve always known from the beginning what the last scene would be, if we would be lucky enough to get it that far,” said Josh Pate. But Burke was quick to add that there was “a lot of dark, blank space” before reaching that closing scene.
Below, the cast and creators fill in the “dark, blank space” leading up to the Pogues’ last moments of the final season.
Rudy Pankow doesn’t make any new appearances in Outer Banks Season 5. But Kiara’s memories of JJ come to the surface as the Blue Crown works its magic in Episode 9. She looks back on when they saved a dolphin together as children and when JJ left a piece of gum for her at the store. And, most importantly, she remembers the good times they shared with the Pogues in recent years. Along with Kiara, we see flashes of Pankow’s JJ we all know and love as he returns for just a few precious moments.
Well, not in the way Kiara thought it would. After she takes the Blue Crown — the coveted treasure that’s rumored to bring back the dead — from Finch (Jason Alan Carvell), the leader of the Corsairs, Kiara runs to the prophesied lake in Azerbaijan. As the meteor shower begins, she recites the Crown’s incantation a few times, imploring JJ to arise and come back to life. When nothing happens, she thinks all is lost. But suddenly she sees a big shooting star coming closer and closer, bathing her in white light.
That’s when her montage of memories with JJ begins. Throughout their moments together, a younger version of JJ (Hudson Brooks) keeps reminding a younger version of Kiara (Savannah Lumar) that “when bad things happen, you just gotta let it go.” And now, after this experience, Kiara finally does let her grief go, to some extent.
“We were trying to thread a needle where he’s not really coming back in corporal form, but we wanted to make it satisfying,” Burke tells Tudum. “It’s a progression in her mourning when she realizes what a beautiful thing she had with him.”
So does the Blue Crown actually have magical properties? Maybe yes, maybe no. “It goes right up to the edge. Jonas would say there’s no magic, and I would say there was.”
No. Finch and his Corsair crew find Kiara after she uses the crown and they make off with the Blue Crown. At the top of Episode 10, the Pogues head back home to Kildare from Azerbaijan; they’ve got their lives, at least.
Due to the raging storm, it’s full evac on Kildare in the Season 5 finale. (“We knew we wanted to bookend hurricanes to start and end the show,” Josh Pate says.) All the Pogues split up: Sarah and John B grab their boats, while Kiara and Pope reunite with their parents. Determined not to let Groff (J. Anthony Crane) get away, Kiara is separated from the group, and Pope is caught adrift at sea with his father, Heyward (E. Roger Mitchell).
As they’re hanging onto the Outer Banks — Paradise on Earth welcome sign for dear life, Heyward reminds his son that he loves him and that he’s been through a lot — a message perhaps all the Pogues needed to hear from their parents over the years. And, with that, the best OBX dad award goes to … Heyward! (Not saying much.)
John B and Sarah ride in on their boat to save Pope and his dad, and they manage to rescue Kiara too, when she’s left out in the water after her confrontation with Groff. The Pogues, Rafe, his fiancée Sofia (Fiona Palomo), and Heyward ride out the storm at the lighthouse, the highest point on the island.
While everyone is trying to get off the island, Kiara overhears that a Kook yacht got stolen, and the thief took sail close to Blackstone Manor, the Genrettes’ old estate. She immediately knows the culprit has to be Groff (who has stolen the Royal Merchant gold), so she breaks away from her family to find and face JJ’s murderer for a final showdown.
Kiara locates Groff’s yacht and hops on before he can leave the dock. She remains hidden, and then pounces on his back and stabs him in the side. They face off, and he manages to pin her down at knifepoint. Groff taunts her, saying she had her chance to kill him, and she can’t do it now. Kiara sureproves him wrong. She hits a button that pulls his rope — and him with it — high up above the water. The mast he’s tied to snaps, and Kiara cuts the cord, once and for all. The mast falls on top of Groff as he sinks underwater, finally vanquished.
The scene was filmed in an industrial port, with bulldozers perched on the edge of the water to create crashing waves. The water was hitting the actors as giant fans were blowing, and Crane was rigged to a mast. “It’s a super noisy set. It’s really cacophonous and hard to act inside of it, but it does help set the scene. You feel like you’re in this storm…it feels like big Hollywood days when you’re shooting scenes like that,” Jonas says.
Yes. After breaking Sofia out of jail and after the deputy Shoupe (Cullen Moss) lets them get away, Rafe is officially on the run. When the storm passes, the Pogues help Rafe acquire a getaway boat, so he and Sofia can head down south. Pope promises that the Pogues will say the boat was lost in the storm once he’s gone. The two shake hands, wishing each other luck, a truce that might have seemed unthinkable since Rafe has stolen multiple treasures that were Pope’s family’s legacy throughout the series (namely the Cross of Santo Domingo).
Rafe and Sarah’s goodbye is the most tearful. He thanks her and tells her he’s sorry for everything. As they hug, they’re both devastated he’ll never be able to come back to the Outer Banks and meet Sarah and John B’s baby. But Rafe swears he’ll make this second chance he has on life count. John B tells Rafe to send them a postcard from Rio, but we’re left wondering where Sofia and Rafe ultimately end up.
“I think she’ll always love him,” Cline says. “He’s her brother… but forgiveness, I think that’s going to be a long time coming.”
After Kiara defeats Groff, she tries to take command of the yacht in the storm, and makes an SOS call. The Pogues jot down her coordinates as they listen in from the lighthouse. As Kiara tosses some of the gold off the boat to prevent it from sinking, she falls off herself, but manages to shoot a few flares into the sky. The Pogues find her in the eye of the storm and take her back to the lighthouse, but the gold sinks along with the ship.
After the storm, the Pogues scour the empty island to find what was theirs. Pope, the brains of the operation, has been doing calculations ever since they rescued Kiara. Finally, John B emerges from the murky waters of the Outer Banks, with a gold bar in his hand. “It’s all down there!” he tells his friends. At last the Pogues get their original Royal Merchant treasure. Remember: That’s $400 million in gold. Woogity woogity!
Yes! After Cleo gets deported to Nassau in Episode 9, she jumps right back into working on the boats with her old pal Stubbs (Jontavious Johnson). Pope calls her and says he’ll fix this, but she warns him that the judge told her she or anyone who helps her could get arrested if she comes back to the US. During the hurricane, Cleo asks if Pope would come to the Bahamas, but their phone call is disconnected.
After the Pogues find the gold, Pope heads to the Bahamas and proposes to Cleo, for the second time. (Looking back on the failed first proposal, Daviss says, “Pope needs to learn romance.”) This time, she wholeheartedly accepts. They return to the US, and as John B says in his narration, once you have access to $400 million in gold, it’s pretty easy to sort out any immigration issues. We see Cleo with her naturalization certificate, celebrating with the Heywards.
“I feel like when we first meet Cleo, she’s so in survival mode, she didn’treally understand or feel like she needed that connection,” Grant explains. “By the end of it, I think she realized that it’s OK to love.”
The Pogues help rebuild the island they call home by buying back the land. John B remakes his childhood home, the Chateau, with no changes (except for putting in central AC). Kiara buys back the old Maybank property where JJ grew up, and starts to rebuild by tending to a blooming garden. She gives her parents a yacht for all the trouble she’s caused them. Pope repays his parents, by rebuilding Heyward’s Seafood. He also gets a little place for him and Cleo to shack up — his family’s ancestral home, Tannyhill. Sarah wants him to have it, returning “Tannyhill back to a Tanny.”
The Pogues have also placed a commemorative bench on the beach that reads, In Memory of JJ Maybank. Kiara etches the classic P4L into it, a phrase which is as meaningful to the character as it is for the actor. “You could tell me 10 years down the line, ‘P4L,’ and I’ll be like, ‘P4L.’ Literally for life. This bond is for life,” Bailey says.
At long last, the Pogues have gotten their happy ending, one that has evaded them for multiple seasons. “You realize that they couldn’t really win until the end and then, once that happens, it’ll be so satisfying because we’ve lived through so many hardships with them,” Burke says.
She’s on her way. With Groff gone, Kiara is finally able to move forward with her dream, and we see her become a marine biology intern for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.
“Kiara’s healed by the end,” Bailey says. “She’s got a new sense of peace within her family, within her friendships, within her own personal life, and she’s ending ultimately where I always saw Kiara ending, which is on the island, in a position where she’s taking care of the island.”
Yes. Holding John B’s hand, Sarah gives birth to a baby girl, who they name JJ. That’s right, a tiny new outlaw has entered the world, by way of two great Pogues.
“Maddie and I really, really dove into making sure that John B and Sarah felt fleshed out and honest,” Stokes says. “Both of us, as we finished the show, feel proud to know that we left a really cool impact and a mark with these characters, that people will take forward forever.”
They do. After baby JJ is born, Sarah and John B have a wedding party at the new and improved Chateau. Nearly all the familiar faces we know and love on Kildare Island attend — the Pogues’ teacher, Mr. Sunn (Chris Gerard), Wheezie (Julia Antonelli), Rose (Caroline Arapoglou), Pope’s parents, Shoupe, Kiara’s parents, Rafe’s buddy Barry (Nicholas Cirillo), and even Sarah’s Kook ex Topper (Austin North), who’s bartending now.
“For as much chaos as the Pogues have created on the island, they’ve also been the heartbeat of this island,” Stokes explains. “So yeah, even though Topper was a little bit of a sleuth, and Barry got us into more trouble than need be, you see the love and the respect.”
Glittering with string lights, the backyard of the Chateau is the setting for the nuptials. Pope’s dad, Heyward, serves as the couple’s officiant. He grows emotional as Sarah and John B help him finish their “by the stars, the sky, and the sea” wedding vows they (unofficially) made all the way back in Season 2.
The look and feel of the wedding was “low-fi but crazy beautiful,” Jonas says. “We have this amazing oak tree that’s on the property where John B grew up. Our set dresser draped this incredible garland through the limbs of the tree. I had so many young people coming up to me saying, ‘This is how I want my wedding to be. I want my wedding to be just like this.’”
Adds Cline, “The Chateau holds so many amazing Season 1 memories, so going back there felt really emotionally loaded for everyone … I was just smiling ear to ear because I was so happy and proud.”
After they get hitched, John B rings the bell in their backyard, just like his dad Big John (Charles Halford) did for him as a kid (and in Season 3). “This is how we call you back from the marsh, little JJ,” he tells his newborn.
No. But if you watch the credits, you’ll see Rafe call in on FaceTime to celebrate and join in the festivities.
Yeah, man. It’s P4L. The Pogues’ mission in life is “to have a good time, all the time.” They went around the world looking for treasure, but, in the end, they found everything they wanted in the Outer Banks, Paradise on Earth.
What can we take away from their epic five-season adventure … aside from a strong desire to pack our bags and head to the Chateau? “This show doesn’t say that bad things aren’tgoing to happen to you — JJ was lost and did not come back — so that’s a really tough lesson, especially for young people,” Jonas says. “But they stuck together and did their best. It wasn’t all perfect, but they didn’t give up.”
Relive all the good times of Outer Banks anytime, only on Netflix.
