Outer Banks season 4 hasn’t ended yet, but fans have already received answers to some of their biggest questions about this season’s biggest onscreen twists and turns.
The hit Netflix series, which premiered in 2020, introduced viewers to a coastal town in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that’s divided into two sides — the wealthy and the working-class— as a group of teenagers navigate a dangerous treasure hunt. By the end of season 3, the group find the riches they’ve searched for, leaving fans with a so-called happy ending.
Several months later, Outer Banks picked back up with John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), JJ (Rudy Pankow) and Cleo (Carlacia Grant) trying to plan for their future using the gold they found. The money, however, quickly ran out, forcing the group to return to their freelance treasure hunting ways .
The first part of season 4 left Pope and Sarah in danger, while their significant others — Cleo and John B — are unaware of how dire their situation is Meanwhile, JJ found out some information about his family, while Kiara was just trying to keep the wheels from falling off as the gang navigates ghost tales, the threatening man looking to find the treasure before them and more.
With a lot of lingering questions left unanswered — for now — the cast and crew are giving fans some insight into what they can expect from season 4 part 2. Keep scrolling for answers to some of those burning questions:
How Will JJ Deal With the Paternity Revelation?
Right as part 1 came to an end, JJ found out that Luke isn’t his biological father — Chandler Groff is actually JJ’s dad. Meanwhile, JJ learns that, his mother died as a potential result of Blackbeard’s curse.
“Well, you’re always trying to torture your characters, right?” co-creator Jonas Pate told Tudum after the first batch of episodes was released. “What would torture JJ the most? The revelation that he’s a Kook.”
According to Jonas, it could take some time before JJ comes to terms with his paternity. “We’ve centered on a character each season, and we knew this season was really going to be JJ-centric,” fellow co-creator Josh Pate told Entertainment Weekly in October “And that was one of the first ideas that we had. What would be the worst thing that could happen to JJ is that he finds out he’s actually a Kook, because he’s the Pogueist Pogue, and that would just put him in the frying pan.”
He continued: “That was an idea we had pretty early on in developing the season, and we loved the idea. And we toyed around bringing it up, that reveal, earlier into the season, but we like where it landed. But it’s all part of the JJ year.”
Meanwhile, third co-creator Shannon Burke teased how JJ may react to the shocking revelation. “It really starts him on a long journey, where he goes through probably the most extreme sequence of events in Outer Banks,” she added to EW . “This is the first step in things that, obviously, we don’t want to talk about since it’s the entire second part. But JJ, he does not take it well, which will be clear right away.”
Pankow weighed in on the bombshell as well, telling TV Insider in October, “In a weird sense, that could give hope, and it could also be very daunting and be like, ‘Am I gonna find myself again?’ I think that’s kind of what part 2 is all about for him. It’s that I need to find out actually: who then am I?”
He added: “I think it’s hard for him to grapple with. ‘Does that change anything?’”
How Will Kiara and JJ Regroup — And Should Fans Be Worried About Their Relationship?
“It’s all tied up together. That’s going to be a part of the story, where he’s dealing with these things and he’s shutting her out,” Burke explained to EW in the same interview. “Basically, the end of episode 5, that’s really the engine of the entire second half of the season, and we’re just getting to it. We held it back so we could have Pogue fun first — we held that reveal until then so we can have some more personal stories and have some Kooks and Pogues in episode 4 on the beach, stuff that you couldn’t do if the real treasure hunt had started.”
Will There Actually Be Ghosts on the Show?
“Superstition, curse, threat — it just felt like a piece with the Blackbeard story. I feel like that’s not a great, satisfying answer for you, but that’s the way we came up with it. It feels right,” Burke told EW. “This feels like Outer Banks, and it became part of the mythology of the legend of the treasure.”
Josh teased the future of the show in a similar way, adding, “We’re always trying to gin up a mythology based around the treasure, so it was our usual process of coming up with crazy stories. I don’t know if it was specifically inspired by any one thing. It just seemed like something useful, creatively.”
Who Almost Returned for ‘Outer Banks’ Season 4 — But Ultimately Didn’t?
Cleo was able to reunite with her old employer Terrance (Terence Rosemore) while helping the Pogues track down the treasure. Unfortunately, Terrance was working for Lightner, who took Cleo hostage in an effort to track down the amulet.
“We were toying with bringing back Stubbs (Jontavious Johnson), too,” says Josh hinted to Tudum in October. Burke clarified that they still might bring the cast member back to cause more chaos in the back half of the season.
How Will the Surprising Death Affect Cleo?
“She keeps a lot of her feelings to herself and she changes as a person,” Grant said about Cleo’s reaction to Terrance sacrificing himself for her. Burke, meanwhile, explained that Terrance’s death is part of Cleo’s “bigger arc” for season 4.
“That’s going to start a series of events that will probably continue even beyond this season,” she told Entertainment Weekly, while Josh added, “We’re always trying to put pressure on them. And it’s easy when you have knucklehead teenager characters because they always do the wrong thing — out of the frying pan into the fire.”
Is Rafe Getting a Redemption Arc?
“I really don’t know,” Starkey told TV Insider before noting how his character is a “bit more jaded and callused” this season. “I think that informs the way he moves through the world now. I don’t know if he’s ever genuine in his approach to anything. Maybe he is? I’m not sure. But I think that’s what hopefully makes it exciting. I think there has to be some part of him that kind of yearns for deeper connection with people.”
Burke weighed in on Rafe’s journey, telling EW, “The best Rafe is an unpredictable Rafe. Every once in a while, we’ll find ourselves drifting into Rafe almost being Pogue-adjacent. But the best Rafe is bad Rafe, so we always have to remind you.”
Will the Pogues Continue to Face More Danger?
According to Stokes, the stakes have never been higher. “I think life will always present opportunities to break things apart,” Stokes told TV Insider in October about the future of the Pogues. “These kids have found some form of stability for the first time in their lives and have created a home, and they’ve created sustainability. And that is quickly taken from them.”
Burke warned that fans should expect “more emotional high stakes.”
“They’re really in a pickle in the second half. And the stakes are higher. The adventure they go on is probably my favorite,” Josh told EW. “They do some globetrotting that takes them further afield than they’ve ever been, where they’re really, really out of their comfort zone, and it just makes for a really dramatic, explosive story in the second half. We’ll have the biggest [action scenes] we’ve ever had. The scope of it is enormous.”
