Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season 4 finale of Outer Banks.
Only the good die young, and JJ Maybank was definitely a good one.
Outer Banks fans are in mourning — and outraged — after part 2 of season 4 premiered on Nov. 7 and ended with a first of its kind: JJ (Rudy Pankow), the OG Pogue, died.
JJ and Kiara (Madison Bailey) had the treasure they’d been hunting, the Blue Crown, and were making a run for it through the sandy streets of Morocco when JJ’s biological father, Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane), came out of nowhere and grabbed Kiara, threatening her with a knife to her neck.
JJ gave Groff the Crown in exchange for Kiara’s life, but Groff brutally stabbed him anyway.
After the fatal stab, Groff — who was revealed to be his biological father in the dramatic mid-season finale — ran off, leaving JJ to take his final breaths in Kiara’s arms.
Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix
As she cried and he struggled to hang on, he told her his wish — which the Blue Crown allegedly could grant — had already come true. “I already got my wish. Everything I wanted.”
“Take care of the others,” JJ told Kiara before taking his last breath. “I love you, Kie.”
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Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix
“Everyone you know will die. Your father, your mother, and even your best friend,” John B (Chase Stokes) said, as a montage of JJ’s moments with John B and the rest of the Pogues over the last four seasons played.
“I like to think it’s not so much how many years you get, but what you do with them. And JJ packed it in. A whole life in those 20 years,” John B said as the emotional montage continued playing.
“Adventure, romance. Some tough things, that was part of it too. Sacrifice. And friendship,” John B added. “If JJ was the king of anything, he was the king of friendship. He held us all together. He was the best friend we ever had.”
Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix
The Pogues appeared to bury JJ in the Moroccan desert, and as the season 4 finale came to an end, Groff escaped with the coveted Blue Crown, and the Pogues sat destitute in their grief by a fire before Rafe (Drew Starkey) riled them up.
“Groff said he was going to Lisbon. I don’t know, if it was my friend, I’d probably go after the guy who just killed him,” Rafe said.
Pope (Jonathan Daviss) told him to shut up. But Kiara, in the rage of her grief, agreed.
Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix
“He’s not wrong,” she said. “You think JJ would sit here if it were one of us? You think he’d do nothing?
“We all know what JJ would do,” John B agreed. “He’d get even.”
The episode ended with a dramatic shot of Kiara, the flickering fire reflected on her face as she declared the Pogues were out for “revenge.”
Fans were not shy about their opposition to the writers’ choice to kill JJ, with one fan writing in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the show is now “ruined” because JJ died, while another wrote that he “deserved so much better than this.”
“John B & Sarah might be the main characters of the show… but JJ was the reason why people watched it & kept OBX going & now that is ruined,” wrote another fan.
Outer Banks season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
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