PLOT: Season 5 finds the Pogues at their absolute breaking point following the tragic loss of JJ in Morocco. Stranded far from home and mourning the heart of their crew, they’ve lost the Blue Crown and continue to face a gauntlet of familiar threats. Their mission is now a desperate race to reclaim their future and finally win the freedom they’ve been chasing since the beginning. It’s the Pogues against the world as they seek to avenge their best friend and bring it on home…one final time.
REVIEW: Premiering in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, Outer Banks was a massive hit for Netflix, managing to connect with younger generations in a big way. Now, five seasons and six years later, the show is wrapping up its run and giving the Pogues one last treasure hunt. It always reminded me of The OC meets Uncharted, which is one of the strangest combinations I could imagine. But it takes both the teen drama and the jet-setting treasure-hunting stakes and amps them up a bit.
The final season of Outer Banks follows the Pogues after the death of one of their own. They’re still trying to find the Blue Crown and hope to avenge their friend along the way. They’ve got people after them who either want to kill them or help them find something. Kiara is obsessed with getting vengeance for JJ, Pope is burying himself in weed after killing a man, and John B is trying to provide for his future family. Rafe also finally stops being an antagonist, and joins up with the Pogues. I really hoped they’d do more with JJ’s death, but they don’t seem to have learned any lesson and are still on their same path, minus one.
All of the main cast members have become competent enough actors to where they each do a decent job. The dialogue is often so inauthentic that it’s impressive they can even get some of these lines out. I still feel bad for Madelyn Cline every time she has to say “John B” in conversation and make it feel natural. Drew Starkey is clearly going to be the one to go on and do big things as he has a natural talent that makes Rafe the most intriguing character on the show.
This final season can feel like three completely disjointed parts. The first sees the Pogues in tropical locations, the second has them back in North Carolina, and the final deals with a hurricane. They feel so separate from each other and practically could have been separate seasons themselves. Sure, there’s the throughline of Chandler Groff and the crown, but that’s been there for years. It results in this last outing feeling very segmented versus one complete picture. All too often, they move on from what the focus has been, and uses expository dialogue to push the story forward in time.
If there’s anything I can compliment, it’s fairly breakneck pacing. It helps that this final season is absolutely bursting with action. There’s cars exploding, gunfire, and so many foot chases that I lost count. Unfortunately this does result in 3000 mile plane trips occurring in an instant or characters making bafflingly stupid decisions in order to keep the stakes high. But hey, at least its not boring. There’s always been a severe suspension of disbelief needed for this show but it’s taken things to a pretty absurd degree. These kid’s have become international treasure hunters and murderers.
The writing is embarrassingly underdeveloped and constantly relies on the same beats over and over. I lost track of the number of times a location is revealed because someone just happens to overhear it because they’re nearby. These bad guys would be shit out of luck if our group of treasure hunters didn’t have such loose lips. It’s really hard to get lost in the story, when dumb plot progression seems to be the status quo. But maybe that’s on me for expecting basic logic when it comes to Outer Banks.
With weird mysticism, terrible writing, and a very uneven narrative, this final season of Outer Banks is a mess. This story has become so far removed from what it started as and has gotten so absurdly convoluted. This results in plot beats constantly being repeated in order to extend the run time. I kept shaking my head at how ludicrous the narrative kept getting. Everything wraps up so neatly that, had JJ not died last season, it would feel like there were ultimately no stakes. Which isn’t what you want when wrapping up a five-season show.
Outer Banks: The Final Season is streaming on Netflix on August 20th, 2026.