“Hot damn.”

Those two words, muttered by John B (Chase Stokes) in the final moment of Outer Banks Season 3, set up a whole new world of adventure for the show’s upcoming fourth season. But behind the scenes of the drama, the phrase has its own significance. 

Before the cameras roll on every scene, the first assistant director (AD) kicks things off with a “hot damn!” It’s become so commonplace to the cast and crew that co-creator and executive producer Jonas Pate secretly instructed Stokes to deliver the quip in that final scene as an inside joke. 

“We didn’t tell [AD Michael G. Jefferson] I was going to say it,” Stokes tells Tudum. So at the very end of filming the scene, “he had tears in his eyeballs,” says Rudy Pankow (who plays JJ), finishing his co-star and former roommate’s sentence. (Stokes crashed on Pankow’s floor in a sleeping bag when they were filming Season 1.) 

The intimate dynamic among the cast and crew — whether they’re tossing the phrase “butterfly knife” into an interview or bringing up Ted Lasso repeatedly — mirrors the Pogues’ on-screen playfulness and closeness, albeit under less perilous conditions. 

Although they all come from different circumstances, just like the Pogues, the cast feel like they’ve formed their own tribe since they’re all “in the exact same boat,” Jonathan Daviss (Pope) explains. “Full pun intended,” adds Stokes.

“We’ve all said the tagline for Season 3 is ‘Nothing to lose,’ and that’s how we started at the very beginning of the show,” continues Stokes. “Our motto was, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose here.’ Now our schedules are a lot different than what they once were, but we still find time to come back to each other and make sure that we’re all checking in and doing each other right.”

🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

While in real life their day-to-days have gotten a little hectic, it’s nothing compared to what the Pogues have been through over the course of three intense seasons. But that just makes the Season 3 finale  — when the Pogues actually find El Dorado — all the more gratifying. “We knew we needed to give them a win, but it ended up being a complicated win,” co-creator and executive producer Josh Pate says. Adds fellow co-creator and executive producer Shannon Burke, “They couldn’t completely lose the third season.”

That win is particularly important to Pope after Rafe (Drew Starkey) sacrilegiously burns his ancestor Denmark Tanny’s Cross of Santo Domingo down for its parts. For the record, Starkey himself wasn’t that surprised that Rafe melted down a priceless historical artifact. “Nothing Rafe does can shock me anymore,” says Starkey. “Round four [between Rafe and Pope] probably is coming up. But it should be a counseling session between the two of them. Let’s just use your words, not your fists.”

Some emotional support really would be worthwhile for these characters who, for 30 episodes, have been playing “really fast and loose with their lives,” Daviss says. Stokes concurs: “I had a talk with Josh and Shannon towards the end of [the season] about the whole idea of when soldiers come back from war and they have to acclimate to being a civilian after that.” 

The actors acknowledge that their characters have been put through the wringer — think getting almost eaten by a gator, being shot at multiple times, etc. There’s a consensus among the cast that “there’s a lot of trauma that is catching up,” Stokes says. “It’s important to honor that and to see where that takes them.”

And if that road leads to a new treasure hunt, then so be it. But at least this time it’ll be closer to home, since the Pogues’ next treasure target seems to be Blackbeard’s ship, which supposedly sunk off the coast of the Outer Banks in “North Cackalack,” as Carlacia Grant (Cleo) calls it. Raised in South Carolina and North Carolina respectively, both Madelyn Cline (Sarah) and Madison Bailey (Kiara) recall the Blackbeard legend being an important part of the region’s past. “It’s cool that they’re tying the treasure hunt back into history rooted in North Carolina,” Bailey says. “It was a whole segment of our history class in eighth grade that we just were learning about pirates, and Blackbeard was a big deal.”

While Blackbeard looms on the horizon, the next chapter for the Pogues will notably pick up after sprinting 18 months ahead. “I love it because it gives us a fresh start for the next season,” says Bailey. In the last scenes of the Season 3 finale, we discover that Kiara is out saving sea turtles (as the series pilot predicted), while Sarah is working at a surf shop with John B. (Cline thinks Sarah is still “giving noob” when it comes to surfing, though.) 

While the Pogues could have only dreamt of air-conditioned surf shops when they were in Poguelandia, the cast had a far more comfortable experience filming in real life in Barbados. Standout experiences on the Caribbean island included evenings listening to music and sipping rum and Cokes at Dina’s, a classic seafood spot on the east side, and, for Pankow, befriending a horse named Vendingo on the beach. “He was fantastic.” Even Austin North (Topper) made it down to visit for a weekend when he wasn’t busy restaurant-hopping in South Carolina with Starkey. “I didn’t film there, but I had to come say hi,” he says. 

But long before that, Stokes had a conversation with the creators where they revealed some very important news to him — that John B’s dad is alive. Stokes had always had an “inkling” that someone as resourceful as Big John (Charles Halford) could still be around, and was excited for the opportunity to spend time with the seasoned actor. “He’s been in the industry for a long time, so he was able to give me a lot of good insight,” says Stokes.

John B spends most of Season 3 tracking down El Dorado with his pops after their reunion and begins to feel his dad’s treasure hunting obsession pull him away from the other Pogues. Stokes wonders how that will affect John B and his friendships going forward. “As things really got darker and progressed into a space where he really didn’t recognize his father, I think he started to grieve for the loss of [his old dad],” he says. Then, with Big John actually dying in the finale, John B is “just broken” now that his dad is really, truly gone.

The same can be said for his other half, Sarah Cameron. While her father, Ward, has been the dedicated antagonist of the entire series, the actor that plays him, Charles Esten (or “Chip,” as he’s known to the cast), became “a dad to all of us,” Cline says. So his sacrificial death hit especially hard, considering Ward’s death scene was also Esten’s last day on set. 

“It was a really heartbreaking send-off,” says Cline of the moment where Esten looks into his daughter’s eyes and takes multiple bullets for her. “The scene itself broke my heart for Sarah because the one time he showed up for her without any ill intentions or underlying motives is the time that ended him. She always had hope that maybe he would be a good person, and the one time he actually did what she was hoping he could do, it was the last.” Grant says that the cast cried the whole drive back from set after shooting that scene. “It was such a long ride back to the hotel, and Chip was just giving us all advice,” she says. “It was so sad.” Esten imparting fatherly words of wisdom is nothing new; Bailey says she’s “been called and given an earful of advice without asking, just something he thought I needed to hear — multiple times.” 

While Sarah is present for her father’s death, Rafe is not —  nor do we see his reaction to the news later. Starkey ventures that Rafe either “blames [Sarah and John B] or is going to end up blaming himself — and both are destructive.” But at least before his death, Ward did name Rafe the man of the Cameron clan. “That’s all he’s ever wanted and he’s finally got that,” Starkey says.

We also don’t see Rafe in the season’s final scene that take place 18 months later, but Josh Pate is quick to assure that there will be flashbacks to that gap in time. He says the group needs to “slow down and let all the ripples wash through” of what they’ve achieved and lost. 

“That’s what I’m most excited for, just figuring out what is in between that time,” Daviss says, knowing that fans are going to speculate like crazy. But Pankow ponders a bigger question for the Pogues: “What do you want now? When you finally get something, what do you want?”

In watching the finale back, Stokes thought “nothing felt safe” about that scene. “Is this the first time they’ve seen each other in a while? Have they been going their own separate ways, or have they still stayed consistent with the Pogues?”

That would certainly be JJ’s hope. Pankow thinks his character’s dream would be to have Pope, John B and the Pogues move into houses next door to one another and “grow old on the porch.” Daviss, on the other hand, thinks the Pogues should go all-in on a communal mansion, now that they’ve got the dough. And he has his eye on one already: Pope’s ancestral home, Tannyhill Plantation. “I’ll be honest, there’s ghosts in Tannyhill,” Pankow says, rebuffing Daviss’ suggestion. Agrees Stokes, “Yeah, Tannyhill seems very haunted, and I have a lot of PTSD from that house.” 

Reflecting on all their characters’ shared PTSD, Bailey wonders if the Pogues are due for a slower paced season? Grant knows the answer straight up — “no chance.” Cline agrees: “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

We all know what John B would say to that. 

Season 3 of Outer Banks is now streaming.