🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Outer Banks creators Jonas Pate, Josh Pate and Shannon Burke are well aware that you’re still picking your jaws up off the floor after that Season 3 finale. And the truth is, so are they. Just like the Pogues, the writers follow every possible path on the search for storytelling gold. “It’s jazz, but the guitars are pens,” Josh Pate tells Tudum.

Currently in the midst of writing Season 4, the trio are game to break down everything that led to the end of this three-season arc… including the revelation that there’s an alternate ending somewhere out there. In fact, they shoot multiple endings for each season.

“I like to shoot a dream ending just for me every year that doesn’t make it,” Jonas Pate says. “You always are trying to come up with that perfect balance that’s surprising but inevitable. And sometimes you’ve just got to mess around with it a little bit.”

But that doesn’t mean we’re going to tell you what those endings are or would’ve been. You wouldn’t want that, especially since the endings left on the cutting room floor can potentially impact the next big adventure for the Pogues. As of now, the future of the Pogues is still in an “embryonic” stage, according to Jonas Pate, although we know they’ll be reckoning with the infamous Blackbeard in Season 4 after an 18-month time jump. “We have some big ideas that we’re still tinkering with,” he says. One thing that’s already been mapped out, however, is the series’ ultimate ending. That’s one key piece that all three writers are on the same page about. “We’ve always known from the beginning what the last scene would be, if we would be lucky enough to get it that far,” Josh Pate says. But Burke adds that there’s “a lot of dark, blank space” before reaching that final moment.

For Tudum’s “Burning Questions,” the show’s executive producers let us pick their brains about the finale of this first trilogy of the Pogues’ story before diving headfirst into the next season. Without further ado: Woogity woogity!

First off, why the 18-month time jump at the end of Season 3? And will we see any flashbacks in Season 4?
Josh Pate: Yeah, we’re going to fill in some gaps in the 18 months. We felt like we needed to migrate them out of school. We think about the first three [seasons] as a trilogy and then we’re starting over on [another sort of] trilogy now. We just needed to clear the decks. We’re going to have new villains, a new treasure hunt, a new life situation.

Jonas Pate: It’s still too embryonic. We have some big ideas we’re tinkering with.

We find out some details, like Pope (Jonathan Daviss) going away to school, Kiara (Madison Bailey) working with sea turtles, JJ (Rudy Pankow) nabbing a charter boat. Did the cast ask you to fill them in or did they come up with stories on their own?
Shannon Burke: Oh, they make suggestions all the time, too.

Jonas Pate: Like the Poguelandia flag was a Rudy Pankow ad-lib. I mean, JJ the character’s capable of pretty much anything. Season 4 is going to be all about that, really.

And Kiara’s parents, who shipped her off to Kitty Hawk wilderness therapy school before the finale, are sitting front row, clapping, at the museum unveiling. How did they repair that fissure in their relationship?
Josh Pate: We try to write all these characters to create these scenes where everyone’s trying to do the right thing inside their own story. And if you had a kid who’s running off, cutting school, you’d be pretty worried about her. Kiara knows that deep down, that even though it was a hard measure... they had warned her. It’s not something they hadn't brought up a few times.

Burke: They’ll probably have some stuff to work through in Season 4.

How did Blackbeard come to mind to kick off Season 4?
Josh Pate: We were joking about it just a second ago. We needed something concise, a one-liner for the last little bit. We needed a name or an idea for a new adventure that could be conveyed in a word. Timing-wise, with the flow of the episode, you needed to hit and go. 

Jonas Pate: It’s also Blackbeard... It’s a big North Carolina thing. 

Josh Pate: And it’s organic to the Outer Banks, “so OK, we’ll play that.” But it’s not going to be the usual Blackbeard story, put it that way.

The ‘Outer Banks’ Cast React to the Season 3 FinaleFind out the real story behind that Pope and Cleo kiss.

The El Dorado story [in Season 3] isn’t the usual El Dorado story either. Was that always meant to be where Denmark Tanny and the Royal Merchant shipwreck story would lead?
Josh Pate: Well, Shannon and I were in Barbados and V.S. Naipaul is a writer from nearby Trinidad, and we both read [his history book] The Loss of El Dorado, which you see in a trailer. It was such an amazing story, so we used a lot of the research from that book. We were just like, “Oh, I don’t think they can get to Egypt and pyramids.” But we needed to do something bigger than the Cross [of Santo Domingo].

Burke: We definitely don’t have elaborate outlines. We more so have a “no boring episodes” philosophy and just keep it going. We’ll have a general idea about where we’re going and it usually gets there. Maybe not always, but how that happens and how we’ll end up implementing those ideas are pretty much on the fly and it’s just feeling the juice in each scene, in each episode. It’s more like a lot of spur-of-the-moment decisions. 

What goes into a decision like Rafe (Drew Starkey) burning down the cross?
Shannon Burke: The worst thing that Rafe could do, that’s what he’ll do.

Jonas Pate: We were trying to make Rafe maximally evil.

In your eyes, does Rafe have a diagnosis? Has he seen a therapist?
Jonas Pate: He’s a narcissistic sociopath, for sure. 

Josh Pate: We introduced a girlfriend character for him [Sofia], and we love [Fiona Palomo]. We’re excited to show other sides of Rafe that aren’t just him being the worst person in the world.

Did you always know John B’s (Chase Stokes) dad Big John (Charles Halford) was still alive? 
Jonas Pate: No. We met Charles and we just really liked him. He’d only been in two scenes when he’s in the Season 2 finale. We knew he would have a huge, huge role in Season 3. His performance for the season was just amazing. He brought so much to it and we would’ve been screwed [if the risk didn’t pay off]. We kind of took a chance on him because we didn’t really know if he could do the whole thing, and then he just delivered. But meeting him and talking with him, we just realized, “Holy... we should use him.”

Burke: If you look at the page count, I’m not sure that Big John isn’t the biggest character with the most pages in Season 3. So it was a big risk, but we’re super, super pleased.

How did you decide to have parallel deaths of the fathers, with both Big John and Ward (Charles Esten) dying in the finale?
Jonas Pate: Also unbelievably hotly debated. We felt like both characters had run the gamut of the best ways that we could use them and that we needed to platform more emotional space going forward for other things to happen, like Rafe to be the bad guy. If Chip [Esten, who plays Ward] was there, it was going to be hard for Rafe to elevate, so we wanted him to [be able to] do that in Season 4.

Burke: The plan was that Big John would probably die at the end of the season. The dream father returns, and he wouldn’t be exactly what they expect. Basically that story was as conceived, but I don’t think we knew that Ward was going to die. Maybe the idea was tossed around, but it became more and more real as we got closer to the end. Like Jonas said, it was highly, highly debated.

Jonas Pate: That’s all we do. We just debate it and debate it and debate it and debate it.

Josh Pate: I was the last holdout on that. What convinced me was he has this act of redemption [sacrificing himself] at the end, and then we didn’t quite know what to do with the character. We had taken him as far as we could and we’d be repeating if we kept going. But it was incredibly difficult because we all loved Chip so much and he’s been a huge part of the show and such a mentor for all the younger actors. None of the kids had been a series regular before and he’d done it for seven years on Nashville, so they learned a lot from him. The hardest part is that we’re going to miss him.

Burke: To his credit, when he found out that this was going to happen in the script, he had one day where he was like, “Fuck.” He was unhappy. Then, he immediately started to make his deathbed. He’s like, “OK, well I could…” or “Maybe do this and do this,” just the way Chip would do with every scene where he just had ideas and he’d make it better. He was in improv for so long [on Whose Line Is It Anyway?]. There are three things in the final scene that are totally his idea. He made his character way better.

Do you think that in the end, Ward and Big John thought that they were good fathers to their kids? 
Josh Pate: Ward, no. I think he feels regret. And then Big John, I think he does that thing where he’s like, “I’m not perfect, kid, but I’m trying.” He was a gruff dad. I lived with my dad when he was a bachelor for a while, and I often think about me and my dad in his bachelor days when we’re writing Big John. He has some similarities to him, but my dad’s a lot better dad than Big John, actually.

In Season 3, Pope says that the Pogues always lose. Did you really want them to find the treasure and win the war even if they lost battles along the way to El Dorado?
Burke: Yeah, we talked about that. They couldn’t completely lose the third season.

Josh Pate: We knew we needed to give them a win, but it ended up being a complicated one. We wanted the audience to feel that they had accomplished something and that it wasn’t all for nothing. We owed the audience that and the characters, too. The characters deserved it.

Sarah (Madelyn Cline) really is the linchpin to finding El Dorado in the end. She gets the plane from Ward, and then once they’re there, she figures out all the clues. Why was that important to you?
Burke: It was Sarah who needed the win. John B’s had a lot of wins in that respect.

Josh Pate: She also needed to redeem herself in Big John’s eyes because he was suspicious of her. We wanted her to be integral to figuring stuff out so that she gradually gained Big John’s trust — to prove herself, that was the whole arc. He’s way too late in the end after being resistant, but at least, better late than never.

In your minds right now, do you know how the series ends? The final scene?
Josh Pate: We’ve always known from the beginning what the last scene would be, if we would be lucky enough to get it that far.

Burke: There’s a lot of dark, blank space before that, but we know where it’s going.

Do you think that in the 18-month gap, these kids [will have taken] time to process all they’ve achieved and lost?
Josh Pate: They need to. They need to slow down and let all the ripples wash through. We’re getting some ideas about that [for Season 4], because I agree. You want the crazy jumping[-off-ships] stuff, but you want an emotional realism. Taking stock and letting the impact of things really reverberate is part of keeping it emotionally real, which allows us to do crazier stunts.

What do you hope resonates with fans when they watch Season 3?
Burke: I hope they feel the friendship. There’s all this action and adventure, but it’s really about the bond between the friends.

Josh Pate: Absolutely. And the sense that there’s more coming.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Season 3 of Outer Banks is streaming now.

Jonathan Daviss of Outer Banks Reveals How Pope Was Almost Stabbed in Season 1Don't worry, John B would've lent him his bandana for the wound.