issue sixty-four
the woes and evils of an attempted PhD in Classics: "outer banks" season 3 review
When I received word of the “Outer Banks” S4 renewal via Variety breaking email blast in my inbox, I was about two-thirds of the way through my showing of “Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey,” which means I was direly in need of good news. More on that film later, but that announcement lit a tiny spark of hope and excitement in my chest that truly exciting and intriguing television was to come.
If you’re new here, you may not know how fervently passionate I am about Netflix’s “Outer Banks.” I take this teen drama very very seriously. In issue five of this newsletter (which was grossly long ago, wow) I detailed how in a cosmic way, all of the things that make me Me converged in the pitch deck for this show: North Carolina, patrilineal legacies, hot teenagers, the seemingly irreparable and racialized chasms of class in the American South and a classic mystery format. Since first encountering the series, I’ve become increasingly invested in something that is definitely not that deep, but I’m making it deep. For those who aren’t familiar with the series or my thoughts on it, please read that article for context — and also pretext to all of the Season 3 spoilers you’re about to receive. Like full spoilers. Scroll with caution!
After the smash quarantine hit that was Season 1, Season 2 arrived to somewhat mixed reviews from fans and critics. Some wanted more expansion and innovation with the lost treasure mystery plot line, and others (mistakenly and misguided at best) simply wanted to see the Pogues frolic around on a boat with no high stakes. The romantic narratives in the story are still painfully predictable, regrettably straight and overall a bit tired, which led to many fans rightfully calling for more queer representation from one of Netflix’s top billed shows reaching teen and young adult audiences by the millions. Personally, I thought Season 2 was a tentative step in an interesting direction, but remained determined to hold out for Season 3 to see if “Outer Banks” could make good on its promises and premises; I wrote that “this series sometimes fails to decide whether it will dedicate itself to a full exploration of the Kook-Pogue battle with class as a lens, or give it up in exchange for a fun rowdy summer mystery with a slightly local-relevant focus,” and can mournfully confirm to you on the other side of Season 3 that it chose the latter.
Simply put, this season was vastly weaker than both of its predecessors. The dialogue is clunky, overly obvious and impersonal, although Charles Esten and Rudy Pankow somehow sell the hell out of their accents. The pacing is grueling — until about Episode 6, most screen time is spent on trivial side quests that separate the characters more than unite them, and until the final couple of episodes, nothing of consequence really actually happens. Though it finally circles back to tie the somewhat fantastical premise of finding the Gold of El Dorado to the Kildare-specific history that informed the treasure hunts of the first two seasons, this season is almost exclusively concerned with breaking the Pogues down to rock bottom before giving them any shot at redemption — a waste of screen time and character development.
I’m inclined to believe that a large part of this flailing randomness is the show losing its direction (more on that later) and attempting to return to form with clumsy writing and confused narratives. Bigger doesn’t always mean better, but I fear that was the hard sell for this season’s pitch: “The stakes are higher! The treasure is more valuable and more dangerous to get! But the Pogues have each other!” In order to connect the dots between the absurdity of six teenagers and a deadbeat dad finding the lost city of El Dorado in like two weeks and the gaps of class and familial ties that grounded the search for the Merchant and Cross of Santo Domingo, the Pate brothers do a bit of a hack job on the mystery elements of the season. In the process, they retcon the entirety of the lore, ancestry and evidence connected to both prior treasure hunts to fit them into this one, and simultaneously end the compelling saga of Pope’s family history in one fell swoop.
I’ve been a proponent of the Pope Heyward Is The Main Character agenda for years and for many reasons. For one, Chase Stokes lacks both the charisma and skill to carry this entire series on his back and abs. Second, and actually probably the reason that pisses me off the most, the creators of this show missed out on the potential to create something so resonant and unique that would cement “Outer Banks” into the echelons of teen television: a story centered around Pope, exploring not only his ties to his family and complex ancestry but the world that surrounds him and the ripple effects that a Black boy in the US South must reckon with. Nothing about John B’s colonial, Indiana Jones ass plotline is compelling or engaging in a new way; there is genuinely nothing we haven’t heard before in his character or story — and the same goes for Big John, who I will surely address in a moment. I know Jonathan Daviss has the chops, and I know audiences would tune in, but it seems Netflix took the easy route to making the most money off of American teenagers, which is a predictably lazy one.
The El Dorado plotline, its conclusion and the setup for Season 4 are collectively all so half-assed and transparent that they feel a bit insulting to the audience. Singh is a comically incompetent villain, poorly written and solely designed for exposition in the blandest storyline possible, and he just represents another amorphous “rich powerful enemy” without a drop of the nuance or detail given to Ward, Rafe and Topper. Also — love how Carla Limbrey fully just placebo effect-ed herself out of a disability. I don’t even have the mental space to reckon with that moment right now, but it was undoubtedly one of the hardest scenes to watch and a ridiculously convenient note to throw away a whole season of antagonism on.
Maybe my least favorite element of this season was the entire presence of Big John Routledge. A victim of the Netflix Can’t Let Anyone Die plague, they resurrected his musty corpse with that dusty blunt bob to do what for a whole season? Shove his son around? Disrespect Sarah Cameron? Show how academia makes you evil? Seriously, I want to circle back to how a piss poor Pogue ended up making it almost to the end of a humanities PhD only to end up back in his conspiracy shack hunting for the Merchant.
Big John’s lines are bulky, self-obsessed and grating. He has no other cornerstone or “core drive” than “Me Want Treasure.” It is genuinely impossible to root for him as a dad because he’s so bad at it, and his irritable behavior just drives a wedge between others and hurts John B further. He also has such a colonial point of view that it would be a bit funny in another world as a satirical look at what academia does to a MF, but Big John is dead serious, so I can’t even give the writers that much credit. When you look at the record, Big John is unlike the Pogues in that he has no kind of alliance to friends or family, no moral code, and no interest to serve anyone but himself at the cost of destruction and death. He’s almost the anti-Ward, but I wouldn’t dare ascribe Big John as the king or leader of the Pogue philosophy and lifestyle.
It’s also incredibly prevalent to audiences in Season 3 that the Pate brothers have no idea what to do with their female characters. Rose vanishes after a few cameos, legend says that Wheezie is still puking up that Crystal Light, and Kie’s mother all but absorbs into her husband despite initial attempts to connect with her daughter. When all else fails: throw them in or out of a relationship — bonus votes if you villainize them in front of the entire audience for cheating! I’m so tired and so so bored, and the female talent on this cast is too significant to be squandered like this.
To address the swirl-colored elephant in the room, I have to speak on JJ and Kiara. As a long-time anti, I have to say that the Jiara endgame is nasty work knowing that the writers of this show didn’t give Kie anything to do but smoke and vibe for approximately two whole seasons. Just now did they give her a season with the potential for the most emotional depth and strenuous performance required of Madison Bailey, only to half-ass it for a love triangle between her situationship and her parents, just to layer trauma on trauma and add salt to the wounds. Get my girl a good playlist, weighted blanket and some EMDR therapy, stat.
In this season we see almost none of Kie’s actual friendships with Pope or John B, supposedly her best friends of all her lifetime, minus hardly any interaction with Cleo. Kiara almost exclusively engages with JJ or Sarah, the former romantically and the latter to turn her down when she needs a place to stay. There’s also a distinct choice on the writers’ behalf to give Jiara a full season and so much rich, passionate content and tense back-and-forth versus very half baked, 3/4 episode arcs for her relationships with Pope and John B — an intentional distinction made to play this long game as the most gratifying part of her role in this story, certainly not the bonds she’s made with her friends and healing those with her family, if you were confused about Kie’s purpose or presence.
As a matter of fact, every character’s path this season is a tiny bit off the rails and somewhat out of character at different points, which adds to the general disorientation I felt while watching it. I was trying to remind myself that “Hey, these kids love and know each other and are actually good at heart” because the various actions and conversations seemingly only there to throw a wrench in the peace and harmony of the Pogues were just so frustrating.
To start with JJ: I saw him devolving from the time I wrote my first newsletter on the show, saying that “in my head, JJ pops an Ambien when he finds his dad’s stash in the Phantom keys scene. The implications that he will follow in his father’s footsteps and fight to turn himself around against a landslide of genetics and guilt - so much more powerful than his inherent “goodness”. Where’s the flavor!” I was right to say that, and hesitantly tuned in to see where his path would take him in Season 3.
I foresaw JJ going down the same path as his dad briefly to emphasize the wounds of abuse and violent patterns, but the recklessness he displays in Season 3 is almost exclusively tied back to Kiara or brash defiance against the Carreras in general (stealing Mike’s money clip, mouthing off in front of her parents). And yes, the Carrera self-hate cycle is tired and boring, but it also provided a sort of crutch for JJ to externalize his grief and wheel off into derelict kleptomania without truly confronting what the absence of his father means for his mental state or his inner potential to be “more than Luke.” We graze it, but ultimately just brush on past. Perhaps Season 4 and the involvement of Barracuda Mike will yield more interesting results and self-examination, but I doubt it. I guess they spent the entirety of the “fathers and sons” budget on Rafe and John B this go-round.
To focus on the rest of the Pogues, I absolutely couldn’t stand how Pope and Cleo were effectively fridged once they got back to Kildare. Besides their romance — which I reluctantly enjoyed despite how much I vehemently hate the “let’s just pair them all up into het couples” approach — they have almost nothing to do besides hand over a perfectly preserved key to a niche indigenous language that leads the Routledges to El Dorado. Pope even gets close to confronting Rafe after the heartbreaking act of violence that is Rafe and Barry melting his family’s cross, but that tension fizzles away to glares and stares on the tarmac and more cuddling with Cleo to calm him down.
Speaking of Cleo — they erased my girl. She made the absolute definition of a token character to round out the Pogues and run around with Pope, and the entire backstory we get from her is a tale of past love used to refer back to and console Pope. Both of them felt like shells of their prior selves being used to shuffle the plot around, as opposed to fully realized characters interacting with others.
Which, to be fair, none of the Pogues really do this season; they’re so isolated and consumed by secondary interests that they’re hardly even a family until a corny speech from Sarah at the conclusion of Episode 8 reunites them. The loss of this bond is a really odd move, especially considering that the bond between the Pogues onscreen and cast offscreen is like 90% of the marketing for this show.
I have to take a second to give it to King Cockroach himself; Drew Starkey gives an incredibly electric performance as Rafe this season. Though he doesn’t entirely feel himself — drug abuse issues and clear demonstrable symptoms of mental illness are kind of forgotten in favor of a vague “something is off with this dude” nod — Rafe grounds the weight of his family’s conflict as a cornerstone, while reckoning with his own changing place in the world. As the ultimate sycophant to status, he declares himself the “Lord of the Manor” with no material power or plot moves besides his own mistakes and a kegger. He also serves crisp linen and White-Boy-Summer-buzzcut-a-la-Chet-Hanks-realness and serves it well.
Ironically, Rafe’s development this season and very thin tenuous grasps on both reality and the power he perceives that he has are perhaps the best evidence of the people that we are told the OBX churns out! The mind games that Ward plays with Rafe are exemplary of the cycles of class, domination and power that the series alludes to but never entirely grasps. Even the contemptuous way Rafe lewdly sneers that “he knew Kie wasn’t half bad because she’s still half Kook” is racially coded and loaded!
Perhaps the best place to leave the inadequacy of this season of the show is the hallowed ground where I won the battle, but lost the war: the patriarchal gridlock that is the Rafe/Ward Cameron standoff. Maybe both the highlight of the season and the closest it got to the intensity of the interpersonal relationships of the first two seasons, their faceoffs were the perfect interaction to spell out the significance of the fissures and chasms the events of Seasons 1 and 2 left on the social fabric of Kildare County — it starts and ends in the family, yet I didn’t want it to end this way.
We got so close to the ultimate resolution, the perfect closed loop. If you were to tell the Leah who wrote, “paternal legacies are … particularly relevant for the Camerons. They refine and redefine “family” through dastardly acts of betrayal and self preservation, leading us to believe that patricide is the only end. My biggest prediction for S3 is that Rafe will finally kill Ward. God willing,” in my Season 2 review that on two separate occasions both Sarah and Rafe pointed a gun at Ward Cameron and didn’t fire, I’d call you a filthy liar. To see the cycle of Ward’s abuse playing out in the most nuanced and material ways — and to see them externalized through Barry as an observer watching the trainwreck happen, which was a bit excellent — all for him to be remembered as a “villain who died a hero” when sacrificing himself for Sarah feels poetically fitting in a way I couldn’t even predict. But still hollow.
Ward’s breakdown in the jungle in the season finale reveals what we, a watchful audience, already knew — that the root of his obsession with Sarah and his idealized veil of “family” is rooted in possession and his affiliation of power with both domination and the collective. For three seasons, he has been opposed to his children when they transgress against being “one of us,” in reference to not only the Cameron family and the status that their name guarantees, but also the ruling class of the island: the Kooks. With the existence of Ward as a reminder, we as an audience know that there will always be an “us” and there will always be a “them.” And as much as the pathos of Madelyn Cline’s narration at the beginning of Episode 8 may try and convince us, you can’t just choose what side of those lines you stand on.
To see Ward’s role in this show erased in such a convoluted, twisted way in the eleventh hour represents the loss of a core, a thesis even. Without this thesis, pivotal lines are redrawn and goalposts are being moved as we speak. Rafe isn’t even particularly important anymore, and is presumably embroiled in more criminal charges than I can count on both hands by the time we get to the conclusion of the finale — in which he doesn’t even appear once. A time-jump scene ties up the entire final episode in a perfect, Carolina-colored bow in a move of such severe emotional whiplash that I could barely process the hammy Stokes narration that brought us to it in the first place, and I guess we’re tracing the manuscripts of Blackbeard now? Is that really the next plan? And anyway, what are we all even doing here if this show is now about rich 20 somethings hunting treasure not for family inheritance, financial necessity, or even fun, but just profit?
I have to take the gold colored glasses off, y’all. Literally and figuratively, considering that the nasty color grading this season was distractingly potent. I have to say that “Outer Banks” has lost me, but we’ll always have the idealized patricide cut that only exists in my mind. Rest in peace, and P4L!
can't put into words how relieved this article made me feel that someone finally understands how frustrated i am with season 3 but TRULY. like i hate to give this show my time and emotions after all this but ill be bitter forever
YOU'RE A GENIUS AND YOU'RE CORRECT