Outer Banks stars talk season 3 finale's 'hopeful' ending: 'The floodgates have opened'

The Pogues definitely aren't known for their success rate on Outer Banks. Throughout the first two seasons of Netflix's sun-soaked treasure hunt drama, John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), JJ (Rudy Pankow), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), and Cleo (Carlacia Grant) have come thisclose to getting the Royal Merchant gold and Cross of Santo Domingo before they were thwarted by the Kooks time and time again. But according to the cast, fans don't have to worry about where the Pogues are going to end up in the season 3 finale (now streaming).

While the stars won't spoil how the new season ends for fans who are just beginning their binge-watches, they all describe the finale's last moments as "hopeful."

"I would actually say very hopeful with the opportunities presented to them in the finale," Bailey teases with a smile. "It's a heartfelt ending. People can expect to get a little bit of peace for everyone's characters. We don't need to worry about them for once. Maybe just for a second, everything can be okay. There's a great sense of peace at the end of the season."

Pankow is keeping things vague but explains that things are finally turning around for JJ. "He might have a little bit more hope about his future — he feels way more hopeful about things than at the start of the season," he says.

Daviss is excited for fans to finally watch the finale because it's "the best episode we've ever done." He adds with a smile, "I literally got a text from the director saying, 'Dude, episode 10 is the best episode of Outer Banks ever.' It's going to blow everyone's minds."

Cline is proud of the work she did in the finale, because it features the most difficult scene she had to shoot this season. "Oh God, it happens in the very last episode, and it tore me to pieces," she says. "It was emotionally very, very difficult. I don't want to spoil anything, but fair warning, it happens in the last episode and it will break your heart. But how I felt by the season's end was proud because Sarah has gone through so much and she's come out so strong. She's learned so much about herself in such a short amount of time at such a young age, and she's very, very badass. She's finally out of the bubble wrap, and it's what she always wanted."

It's a good thing that Netflix recently renewed Outer Banks for season 4, because Stokes says that the season 3 finale ending sets up a brand new story that he can't wait to dive into. "I'll just say this: the floodgates have opened," he says.

Outer Banks co-creators Josh Pate, Jonas Pate, and Shannon Burke tell EW that developing the way season 3 ends actually helped them figure out the plot for the rest of the show — for however many more seasons it will run. "As we started this season, there was some work to try to connect everything together," Burke says. "Now we have a very general roadmap for what we want the whole rest of Outer Banks to look like."

Jonas describes the season 3 finale ending as "a culmination of not just this season's story, it's the whole series story that comes to fruition at the end of the season. This really, hopefully, is a satisfying culmination of the first 30 episodes of the show." Burke agrees, adding, "This continual three-season story does come to more of a satisfying conclusive finale than it has in other seasons, though there's hopefully many more stories after this."

"We're also setting up the Pogues for this transition as they're getting older into future seasons," Josh says. "We're playing a lot of big cards at the end, put it that way."

Outer Banks season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

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