Outer Banks fans are furious after season 4 ends with the death of the main character

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season 4 finale of Outer Banks.

Only the good die young and JJ Maybank was certainly a good one.

Outer Banks fans are grieving — and outraged — after Part 2 of Season 4 premiered on Nov. 7 and ended with a first of its kind: JJ (Rudy Pankow), OG Pogue, dead.

JJ and Kiara (Madison Bailey) had the treasure they had been chasing, the Blue Crown, and were chasing it through the sandy streets of Morocco when JJ’s biological father, Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane), came out of nowhere and took grabbed Kiara and threatened her with a knife to her throat.

JJ gave Groff the crown in exchange for Kiara’s life, but Groff brutally stabbed him anyway.

After the fatal stabbing, Groff – who was revealed to be his biological father in the dramatic midseason finale – stabbed, leaving JJ to take his last breath in Kiara’s arms.

As she cried and he struggled to hang on, he told her that his wish – which the Blue Crown could supposedly grant – had already come true. “I already got my wish. Everything I wanted.”

“Take care of the others,” JJ told Kiara before taking his last breath. “I love you, Ki.”

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“Everyone you know is going to die. Your dad, your mom, and even your best friend,” said John B (Chase Stokes) as a montage of JJ’s moments with John B and the rest of the Pogues over the past four seasons.

“I like to think it’s not so much how many years you get, but what you do with them. And JJ packed it in. A lifetime in those 20 years,” John B said as the emotional montage continued to play.

“Adventure, romance. Some tough stuff, that was part of it too. Sacrifice. And friendship,” added John B. “If JJ was the king of anything, he was the king of friendship. He kept us all together. He was the best friend we ever had.”

The Pogues appeared to bury JJ in the Moroccan desert, and as the Season 4 finale ended, Groff fled with the coveted Blue Crown and the Pogues sat in their grief by a fire before Rafe (Drew Starkey) turned them on.

“Groff said he was going to Lisbon. I don’t know, if it was my friend I’d probably go after the guy who just killed him,” Rafe said.

Pope (Jonathan Daviss) told him to shut up. But Kiara, in the fury of her grief, agreed.

“He’s not wrong,” she said. “Do you think JJ would be sitting here if it was one of us? Do you think he wouldn’t do anything?

“We all know what JJ would do,” said John B. “He would be fine.”

The episode ended with a dramatic shot of Kiara, the flickering fire reflected in her face, as she declared that the Pogues were out for “revenge”.

Fans were not shy about their opposition to the writers’ choice to kill off JJ, with one fan writing in one post on X (formerly Twitter) that the show is now “ruined” because JJ died while another wrote that he “deserved so much better than this”.

“John B & Sarah may be the main characters of the show… but JJ was the reason people watched it and kept OBX going and now it’s ruined.” wrote another fan.

Outer Banks Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.