Across its five seasons, Netflix’s teen adventure drama Outer Banks was never short on producing audible gasps. Some were gasps of genuine shock — like at the end of Season 4 when sweet, troubled JJ (Rudy Pankow) was murdered by his own father, Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane). Some were gasps at the bonkers turns this show took, like when the OG OBX villain Ward Cameron (Charles Esten) took his daughter Sarah’s (Madelyn Cline) boyfriend, John B (Chase Stokes), out into the middle of the ocean in an attempt to kill him with a harpoon gun. And some were simply gasps of disbelief that this was currently happening on a television show. Remember when John B wrestled that alligator for no real plot-related reason? I do. Oh, I do. But it turns out that Outer Banks saved its most satisfying surprise for its final bow: By the time the season ended, I realized that somehow, incredibly, Outer Banks had taken one of its most unhinged antagonists and not only given him an improbable redemption arc, but made him the most compelling, emotionally impactful character on this show. And it worked. Rafe Cameron (Drew Starkey), the man that you are! The gasp I gasped!
Turning Rafe Cameron into a character to root for would have been as ridiculous as the wrestling-an-alligator thing back when Outer Banks began. Ward’s oldest son and Sarah’s older brother was king of the Kooks, which meant that the audience, as loyalists to the heroes of our story, the Pogues, hated him before we even knew him. But knowing him only made it worse. He spent three seasons terrorizing John B and his friends — sure, he engaged in typical rich kid scumbag stuff, but he also did things to the Pogues that included stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in gold from them and leaving them for dead in foreign countries. We watched him murder the noble Sheriff Peterkin (Adina Porter) in cold blood and get away with it. We watched him “accidentally” shoot his own sister and then purposefully attempt to drown her in a plastic tub. He was very much breaking down at one point and making some disturbing decisions. There should have been no coming back from this. And then he started losing. By the end of Season 4, Ward had died, Rafe’s stepmother, Rose (Caroline Arapoglou), was in control of all the gold they stole from the Pogues, and Rafe had been swindled by Groff, leaving him bankrupt. Not to mention the fact that his major love interest, Sofia (Fiona Palomo) — also a Pogue! — betrayed him when her life was threatened. He was all alone.
One of the most moving scenes in Season 4, aside from JJ’s death in the finale, which was legitimately gutting (no pun intended), is a scene in which Sarah is trying to convince Rafe to trust her and her friends with information they need to find the infamous Blue Crown (which is worth a lot of money and contains magic powers, maybe?). They can work together. Rafe thinks he’s going to get burned; he always gets burned. The two siblings finally talk about how he blames Sarah for their dad’s death, and she explains that their dad sacrificed himself for her, and that despite everything, she has Rafe’s back. Their teary hug at the end, when Rafe, still a little unsure, hands over the intel, is much more moving than it has any business being. It’s obvious there is really one reason for this: Starkey and Cline. It’s their commitment to dialogue that is, at times, unbelievably cheesy, yes, but it’s also their authentic chemistry on screen. You believe in their sibling bond, you believe that Sarah is trying so hard to move past the trauma her brother has caused, and wowza, do you believe that Rafe is grappling with taking this risk to trust someone because he doesn’t want to be alone. (The desperation and pain in his face still gets me!) In a show about North Carolina youths traipsing around the world to track down ancient treasure without money or passports, evading death far more times than is plausible, and never once doing laundry, it’s hard to find any moment that’s really grounded in something real — but Starkey and Cline create one here.
It was such a pleasant surprise to learn in Season 5 that this baby step toward healing between Rafe and Sarah was simply the first in Rafe’s redemption arc. Again, Starkey’s performance and the Cameron sibling dynamic are the main reasons this arc works. It would’ve been easy to make Rafe the villain again; he has done some truly evil stuff throughout his Outer Banks run. Getting the audience to really root for him is the more challenging route.
It starts slowly. When Season 5 begins, Rafe is stuck in Morocco with the Pogues and forced to go along with them as they try to track down Groff to avenge JJ’s death. Rafe continues to claim that he’s only helping them because he wants to get back the money Groff stole, but there are clues that he is standing by them for more than personal gain. When he learns Sarah is pregnant with John B’s baby, he may not say congratulations, but he has an emotional response. Not long after, when the siblings are paired up during a Groff reconnaissance mission, Rafe tells Sarah outright that he’s only sticking around to help her — a big step up from attempted murder a few seasons ago. And there are signs that Rafe wants to be better. When he tries to check in on Pope (Jonathan Daviss), who has been basically catatonic since killing an evil henchman to save his girlfriend, Cleo (Carlacia Grant), at the end of the fourth season, and Pope lashes out about how the two of them are not the same because Pope has empathy, among other things, Starkey’s expression is just hurt enough to show the audience that the accusation stings. Once the crew returns home — without having enacted their revenge on Groff or getting back the Blue Crown — Rafe could easily go his own way, but instead he continues to, sometimes begrudgingly, help the Pogues and his sister.
If Rafe wanted to be who he was in Seasons 1 through 3, he wouldn’t repeatedly help John B, who gets into an increasingly dangerous situation with some local drug dealers after a series of horrible decisions on John B’s part. He wouldn’t genuinely try to work out what’s best for him and Sarah (and their younger sister, Wheezie [Julia Antonelli]; poor thing is always getting forgotten) when Rose comes to him with a risky deal to sell their family estate in order to launder that $400 million in Royal Merchant gold she’s been hiding. He would not, excuse me, sit and have a heart-to-heart with Kiara (Madison Bailey) about grief. These signs of character development for Rafe could feel out of left field and unearned, but Starkey plays them all with enough hesitation, with hints of that scumbag still rearing his head, and with enough desperation that you believe this guy could really want to change.
The real test for Rafe comes toward the end of the season when Groff, who, yes, is still alive, still a menace, still allowed in Kildare, and somehow dating Rose now, uses a piece of blackmail Rose has been keeping (in case Rafe doesn’t go along with her real estate and gold deal) that provides additional evidence that Rafe did kill Peterkin in order to distract the police from going after him. Rafe is now a wanted man. If he’s arrested, he will go to prison for life. And to be clear, he 100% should. He knows it; his sister and the Pogues know it; Sofia, whom he has rekindled things with because he is learning to trust again, knows it; and the audience knows it, too. And yet everyone is still rooting for this guy to get a second chance. Thankfully, Outer Banks gives us a few reasons to not feel awful about that.
When he watches as Sofia runs interference for him with the police and gets arrested for it, he gives up his place on a plane out of the country in order to find a way to get her out. The old Rafe would just cut his losses and run. He gets his chance to save her thanks to a category 5 hurricane that throws Kildare into chaos. In the middle of that hurricane, as he and Sofia run from Sheriff Shoupe (Cullen Moss), Shoupe gets caught under a fallen tree. He’ll die if they don’t help them. Again, this is the perfect opportunity to run — but he doesn’t. He follows Sofia, who wants to help. Does Rafe grab Shoupe’s gun first so he has the power in this conversation, in which he admits that he did kill Peterkin, and will live with the guilt forever, and asks Shoupe to just let him go if he promises to never return? Sure. Rafe is always going to Rafe a little bit. But he does rescue Shoupe in the end and makes good on his promise to leave.
Before he goes, Rafe is given a few more moments to really sell that he’s worth this second chance. He and Sofia wind up waiting out the storm in the lighthouse and are eventually joined by Sarah, John B, Pope, and Mr. Heyward (E. Roger Mitchell). Rafe stays back when Sarah, John B, and Pope head back out into the storm to rescue Kiara, who is currently on a boat enacting her revenge on Groff. Soon, Rafe gets a call over the radio that the group will be lost at sea if he doesn’t get the lighthouse beacon on. He doesn’t hesitate to help this time, even when he needs to go back outside and make a jump that could easily end in his death. He saves them. Even a murderer can get a hero moment on this show.
After the storm, the Pogues get a happy ending — Groff is dead, they go on to find the $400 million of gold and rebuild their lives and Kildare, and Sarah and John B have a son, whom they name JJ, of course, before they get officially married. And Rafe, well, he and Sofia sail off to somewhere in South America to start a new, assumably murder-free life. Before he goes, we get what is perhaps sneakily the most emotional moment in the season (which is saying a lot, since there’s a lot of grieving for JJ going on, not to mention the finale montages) when Rafe says goodbye to Sarah.
Again, there is no reason for this scene to have as much emotional impact as it does — Rafe has been a real dick for so long! — but the way Starkey and Cline play it makes it a real heartbreaker. He’s almost hesitant to go over to his sister, knowing it’s goodbye. When he does hug her, he pulls her in close and makes a sincere attempt to apologize for what’s happened and for not being around to meet her kid. He tells her that he has a second chance and he has to make it count. Sarah can barely speak, except to agree and to tell him to “be good.” It wouldn’t feel like Outer Banks or like Rafe to have some long, emotional monologue, but Starkey and Cline are able to pack the right amount of emotion into the scene to make it a believable and satisfying conclusion to a truly complicated — sometimes, let’s call it, warped — sibling relationship.
When Rafe sails off, out of the Outer Banks and Outer Banks, it’s incredible to think about who this character was when we first met him and how in lesser hands this arc would have made the long list of this show’s ridiculous (that’s a compliment) plot points. Instead, in the end we all wound up pulling for the formerly unhinged scumbag to get a real win — a surprising Outer Banks twist if there ever was one.
Outer Banks Season 5 is now streaming on Netflix.
