Outer Stanks: Outer Banks Review
The action-packed and award-winning drama Outer Banks recently released a new season consisting of two parts, five episodes each, in early October and then November. The show follows a young man named John B and his friends JJ, Kiara, Pope, Cleo, and his girlfriend Sarah. Outer Banks follows the colloquial “Pogue” gang as they search for treasure and engage in turf wars with the rich “Kooks” on the island. At the end of season three, the show’s tumultuous plot resolves, but came back this year with yet another season. Over the past five years, Outer Banks has become a hit for Netflix, with Instagram users dubbing the recent death of beloved character JJ “the saddest death in cinematic history;” but don’t fall for it. The scene is filled with many inconsistencies and gives a disappointing end to a character that so many people love.
At the end of the final episode, JJ is killed by his biological father, Chandler Groff. The fact his father was able to kill him at all is nothing short of a miracle. When searching for a “magical” crown, Groff arrives at an ancient well. Sarah’s older brother and Kook royalty, Rafe Cameron, who was pursuing Groff on a stolen motorcycle, shows up at the well and a fight ensues. Rafe proceeds to push Groff down the well and rides off still on the hunt for the crown. Groff miraculously survives the fall but is in rough shape. He is sporting a clearly broken leg and cannot stand. When John B and his friends roll up to the well, Groff stands and beckons JJ to throw a rope and rescue him from the well. The friends refuse to aid Groff in his escape from the well but decide to throw him a container of water instead. The friends continue to the city where the crown is supposedly stashed, and Groff is left at the bottom of the thirty-foot well with a broken leg. When John B and company arrive in Agapenta, they are chased by mercenaries also in pursuit of the crown. Many of the mercenaries are shot and killed by the teenagers, but when Cleo is shot in the shoulder, she not only survives but barely loses any blood. Just minutes before the gang is about to acquire the crown, a sandstorm conveniently rolls in. Despite this hardship, JJ retrieves the crown and flees into the city with Kiara. Once within the city’s walls, JJ and Kie are confronted by none other than JJ’s dad. He proceeds to put Kie in a chokehold and threatens to kill her unless JJ hands over the crown. JJ hands the crown over to Groff, but Groff stabs him anyway. Before you feel upset about his death, let me explain how incredibly unlikely this scenario is.
When Rafe pushes Groff into the well he free-falls for around 1.5 seconds. By using a good old online calculator, it tells us that in those 1.5 seconds, he fell approximately 11 meters, which converts to 36 feet. The survival rate of falling from over 30 feet is around 12%. Once he reaches the bottom, he grasps at his tibia (shin bone) in pain. The tibia is one of the easiest bones in the leg to break, so we can assume from this statement, and the fact that he is holding his leg in pain, that his leg is most likely broken. When John B and friends arrive, Groff rises to yell up to them, despite the fact he just fell 3 stories and has a broken leg. He walks around on said leg, which is proven to worsen the condition of the break and make the pain even worse. As previously mentioned, the teens retrieve the crown just as the sandstorm rolls in. When the sandstorm begins, Groff begins to climb out of the well. Keep in mind that most people with a broken leg would need a cast plus months of physical therapy to heal their leg, but Groff climbs out of the well with no problem whatsoever. Clearly, the writers didn’t research what to do after falling 30 feet, breaking your leg, and becoming severely dehydrated, because climbing out of a well is not the correct answer to that question.
When walking down the road, Groff just so happens to come across a hay-hauling truck that gives him a ride. What luck! Even if he manages to survive escaping the well, the chances that he would come across a truck in those circumstances are beyond rare. Driving through sandstorms is incredibly dangerous and highly advised against. Morocco is located in the region of the Sahara Desert, experiencing sandstorms up to several times per week. With this knowledge, I would hope the locals would be aware of the danger of driving in such conditions. Nevertheless, Groff enters the truck. This truck is carrying what I would guess to be around 200 square bales of hay each weighing around 40 pounds each. The bales are spaced out across the truck, making the vehicle very imbalanced and slowing it down to drive no more than 20 mph. The fact the sandstorm did not tip the imbalanced truck becomes yet another coincidence this show has included. The truck driver then drives Groff to the exact location of Agapenta. How convenient!
Not only that, but on the way to Agapenta, there is a massive ravine which the truck could have easily driven off of due to the low visibility conditions. Groff arrives unscathed just as the sandstorm is winding down. You heard that right folks! He managed to climb out of a well with a broken leg, catch a ride in a truck during a sandstorm, get dropped off at exactly the right place despite the low visibility, and find his son in 13 minutes! I know that time in shows doesn’t exactly convert to time in real life, so let’s break it down. Pope mentions that Agapenta is 62 miles from where their truck broke down. Let’s be generous and assume that the well is half that distance. If the truck Groff was in was going 20 miles per hour, then it would have taken him over an hour to reach Agapenta. We see the gang retrieve the crown and flee in real-time without any jump cuts so the time is much more accurate. Even if the truck was going 30 mph it still would have taken Groff a whole hour to reach the location of John B and his gang. The fact he is here threatening Kie after just thirteen minutes is impossible. If you can’t get behind the ‘climbing out of the well’ theory, settle for the straight science that proves Groff’s presence in Agapenta can not possibly match up with the time that JJ was returning from retrieving the crown. When Groff releases Kie and gains possession of the crown, JJ and Kiara exchange a heartfelt hug. This is just so incredibly stupid knowing Groff’s past, and it was no surprise to me that JJ got stabbed. Both JJ and Kie lack the common sense to run that I feel most people would have if they were previously held at knifepoint by their boyfriend’s psychotic father.
The number of inconsistencies in Outer Banks, especially in the last episode, is too many to simply ignore. Outer Banks has never been a fantasy show, but the more creative the writers get, the less research they seem to do. I understand that this show is a drama and some elements are added for cinematic effect, but the finale would have been 1000 times better if the writers took two minutes to search Google. So dear reader, do not grieve JJ’s death; grieve for what his death could have been, because we should not be deeming this garbage the “saddest death in cinematic history.”