Warning: Outer Banks season 3 spoilers ahead. Once a pogue. Always a pogue. If you’ve shipped them from the first season, you may be asking yourself: Does Sarah cheat on John B. in Outer Banks season 3 and are they still together?
Outer Banks, which premired on Netflix in 2020, is a action-adventure drama that follows a group of teenagers from the Outer Banks of North Carolina as they search of a lost treasure. The show’s main romance is between John Booker Routledge—a “Pogue” from The Cut, a working-class area of the OBX—and Sarah Cameron—a “Kook” from Figure 8, a more upper-class area of the region. Throughout the show, fans have seen John B. and Sarah meet, fall in love and escape danger together. But will they stay together?
Read on for what we know about if Sarah cheated on John B. in Outer Banks season 3 and if they’ll end up together.
Does Sarah cheat on John B. in Outer Banks season 3?
Image: JACKSON LEE DAVIS/NETFLIX.
Does Sarah cheat on John B. in Outer Banks season 3? The answer is yes. Sarah cheats on John B. in the middle of Outer Banks season 3 after they get into a fight, and Sarah leaves The Cut (the working-class area of the OBX where John B.’s family and other Pogues are from) and goes back to Figure 8 (the upper-class area of the OBX where Sarah’s family and other Kooks are from). When she returns to Figure 8, Sarah runs into her ex-boyfriend, Topper, who offers to take her to a party with their old friends, who are a safe space for her. After a romantic moment, Sarah and Topper share a kiss and spend the night together on the beach. “I remember reading the script and choking a little bit because in the past season she’s gone through a really crazy physical adventure, and then this year has kind of been a big emotional ride,” Madelyn Cline, who plays Sarah Cameron, told InStyle in February 2023. “Obviously, she’s got daddy issues, relationship issues, and family issues, so [I] just try to make them as real and relatable as possible and approach it with as much empathy as I possibly could.”
Cline also explained why Sarah cheats on John B. in an interview with Entertainment Tonight in February 2023. “I was so scared about this storyline because I felt that inherently wasn’t in Sarah’s nature,” Cline said. “I wanted to make it feel like ultimately she was so lost and so confused. John B has been Sarah’s home, and she gets kicked out of that home, figuratively, so where does she go?” She continued, “She has nowhere to go. She’s kind of on her own. It’s just hard, you tend to go toward a person who will welcome you. I think that’s a very human thing and it’s complicated, just like any relationship.” Chase Stokes, who plays John B. Routledge, also understood why Sarah cheated on his character. “Cheating is never warranted, but John B does her dirty too,” he said, referencing how John B. reacted in his argument with Sarah.
In an interview with W magazine in February 2023, Cline revealed that, while she didn’t agree with Sarah cheating on John B., she understood her decision. “I want to get one thing straight: Cheating is not acceptable under any circumstances,” she said. “I had a hard time when I first read this arc for Sarah, and I had extensive conversations with our writers about it. It wasn’t necessarily where I saw Sarah going, and for me, it contradicted everything that we’d built up in the past couple of seasons, so I definitely had a bit of a moral dilemma.”
She continued, “But I’m also not my character, and my job is to portray my character with as much empathy and understanding as possible. So I spent a lot of time, obviously, not trying to justify it, but trying to approach it: ‘Why would Sarah do this?”’ There’s a little part of her that dies with Ward, but I think a little part of her died when she realized that family can also be chosen. When you go through big changes, as she has in her life, there are little parts of you that you say goodbye to and little parts of you that die. She’s given up her family, she’s given up a lot of her friends, she’s given up her whole life to be with this newfound family. And when they get back to the Outer Banks, we see this new arc where she realizes, ‘I don’t have anywhere to go outside of John B. or the Pogues, and now I’m high and dry,’ because she’s being gaslit by John B., she has nowhere to stay.”
Cline explained that Sarah’s “comfort” with Topper was one of the main reasons she did what she did. “When you’re sitting there and the life you’ve chosen is showing up empty-handed for you, it’s natural and very human to find something that gives you comfort—and something that gives you comfort is something that’s familiar,” she said. “Even if it’s a part of her that has been dormant for a while, or that she has said goodbye to, there are still people who are welcoming her with open arms, and those are her old friends. That, I think, is where this [lapse in judgment] can come from. She’s mourning the loss of parts of herself. … So her whole arc this season, I think, is picking up the pieces and confronting past versus present, and it’s very internal.”
Austin North, who plays Topper, told Entertainment Tonight why he doesn’t think Sarah’s love triangle with John B. and Topper is “healthy.” “I don’t think any of it is healthy,” he said. “I think [Sarah’s] torn in a way. She finally realizes that everything [Topper] has done that seems controlling is all out of love for her.” He also told Entertainment Tonight that he thinks it’s time Topper “move on” from Sarah.
Despite the infidelity between Sarah and John B., Cline told Entertainment Tonight that she still thinks the Sarah and John B. will end up together. “I think they will,” Cline said, to which Stokes added “I like to think so.”
Cline also described Sarah and John B.’s relationship in Outer Banks season 3 as an “emotional roller-coaster” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time. “I mean, look, it’s not boring, that’s for sure,” she said. “It’s been a joy portraying this enemies-to-lovers, forbidden-lovers storyline. It is quite a journey this year, again. We really drove the point home of choosing family, and also relationships and friendships are hard and sometimes it gets messy, but you still care, you still love hard.” Stokes also described John B. and Sarah’s relationship as a “wild ride.” “Love isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to be something that comes naturally. Part of me wants to continue down the road of peace for John B and Sarah, but if there’s anything we know about this show, it’s that it’s going to take you for a wild ride. They’re definitely, yet again, going to be tested, and hopefully the fans understand it through the lens of what they’re going through and the circumstances that they’re put under.”
Though Stokes and Cline agree that Sarah and John B. will end up together, the two broke up in 2021 after a year of dating. “Mads and I have been working together now for 30 episodes, and we made a promise to each other before we even started dating that the work was always going to come first,” Stokes told Entertainment Weekly. “And that no matter what happens in our personal lives, and the ways that life sometimes takes you in different directions, that we’re always going to honor the work. That stayed 100 percent truthful this season.”
Cline added, “We had a working relationship before we had a personal relationship, and our job from day one has always been to leave the show better than we found it.”
Outer Banks is available to stream on Netflix.
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