New season, new daddy issues.

P4L is the mentality of the Pogues in Outer Banks.

They live and die on their side of Kildare Island, taking care of each other, catching waves, and maybe going on a treasure hunt or two — even though Chase Stokes (who plays ringleader John B) would tell you that the Pogues are not avid treasure hunters. “It’s a combination of good luck, right place, right time, and a couple of good things happening,” he tells Tudum.

But what happens when one of your own finds out that all this time … they were actually born a Kook? Yeah, you read that right. At the end of the Outer Banks Season 4, Part 1 finale, JJ (Rudy Pankow), who is perhaps the Pogue-iest of the Pogues, learns that his drunken jailbird of a father, Luke (Gary Weeks), isn’t really his dad. And the woman he thought was his mom? Just one of Luke’s girlfriends. “It was a shock,” says Pankow. “Not a single thought” had ever crossed his mind that JJ might be a Kook. Until Season 4.

“That was the most extreme thing we could think of: That JJ’s actually a Kook,” Outer Banks co-creator Shannon Burke tells Tudum.

So who is JJ’s real daddy? And what’s the status on the Blackbeard treasure hunt that Wes Genrette (David Jensen) tapped the Pogues for way back in the Season 3 finale? Let’s hit rewind on “The Albatross” with the cast and creators to figure out how the hell we ended Part 1 with a full-blown parentage confession.

So exactly how does JJ figure out his dad’s not his dad?

Well, Wes Genrette’s the one who eventually put it together. And before he died (under mysterious circumstances) at the end of Episode 2, he wrote a letter to be delivered to “Master JJ Maybank” in case something happened. Well, good thing he did. The letter encouraged JJ to talk to his father and ask him about “Albatross.”

Well, what the heck is “Albatross”? And wasn’t Luke supposed to be far, far away from the OBX?

Turns out, Luke is hanging out not too far down the shoreline. He’s crashing at his pal Barracuda Mike’s (Justin Matthew Smith), making runs in and out. “Mostly out,” he tells JJ, explaining that he didn’t say he was back because he’s a wanted man and JJ could get in trouble.

At first, Luke plays dumb when JJ brings up “Albatross.” But after JJ helps Luke get away from the cops (yet again) on his boat, Luke loosens his lips and spills the beans that “Albatross” was the name of the boat Larissa Genrette died on years ago. And reveals that she was JJ’s real mom. That means JJ is the grandson of Wes Genrette and Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane) is his real dad. Talk about daddy issues.

Stokes says he always had “this weird thought in [his] brain” that JJ might be a Kook from the beginning. Why? Because “sometimes when people fight so hard for an image, there’s something behind it,” he tells Tudum. But Pankow is quick to add that JJ himself had no idea.

Stokes agrees. “But I always thought, ‘What is the backstory of Luke? Did he come from the other side? Is it like a Kiara (Madison Bailey) situation where her parents are on the other side of the tracks, but she wants so badly to be a part of this world?’ There’s something about that level of intensity of committing to the Pogue mentality.”

Pankow always chalked it up to “JJ coping with his shit hand,” he says.

Does JJ actually believe Luke is telling the truth? Luke has lied to him before.

“Well, you’re always trying to torture your characters, right?” co-creator Jonas Pate tells Tudum. “What would torture JJ the most? The revelation that he’s a Kook.”

All three creators think JJ isn’t handling the news well, but in different ways. Jonas Pate thinks he doesn’t believe it really, at first. “His dad has always been a bit of a scoundrel and he just doesn’t accept it. He thinks there’s got to be an angle here. This can’t be real.” Josh Pate adds, “He’s in total denial.”

And Burke thinks “he probably knows it’s true. I just think that he believes it more than he’s totally in denial, overtly and consciously.”

Speaking of Kooks, who is this new Kook Ruthie (Mia Challis)? And did she actually run over those baby turtles?

“It’s the craziest thing anybody could ever do,” says the Pogues’ resident humanitarian, Bailey. “And then they pretended they couldn’t see!”

All Kiara wanted to do in the midst of their chill day at the beach was rally the Pogues to help a turtle hatch reach the ocean. “It’s not even a big grown turtle! They just got here. They just got here. Give them a chance!” says Bailey. Instead, Topper’s (Austin North) new, sort-of girlfriend Ruthie (Mia Challis) let her road rage override her judgment and charged for the little sea creatures, later calling their murders “the circle of life.” (She clearly didn’t understand The Lion King.)

But it wasn’t all awash at the Pogues’ swell day. Sarah (Madelyn Cline) finally caught a wave. Is she no longer a “noob” though? “She’s still a noob,” Cline tells Tudum. “Noob stands for newbie. She still doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s caught one wave, let’s everyone relax.”

OK, but what about Cleo? She’s been kidnapped!

Yes, Cleo (Carlacia Grant) is kidnapped by the mercenaries who are also after Blackbeard’s treasure — first an amulet, but, now more importantly, the Blue Crown. And the mercenaries have Cleo’s old father figure Terrance (Terence Rosemore) with them as a crew member-for-hire. “We were toying with bringing back Stubbs (Jontavious Johnson), too,” says Josh Pate. Burke says that they still might.

Terrance had no idea Cleo was mixed up in this treasure hunt — and thought she was likely dead. Now that he knows, he wants to protect her as best he can. “When they told me this was happening, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, great. I love Terence. I haven’t seen him since we were in Barbados,’ ” Grant tells Tudum. She was glad Cleo could reunite with a member of her original found family. “She still had feelings about it and wondered about him and cared about him and wanted to know that he was OK.”

But Lightner (Rigo Sanchez), perhaps the most ruthless of the mercenaries, doesn’t care for niceties. When he attacks Cleo in pursuit of the amulet, Terrance jumps in and dies at Lightner’s hand. Devastated and numb, Cleo and the Pogues lay Terrance to rest out at sea, and she vows, “I got you, boss.” She also bemoans how “everyone’s always sorry. Nothing ever happens.”

Grant teases that Cleo carries her pain throughout the rest of the season. “She keeps a lot of her feelings to herself and she changes as a person.” Burke adds that Terrance’s death is part of Cleo’s “bigger arc.”

That’s another father figure gone, if you’re counting. So do the Pogues stop chasing Blackbeard’s treasure for a sec?

This is Outer Banks, what do you think? For one, Cleo wants to go after the guy that killed Terrance who’s also on the hunt for the treasure. And now Pope’s (Jonathan Daviss) figured out that the directions on Blackbeard’s amulet are pointing to a crypt underneath a cemetery in the heart of Charleston. So, to Charleston we go!

Right, so does John B spot a relative of his in the cemetery?

Oh, yeah. If you take a close look at the grave he stops at once they reach the cemetery, you’ll see the name “Routledge Taylor” written on the headstone. Then John B starts having flashbacks of his late dad Big John (Charles Halford).

So this Routledge is John B’s ancestor? Honestly, the creators just wanted to get him in the mindset of remembering his father, because, unlike something his dad would do, John B doesn’t shoot Lightner in cold blood.

But that doesn’t mean Taylor wasn’t his relative. Let’s put a pin in that one for now.

Hold up, John B was going to shoot someone?

Yup. After Lightner attacks Cleo (again), John B goes on the attack. But unlike his dad, who shot someone on a boat right in front of John B last season, John B thinks better of it and reins it in. Not turning into his treasure-obsessed dad is a fear weighing on the fatherless Pogue throughout Season 4.

“There’s a lot of hesitation in John B when it comes to pursuing anything treasure-oriented, and it’s because he’s really battling the fact that he didn’t get the time he wanted with his dad,” says Stokes. “And his memory of his dad is now enshrined in this big giant win of finding El Dorado. But he’s had the realization that his dad was kind of a shitty person. [And] he doesn’t want to go down that path.”

That’s tough. So, do the Pogues find Blackbeard’s treasure in the catacombs or what?

Pope and Sarah end up being the volunteers who go down into the dregs below the church. Lightner and his boss Dalia (Pollyanna McIntosh) are right on their heels, and prove successful in grabbing a secret scroll stowed away in the coffin of Blackbeard’s navigator.

But Pope and Sarah find something else a little more lively — rats!! And we’re talking real rats, not just CGI ones. “It’s called ratacombs for a reason. Those rats are real,” says Daviss.

What? No. Those were real rats?!

Yeah. Production added some extras in post, but Daviss and Cline were swimming in the water with some small co-stars on those night shoots. “One crawled onto my shoulder and was nibbling at my ear at one point,” says Daviss. Cline would personally “like a barrier between me and rats,” she says. “I had a friend growing up who had rats and one of them bit me. So I’ve just been good since then.”

Cline remembers those days of filming before production went on Christmas break as “a nasty, nasty three days. The rats were as stressed as I was, I could tell,” says Cline. “So I didn’t blame them, I just didn’t want to be the one in the way.” Like his character, Daviss was as calming a presence for Cline as Pope was for Sarah in their scenes. “He has this way about him, he’s so good at leveling the situation and moods,” she says.

Daviss became a real rat wrangler. “The rats are trying to escape, and I’m like, ‘Come on, come here buddy!’ giving them to the trainer, trying to be cool about it,” he says. Daviss also saw some of them in their cage before filming and got to hold them for a bit, which he thinks helped. “Shout out to those rats!” he says.

OK, but do Pope and Sarah get out of the crypt?

Um, nope. They’re locked in with the water rising higher and higher. But while their characters are still stuck when the credits roll on Episode 5, Daviss and Cline at least got to go home and wash their matted hair. “The scenes ended up looking awesome,” says Cline. “And we were really, really proud of them at the end of the day — but at the end of the day, not in the middle of the day!”

Watch every episode of Outer Banks now, only on Netflix.