Spoilers below for Dutton Ranch’s Season 1 finale for those who haven’t yet streamed it via Paramount+ subscription or watched it on Paramount Network, so be warned!
Ahead of Dutton Ranch’s first seasonal capper, titled “El Padrino,” it was pretty clear that another big character would be killed, and I’ve been waiting for Jai Courtney’s Rob-Will biting a bullet or two for weeks now. So imagine how joyfully I clacked my heels together mid-air upon seeing that the Ten Petal’s most irresponsible employee/heir was put out of everyone’s misery. But it’s what we didn’t see that had my antennae up until the credits: the actual murderer.
The episode laid out one clearly telegraphed way for Rob-Will to meet his maker, with Raoul Trujillo’s Mariano Reyes ordering Juan Pablo Raba’s Joaquin to kill his wayward brother. But as Raba pointed out to US Weekly, at no point do we as viewers see Joaquin pulling any triggers. What’s more, the actor says at no point in the episode’s script is there an “actual scene where Joaquin kills” his sibling rival. As he puts it:
You see Joaquin in a car with a gun, and a lot of doubt and heartbreak. He’s not getting pumped to do something that he’s never done before. All we see is Joaquin in his car giving some hard thought to something. And then we see him later, in the same car with the same gun … but did he do it?
That's what I'm saying! I don't think Raba's performance indicated that Joaquin was only feeling doubtful about killing Rob-Will. In a vacuum, I think he'd relish that act for hours on end, so maybe his angst was more like, "Damn, I'm supposed to shoot. him when all I really want to do is cut off his limbs and leave him for wild animals." Maybe not fully that either, but closer to it than the other.
What I took away from those moments while watching, and then thinking about it afterward, is that Joaquin knew how killing Rob-Will would affect his placement within the Jackson side of the family. His whole goal here was to take over the ranch, and being responsible for the current boss' death isn't the best way up the ladder. Beyond that, I think his worried looks were also anticipating how Mariano would react to him not taking Rob-Will out.
So who would have done it if not Joaquin? Juan Pablo Raba makes it clear in the interview that he has no direct knowledge of what will happen in the already renewed second season, which recently set Benjamin Cavell as the new showrunner. But he did offer up his own conjecture about it, and I think it sounds right on the (dirty) money.
If you’re Mariano, and you’re saying [demeaning things] about your son, and then you tell him to go kill his brother, wouldn’t you also send someone to make sure things have been done? I’m just saying!
I wouldn't be that surprised to find out Mariano himself was the one holding the gun as Rob-Will's big dumb body hit the ground. But it's more realistic to think he sent his bodyguard henchmen out to make sure the deed got done.
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Despite having theories about Joquin's innocence, which could very well be just a biased take from an actor, Raba says he loves that the lead-up to the death was left up to viewers' imagination. It lends a sense of mystery to what was an inevitable outcome, regardless of what the outcome will be.
Maybe security camera footage will reveal that Rob-Will needlessly pulled his gun out to threaten a Ten Petal employee and then dropped it on the ground, and a squirrel ran through the room and tripped over the gun's trigger, and that's how he died. Now I guess there's nothing more for me to do today than to keep thinking up undignified ways for Jai Courtney's character to get snuffed.
