“Dutton Ranch” star Juan Pablo Raba told TVLine that Joaquin’s phone call to his father would bring heartbreak and devastation to everyone in the “Yellowstone” spin-off’s first season finale — and now that we’ve seen it, we actually think he was putting things mildly.
We’ll get to the rest of the episode in a minute, but first, we’ll begin with the question on every viewer’s mind right now: who shot (and killed!) Rob-Will? The fateful moment occurs at the end of the finale, with Oreana rushing to the Jacksons’ front door after hearing a gunshot, only to discover her father bleeding out on the entryway floor. (We should have known this was going to happen the minute Rob-Will and Oreana finally had a heart-to-heart talk just a few minutes earlier.)
Many viewers will assume that Joaquin pulled the trigger, especially since his father orders him to kill Rob-Will earlier in the episode. But as Raba reminds us, we didn’t actually see the murder take place, meaning Joaquin may be innocent after all.
“When I first read it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how is this going to play out?’ But as I flip through the pages, I don’t see an actual scene where Joaquin kills him,” Raba tells TVLine. “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?”
Though Raba insists he doesn’t know how things will play out in “Dutton Ranch” Season 2, he theorizes that Mariano probably had a “back-up plan” in place, just in case Joaquin chickened out and couldn’t kill Rob-Will. “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?” he asks. “I’m just saying!”
In fact, Raba suggests that whoever committed this fatal act is clearly someone who has done this before. “There was no climax, no discussion,” Raba points out. “This guy literally just opened the door and somebody shot [Rob-Will]. That’s a stone-cold killer if you ask me. Now, is Joaquin capable of doing that? Maybe the heartbreak [of losing the 10-Petal] was too much for him to handle, but I have no idea.”
Raba originally wished we had seen a “dramatic, powerful” confrontation between Joaquin and Rob-Will, but he has since changed his mind about how the shocking moment unfolds. “You can always have the killer revealed, maybe in a flashback, if you need to in the future, but it was much better to leave the possibilities open for a storyline in the second season,” he has decided.
