Red Dead Redemption 2 Dutch: The Slow Collapse of a Leader

Red Dead Redemption 2 Dutch van der Linde opens the game as the most persuasive man in the American West and closes it as something much smaller. Benjamin Byron Davis plays him, in the same performance-capture role he held in the 2010 game.

What he believes at the start

Dutch does not see himself as a criminal. He sees a corrupt system and a frontier being fenced in, and sells his gang a way of living outside both. That pitch is why people follow him, and why "I have a plan" keeps working long after the plans stop.

What breaks him

• Blackwater. The ferry job goes wrong before the game even starts, and the gang spends every chapter afterwards running rather than building.
• Losses. Sean, Lenny, Kieran, and above all Hosea — shot by Agent Milton during the Saint Denis bank robbery — remove every voice that talked him down.
• Micah Bell. Micah spends the back half of the game feeding Dutch suspicion of Arthur and John. The epilogue reveals why: he was the informant.
• Bronte. Drowning Angelo Bronte and feeding him to an alligator is where Dutch's violence stops being strategic.

Where he ends up

At Beaver Hollow he walks away from Arthur rather than help him. Eight years later he appears at Mount Hagen during the hunt for Micah, shoots him without a word of explanation, and leaves again.

The point of him

Dutch ends up indistinguishable from Colm O'Driscoll, the rival he defined himself against — not because he was lying, but because a man who cannot admit the plan has failed will burn everyone who believed it.