Who is the villain of Red Dead Redemption 2? The West that is ending
Micah betrays, Dutch falls apart, Colm takes revenge and Cornwall pays for the manhunt. Behind all four stands an enemy with no case file: 1899.
(Spoiler warning: this article gives away the ending and the epilogue.) If you want a name, the villain of Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018) is Micah Bell: the traitor who sells out the gang from within and the antagonist the story closes on. But the game has another villain, harder to hate and more important: Dutch van der Linde, the leader who ends up destroying his own people without ever ceasing to believe he is a good man. He is the tragic villain. Outside the gang wait the others: Colm O'Driscoll, boss of the rival gang; Leviticus Cornwall, the tycoon who pays for the manhunt; and the two Pinkerton agents who run it, Andrew Milton and Edgar Ross.
The first chapter already warns you that the answer has a catch. Spring 1899, snow over Colter, an abandoned mining town. The gang is on the run from a botched job in Blackwater, and Dutch, instead of lying low, announces they are going to rob a train. Hosea Matthews objects: the man who owns that train is no joke. It is Cornwall. Rockstar's official synopsis says it plainly: in 1899 the end of the Wild West era has begun, and lawmen are hunting down the last outlaw gangs. The villains have names. The enemy in the background is an era coming to a close.
// The suspectsFour villains and an agency
Micah Bell — the traitor
He is the poison of the story: he sows distrust, pushes Dutch toward his worst decisions and, in Chapter 6, Agent Milton reveals that Micah is the one who has been informing for the Pinkertons. His case file reads him through left realism: the predator who devours his own gang. He is also the game's last enemy: in the epilogue's final mission, “American Venom,” John Marston hunts him down, Dutch shoots him and John finishes him off. Full case file.
Dutch van der Linde — the tragic villain
The founder and father figure of the gang, the man who talks about loyalty and freedom and keeps repeating “have faith” and “I have a plan.” Every job was going to be the last, and every death was someone else's fault: his case file reads him through Sykes and Matza's techniques of neutralization (1957). His fall begins with a sincere ideal, which is why it hurts more than Micah's: he ends up betraying the very people he swore to protect. Full case file.
Colm O'Driscoll — the old war
The boss of the O'Driscoll Boys is the antagonist of the first chapter and the shadow that follows the gang all the way to the sixth. Dutch killed his brother; Colm answered by killing Annabelle, the woman Dutch loved. In Chapter 3 he offers a truce that turns out to be a trap, and in Chapter 6 he dies on the gallows in Saint Denis. His logic is the code of the street: revenge does not mend the dead, it warns the living. Full case file.
Leviticus Cornwall — the new order
A tycoon in oil, railroads and sugar. After his bonds are stolen he starts paying the Pinkerton agency to wipe out the gang, and he never fires a gun in the whole game: contracts, letters and checks are enough. In Chapter 6, on the Annesburg dock, he orders Agent Milton to forget the law and bring him Dutch, brushes off the representative of the striking miners, and dies from a single shot fired by Dutch. His case file reads him through green criminology. Full case file.
Milton and Ross are the law on a private payroll: Milton dies in Chapter 6, shot by Abigail Marston, whom the Pinkertons had captured; Ross survives, and his story continues in the first Red Dead Redemption (2010). And in the middle stands the protagonist, Arthur Morgan: not the villain, but not the innocent either. He robs, kills and beats debts out of people for Dutch until terminal tuberculosis forces him to take stock.
Micah Bell
Read Micah Bell’s full case file · Left realism →
// The theoryDurkheim and the year the frontier closed
In 1893, Émile Durkheim published The Division of Labor in Society and named an ailment of societies that change too fast: anomie, from the Greek a-nomos, “without law.” It does not mean that written laws are missing. It means that the norms telling each person where the limit lay have loosened, and the new ones do not regulate anything yet. Among his examples were industrial crises and the clash between capital and labor. In Suicide (1897) he took the idea further: without norms to contain it, human desire has no ceiling, and the lack of regulation strikes in ruin as hard as in sudden prosperity.
That same year, 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis in Chicago, starting from a finding of the 1890 census: there was no longer a frontier line to draw on the map of the United States. Neither man was talking about the other, but they were describing the same vertigo. Red Dead Redemption 2 takes place six years later, in the gap between a world that is ending and another that has no room for the people who lived in the first.
The gang has a code; the world no longer recognizes it
Durkheim's anomie does not describe people without norms, but people whose norms have stopped working. Dutch's gang has its own: loyalty, blood debts, robbing those who have, looking after those inside. They were rules for a West where the law arrived late or not at all. In 1899 it arrives, and it arrives with a contract: the railroad, the refinery, the detective agency paid by a tycoon. The new order has no room for outlaws, and the old one no longer holds them up. What is left in between is a normative void, and each character fills it in his own way.
Read this way, the villains become a map. Dutch is the unbridled desire of Suicide: always one more job and a retirement that keeps receding; nothing tells him “enough,” and when the world does, he hears it as betrayal. Micah is the void taken to its end: no old code and no new one, only the every-man-for-himself creed of a man who calls himself “a survivor”, which is why he moves through the collapse better than anyone. Colm clings to the old rule, retaliation. And Cornwall is the order that is arriving, the anomie of 1893 in its purest form: capital against labor, with striking miners on his own dock and the law on his side for as long as it suits him.
The counterpoint is Arthur. When everything around him loosens (the gang, Dutch, his own body), he does what Durkheim considered indispensable: he looks for a limit. He does not find it in the law but in a debt to those who will go on living, and he spends his last days helping John Marston's family escape. He is the only one who, in the middle of the void, regulates himself again.
Red Dead Redemption 2
The villains have names; the enemy in the background is a world that changed the rules without telling the people who lived by the old ones.
// The answerSo who is the main villain?
To settle the argument: Micah Bell, the traitor, the informant and the last man the game asks you to shoot. If the question is who embodies the tragedy, it is Dutch, because the story is built around his fall. Colm is the villain of the first act; Cornwall and the Pinkertons are the force that drives everything else. And behind all of them stands the antagonist with no case file: 1899, the end of a West whose rules no longer protected anyone.
// The flawThe end of the West does not pull the trigger
Anomie is a condition, not a trigger: Durkheim studied rates, not persons, and stretched too far the concept explains everything and nothing. Turner's thesis, for its part, has been disputed by historians for decades, who fault it for telling the story of the West without the peoples who already lived there; the game, with the Wapiti tribe harassed by the army while an oil company covets their land, seems to know it. Above all, the same collapse runs through the whole gang, and not everyone responds the same way. Micah chose to sell out his own. Dutch chose, again and again, another plan over a reckoning. Colm chose Annabelle as his target. Cornwall chose to pay for the manhunt.
Nor were the victims the West in the abstract: Annabelle, Kieran Duffy, the Wapiti, the miners of Annesburg, Arthur himself. The normative void explains why that era turned out men like these so easily. It does not explain why each of them pulled the trigger he pulled. At KRIMINIS we put it in three words: explaining is not excusing. Arthur lived through the same end of an era as Micah and chose the opposite.
Three key takeaways
- The main villain of Red Dead Redemption 2 is Micah Bell, the traitor who informs for the Pinkertons and the final antagonist of the epilogue. Dutch van der Linde is the tragic villain; Colm O'Driscoll, Leviticus Cornwall and Agents Milton and Ross are the enemies from outside.
- Durkheim's anomie (1893, 1897) is the loosening of norms during change that comes too fast. The game takes place in 1899, when the outlaws' code no longer works and the new order of railroads and oil leaves them no room: Dutch is unbridled desire, Micah the void, Colm the old rule and Cornwall the new one.
- Anomie explains why the era produced villains, not why each one chose what he chose. Arthur lived through the same collapse and looked for a limit: explaining is not excusing.
Sources · further reading
- Durkheim, É. (1893). De la division du travail social. Alcan.
- Durkheim, É. (1897). Le Suicide: étude de sociologie. Alcan.
- Turner, F. J. (1893). “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Paper read to the American Historical Association, Chicago. In Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (1894).
- Sheridan, W. (August 9, 2018). “'Red Dead Redemption 2': Wild West comes alive in new video.” UPI. https://www.upi.com/Red-Dead-Redemption-2-Wild-West-comes-alive-in-new-video/5661533828840/
- Rockstar Games (2018). Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar Games.
// Quick challengeWhich theory best explains Micah Bell?
Frequently asked questions
Who is the main villain of Red Dead Redemption 2?
Micah Bell. He is the gang member who betrays it by informing for the Pinkertons, which is revealed in Chapter 6, and the game's final antagonist: in the epilogue's last mission, “American Venom,” John Marston hunts him down. Dutch van der Linde is the tragic villain of the story, and outside the gang there are Colm O'Driscoll, the tycoon Leviticus Cornwall and the Pinkerton agents Andrew Milton and Edgar Ross.
Is Dutch van der Linde a villain?
Yes, although he does not look like one at first. Dutch is the founder and leader of the gang, talks about loyalty and freedom and presents himself as a man of principle, but over the course of the game he robs, lies, kills and ends up betraying the very people he swore to protect. Sykes and Matza's techniques of neutralization (1957) explain his fall well: every crime is the last one, necessary and someone else's fault. He is the game's tragic villain; Micah is the antagonist.
Who is the rat in Red Dead Redemption 2?
Micah Bell. In Chapter 6, while Arthur Morgan and Sadie Adler are trying to rescue Abigail Marston, Agent Andrew Milton reveals that Micah has been talking to the Pinkertons. Milton dies right afterward, shot by Abigail. Micah does not answer for it until the epilogue.
What does Durkheim's anomie have to do with Red Dead Redemption 2?
Émile Durkheim used the word anomie (1893, 1897) for the void that opens when a society changes so fast that its norms stop regulating behavior. The game takes place in 1899, at the end of the Wild West: the outlaws' code no longer works, and the new order of railroads, oil and private agencies leaves them no room. Each villain responds to that void in a different way, but anomie explains the era; it does not excuse what each one chose to do.