John Dutton Is A Dunderhead

[Sgt. Saunders]

Someone recently posted an article, citing all of the times that John Dutton, the Dutton family patriarch, really fouled things up.

I think my favorite screw-up was right after John's unfailingly charming and lovely daughter, Beth, was beaten to within an inch of her life (and also with Beth's young office assistant shot point-blank in the face) by two thugs sent to her office in town by the evil Beck brothers.

Fortunately, Rip "Macho Man" Wheeler arrived in the nick of time and knocked off the two hitmen.

Okay, John Dutton now knows that literally everyone in the Dutton family is at extreme risk of being killed by the nefarious Beck brothers. So, one night right after Beth's close shave with death, John is having dinner with his young grandson (son Kayce's little boy) at the ranch. As the little boy is enjoying his ice cream for dessert, John tells him to first go out to the stable and feed the little boy's new horse before eating his dessert.

Of course, the grandson goes out into the stable at night by himself and proceeds to get kidnapped by one of the Becks' henchmen.

When Kayce and his pretty wife, Monica, return to the ranch to pick up the boy, he's nowhere to be be found. Rip and the rest of the cowboys in the bunkhouse immediately go out to find the boy and finally realize that he's been kidnapped by the Beck brothers.

John's immediate reaction is, "Why wasn't anybody around to watch the boy as he fed his horse?" Yeah, like it was THEIR fault that the little boy got kidnapped instead of pig-headed, not to mention block-headed, John Dutton's own fault.

Maybe John was having a "bad-hair-day," what with John's seemingly omnipresent cowboy hat he wears and, when he's not wearing that ostentatious hat of his, John's all-too-obvious rug were just too tight around his head, causing John to use bad judgment?

In any event, John Dutton is NO sage and circumspect Ben Cartwright, that's for sure. (And, Ben's toupee was much less noticeable, imo.)