What is so great about a show like Tracker is that it can explore various genres without feeling like Colter Shaw’s (Justin Hartley) adventures are getting either too out of hand or stretching beyond belief. Because of the show’s basic premise — “rewardist” travels the country collecting rewards for missing people — there is a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the sorts of stories a network series like this chooses to tell. Thus far, the series has explored the world of government espionage, gritty serial killers, and even cult behavior. But in this week’s “The Mercy Seat,” Tracker took a dark turn to become a twisted survival thriller straight out of a backwoods horror flick. To be honest, the show should do this more.
‘Tracker’ Raises the Stakes With Its Twisted Survival Thrillers. While “The Mercy Seat” was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, the episode threw Colter and his buddy Roger McLaren (Diego Klattenhoff) head-first into the Montana wilderness as they search for a pair of girls who went missing. Things quickly go from bad to worse when the weather picks up and, after first finding said girls, they encounter a group held up in a cabin. The problem is that this is a group of killers led by the deranged Father Ammon (Sean Bridgers), who has been on the loose in the mountains for (at the very least) a decade. Because of this, one victim, a woman named Amelia (Ariana Guerra), has been their captive for nearly a decade, being beaten, tortured, and God-knows what else in all that time.
“The Mercy Seat” is a pulse-pounding thriller that takes Tracker to new heights, going beyond the standard procedural formula we’re used to seeing and raising the stakes on every level. It’s a fantastic episode of television, and one that gets under your skin as you hope and pray that Colter will rescue these girls from each new danger in time. One aspect that works particularly well here is the elemental horror, which becomes a major factor as the snow storm picks up, stranding our hero in the wilderness with no way to call for help. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a network television series that’s willing to actively work in snowy conditions, but the weather is a major factor (arguably its own character) in this episode.
Without it, the suspense and immediate threat in the first half (not to mention the tension that builds as a result of Colter being “off-grid”) wouldn’t quite work. But a good horror story only works if the threat is more real than simply bad weather. The introduction of Ammon and his deranged family turns the dial up to eleven as Colter and these girls are forced to endure this fresh hell that will soon use and abuse them. It’s an inspired way to elevate this story from your standard survival fare into something far more intricate and deadly, and it works quite well. Of course, this is not the first time that Tracker has strayed into horror territory. Season 1’s “Aurora” leaned into the psychological horror subgenre with Maeve Price (Bronwen Smith), a murderer who locked a teenage girl in a closet for three years before Colter found her. Likewise, the following episode, “Into the Wild,” introduced a horrific mob enforcer played by Peter Stormare who feels like something out of a Friday the 13th-inspired slasher.
‘Tracker’s Premise Lends Itself to Horror. The truth is, many episodes of Tracker are borderline horror stories. The entire Season 2 arc surrounding the abduction of Gina Pickett (Lina Lecompte) by the serial killer known as “The Teacher” (Nicholas Lea), which comes to a head in “The Disciple,” feels like a dark mix between a Silence of the Lambs-inspired psychological thriller and a straight-up horror story. Including villains like Peter Storemare’s Valtz character or The Teacher into the Tracker canon opens the door for far more horrific possibilities in the future. Possibilities that, frankly, deserve to be explored more regularly. Given that many who have disappeared without a trace could be said to have been kidnapped or worse, the real-world terrors that Colter encounters almost daily would naturally explore the darker side of human nature. For Tracker to ignore that would be disingenuous, so to lean in further and dive into those stories is the only natural conclusion.
Horror is a genre that has the unique ability to explore the darkest aspects of humanity while saying something meaningful about them. Admittedly, not every horror flick does just that (and certainly other genres have this ability as well), but the way that Tracker frames these tales, there is always a choice for someone to succumb to that darkness or to reject it. In the case of “The Mercy Seat,” what makes this Tracker hour so compelling isn’t simply the unbalanced mountain family who torture and abuse their victims, but Amelia’s part in it as an unwilling participant who chooses to reject those she has been stuck with for nearly a decade. It’s a harrowing picture that Tracker paints here, but one that it manages.
