Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) has spent most of his adult life helping private citizens and law enforcement agencies across the United States solve all kinds of mysteries, but the self-described lone wolf survivalist uncovered a shocking secret about his own family history in the Season 2 finale of Tracker. The hit CBS drama, whose first two seasons were among the most-watched on network television, will return later this month for Season 3, promising to deliver some much-needed answers to questions that viewers — and Colter — have had all summer long.
Tracker Season 3 release date
The third season of Tracker will premiere Sunday, Oct. 19 at 8/7c on CBS. While most viewers tend to watch their favorite shows on streaming these days, the first two seasons were a massive hit for CBS in the post-Sunday Night Football time slot, so it comes as little surprise that the Eye Network is looking to employ the same strategy this coming season. New episodes of Tracker will be available on Paramount+ the day after they air on CBS.
How did Season 2 of Tracker end?
Over the course of two seasons, Colter slowly unravelled the mystery that had torn his family apart, leading to a devastating family secret that implicated his own mother, Mary (Wendy Crewson). Since he was a teenager, Colter had been convinced that his estranged older brother, Russell (Jensen Ackles), had pushed their father, Ashton (Lee Tergesen) — whose paranoia about government surveillance had forced their family to live off the grid — off a cliff on a rainy night in the woods.
In the Season 2 finale, Colter returned to the sleepy California town where he grew up to investigate the disappearance of a local diner owner. Colter discovered that the diner owner had been murdered after stumbling upon a child trafficking ring, which had been using the small town as a kind of pit stop on the terrifyingly elaborate network. Colter was thankfully able to stop the young victims from being smuggled away late one evening. But during his investigation, Colter had stumbled upon the trailer of Carl Murphy, the perp who had killed the local diner owner, and found a carving of a wolf with the name “Ashton” scratched on the bottom.
With Colter threatening to do serious bodily harm, Carl revealed that he had gotten that carving from his uncle Otto Waldron (Alex Fernandez), who had helped the Shaws live off the grid by installing their wind turbines. In the final scene of the season, Colter arrived unannounced at Otto’s front door and held Otto at gunpoint, forcing him to confess that he was the mysterious man who had pushed Ashton off that cliff — but only at the behest of Mary.
Speaking to TV Guide about that heart-pounding final scene, showrunner Elwood Reid explained that a large part of the second season — in between all of the individual cases of the week — was about Colter beginning to question all of the stories that his mother had told him leading up to his father’s death.
“On top of that, when he knocks on that door, both of those guys have been waiting for that moment their entire life,” Reid said of that tense confrontation scene between Colter and Otto. “You can see that with the actor that plays [Otto]. He’s been waiting to give his confession to Colter, and he’s telling the truth there. I don’t think Colter, when he knocked on that door, thought he was going to get that answer, and you see it in the moment. … That emotion you see when he pulls that gun and when the guy says that about his mother — that was right in the moment.”
Needless to say, there will be a lot of questions that need to be answered in the third season. “There’s also an Easter egg that we planted in this season that just because we know who was up there on the cliff with his father that night doesn’t mean we know what was going on in that family,” Reid teased. “To date myself, the whole movie Citizen Kane is about how complicated anyone’s life really is. I don’t think Colter’s ever going to have all the pieces to figure out what went wrong in his family, but he’s going to ask those questions. That’s what’s fun.”
Tracker Season 3 trailer
In September, Hartley revealed the trailer for Tracker’s third season on his Instagram.
