Tracker Season 2 Premiere Reveals Another Tragic Mystery in Colter’s Past
After a long summer hiatus, CBS’ biggest breakout series of the last year is finally back for Season 2. Tracker debuted its second season on Sunday night, moving to an earlier time slot and (hopefully) drawing more live viewers from the move. Not only does the procedural series return with another clear-cut case for Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley), it also introduces a tragic mystery about the hero’s past that looks set to play a major role in the rest of the season.
Throughout the first season (as well as the Jeffery Deaver book series on which the show is based), the only ongoing mystery revolved around the death of Colter’s father. While that remains unresolved on Tracker, the series has revealed a second ongoing mystery for Colter, this time involving a past case and a love affair.
The first episode of Tracker Season 2 begins with Colter breaking into the home of a man named Frank, looking for some clues before he returns home. When Frank arrives, it becomes clear that he and Colter have a history. Colter interrogates him about a girl named Gina Pickett who went missing 10 years ago. Colter is convinced that Frank had something to do with the disappearance, despite having no real evidence, and he visits the man every year on the same day to try to get information out of him.
So there is a case of Colter’s that has never been solved, and it’s clearly haunting him. He’s spent 10 years trying to close the book on Gina’s disappearance, to no avail. By the end of the episode, we learn a little more about why Colter is so obsessed with finding out the truth about this particular disappearance.
Colter visits a woman who turns out to be Gina’s sister. He promised her that he wouldn’t stop until he found out what happened to Gina, so he keeps looking. The two of them also have a romantic connection. Wanting to “feel something” other than the sadness that engulfed her sister on the anniversary of her disappearance, the woman takes Colter to bed, and it seems like this isn’t the first time they’ve had physical contact. But it’s also very clear that this isn’t some kind of steady relationship.
This sets up a mystery that will likely continue throughout the season, as we get some hints that Frank may be hiding something. In addition to Colter’s hunch about the guy, Frank also has a mysterious bag of dirt sitting in his empty freezer. According to Frank, it’s because he’s been working on the dirt in his backyard, but Colter clearly doesn’t believe that.
Most of Tracker Season 2 will follow a procedural format, with each episode taking Colter to a new case from somewhere in the country. But this Gina Pickett story will likely come up a few times throughout the season, based on the clues left behind in this first season.
After Tracker Season 1 ended, star and executive producer Justin Hartley hinted at a “bigger mystery” that will play out throughout Season 2. Nothing is known at this time, but this Gina Pickett case seems like a good fit.
“When you have a show like this, and you end it in such a nice way, and you wrap all these stories up in a nice little bow, it’s great and wonderful,” Hartley told Deadline. “But we had another season to shoot that we had to do better than Season 1. So… while we wanted to wrap up all those storylines, we also wanted those bows to lead to other questions – bigger, deeper questions – about his past. So I think we did that in answering some of the questions that we’ve been building up over the course of the year. I think we did a good job of making sure that the answers to those questions then lead to a bigger mystery, something that we can solve in Season 2.”
