Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) is back on the case. After Tracker debuted earlier this year as the most-watched new show on network television, the hit CBS drama about a lone survivor who uses his expert tracking skills to help solve mysteries across the country is returning for a 22-episode second season that promises to answer the burning questions raised in the final minutes of the first season.
The last time viewers watched Colter, he learned a heartbreaking secret from Lizzy (Jennifer Morrison), a close family friend whose daughter he had just tracked down. Lizzy told Colter that, shortly before his father Ashton died under mysterious circumstances, he had an affair with Lizzy’s mother. After her mother’s death, Lizzy found a box of Ashton’s research papers and journals in a box under her bed. Lizzy sent the box to Colter’s sister, Dory (Melissa Roxburgh), who neglected to mention, in her last meeting with Colter, that she had their father’s belongings.
The revelation is enough to rattle Colter, and he’s now forced to question everything he thought he knew about his father’s death and how much he can trust his surviving family members. But instead of opening the new season with Colter “crossing the line” about his father’s affair (and his mother possibly knowing about his infidelity), executive producer and showrunner Elwood Reid wants to put the main character through a big personal case that has become a thorn in his side.
“What we’re building is that he has a case that’s haunted him for 10 years. It’s something that’s haunted him. He never solves it, and we meet a woman who he’s connected to that case,” Reid told TV Guide at the Television Critics Association press tour in July. “You’ll see how he deals with the pain and the mystery of not being able to solve that case in the first episode. He doesn’t always show emotion on the outside, and it comes out in a different way, and I think that’s the trick and the challenge of writing this character.”
Executive producer Ken Olin — who developed the series, based on Jeffrey Deaver’s The Never Game, from scratch with Hartley — says the creative team always wanted to portray Colter as a classic male hero with “a very contemporary psychological backstory” that made him feel more emotionally accessible.
“One of the things I’ve found that’s been really cool about Colter, as he’s developed or as Elwood has portrayed him, is that we’ve given him a really complicated dysfunctional family,” Olin says. “What Elwood has done is create a character who doesn’t have any self-reflection tendencies. It’s like in the classic movies. He’s not a self-reflection character, but he’s clearly a caring character. He has all these skills that he’s trying to put into place. He uses those skills to help people, [whereas] his father’s tendency is to just want to go off the grid [and not trust anyone].”
Titled “Out of the Past,” the first episode of Season 2 will see Colter investigating the disappearance of a missing family whose car was found abandoned on the side of a road in the Arkansas backwoods—an investigation that will draw him into the world of organized crime. At the same time, Hartley said, the character “takes a little longer to figure out his next move” after feeling betrayed by his own flesh and blood. “It’s a weird game that he has to play while he’s taking on all these jobs,” Hartley said.
“At the beginning of Season 2, we don’t know where Colter is, and he’s doing some things that are a little bit strange,” Hartley, who also serves as an executive producer, added. “Is he working, or is he doing leisurely activities? And then even after you figure out what he’s doing, there’s still the question: Why is he doing this?”
