‘Tracker’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Missing Hikers Lead Colter Shaw to More Mysteries
This week, Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) goes on a quest to find some friends from college on Tracker and ends up finding a new father. In Episode 6 Season 2, “Trust Fall,” directed by Tracker past and future guest star Jennifer Morrison, the past, present and future come together on a camping trip gone terribly wrong. The episode opens with a seemingly harmless drunken campout in Washington State’s Snoqualmie National Forest. Monica (Holly Curran) and Jason (Jean-Luc Bilodeau) tease their friend Sam (Dejon Loyola) about being a lightweight. They dance to The Cranberries’ “Time Is Ticking Out” and reminisce about old times. Even when Monica suggests to Cooper (Andres Velez) that they take a moonlit hike to a waterfall to sober up, it doesn’t seem too scary. Cooper is a little upset and hesitant, but maybe it’s because he’s grown up and doesn’t party anymore.
The next morning, however, all four are missing, and the newest member of the group, Lauren (Ashley Wong), hires Colter to find out what happened. Lauren missed the first night of the camping trip to attend a company dinner and arrives to find her friend’s tent abandoned and covered in blood. Everyone but Sam also left their phones behind, which is definitely a red flag. In a rare moment of judgment, Colter remarks that hiking drunk “isn’t the greatest life choice” – okay, Mr. Goody Two Shoes!
Bobby (Eric Graise) looks up the mildly suggestive information and finds that Sam has a criminal record for drunken and disorderly conduct. Could he have done something to the other three? It seemed like it, so Lauren called the police. But then Colter found Sam injured not far away. He claimed that he had missed his hike because he had fallen down a hill and was unconscious. He also said that he had heard a gunshot, and Colter determined that it came from a shotgun. Our reward-seeking hero believed Sam’s story. It was nice to get a sense of Colter’s character and confidence. Just minutes earlier, he had asked Lauren if Sam, a man she had recently befriended, could be dangerous and violent. Then he not only left her alone with him, but demanded that she take him to the hospital in her car. Luckily, Sam was not a threat in this situation and did not attack Lauren, but what if?! The lesson of this story is clear: this group of friends did not deserve someone as good as Lauren.
Deeper into the woods, Colter meets a retired Tacoma cop named Keaton (Brent Sexton). The two of them are different sizes. Colter knows he’s not the gunman he’s looking for, which impresses Keaton. The old man is a different kind of stalker—or so he says. He tracks the phases of the moon, and last night was a Super Blue Moon. As he explains to Colter, there’s a reason this particular moon brought him to the area. Back in the day, Keaton was never able to catch a potential serial killer in the area who killed him during this rare astrological event. The two of them team up to find out who fired the shotgun in the woods. They bond over unsolved cases that haunt them years later. Colter mentions the disappearance of Gina Pickett, whose wedding anniversary he “celebrated” with her sister in the Season 2 premiere of Tracker. At the end of the episode, Keaton offers to revisit the mystery. Colter doesn’t mention the man with the bag of dirt he harassed in Episode 1, but he does mention that Gina works at Hot Topic and that the sisters live near the Ozarks. It seems like this won’t be the last we see of Keaton on Tracker. But before that, Colter helps Keaton track down the man with the shotgun. Here’s another clue. Colter manages to avoid getting shot by simply saying, “No, don’t point that thing at me” — impressive! Turns out he’s a mentally ill genius named Marcus Wilson (Haig Sutherland), who lives isolated from the outside world under the delusion that the woods belong to him. Interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to the campers’ location. Marcus admits that he decided not to kill the hikers because, he says, the hikers were pretty determined to kill each other. He fired the gun because he felt like it. Pointing to a photo Colter had of the campers, Marcus informs him that Monica and Jason had held Cooper at knifepoint before running away together.
