With its premiere, Tracker season 2 seemed to put itself in a difficult position regarding its plot, and the most surprising thing is that it didn’t need to put itself in that position. Tracker season 1 was incredibly successful for CBS; according to the network, it was their most successful original show in years. Part of that success was due to the interesting premise, following “reward-seeker” Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) as he hunts for missing people, but it was also due to Tracker’s compelling cast of characters, both main characters and one-offs in each standalone episode.
One of the stand-alone characters viewers loved about Tracker was Jensen Ackles’ Russell Shaw, who reappears in Colter’s life with a new case for him and the revelation of their father’s mysterious death years ago. What happened to their father and why he was killed was the big mystery of Tracker season 1, and the show barely touched on it. However, Tracker season 2 has introduced another unsolved case that seems poised to take over the entire story.
Introducing a storyline that will clearly span more than a few episodes, if not the entire season, isn’t a problem in itself. The problem is that Tracker already has one of those: the aforementioned mystery of what really happened to Colter and Russell’s father. The mystery surrounding their father’s death was established at the very beginning of Tracker season 1, with numerous flashbacks to their childhoods, including the climactic moment when Colter finds their father, Ashton, dead at the bottom of a cliff and looks up to see Russell standing at the top of the cliff, leading Colter to believe that Russell pushed their father and caused their years-long estrangement.
Introducing a storyline that will clearly span more than a few episodes, if not the entire season, isn’t a problem in itself. The problem is that Tracker already has one of those: the aforementioned mystery of what really happened to Colter and Russell’s father.
While Russell’s return to Colter’s life has finally cleared up his suspicions, the larger question of who killed their father and how much their mother, Mary Dove, knows still remains. It’s been established that their father was a smart man who disappeared off the grid, apparently after a run-in with the US government or other powerful figures. It’s a complicated mystery that will take time to solve, but introducing the new storyline about his ex-lover’s missing sister will certainly draw attention away from it.
It’s possible that this storyline was introduced because the writers chose to continue the mystery surrounding Ashton’s death only in the Tracker season 2 episodes that Jensen Ackles’ Russell Shaw appeared in. If that’s the case, it’s understandable that they’ll need a separate storyline for Colter to fill the void left by Russell’s absence. That might be a bit disappointing, though, since it’s unclear how many episodes Ackles will appear in. We know he’ll be in more than one episode, but we don’t know how many more. If there are only a few, at that rate, the mystery of their father’s death could take years to unravel, a frustratingly slow process.
If Tracker season 2 doesn’t put aside the romance between Gina Pickett and Camille Pickett or the Ashton Shaw mystery, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to do so and still use the case-of-the-week format that worked so well in the first season. It’s almost impossible to devote enough time to each mystery to advance their stories in a meaningful way without putting aside, or at least cutting back on, some of the one-off episodes and their cases. This is a problem that often plagues weekly procedurals with longer arcs in their second and later seasons, when a show bites off more than it can chew too early and abandons its premise to the show’s detriment.
However, Tracker season 2 has two notable points. One, it’s twice as long as season 1, with 13 episodes. Considering that it was CBS’s biggest hit in years, it was inevitable that the second season would have a larger episode count than the first, and the fact that season 2 has a full 22 episodes gives the show more time to devote to longer story arcs. Two, the showrunners have mentioned in previous interviews that they have no intention of creating any Tracker spinoffs at this time, as they want to focus on season 2 without falling into the trap of having their focus pulled in too many directions, leading to a slightly less-than-stellar quality.
That’s not to say that Tracker’s writers won’t deftly balance both larger mysteries with the episodic storytelling format that has been so successful with audiences. However, it’s surprising that the show even dabbles in this potential issue in the first place, since it never had to. The missing sister storyline comes out of nowhere in Tracker’s season 2 premiere, as does the sudden revelation of his ongoing affair with
