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.
Everything you need for fall TV:
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.
Are Velma and Bobby leaving Tracker?
Yes, after Teddi (Robin Weigert) was written out between Seasons 1 and 2, TV Guide can confirm that Eric Graise (who played tech whiz Bobby Exley) and Abby McEnany (who played Teddi’s estranged wife Velma) have exited the show before Season 3. Reid told TVLine that those exits will be explained in the premiere — Velma has left to be with Teddi, while Bobby “seized on a good opportunity” — but the showrunner said the door is open for them to return at some point.
In their absence, Chris Lee, who debuted in Season 2 as Bobby’s cousin Randy, will continue to recur.
Will Jensen Ackles return to Tracker in Season 3?
Yes! Despite filming the final season of The Boys, leading the new Boys spinoff Vought Rising, and promoting his just-cancelled series Countdown, Ackles somehow had enough time this past summer to fly back to Vancouver — where he famously shot all 15 seasons of Supernatural — to guest star in the first two episodes of Tracker‘s third season.
“Justin and I chopped it up pretty good when [Colter] reveals the new knowledge that he has to Russell, and Russell is now having to absorb that. How is that going to affect their relationship? How is that going to affect Russell moving forward? What are we going to see from them?” Ackles told Variety in a recent interview timed to the Countdown (now series) finale. “You’ll obviously see the camaraderie between the two brothers that I think people enjoy, but now that we have this new information about our family, is that going to bond them further, or is it going to drive more of a wedge between them?
“I think it’s a fun thing to play that Justin and I both really, really enjoyed, and Elwood [Reid, who previously worked with Ackles on Big Sky] likes writing for the two of us,” Ackles continued. “We did a scene — it was one scene — and I think it was like eight-and-a-half minutes long, and I was like, ‘What are we doing here? I’m not used to this! I’m not used to six-page scenes of just dialogue, just two guys just cutting it up. I was never on This Is Us. That’s Justin. I don’t do this kind of stuff. Give me a hammer!'”
Tracker Season 3 cast
With all of the cast turnover in the first two seasons, viewers will likely be wondering who is still on this show. There are currently only two confirmed series regulars remaining:
The recurring cast will include Wendy Crewson as Mary Dove Shaw, Jensen Ackles as Russell Shaw, Chris Lee as Randy, and Alex Fernandez as Otto Waldron. Even though Melissa Roxburgh is currently leading the second season of NBC’s The Hunting Party, viewers shouldn’t be surprised if Colter and Russell’s sister, Dory, comes for a visit as well.
What else do you know about Tracker Season 3?
Looking ahead to the show’s third season, Reid told TV Guide in May that this dark family secret will further upend Colter’s relationship with Mary. “Colter suspected that something was not wrong, but something was not right with his mother, and now he’s got confirmation of it,” he said. “But the bigger question is, if you look back to the pilot, his father wasn’t a very stable or nice guy. So I think that’s a question he’s going to take into Season 3: What were the forces acting on my father to put him in such an extreme place that my mother asked this guy to help her? … Can you ever forgive her for that?”
Here are the synopses for the first three episodes of Season 3:
Episode 1: As Colter grapples with the shocking truth surrounding his father’s death, Russell joins forces with his brother to help track down the missing wife and daughter of one of Reenie’s clients. Their reunion finds them mixed up in a chain of events involving a sinister underground operation known as “The Process.”
Episode 2: After discovering they’ve disrupted a sinister underground operation called “The Process,” Colter and Russell must race to find the source behind these chained events and end it once and for all.
Episode 3: On Halloween night, when a nurse is murdered and arsonist Heston Koontz disappears from a psychiatric facility, Colter follows a trail of unsettling clues to uncover the truth with assistance from local officer Dundee (Derek Richardson).
Is Tracker based on a book?
The drama series is based on The Never Game, the first book in a series by Jeffery Deaver. (The TV series was originally titled The Never Game.) The Never Game was published in 2019 and is the first in a series of four books centered on Colter Shaw. The other three books are The Goodbye Man (2020), The Final Twist (2021), and Hunting Time (2022).
Previous coverage of Tracker
You can read TV Guide’s Season 2 finale interview with showrunner Elwood Reid here.
Where can I watch Tracker?
Tracker airs on CBS and can be streamed on Paramount+.
