Tracker Boss Unpacks That Season 2 Finale Revelation and What’s Coming for Season 3

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Tracker Season 2 Episode 20, “Echo Ridge.” Read at your own risk!]

Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) could never really leave well enough alone. For over two decades, the self-described lone wolf survivalist was convinced that his estranged older brother, Russell (Jensen Ackles), had pushed their father, Ashton — who had been paranoid about government surveillance and had forced them to live off the grid — off a cliff on a rainy night in the woods.

But over the course of two seasons on the CBS drama Tracker, Colter slowly began to unravel the mystery that had torn his family apart, leading to a devastating family secret that implicated his own mother, Mary (Wendy Crewson).

In Sunday’s Season 2 finale, Colter returns to Echo Ridge, the California town where he grew up, to investigate the disappearance of a local diner owner (Brian Keane). After cobbling together enough information from a series of interviews with locals he has known since he was a child, Colter quickly discovers that the diner owner had been murdered after stumbling upon a child trafficking ring, which had been using the sleepy town as a kind of pit stop. Colter is ultimately able to stop the young victims from being smuggled away late one evening, but he has an even more personal reason for going after Carl Murphy (Shane Leydon), the perp who had killed the diner owner.

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As it turns out, during his investigation, Colter had stumbled upon Carl’s trailer and found a carving of a wolf with the name “Ashton” scratched on the bottom. Under serious threat of 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 heart-pounding final scene, Colter arrives unannounced at Otto’s front door and, once inside, holds Otto at gunpoint, forcing him to confess that he was the mysterious man who had pushed Ashton off that cliff — but only at the request of Mary, who had clearly grown uneasy at the thought of Colter finding out the truth in the present day.

Below, executive producer and showrunner Elwood Reid breaks down how that satisfying cliffhanger sets the stage for Season 3 (which will consist of 22 episodes), why he is committed to further developing the characters on Colter’s team, and why he believes executive producer and star Hartley is the key to the success of Tracker, which is now the most-watched show on network TV.

Justin has spoken recently about how important it has been for Colter to evolve over the course of these first two seasons. He’s gone through a lot of emotional turmoil, and the many lessons he learns on his jobs tend to stick with him. How have you seen Colter’s evolution, and what new layers did you find in the writing of the character this season compared to the first?

Elwood Reid: I think one of the things with Justin as an actor — I say this all the time with him, and I think it annoys him — he does have, I know this sounds weird, that Clint Eastwood element where he doesn’t have to say very much, but there’s a lot there [in a single look]. But then when we do decide to open him up emotionally, he’s got all these gears that are there. I think the show really works well when we keep him stewing on something, and in this season in particular, we started out with this [story] about his past with his girlfriend’s sister going missing and this thing that haunted him [for 10 years], and we got to see how that reflected in his other relationships.

But there’s the big unanswered question from the pilot: What happened with his family? What happened to his father that night? We’ve seen him talking to his sister and his brother, and they don’t quite get the straight answer. Reenie’s asked him about it. Bobby’s asked him about it. I think one of the things that makes this show successful is keeping those secrets pretty well guarded with Colter, so when we do get pieces of them, the audience feels like they’re earned. It’s not just like he’s babbling in therapy every week, because he’s not a guy that talks about his feelings. So when he does, it’s meaningful. We all have, and I speak for myself, messed-up families. Families are complicated, and I think you take that into the world with you, whether you choose to put a mask on or not.

I think Colter’s really good at [hiding] it, but I think there’s something that comes through when he’s talking to these people that he’s going to help. They sense someone who’s a fellow traveler; they sense that there’s a human being behind this good-looking guy that comes through their door and says, “I can help you find your daughter, your brother, your mother, your husband.” Justin does all that intuitively and without asking. You’d laugh if you saw some of these scripts. He has almost no dialogue. We just take it away because I don’t need it with him. He can do it with the look. There’s something internal with him that I’ve not experienced with a lot of the actors I’ve worked with.

What kinds of conversations did you have with the rest of the creative team about this cliffhanger that implicated Colter’s mother in her husband’s death?

Reid: Well, it’s funny. I, like an idiot, had introduced this idea of the box at the end of the first season, and I was like, “God, that f***ing box.” Everyone started asking me about the box! I was like, “I’m going to hate a TV show if, at the end of the day, the secret’s in the box somewhere.” So what does the box represent? The box represents this unknowable mess of your childhood and what made you, and you think that there’s going to be some answer in there, so that’s how I approached it. My discussion with the network and studio was, look, Colter’s a guy that’s lived with his mother the longest. His brother left after their father died. His sister went to live with an aunt and uncle. I think [Mary] thinks [Colter] believes everything that she’s told him. I think in this season you begin to see him question that.

On top of that, when he knocks on that door [at the end of the finale], both of those guys have been waiting for that moment their entire life. You can see that with the actor that plays that. 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. We were [shooting] late at night, up in the middle of nowhere in Canada. It was cold and dark, and Justin only did two takes of that scene. That emotion you see when he pulls that gun and when the guy says that about his mother — that was right in the moment. He wasn’t prepared. If you look at the script, it wasn’t written that way. There was no blocking, there was nothing, and it felt very visceral. So I think that’s the kind of stuff we can continue to mine.

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. 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.

How do you think this dark family secret will further upend Colter’s relationship with Mary?

Reid: I think it’s going to be devastating. Colter suspected that something was not wrong, but something was not right with his mother, and now he’s got confirmation of it. 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? I don’t know. We haven’t gotten there yet [in the writing]. Can you ever forgive her for that? I don’t know. What I do know is that the character of Colter is going to carry that pain around for a little bit longer and carry those questions around, and we’re going to see the other family too, like his brother and his sister, and get to see what they think about what he’s learned.

In the second season, you decided to pair up the other main characters who are part of Colter’s makeshift team — Velma (Abby McEnany) helped Reenie (Fiona Rene) open her own law practice, and Bobby (Eric Graise) joined forces with his cousin Randy (Chris Lee) on the tech side of the show. How did you think about deepening their arcs this season? Is that at all a priority of yours going forward?

Reid: Well, it’s smart of you to say that. I think that if you’re being lazy — which I’m accused of all the time — those [characters] are just “phone-a-friend” people. They just exist to give Colter information. In my opinion, that’s really boring. It’s challenging because the show lives or dies over Justin’s shoulder. He’s so fun to watch, and he’s the center of the show, but we have to plant and grow those other character storylines.

The Reenie world is really interesting because we smashed her up at the end of Episode 19 and we get to see a [new] side of her, and she’s going to be in a kind of weird, unsure, dark place coming into next season. [I’m interested in] seeing the way Colter interacts with that or doesn’t interact with that because he’s a guy that doesn’t open his emotions up very often.

But I think from a showrunning standpoint, we do have to build out those worlds more. And if I don’t build out those worlds, then I think it’s just Colter running around Googling things. I don’t want to do that either, because I think there’s something to be gained by those characters. I thought that episode when Colter was with Randy in Reno was fun because you get to see the two together and you get to see Colter interact with [a main character] face-to-face, which is always good for the show.

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Looking ahead, what unanswered questions will you be looking to answer over the course of Season 3? Will we see the return of any other familiar faces?

Reid: We know at the end of Season 2 that his mother asked this stranger to be up there to talk to the father. We don’t know what about. We don’t know what she told him. I think Colter’s going to ask those questions now. I haven’t written the scenes yet, of course, [or decided] whether she’s going to lie to him or she’s going to tell him the truth. I think both of those things are dangerous. She’s been lying to him his whole life, so I think Colter’s going to take that forward.

As I said, there’s going to be a much larger question about who his father was and who he was involved with that we planted in Season 2. We’re going to come back to that hopefully a little bit with his brother, if we can steal Jensen away. And then there’s some of the characters from [past] seasons that are going to come back and help us learn more about Colter’s past. I think there’s some other older cases that are going to come back. One of the things I’ve pitched to the studio and network is a little bit more of a longer-running mystery arc that ties into one of the cases that was mentioned in Season 2. I won’t give it away, but there’ll be a hanging mystery that we’re going to continue to explore.

Justin, from what I understand, seems to have a lot of ideas about where this story could go. He recently told me about this potential arc about how Colter could be accused of murder and trying to solve that murder while on the run from the authorities.

Reid: So many story ideas! [Laughs.] Because the show is not formulaic, that’s what makes it hard, but there’s no rules. I don’t have to do anything [in particular]. It’s not a cop show. It’s not a legal show. It’s not a medical show. It’s not a private investigator show. We can take the show anywhere we need to. I think that’s what’s fun about the show — taking it in different directions every week in different worlds.

The procedural format has become so widespread on television — it seems like every broadcast network’s drama slate will be made up exclusively of procedurals next season. The genre itself is extremely versatile but can also feel constraining, but you have somehow found yourself at the helm of the most-watched show on network TV for two years in a row. To what do you credit the overwhelming success of the show, and how have you and the rest of the creative team attempted to create your own spin on the network procedural?

Reid: You must be in my writers’ room. Whenever someone uses the procedural word in the room, I’m like, “It’s not a procedural!” [Laughs.] It’s an emotional procedural, in some weird way. But I think that what procedurals normally have is a motor — there’s going to be a dead body, and then they’re going to go talk to this person. Then they’re going to talk to the boss. Then they’re going to go home and talk to people at the bar. I don’t have that.

I think as far as the appeal of the show goes, it’s a different thing every week. I think that as much as Justin probably hates this, he’s a mysterious character. He’s the stranger that comes into town every week and he holds a little bit back. But at the same time, he’s an emotionally accessible person. He’s going to help you because there seems to be a real genuineness and earnestness and an old-fashioned element to the show — which is what I think has resonated with people — because he’s not a cop, he’s not a private investigator, he is not a lawyer. He doesn’t have a soapbox. He’s a guy who comes and says, “I can help you find your loved one. I can help you put this mystery to bed.” That’s what makes it appealing. A lot of that is Justin, and it’s not necessarily in the writing. It’s just in the way that he says, “I can help you.” I think that’s what makes the show — knock [on] wood — interesting.

When you’re writing the show, it never feels cookie-cutter. There’s always these shows where you can go to page 12 and you have to do this — and I’ve done those shows; I’ve written many of them. This show is not that. I think that’s what makes it both interesting and really hard to write. But I think that’s what keeps people guessing each week. It doesn’t seem like the same old, same old. So it looks and kind of smells like a procedural, but it’s something different.

All episodes of Tracker are now streaming on Paramount+.