After a long summer break, CBS’ biggest breakout series from the last year has finally made its return for Season 2. Tracker debuted its sophomore season on Sunday night, moving to an earlier time and (hopefully) picking up more live viewers from the move. The procedural series not only got back to business with another open-and-shut case for Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley), but it also introduced a tragic mystery to the hero’s past that looks to play a major part in the rest of the season.
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WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the Tracker Season 2 premiere! Continue reading at your own risk…
Throughout the first season (as well as the Jeffery Deaver book series the show is based on), the only ongoing mystery revolved around the death of Colter’s father. While that still hasn’t been solved on Tracker, the series revealed a second ongoing mystery for Colter, this time connected to a past case and a love interest.
The Tracker Season 2 premiere starts with Colter breaking into the house of a man named Frank, looking for some kind of clue before the guy comes home. When Frank arrives, it’s clear that he and Colter have a history. Colter interrogates him about a girl named Gina Pickett, who went missing 10 years ago to the day. Colter is confident that Frank had something to do with the disappearance, though there hasn’t been any actual proof, and he’s been visiting the man every year on the same day to try and get something out of him.
So there’s a case of Colter’s that was never solved and it is clearly haunting him. He’s been spending 10 years trying to close the book on Gina’s disappearance, but to no avail. At the end of the episode, we learn a little more about why Colter is so obsessed with finding the truth about this specific disappearance.
Colter visits a woman who turns out to be Gina’s older sister. He made a promise to her that he wouldn’t stop until finding out what happened to Gina, so he remains on the hunt. The two of them also have something of a romantic connection. Wanting to “feel something” other than the sadness surrounding her sister on the anniversary of her disappearance, the woman takes Colter to bed, and it doesn’t appear to be the first time they’ve been physical with one another. But it’s also very clear that this isn’t any kind of steady relationship.
This sets up a mystery that will likely continue to unfold over the course of the season, as we got some hints that Frank could be hiding something. In addition to Colter’s gut feeling about the guy, Frank also had a mysterious bag of dirt sitting in his otherwise empty freezer. According to Frank, it’s because he’s getting work done on the soil in his backyard, but Colter clearly doesn’t buy that.
Most of Tracker Season 2 will follow the procedural format that sees each episode bring Colter a new case from somewhere in the country. But this Gina Pickett story will probably pop up a couple of times throughout the season, given the breadcrumbs that were left behind in this premiere.
Following the end of Tracker Season 1, star and executive producer Justin Hartley hinted at a “bigger mystery” that would unfold throughout Season 2. There’s no telling just yet, but this Gina Pickett case seems to fit the bill.
“When you have a show like this, and you end it in such a good way, and you wrap up all these stories in a pretty little bow, it’s cool, and it’s great,” Hartley told Deadline. “But we have a whole other season to shoot that we have to make better than Season 1. So…while we wanted all those storylines wrapped up, we also wanted those bows to sort of lead to other questions- bigger, deeper questions — about his past. So I think we did that in answering some of these questions that we had built up all year. I think we did a good job of making sure that the answers to those questions then lead to a bigger mystery, something that we can unpack in Season 2.”
