When Tracker goes dark, it goes really dark.
Tracker is inherently grim, centering on Colter Shaw trekking across America to find missing people and things. Still, hope threads through each episode.
When you start an hour with a whole family being murdered, though, it’s hard to feel any kind of hope.
Tracker Season 3 has had some really intriguing cases as a collective, and Tracker Season 3 Episode 17 was one that will definitely stick with you.
Tracker typically excels at these intense installments.
Sometimes Tracker can get a little too overzealous and complicated, with too many red herrings and too much crammed into a network time slot.
Although I missed Reenie, this was one of those episodes that needed every single minute dedicated to the case and to the search for Tori.
When the opening minutes played out like a horror film, I knew we were in for a time, and that was evident in the brutality and overall creepiness. The killer’s slow steps and rhythmic whistling playing as the background to Tori’s fear was one of the creepiest scenes this show has ever tackled.
Even if you knew that Tori would get snatched up from underneath that bed, it was still a shocking moment, and a jumpscare, even for seasoned horror fans.
A triple homicide means a lot of police activity, and if there was ever a time for Colter to sync back up with an officer for a case, it would be this one.
Where that was more or less the case often in earlier seasons, Colter has been more lone wolf than usual this season. He’s barely even checking in with the police most weeks, let alone teaming up with them.
The Sheriff, not wanting him snooping around, made sense because that kind of murder would be a big deal in any small town or city. But lucky for Colter, he made a friend with Special Agent Temple, because she was way more taxed with stopping a serial killer than playing law enforcement politics.
Temple’s profiling skills complemented Colter’s knack for spotting overlooked clues, making them an effective team.
The killer was clearly someone who had chosen this family to target, but why not just kill Tori as well? That didn’t make sense to me, and without Temple, Colter would have had a much harder time with this one because the motive didn’t exactly sync up.
Temple was able to paint a picture of who this person could be, and the fact that they often took the family’s daughters as trophies, torturing them for a day or two, meant something. But what?
The killer taking Tori instead of Julie was a break from his pattern, and when someone as meticulous as a serial killer breaks from the norm, then that means they did something on the fly.
Improvisation will trip up even the most careful killers.
When Colter and Temple found the path out to the road, it seemed like the mistake. How many times have we seen Colter get the right camera angle to blow a case wide open?
The RV driving by at the right moment and the owner having a rap sheet felt a little too convenient, as did the bloody knife being found so easily.
Straight away, I believed Nelson when he said he was being framed, though it would also be a very Tracker thing for them to find the killer quickly, but then have to spend the rest of the hour finding the victim.
Ultimately, Colter and Temple both believed that Nelson may not have been a stand-up citizen, but the kind of killer they were working with is probably the kind of person to frame someone, as opposed to leaving the bloody knife in his home.
So, the killer covered their tracks with the camera footage and found a suitable man to frame, but they didn’t account for anyone making the connection to the knife.
It’s always a super small thing that will trip up even the most well-prepared bad guy. And all you need to do is give Colter an inch, and he’ll take a mile.
When Colter went to that massive compound alone, I knew it was going to go badly. It’s very rare that Colter is outmatched, and he wasn’t even necessarily outmatched, but outwitted this time.
This killer was a hunter, and hunters are known for their tactile, patient nature. The killer would have his compound well insulated, covered in cameras, and probably equipped with a lot of other technology, so he was never going to come out guns blazing against Colter.
A smart person lures their prey in and then pounces on them, and that’s exactly what they did.
I am suspicious of everyone introduced in a Tracker episode, because you just never know. But sometimes the bad person turns out to be a random person we don’t meet until the very end.
The hairdresser, being a stone-cold killer, was absolutely not on my bingo card.
The hairdresser laid the perfect trap for Colter, and he fell right into it. The way he talked to Colter, he didn’t so much explicitly state his motive as much as he just proclaimed himself some kind of martyr, ridding the world of people like Julie and Tori, who were apparently rotten to their core.
You don’t always need someone detailing out the exact reasons why they’re a terrible person and why they’ve committed the crimes they have, but I wish we got a bit more insight into the motive aside from throwaway lines that didn’t do much to tell us why he had to kill two parents and torture their daughter outside of talking about “the waste” these girls were leaving behind.
There was a bit of a lack of clarity with this one, though, when you think about it, that’s awfully true to life.
Sometimes there isn’t a reason. People are just evil, do evil things, and that’s just that.
Colter’s kill count has been a recurring topic this season, and he added another one here in brutal fashion.
That man (did he have a name?) was going to kill Temple, so he had no choice but to act, but I feel like it’s become such a talking point that I have to mention it every week.
In the end, perhaps the most emotional moment of the hour was that conversation between Colter and Temple, because even though they found Tori and they stopped the hairdresser from killing and terrorizing another family, that wouldn’t bring anyone he had already killed back.
This was a really tough one, and while it didn’t nail everything, Tracker is at its best when covering these disturbing hours that are hard to shake.
These hours are not always comfortable or hopeful, but they’re undeniably effective.
Tracker Notes
- Missed you, Reenie!
- They need to stop breadcrumbing us with Shaw family drama just to drop it again. We are running out of episodes!
The dark, twisty cases are usually among my favorites, and this was no exception.
Let me know what you guys thought in the comments below!
You can watch Tracker on Sundays at 9/8c on CBS.
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