SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 3 premiere of CBS‘ Tracker.
Tracker returned Sunday night, and it appears Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) will have his hands full in Season 3 of the CBS missing persons drama.
The premiere episode opens with Colter starting a brawl in a small town bar after another patron disrespects the bartender. He is quickly backed up by his brother Russ (Jensen Ackles), who turns up just in time after having been sent to find Colter at Reenie’s request. It turns out Colter went a little MIA after finding out that their mother knew more about their father’s death than she was letting on.
In the Season 2 finale, Colter discovers that the man he’d been searching for, Otto, was the one to push his father off that cliff — not Russ, as Colter had suspected for many years. Otto tells Colter that he’d been summoned by their mother to break the news to their father Ashton that she’d be leaving him and taking the children with her. When Ashton reacted terribly, well, he got pushed off that cliff.
The real kicker, though, is that their mother let Colter suspect Russ for all these years even though it hurt the brothers’ relationship for so long.
“There’s not even an excuse he can think of that would warrant that kind of behavior,” star and executive producer Hartley tells Deadline of Colter’s mom’s lie by omission.
Before the brothers can get too deep into their familial drama, Reenie calls asking for help with a new case that leaves them mired in a much bigger conspiracy than they had anticipated. In the interview below, Hartley breaks down the Season 3 premiere and teases what’s in store for the remainder of the season.
DEADLINE: What would you say are some of the big themes for Season 3?
JUSTIN HARTLEY: It’s sort of his journey to find an inner peace with his family…because, it’s been years, and he’s been misled and misdirected in terms of who’s responsible for his father’s death and how crazy his father really was. What he was into, if there’s a government conspiracy and all that kind of stuff. Now, he finds out that his mother knows more than she let on, which is not a huge shocker, I guess, that his mother lied to him, but that’s a pretty crazy story. The fact that his own mother knew that he blamed his brother, and she let him do that for a while. It kept the brothers apart, and that’s really disappointing. So just [Colter’s] quest to find some inner peace with all of that. I don’t know if you can ever move on from that, but I think the more answers he gets, it’ll help him get there.
DEADLINE: How would he start to make sense of this idea that his mom let him blame his brother for his dad’s death for so long?
HARTLEY: Well, I think he’s trying really hard to wrap his brain around any kind of reason, anything that would make sense, and he’s struggling to come up with anything at all that would make sense. So that’s where his main struggle is. There’s not even an excuse he can think of that would warrant that kind of behavior. So, I mean, I guess it could be that she was trying to protect him, but protect him from what? From his own brother? We’ll unpack that in Season 3, and we’ll get some answers there as well.
DEADLINE: Colter and Russ seem to be at odds with how to handle things going forward. Russ wants to let it go, and Colter needs more answers. How might that impact their relationship?
HARTLEY: I think there’s a mutual respect there. I think Colter understands that his brother is never going to be this dog with a bone guy that Colter is. I think Russell also understands and respects that Colter just doesn’t tick that way. He needs to get to the bottom of this, and he’s going to, if it takes forever. So maybe they’ll help each other out in that regard. Maybe Russell will help him a little bit with his thing, knowing that that’s not the way Colter’s brain works, and Colter will have a better understanding of the fact that his brother doesn’t operate in the world that way. So there’s room for both ways of going about things.
DEADLINE: It seems like they have a more immediate problem on their hands with this case they’ve gotten involved in. What can you say about where they’re going next in that regard?
HARTLEY: So at the end of the premiere, they get the texts one text after another. Russell was like, ‘Hey, we got we’re done. Let’s move on.’ And in keeping with that theme of Russell being able to just sort of leave things behind and move on, and Colter not being able to, once they get that text, it’s like, ‘Yeah, see, we are not at the end of this.’ We are at the beginning of this. We’re right in the middle of it now, and now they’re after us now. We got to figure out what the hell this is, because we’re wrapped up in this so deep. Now we have no choice. There’s no way we can escape, even if we wanted to. So they will have to dive deeper into it and get to the very bottom of it in order to get order to get themselves out.
DEADLINE: Have you thought about why Colter seems to be someone who can’t let things go the way his brother can?
HARTLEY: I think some people are just wired differently. I like to get to the bottom of things. I know people in my life that are more like, ‘Well, I don’t care.’ I just think sometimes it comes down to the simple fact that people are just wire differently.
DEADLINE: Reenie has become more and more involved with Colter’s cases over the past two seasons. What can you say about their relationship this season?
HARTLEY: She went through a lot there at the end of Season 2 with her boyfriend and the kidnapping and all that stuff, so she’s got to deal with all that trauma. I think we’ll find that Colter starts sensing there might be something up with her, a little bit, in terms of how she’s coping with all of that stuff that happened to her. He’s not going to let her suffer alone. He’ll be there for her in whatever way he can. So that’ll be an interesting dynamic that we haven’t seen before.
DEADLINE: Should we expect Sophia Pernas back as Billie this season?
HARTLEY: Yeah, she’ll be back. She comes back in a little bit. I’ll be working with her in few weeks, I guess. She comes back in a big way. She’s got a really cool thing that she’s helping Colter with.
DEADLINE: How do you feel like you’re expanding the universe this season as you’ve settled in with two seasons under your belt?
HARTLEY: We have some pretty cool characters that are going to be mainstays on the show. We also have some characters coming back that we’ve seen in the past, favorites that we’re going to see pop back up. What I would like to see is what Randy does when he’s not working. I would like to see a little bit of that. I’d like to see what Reenie is doing when she’s not working for Colter. We dive into that a little bit in Season 3, which I think will be fun for her and fun for the audience as well.
DEADLINE: What about Colter’s personal life? Will we see more of his life outside of chasing leads?
HARTLEY: I hope a little bit more. I think that would be great. We do a little bit, but I would root for a little bit more of that. I always love character work and [exploring] what makes people tick. What sort of makes me tick is thinking about that. So, I would hope a lot more of that, actually.
DEADLINE: What else can you tease about the rest of the season?
HARTLEY: Well, we’ll dive deeper into some of the family background stuff with his mom and her involvement with his dad’s death. He finds out a little more here and there throughout the season and is able to unpack that a little bit. He finds himself in a situation at a certain point in our season where he’s the one being hunted, which we haven’t seen before. Usually, he’s the one that’s looking for something. That he actually is the one that’s being hunted for a little bit here in the season, I think that’s a pretty cool turn that I think the audience will really enjoy.
Tracker airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
