[Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers for Episode 9 of Season 3 of Tracker.]
In the midseason finale of the CBS series Tracker, entitled “Good Trouble,” Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) helps Keaton (Brent Sexton), an ally who he not only has an affinity for but who has earned his respect, with his former partner, which unexpectedly reveals a conspiracy that puts them both directly in the line of fire. Dead bodies, torture, a crime boss, and an assassin all spell danger that ultimately leaves Colter and Keaton with their lives hanging in the balance. And viewers will have to wait until Season 3 returns with new episodes for answers as to whether Keaton is still alive and Colter makes it out unscathed.
After watching the episode, Collider got the opportunity to chat with showrunner Elwood Reid who discussed the decision to leave viewers with a cliffhanger, digging deeper into the hitman, the bond between Colter and Keaton and how they’ve wanted to get him more involved in the story arc, balancing darker and more intense cases with the straight Tracker stories, that Hartley was the one to insist that Colter knows how to hot wire a tractor, the chances viewers will see Italia Ricci’s character again, and that we’ll be getting some more answers about Colter’s family.
When Season 3 of ‘Tracker’ Returns, Viewers Will Get Answers About That Cliffhanger
"What the best cliffhangers do is put the lead characters or people you care about in really bad situations."
Collider: You are literally leaving everyone hanging in the balance at the end of this episode, and viewers are not going to find out what happened until March. Obviously, the tracker will most likely live to see another day on Tracker, but we don’t know what happened to Keaton and we don’t know how this is going to play out. Are you a big cliffhanger guy? Were you thinking about how to leave people gasping at the end of this episode?
ELWOOD REID: It’s funny you asked that question. As a cynical writer, I’m like, “Of course, he’s going to live.” But what the best cliffhangers do is put the lead characters or people you care about in really bad situations, but it’s about when they come out of it and how they get themselves out of it. To me, that’s why you do a cliffhanger, because you get the gold of putting your character in an extreme situation. He’s in extreme situations a lot. He screws up. He gets injured a lot. He meets people that somehow sometimes get the best of him. I think that’s what makes it fun, putting the audience in a situation where they go, “Is he real badly injured? How’s he going to get out of this? Is Keaton dead or alive?” Those are all useful tools to get to the back side. We pick up the next episode right away, right after the crash, and you get to see some weird shit happen.
A lot of weird shit happens in this entire episode, and it keeps spiraling. You have cops that are maybe corrupt and mobsters and a hired assassin. What are we going to see when this does resolve? Does a case like this weigh heavier on Colter Shaw?
REID: We’ll get to it in the back, but he does end up saving somebody that needs to be saved and there are some interesting reveals about the hitman. When Colter’s car crashes over that cliff, who does he call to get out of that? The fun part of the show is trying to tell a story that doesn’t feel like it uses all the usual tropes. The hitman has a surprising reason why he’s doing this stuff, and you’ll learn that [when the series returns], which I thought was really fun. He comes face to face with the guy, so that will be fun.
The way this show is set up, it’s not possible for Colter to just hang out with Keaton. They don’t live in the same place, and this show is constantly moving. But this case does hit so close to home for Keaton that it actually feels like a good way to give us more backstory on him and help us get to know him a little bit better. Was that something you also thought about as a way to give us more of him?
REID: When you’re writing shows, you never know when you bring a character onto the show whether they’ll have any stickiness with the audience. Because of the case that Keaton was brought in on, that was really, really personal to Colter, which I thought was really interesting, I think there’s some goodwill of the audience towards Keaton. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we were trying to put Keaton in the office to be a private investigator with Reenie. Colter said, “Hey, I met this really great cop. He’s retired and he’s got nothing to do.” It was a way to close a loop on that storyline and maybe dangle that possibility of Keaton was to live. That’s the way we backed into that thinking. Keaton is a character that we, since last season, have talked a lot about. I thought those episodes were really intense, with him hunting down the guy that killed Colter’s old girlfriend, so they’ve got this bond that’s there.
Keaton Was a Character Designed to Reappear in the ‘Tracker’ Universe
"We do like it when [Colter] has repeat customers and we see him with the same people."
Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw holding his cell phone while standing with Brent Sexton as Keaton in Tracker
When did you realize that was a character that would be coming back? Was it fan response? Was it watching Justin Hartley and Brent Sexton together?
REID: I do get swayed by that sometimes. From a writing standpoint, Colter’s always alone, so it’s hard. We do like it when he has repeat customers and we see him with the same people. So, last year, we designed the character, in success if this guy pops and if the actor delivers, to be somebody that would live in our universe. We’re trying to slowly expand the Tracker universe a little bit, just like we did with Russell, his brother, and we’ve done some of their characters. If you’ve paid attention to the backstory of his father, he goes and sees a guy at the gun range that has a connection to his father. It’s just trying to build out that more arced out storytelling. We’re episodic, half the time. But we had always hoped that if Brent came on and nailed that role, that he’d be somebody we’d see again. And then, of course, the devious writers are like, “Fuck, we’ll shoot him and put them over a cliff, and see what happens.”
It feels like since the beginning of this series, the cases have also gotten darker and a bit more intense. Have you just learned what ways you’re able to push things further, and what you’re able to get away with, the deeper you get into the series?
REID: Just letting you inside the writers’ room a little bit, because of the way Justin plays the character, he’s very intense and very emotional. We’ve tried looking for a lost car or a lost baseball card, but it feels like it belittles his skills for him to be doing that. We do find moments of humor. The way we have been modulating the episodes, like with the girl that was missing for a year, that was a really emotional episode because the bad guys weren’t necessarily that bad. They had good intentions. And then, you got to see him reunite that little girl with the mother, which I thought was really powerful. We’re always just looking for what stories pay off emotionally. Sometimes we just do the creepy stories too, but we can’t do that every week because that’s too intense. We try to mix and match our tones.
The one serial killer episode we did this year had two very funny characters that were the investigator guys. It’s a way to bring a little bit of light and dark in, and we have to keep mixing it up. There’s also the very straight Tracker stories, like people who are lost in the woods or lost somewhere in a city, and he just goes and finds them. That’s a perfectly great episode of Tracker. With the tool we have in Justin, he’s best when he feels emotionally connected and committed to finding this person and getting a good result. We’ve also tried having him search for bad guys, but that doesn’t work either because you don’t want him to rescue the bad guy. It’s a testament to how much earnest emotion that Justin’s brought into this character. I think when the audience tunes in, the stories are going to have stakes and they’re going to have sympathetic victims. That’s part of the formula for why this show works.
Do you also have to think about the fact that because Colter is alone so much of the time that there’s only so many things that he can have the skills for? Who knew he could hot wire a tractor?
REID: That’s a funny story because I wrote that scene. I’ve worked around heavy equipment and usually people just leave the key hidden somewhere. And it was Justin’s pitch to be like, “No, I want to hot wire it.” I was like, “Are you sure? It’s going to be raining. It’s going to take a long time to shoot.” He was like, “No, it’s so cool off if his dad taught him how to do that.” That was his pitch. It was fun.
When he is someone who spends his life searching for answers, is there something fun about the same guy not having answers about his own family? It’s the one thing he just keeps failing at.
REID: That’s what drives him. What makes it interesting is when here’s this guy who’s really good at understanding the situations and the mystery of why someone disappeared and is delving into these backstories, but the one thing he cannot crack is his past. We’re getting into it. If you’ve watched the season, we’ve been slowly picking away at that. And towards the end of the season, we’re going to culminate in some more reveals about what happened when he was a child. I think that’s what makes him tick. We’ve also spent a lot of time with this idea that’s Justin’s idea too, that he’s a lonely guy that we see driving around the country in this Airstream, contemplating this great mystery with his family. So, when he goes into these families that are under stress and distress, he says, “I’m going to help you.” That’s his therapy, and it works every time. One of the working theses of the show is that here’s this guy that can fix all these other things, but he can’t fix this mess in his past.
You also have to figure out how much to reveal and when to reveal it.
REID: I have these conversations with Justin all the time. He’ll be like, “No, he’s a lone wolf.”
In episode seven, you introduced Italia Ricci’s character, and it certainly seems like that won’t be the last that we see of her. Did that episode feel like a bit of a tease for that character?
REID: Yeah. It’s funny you bring that up because that was a character, when we started to design her, where we thought about what would be a fun character that, if the actor works and is amazing, she could call on Colter again, but to try to do something good. That was interesting because he knew she was a bad person, but he also acknowledged that she had skills. I thought that scene was so good between those two. They both just really underplayed it in a really interesting way. That’s a character that we want to bring back. We talk about that character all the time. Justin has crazy pictures about that character. Don’t ever ask him.
‘Tracker’ Showrunner Elwood Reid Is Always Trying to Get More of Jensen Ackles on the Show
"My dream is to try to have a show with Russell."
Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw standing on a house porch with Jensen Ackles as Russell Shaw in Tracker
When it comes to Russell Shaw and Jensen Ackles, it’s fun to watch what he does with that character because it just always leaves viewers wanting more. There’s something about the brothers together that’s just so fun. Would we see him pop up more often, if Jensen was more available, or do you think it works so well because you keep people wanting more with that?
REID: My dream is to try to have a show with Russell. It would be so much fun. I don’t want to make any promises, but we want him whenever his schedule allows. He made the mistake of texting me and I casually asked him what his life looked like. He was like, “I’m finishing something.” I was like, “What do you mean? Are you going on vacation?” And he was like, “No.” I said, “Can I steal you for two days?” And he said, “Let me see what I can do.” I think he had 12 days days off, in between finishing Countdown and going to The Boys reboot. I took eight of those days, and he gave them to me. He was such a gentleman about that. It was a two-parter. He took his only time off and came and did our show. That just shows you what kind of guy he is. He’s just a really great guy. Anytime that I can steal him, I might grab him. I’m not done yet. Believe me, I’m about ready to text him after the holidays, see if I can get some time with him.
There’s a fun humor that’s inherent in him and he seems like one of the only people that can really poke at Colter without there being much that he can do about it.
REID: They have so much chemistry. It was so funny because you never know, when you bring in two Alphas like that, whether they’ll mix. Justin just never breaks character, and Russell is always trying to bust him a little bit. The chemistry those two have was instant. From the minute I saw them together, I knew it was going to work. You just never know. It was magic. It just worked. You get lucky like that in your career where you just hit on some chemistry like that.
It feels like the same thing watching Reenie and Randy together. Even though we love both of them, I would imagine you also don’t quite know how that’s going to work until they’re in the room together.
REID: That was very intentional. These guys were never in the same room together, so it was always phone calls. You can only do so much Zoom calls. We took a gamble and moved Chris Lee’s character, Randy, in there, and it worked. And once we saw that it worked, we built the storyline so that he was always there. He’s such a physical actor that to shrink it down to a phone call, and then you get to see him interacting with Fiona [Rene], who plays Reenie, they’re really fun when they play together. The more I’ve done this, I’ve learned that you just don’t know until you’ve seen it. It’s always a gamble. With the stroke of a pen, I could take the character out of there. But Chris and Fiona knew it would be a lot more fun to have scenes with each other physically. And then, it allowed us to bring the Mel character in there to try to fill out that workspace a little bit. It’s just fun stuff. From a writing standpoint, it is really tedious to script phone calls.
Tracker airs on CBS and is available to stream on Paramount+. Check out the Season 3 trailer:
