A Tracker hour with a little bit of everything is one I can get behind.
An appealing case that’s not overly complicated? Check. Colter having to use his survivalist skills? Check. And that said case made Colter think about his own complex personal troubles? Double check.
It may not have been a perfect hour, but it was certainly very close.
Maybe it’s the Yellowstone girlie in me (the early seasons, not whatever they were doing toward the end), but the minute I saw the preview and Colter on a horse, I knew Tracker Season 3 Episode 4 was going to be a favorite.
Colter was in small, small-town America. The kind of place where you could ride a horse down the city square and no one batted an eyelash.
It’s the kind of town where clearly everyone knows everyone to a certain degree, and that ended up being something that Colter was able to use to his advantage in the end.
At first, the case seemed ordinary: one could surmise that Trey had gotten mixed up in something his girlfriend wasn’t aware of, which explained the extra, unexplained money, but it blew up in his face.
But the big early twist came when Gracie was revealed to be Maggie —and actually more than just Trey’s girlfriend. And how in the world did she think Colter was never going to figure out who she really was?
I can understand that she didn’t want to be judged, nor did she want to put her messy love life on front street, but that was a massive thing for Maggie to hide.
Had she told Colter straight away about the affair, Colter would have likely gone straight to looking into Sheriff Holt, and potentially avoided almost dying of dehydration.
A shady and dangerous Sheriff in a small desert town abusing his power? That’s a story that’s as old as time, and if done correctly, you can forgive the fact that you’ve seen it told a hundred times over.
Having said that, I enjoyed the swerve in this story a lot.
When Colter was being driven out into the desert to be buried and never heard from again by two cops who weren’t even trying to hide the fact that that’s who they were, it made all the sense in the world that Holt was behind it.
He got sick of his wife making him look like a fool, and he decided to get rid of Trey once and for all.
Then, believing that Colter was someone who was going to get in the way of his plan to dispose of his competition quietly, Holt sent his underlings to get rid of him in a place where only the coyotes would find him.
It made sense on the surface, and once Colter got himself back to town, it made sense that Holt would be his first stop.
Even though it didn’t last nearly long enough, I enjoy it when Tracker remembers that, before anything else, the Shaws are a group of survivalists. You can stick Colter in the worst of situations where your only chance at survival is to live off the land, and Colter will do just that.
We get bits and pieces of him using those skills throughout the seasons, and had Colter not luckily come across that random horse, it would have been interesting to see how he would have made it through a night out there if it came to that.
There was no time for that, though, because Colter had a sheriff to confront!
Sheriff Holt seemed like a nice enough guy right from the get-go, and Colter’s rarely wrong about his read on people. Within a few minutes, his entire perception of the case shifted from a disgruntled husband looking to get even to a whole other deep-seated, nefarious backyard operation.
There was something oddly sweet about Holt, who you could tell was just worn down from life at that point. While we didn’t get his whole backstory, it was clear he dedicated his entire life to the job, to the detriment of everything else.
He didn’t even seem overly upset about Trey and Maggie, but just more disappointed that his marriage wasn’t what he thought it was.
A lesser man would have been a lot less motivated to find their wife’s boyfriend, but Holt didn’t seem to hold any real malice for Trey or Maggie, though he did have some venom for the dirty cops in his department.
The dirty cops being a part of some bugger conspiracy wasn’t shocking, but things did get a little head-scratching when Jimmy was introduced as a young man hellbent on getting revenge and using Trey to do it.
They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and Jimmy clearly took that to heart. He’d been planning to get to Diaz for a long while, and Trey became the way to do it once he realized his proximity to the criminal.
I’ve lamented this in the past, and it’s time I accept it for what it is, but the series does tend to just throw in a bad guy in the third act instead of building that bad guy up throughout the hour to make their inevitable downfall more satisfying.
That has never been how Tracker works, though, and henceforth, I will stop bringing it up because I’ve annoyed myself with it.
Jimmy was a heartbroken kid, grieving the loss of his mother, and he truly convinced himself that killing Diaz would help assuage some of the pain and anger he felt about losing his mother in such a brutal and completely avoidable way.
Trey was just a bystander with access for Jimmy to use and help him carry out his Kill Bill-style revenge tour, and he likely would have gotten away with it had it not been for Holt and Colter.
The unlikely duo worked really well together, and they may be one of my favorite Colter plus random cop team-ups.
Considering they’d known each other at most a couple of hours, there was a seamlessness to the way they moved together.
Holt wasn’t intimidated or put out by Colter waltzing into town in the manner he did, but instead, he was impressed, and the two of them fell into an easy rhythm that was punctuated by respect and immediate trust.
The final standoff at the ranch (which was beautiful by the way) found Colter in one of his most likely predicaments: outnumbered.
That place was locked down heavily, but Colter and Holt snuck all the way to the stables without nary a man with a Stetson and a Colt 45 seeing them.
That moment when Trey was relieved to be rescued and then immediately terrified again upon seeing Holt was priceless. There’s nothing like your girlfriend’s husband coming to save you in the 11th hour.
From there, things went the way things always do on Tracker, with bloodshed and Colter gunning down multiple people, but I must admit this is the second episode in a row, after Tracker Season 3 Episode 3, where I was surprised someone made it out alive.
I thought for sure Jimmy was going to die, and his death was going to teach Colter a valuable lesson about what a thirst for revenge will get you in the end. That’s to say, nothing good.
Instead, Jimmy survived, and Colter still learned a lesson and got to teach Jimmy a little something, too.
The hour, beginning with Colter fixating on all the lies and information he recently learned about his family, and ending with him realizing that sometimes you genuinely do have to let things go in this life, felt like a full-circle moment. Still, I’m not buying it.
Am I to believe that Colter’s suddenly going to be over the Shaw family drama because he saw the consequences of a revenge tour gone bad? Absolutely not.
Maybe his approach to everything will change, but I don’t buy Colter Shaw ever getting to a place where he can let things go.
Maybe when pigs fly and the Shaw family is all in the same room.
Tracker Notes
- Okay, so Reenie’s clearly having a hard time in the aftermath of everything that happened to her at the end of Tracker Season 2, correct? Is that where this story is going? If so, I’m hopeful we’ll get her and Colter leaning on each other at some point.
- Randy is the best. I can’t say enough about how excellent his addition to the team has been.
- We only saw Mel for a moment, but what was she doing? Well, of course she was asking about Colter and being nosy about how he gets his cases. She is doing NOTHING to quell my Spidey senses about her being up to no good!
- Colter riding that horse down the street was giving Wyatt Earp riding down the street in Tombstone. I loved every second of it.
- Holt and Maggie deciding on the spot to get a divorce was so funny because, imagine, these two had an honest conversation at any point before that disaster of a day.
Could you tell I liked this episode? If you couldn’t, let me say, I enjoyed this episode!
But now, I want to hear from you guys! What did you think about this hour?
Why did a small part of me want a Tracker spinoff that ONLY takes place out in the desert now?
Let me know all your thoughts about this one in the comments below!
You can watch Tracker on Sundays at 8/7c on CBS.
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