[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Tracker Season 2 Episode 2 “Ontological Shock.”]
When Colter (Justin Hartley) goes MIA while looking for a missing person, his team turns to his brother Russell (Jensen Ackles) to help—and the episode adds to the Tracker mystery surrounding their father. (And yes, as with his first episode, there are plenty of moments that remind us of Ackles on Supernatural.)
Colter’s newest client is worried after her father, Scott (Steven Culp), who’s obsessed with government conspiracies, goes missing after claiming he was being followed. He was also harassing an astrophysics professor, whose husband took out a restraining order against him. But at least one of the calls was 10 minutes long. The professor, Blair (April Parker Shaw), says Scott had interesting ideas; they’d been talking about UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena, similar to UFOs), but there’s a stigma, especially in academia. She’s clearly afraid of something when Colter talks to her but won’t discuss it.
Colter goes to the last known location of Scott’s car and finds it—but then his call with Bobby (Eric Graise) drops. Numbers appear on his phone’s screen (the same thing happened to Scott earlier), then there’s a light above him…
When there’s no word from Colter for 12 hours, Reenie (Fiona Rene) calls in Plan B, even as Velma (Abby McEnany) warns that he won’t be happy. But where is Colter? In a government facility of some kind, cuffed to a bed, after breaching a secure DOD facility. The man holding him claims the land Colter had been on was filled with unexploded ordinates. He then watches from the security room as Colter frees himself from his restraints; he tells another man to let him have his fun while he makes a call. They’re still on schedule, the first man says … as someone sneaks around behind him: Russell. Colter’s brother then finds him, and the two make their way out.
Russell was close by, cleaning up a mess, he shares, and so he made some calls. (Colter asks about Russell and Reenie being phone buddies, and his brother says she keeps ducking his invites for dinner, though he thinks this rescue might score him a date.) Russell also claims to “know” about UAPs. “Oh, brother, the stuff I’ve seen? Would blow your hair back, that’s all I’m going to say about that,” he says. He even suggests that aliens could have taken Scott, recalling when their dad would show them the lights in the sky and he’d point to the spaceship on Colter’s pajamas. Colter doesn’t remember that.
Colter thinks he was let go on purpose; the “escape” was too easy. Those holding him want him to find Scott for them. Russell smashes Colter’s phone (getting rid of the SIM card isn’t careful enough) and checks the back of his brother’s neck. There’s a tracker in him, and Russell cuts it out. Colter puts it in his phone and throws it into a field.
Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
Colter and Russell then go see Blair, who reluctantly talks: They think that the numbers that appeared on Scott’s then Colter’s phones are a form of communication and have been trying to decode the messages. It turns out they’re coordinates, and while Colter and Russell head to them to see if that’s where Scott is, Blair packs to leave town—only to be stopped by the man who took Colter. (Her body is later found, made to look like a suicide.)
Once near the site, Colter throws away Russell’s phone as Reenie’s calling; whoever’s tracking him could be onto her signal and then theirs. The brothers split up as there’s an announcement of a surge beginning in 10 minutes. Russell runs into the man who took Colter—and he reveals he knows about the Shaws, including their father. “You have a long family history of getting in the government’s way,” he says. “What, you don’t think I know who you are?”
Russell tells him he knows what’s going on at the site: They sent up a cosmic morse code, and someone answered back, right? And the landing pad out there is for an alien meet-and-greet. The man says he has no idea what he’s talking about. Though the man warns Russell he’ll kill him if he takes another step, an announcement of T-minus three minutes distracts him, and Russell easily grabs the gun and knocks him out. He then takes something out of a cabinet.
Colter, meanwhile, finds Scott, who wants to stay to see whatever’s coming. He can’t keep this secret, he argues. But Colter tells him some secrets aren’t worth dying for and reminds him of his daughter. Before they can leave, however, alarms sound, something’s happening outside, there’s a bright light, and the room shakes. Once it stops, they leave, meeting up with Russell and hurrying away from the site. Both Colter and Russell pull their guns when a van approaches them on the road, but it’s just the help that Reenie called in for them.
Sergei Bachlakov / CBS
After reuniting Scott and his daughter, Russell shows Colter—who still doesn’t believe—what he took: some sort of alloy he thinks could be a piece of a craft. He has a guy to run tests for him. As they get in Russell’s car, Colter remarks he wouldn’t mind getting behind the wheel. “That’s never going to happen,” Dean Russell says.
That’s when he fills Colter in on that man knowing about their father. Colter wonders if it’s more than just a “textbook spook move,” dropping a crumb and seeing where it goes, given the box of their father’s stuff that their sister Dory (Melissa Roxburgh) has and didn’t tell either of them about. Russell thinks she just didn’t want him going down some rabbit hole.
Russell leaves Colter on the side of the road to walk to his truck in the woods. “This baby doesn’t drive on gravel,” he explains. Before, sure, to pick him up from the black site (“That was an emergency”), but this is different. He’s headed to Colorado to collect on the date Reenie promised for saving Colter. He’ll see him when he sees him. We hope that’s sooner rather than later.
What did you think of the latest episode with Russell? What are your theories about what happened to the Shaws’ father? Let us know in the comments section below.
Tracker, Sundays, 8/7c, CBS