Tracker Season 3 Episode 21 Finally Explores the Shaw Family Secrets

Critic’s Rating: 4.7 / 5.0

4.7

There is something in the water when Tracker brings Russell Shaw back to town.

The sun shines a little brighter. The jokes are a little funnier.

Russell always brings a little extra to the mix, and when you center an hour purely around the Shaw Family drama, with no outside interference, you get Tracker magic.

They’ve sprinkled in Ashton Shaw lore throughout Tracker Season 3, but ultimately, Tracker Season 3 Episode 21 was the first dedicated hour. It also felt like a direct pickup from Tracker Season 2 Episode 20.

We got this giant reveal about Otto and Mary Dove, only for it to turn out to be a storyline that was essentially put on ice for an entire season.

I understand wanting to drag this out because once we get all the answers, that will be it. But it’s always been wildly fascinating, so completely abandoning it at times will never make sense to me.

When Colter was looking into Ashton’s past, he would learn a new name or location related to his father, but he was never able to figure out how everything connected.

Dropping the name Serena Jukic to Russell was all it took for everything to slowly come into focus.

I love that Russell just shows up wherever Colter is, no phone calls or texts. It’s like he needs to make it clear that just like his little brother, he can track someone down, too.

Hearing from Russell that Mary Dove was selling Echo Ridge felt like the moment Colter realized not only how out of the loop he was, but also just how singularly focused he had been in the quest for answers.

He talked to Otto and allowed him to tell his side of the story, but he never gave Mary Dove the same courtesy. Now, can you blame him for that?

He knew that his mother was lying to him about certain things, and Colter, someone who has made a life out of compartmentalizing his emotions, decided that not addressing her or those lies was the way forward.

It was so fascinating to hear Russell encourage Colter to hear Mary Dove out, even though she was content to let Colter believe his brother was a monster for most of his life.

The reunion between mother and son was awkward at best, and painted Mary Dove in the gray area she’s always tended to reside in.

The more we learn about Ashton, the clearer it becomes that he had lost his way at a certain point in time and that his family bore the brunt of the pain he was harboring.

Mary Dove, alluding to domestic violence, wasn’t shocking, because time and time again, Colter learned from others just how deeply disturbed his father became in the final years of his life.

He saw things for himself, of course, but as a kid, he wasn’t privy to much, which is why he’s had to do so much research now.

Do I believe that Mary Dove was trying to protect her children when she made many of the decisions she did? Yes. But I also think that, at some point, she owed it to her children to be more honest with them.

Ultimately, the secrets she kept from them did little more than spur their curiosity and push them further and further to find the truth by any means necessary.

All roads were always going to lead back to this Alaskan government program, and each name Colter learned along the way led him to Serena Jukic, who turned out to be the key to something much bigger than Colter or Russell anticipated.

From the moment they arrived at Serena’s home, it was obvious she was guarded. And that alone made it clear that whatever Russell and Colter were about to find out would be serious.

I won’t pretend to understand everything that transpired within that living room because they were throwing around a lot of terms that admittedly went over my head, but the bottom line was that the Chrono Stasis program was exploiting gifted children.

The story about the kids made me think about that X-Men movie from a few years ago, where the kids were being held in a secret facility, and they eventually fought back against those keeping them there.

Now, there’s a big difference between that movie and this story: the movie dealt with make-believe mutants, and, as far as I can tell, the world of Tracker does not exist in the same universe as the X-Men.

Serena described high-intelligence activities occurring within the research being done in Alaska, such as astral projection and remote viewing, which are the kinds of things most people will scoff at, but not all.

Clearly, the government believed it was worth holding these children, honing their skills, and then using them for different purposes.

The idea that a child dying was the only reason Ashton eventually went rogue may be a question for another day, and that’s the approach that Colter took immediately.

He got the information he wanted about what happened in Alaska, but his tracker brain wouldn’t let him stop wanting to save Danny. And as entertaining as this show can be, there are times when things go a little off the rails, and this is one of those times.

I don’t mean that in a bad way, though.

The fact that they were within driving distance of this facility housing Danny was television witchcraft at its finest, and weaving in all these new government people, basically plotting to kill, or at the very least silence Colter and Russell, made the hour feel bigger and more chaotic than expected.

But the hour also unfolded in the kind of edge-of-your-seat way that kept you locked in when your brain is telling you none of this should be working as well as it is.

When Russell met with his old Panama friend, that was the second time I knew that none of this was going to go well. That guy was shady, and I was proven right when, not long after, he was confronted by his superior and threatened.

Colter and Russell are highly intelligent people, and even though they talked openly about understanding the risks, did they actually grasp the dangers and realities of the situation?

I joke about it being Colter and his gun against the world, but Colter and his gun against the government? That’s something else entirely.

When they got to the facility, which was far too easy, my first thought was: wouldn’t this place be crawling with cameras? How would Colter and Russell even get that close to the gates?

Of course, they got that close to the gates and inside after taking down only one guard, but what followed was highly suspenseful, in the way that I kept wondering how they would be caught rather than how they would get out.

For starters, after seeing how Danny reacted to the doctor after Lola acted out, you could tell that he was someone who’d been in that facility for a long time, and he may not have been looking to leave.

Especially if he believed there was no one else in the world for him. And who knows what other kind of lies they’ve been feeding him his entire life to get what they wanted.

Plus, no matter how easily they got inside, getting out would likely be a whole lot more complicated.

The most realistic part of the whole ordeal was a guard stopping Russell, because that place should have been teeming with guards who would see them walking the halls, given the millions of cameras that should have been installed in an off-the-books government experiment factory!

It was also realistic that Danny would be confused as hell about why some man would bust in there after however many years of trying to save him. I think most people would pause a bit.

Even so, what I did not see coming was him pushing that button.

Maybe not the most jaw-dropping of cliffhangers, but Colter standing there with the alarms blazing, eyes full of something unexplainable, was a great way to leave us before the conclusion of this chapter of the Shaw Family drama.

Tracker Notes

• Things were moving really fast during the back half of this hour, but the narrative allowed for these small pockets of time when Colter and Russell could reminisce about the happier times in their childhood, which was lovely. It felt like something they both needed.

• If Colter and Reenie are never going to happen romantically, then I will always root for Russell to win her over somehow. The running joke of him having a crush on her will always be cute.

• So, is it safe to assume that Colter and Russell will be snatched up, and then that random man who was cleaning blood off the car seats will be sent to “dispose” of them in the finale?

We made it to the end of the road, Tracker fans!

Yes, there was a lot of stuff that did not make sense, but I had fun!

Once this story wraps up in the finale, doesn’t it feel like we still won’t know EVERYTHING about Ashton and his death?

Or do you believe things will be tied up with a nice, neat bow fairly soon?

As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

You can watch Tracker on Sundays at 9/8c on CBS and Mondays on Paramount+.