Reenie calls in a favour, one that sends Colter parachuting into the wilderness to retrieve two missing siblings. But he’s not alone out there…

One of the things I’ve really come to enjoy about Tracker is how  good it is at coming at stories from unusual angles. This episode is no exception with three mysteries unfolding at once. The first is the disappearance of Hank’s children. Played with tremendous charm by Gil Birmingham, Hank is an old friend of Reenie’s family and she’s the one who calls Colter in. Birmingham and Reenie Green have great easy-going chemistry and some of the most fun scenes this episode are the ones they share together. That pseudo familial connection is of course exactly what Colter has with his team but unlike him, Reenie embraces it.

The second mystery is just what their client was doing. Hank’s kids, it turns out, had been hired to fly someone a client out and as the episode goes on, it becomes clear the client, Bratton, has much more going on than he first seems. The fondness this show has for dropping us into the middle of other people’s narratives is shifted here to the end of Bratton’s narrative and again, it’s a fun, interesting choice. There’s a real sense of another, darker story unfolding just ahead of Colter and it’s interesting to see the team race to put it together before anyone else dies.

Then there’s Voltz, the mysterious man who shows up looking for Bratton. And the problem is, he’s not really a mystery at all. Tracker’s done a great job of casting familiar but not especially big name actors and as we’ve seen time and again it’s paid off. Hell, it does here, with Jonathan Connelly as a terrified park ranger and Liza Huget as a printing station clerk who feels like she’s just stepped out of her own sitcom. Tracker’s greatest strength is that no one is just one thing, and this episode, for the first time, it breaks that mould by casting Peter Stormare as Voltz. You’ve seen Stormare in a dozen things I’m sure, he’s been a part of everything from Armageddon to John Wick and the Bad Boys franchise and Constantine. He’s always good, always fun, and always Peter Stormare. So when he shows up here, Voltz breaks the reality of the show and, honestly, it never recovers. We can’t see him as his character, we can only see him as Peter Stormare and so everything he does is coloured by the fact he’s playing to a different set of rules. Worse, his presence is weirdly ineffectual on the plot and takes massive amounts of time away from Jarrod Daniel and Rachel Colwell as Hank’s kids, the supposed core of the episode.

Verdict: The result is a story that feels massive but also weirdly rushed and lacks a lot of the emotional complexity of recent episodes. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s assuredly a misstep. Even if it is the show’s first one in a while. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart