In Wyoming looking for a missing student. Colter finds a big pharma conspiracy and takes some time to visit his sister, Dory.

We’re officially in the run up to the season finale here and festivities kick off this episode with the arrival of the first of two Shaw siblings. Melissa Roxburgh, best known in these parts for being one of the strongest elements of Manifest, is fantastic here and occupies an interesting space in the episode. She’s essentially used to bookend the plot, and also to throw some very different light on Colter and his past.

We’ve had almost a full season now of stories where it’s clear Colter is only comfortable with his chosen family and even then not so much. Seeing him in the same room as a sibling was always going to be tense but it’s even more nuanced than I was expecting.

Roxburgh’s Dory is a very successful, very grounded woman with a PhD, a teaching position and no interest in her past whatsoever. She and Colter have similar brains but Dory took a very different path, as we find out. Colter opted to stay with their mother, while Dory moved back to the city with relatives and the differences between the two could not be more stark. Colter is a man trapped in his family’s shadow. Dory is a woman outside that shadow. Neither of them are entirely sure how they feel about that or about the fact that Colter opted to stay so Dory didn’t have to. It’s a complicated dynamic and a very well written and played one. The closing scene of the Shaw kids at dinner is slow and tense and full of hurt that neither of them can fully articulate. There’s a moment where Colter closes the argument down that’s especially touching. Dory, resignedly, looks down at her menu as her older brother does what he does. Colter looks at his sister with total love, across a divide that’s much more than just a table.

The case of the week is also a lot of fun. Blake Baker, played by Tyler Cotton, is a biochemistry graduate student who saw something he shouldn’t have. Cotton’s great in the role and the episode does a neat job of exploring, and subverting, the expectations we and his colleagues have of him. Blake’s family have a history of mental illness, his mother works as a custodian on site and he almost falls between the cracks. As Dory explains, a couple of students a year drop out, and the insidious evil of this episode is how that stat is used as a shield by some very bad people. As is always the case, there’s more going on than there seems but this episode is even more of a rabbit hole than usual. In addition to Nicole Oliver’s strong work as Blake’s mom,  we also meet his lab partners Jada (Mika Bantog) and Dex (Amitai Marmorstein) and boss Professor Hewitt (Bob Frazer) as well as a husband and wife catfishing team played by Kyle Mitchell and Siobhan Williams. None of these people have the whole solution and there’s an interesting sense of larger forces at work with this one. It’s not an arc plot, we get a definitive answer and resolution, but much like earlier episodes, Tracker does its best work exploring the impact modern society has on people and the lengths it drives them to.

Verdict: While a complete story this is also very definitely the offramp to the finale and it’s a good one. Colter’s family issues being back front and centre work well, I’d love to see Roxburgh again. Next episode, we get Jensen Ackles and the family reunion continues. Even if Colter really doesn’t want it to. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart