Things get personal as Reenie asks Colter to help find the missing son of one of her closest friends.

Four episodes in I think we can officially call Tracker as finding its feet. After that deeply ropey first episode, each one that’s followed hasn’t just been stronger but has worked to expand and explore the premise. This is one of the strongest episodes so far.

A big part of that is the show starting to learn what it can do, what it looks like and how it moves. Set in the woods around a school for troubled teens, the episode gives director Douglas Aarniokoski a really fun canvas to play with. The woods feel big and threatened and ODD here, and there’s a great beat involving a crashed truck which makes you doubt everything. It’s smartly handled stuff, and Steve Harper’s script continually uses the setting to both drive the plot and expand the characters.

As is increasingly becoming the norm, this is an episode populated with people who are more than they seem, and Colter’s true skill is seeing that. Darius Willis is great as Johnny, one of the other kids at the school as is Cassandra Sawtell as the surprise girlfriend of Colter’s target. The standout though is Josh Collins as Alex Cooper, a bouncer. He joins the increasingly long line of supporting characters who are well rounded and interesting, as does Chris William Martin as Tom Ritter. The head of security at the school, he’d be an adversary on a lesser show. Here, like Collins’ bouncer, he’s a man with a different agenda who wants to help. Likewise Peter Bryant as the school principal. You wouldn’t expect a show like this to be concerned with the fundamental goodness of humanity and the fact it is is as pleasant as it is refreshing.

Nearer the top of the cast list, Hunter Dillon is excellent as Noah, the boy everyone’s searching for and genre stalwart Marley Shelton is excellent as his mom. The friendship between her character and Fiona Rene’s Reenie is what the episode hinges on and you buy into it completely.

But the core of what works here is how Green and Hartley’s Shaw interact. The spiky, honestly dull, interplay of the first episode is replaced by something deeper and subtler that speaks to the show’s development. Rene has always been good as Reenie but here she’s fantastic, driven and focused and terrified and doing it anyway. Hartley’s Shaw is fantastic this week too and this episode really feels like the character is getting dialled in. The moment he draws a gun is shocking not just because of the weapon but because we realise we’ve barely seen him use one since the pilot. He plays Shaw as calm, kind, aware of his damage and starting to use it to help others avoid sustaining it. We’re four episodes in but he’s a long way from the Reacher-alike we saw in the first episode and getting more fun every episode.

Verdict: This is turning into a really good show. It’s compassionate, subtle and fun and feels like it’s just getting started. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart