Colter is hired to find a mother who vanished after tucking her son in for the night.

The show’s willingness to shift genre and tone is something we’ve discussed before and it does so again here. Unfortunately it skews, hard into the sort of territory we aw recently in ‘The Disciple’. That was the weakest episode of the season to date. ‘Monster’ now takes that crown.

Part of it, as others have discussed, is that Colter feels oddly sidelined. His tracking skills are largely useless in stories like this and he becomes the exact thing the show normally does a great job of avoiding; a fairly standard issue handsome detective doing slightly generic things. It’s not Justin Hartley’s fault either, and the moments that fly this episode are all focused on Colter’s emotional approach to the job. But this is an episode that, with relatively minor modification, could have shown up on Criminal Minds or The Rookie. Both those shows are good, and have their own tone and style but a script non-committal enough to fit any of them isn’t a script that has a strong voice.

That sense of the generic is borne out as the episode hits every conceivably stereotype on the way to the end credits. The villain is mentally ill in the way villains were in the ’90s: tediously. He’s got no nuance, no sense of proportion and there’s precious little attempt made to give him any context beyond mental illness equalling evil. He reads, cynically, like an excuse to do excessive gore and little else. That’s not just a shame, it’s lazy and bluntly dangerous. As we enter yet another decade of torturously dragging the perception of mental health issues out of the gutter, a legitimate mainstream success like Tracker closes an episode with a homicidal psychotic who likes violence stalking our hero through a funfair at night. It’s 2025, the most dangerous time for anyone the slightest bit different since 2024. Yet here we are.

The episode shoots for dark and grim but just ends up feeling grump. Claude Duhamel is wasted as an evil storage company clerk who’s mildly threatening but nothing more. Hamza Fouad is given nothing as the detective working the case and Jonathan Whitesell’s work as the killer is better than the material deserves. Only Mariana Klaveno as Alice, the woman at the core of the case, is given something approaching an arc and some depth. She’s great, Hartley’s great, everyone else is given nothing to do by the show’s weakest script to date.

Maddeningly, aside from one single scene. Right at the end of the episode, Colter and Reenie are at a diner. A conversation about pancakes becomes a conversation about trauma, survival and the damage that Colter sustained as a kid but can’t quite look in the eyes. Hartley and Greene are fantastic, the scene sparkles with intelligence and kindness, it’s great. If the rest of the episode had been this good, it would have been an all-time great for the show.

Verdict: As it stands, this is a case Colter, and Tracker, and we, are all happy to leave in the rearview. 4/10

Alasdair Stuart