Taking a case in his home town, Colter takes a massive step closer to discovering the truth about his father’s death.

What a very odd season finale this is. Starting with Colter’s support team, we get two moments with them. Bobby and Randy are working I.T. support together, which I’m guessing means Randy’s on the team now. That’s great, but I’m a little curious as to why Bobby’s brief absence seemed to be hinting at something dark if it was just a vacation. Maybe next season we’ll get answers. Reenie and Velma also get some token coverage this week, with Sharf (Pej Vehdat), Reenie’s client who got her in serious trouble a few episodes back reaching out. That’s it. Again. No payoff, just set up.

In the core plot, Colter is asked to track down a missing man who owns a local diner. It’s a grim story, one we know is going to go there from the dark opening teaser but even then, this is Criminal Minds’ level nasty. Bill, played with gentle aplomb by Brian Keane, saw a kid in the diner who seemed scared. Digging in, he soon establishes that the man the small boy is with isn’t a relation but in a distraction, they get away. Bill goes looking, Bill goes missing and while Colter takes a while to find him, we know from the opening this doesn’t end well.

From a procedural point of view, it’s a solid to very good episode. Colter methodically works the evidence up the food chain, aided by everyone else. There’s also a welcome supporting turn from Drew Powell, one of my favourite character actors, as Colter’s childhood friend, Joe. Powell brings calm, cheerful big guy energy to any role and can match that with real physical presence. He gets to that here and joins Randy and Keaton as screen partners introduced this episode I’d like to see back.

But despite all this, the plot has a very odd cadence to it. It’s well realised, fully explored, very dark and has moments of much needed light to it. But it’s also an episode where Colter tells his friend to torture a suspect and he’s prepared to do it. An episode where that friend refers to ‘getting a pedo’, which puts the show way too close to the sort of belligerent vigilante justice that leads, bluntly, to fascism. The show toying with that here is understandable but it’s also worrying. Once again, all we can do is hope that next season’s explorations of this ground will be more in depth and less tabloid headlines.

But there’s also the inescapable sense of false advertising. The scenes with Colter’s mom played by Wendy Crewson are great and crackle with the awkwardness of a family built around grief. But this was an episode presented as a massive reveal in the show’s main plot and, while it is, we get there in the oddest of ways.

For most of its running time, this is a standard, if dark, Tracker episode. Then, over the course of his investigation, Colter sees a wood carving he knows his father made. Trying to understand how it could have got into the hands of some of the worst people he’s ever met, Colter works his way back to the uncle of one of the perpetrators. Played by Shane Leydon, Carl Murphy is a former lineman who befriended Colter’s dad and, we learn, killed him. Hartley makes odd choices this episode, but you can see why as it ends. After a race through very dark places, Colter, shaking with barely containable rage, pulls a gun on Carl and asks why. Carl replies because his mother asked for help.

Boom. The polite lie of the Shaw family is blown open, with the clear implication that Dad was intensely abusive and Colter, a man trained from childhood to notice things, didn’t. It’s a brilliant conceit, and one that should turn season 3 on its head. But, for some reason, we get it right at the end of an episode which feels like it could have been dropped anywhere else in the season.

Verdict: Tracker has tried some new things this year. Most of them have worked. This choice doesn’t for me. I’m very curious to see where season 3 goes though, even if the path there has seemed more torturous than it should have been. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart