‘Tracker’ Season 2 Episode 13: Did Colter Shaw Just Cross the Line for Good?

In this week’s episode of Tracker, Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) enters the world of espionage — and not the corporate kind. Even though he’s somehow survived multiple encounters with trained government agents and managed to pull the wool over their eyes, this story doesn’t feel over somehow. There’s always a bigger fish, you know?

Speaking of stories that aren’t over, is Bobby (Eric Graise) ever coming back, by the way? Cousin Randy (Chris Lee) is fun, but is he a full-time replacement now? What happened with Bobby’s family emergency? Sources say that Colter’s original hacker will be back before the end of Season 2. But he’s been missing longer than most of Colter’s assignments at this point.

Colter Heads Back to the City in ‘Tracker’ Season 2 Episode 13

In the cold open, a loved-up couple are window shopping in Manhattan. The husband, Logan (Oliver Rice), encourages his wife Claire (Alvina August) to try on a dress they can’t afford — they’re saving for a dream vacation to Fiji, and it would be two times their rent — at a fancy boutique. It’s a sweet scene, almost Hallmark-Christmas-movie-sweet. But then, as casually as they strolled up to the store, Claire never comes out of the dressing room. When Logan finally goes to check on her, she’s left her phone and purse in the stall. Vanished.

The saleslady asks deeply unhelpful questions (“Did she go out the front? Are you sure she didn’t go out the front?” Maybe she went out the back?”), but Logan is too distressed to notice or care. The police, as we know, won’t help him find her until it has been 48 hours. Logan posts a $20,000 reward, which finds its way to Velma (Abby McEnany). Colter happens to still be on the East Coast, camping in the Adirondacks, so he heads back down to the city.

Midway through telling Colter about his wife’s boring job in publishing and unstable brother Sam who hasn’t spoken to her in a year, Logan gets a ping from a home security system. His and Claire’s apartment is being robbed as they speak. He takes Colter there next, naturally. The apartment is very nice, so nice that they are extremely lucky the rent is only half the price of a dress from that store. And the robbery is clearly targeting. Only Claire’s work computer has been taken, and an advanced signal jammer wipes the home security system of all evidence. This ordinary couple is looking less Hallmark Christmas by the minute.

Spy Work Turns Nasty on ‘Tracker’ Season 2 Episode 13

Colter suggests that Logan go to a hotel while he checks out Claire’s office. It’s a good thing he does, because when Colter arrives at the “chill” publishing house, there are about half a dozen dead bodies on the floor. Colter gets Cousin Randy on the phone to start investigating this situation. As Randy pokes around the publishing company’s outdated website and Colter thumbs through stacks of blank printer paper labeled as manuscripts in the office, they come to the same conclusion: this business is a front. What are they, actually? Some kind of off-the-books government agency, Colter thinks. They more or less confirm this after hacking into some encrypted files. The only other living employee, it seems, is the boss, Eileen Turner (Gabrielle Rose), who becomes Colter’s suspect.

But then a clean-up crew comes in to take care of the bodies and wipe every computer in the joint. Colter texts Randy in all caps, asking him to create some kind of distraction. (If you look at the phone screen, this is clearly the beginning of Colter’s conversation with Randy. What do we think? Lazy continuity, or is Colter wiping his text history after every conversation?) Colter manages to get out safely and informs Logan that Claire is some kind of spy. He’s pretty freaked out by the revelation that he doesn’t know his wife. But he doesn’t have time to process: Logan gets taken from his hotel room mid-phone call by someone pretending to be room service.

It’s the first in a series of intense phone conversations. Next, Randy calls up Reenie (Fiona Rene) and asks her to get some intel from her government contacts. Then, when Colter gets to Logan’s hotel room, the phone rings. Colter picks up and a spooky, mechanically disguised voice tells him to distance himself from this case. Now, Colter hears “walk away from this” on a near-daily basis in his line of work. It’s just that usually the person telling him to back off is a local sheriff or a gang leader, not a covert government agent. Reenie has the same advice for Colter after she gets the truth out from her government contacts: they’re dealing with a counterterrorism agency. Also, Randy’s entire computer system (which is really Bobby’s entire system) starts going haywire. The hacker got hacked!

At the hotel, Colter follows the room service guy he thinks may have taken Logan and almost randomly runs into Claire — the person he was hired to find. She tells Colter that she got a message from Eileen to go dark and follow her protocol. That meant leaving her husband without warning or briefing him about what her job actually entails: controlling cloaked satellites. But she’s in the dark about a lot of things. She’s figured out that Eileen was leaking information to a third party — but why, and what does Eileen need from Claire? She went looking for Logan on her own. Colter offers to help her find him while she deals with Eileen.

Claire meets with Eileen in public and realizes that Eileen needs her help repositioning a satellite. It’s a two-person job, and if she doesn’t do it, her old boss’s goons are going to kill her husband. Colter watches from across the street. A random magician picks a fight with Colter and calls him a peeping Tom. Only in New York! But Randy’s able to get Logan’s location when Eileen places an outgoing call to his captors. While Claire leaves with Eileen to do one last job, Colter rescues Logan from where he’s being held by the same clean-up crew guys. Well… almost. He does get shot in the process. Colter calls an ambulance before moving on. Does Colter bust in at the last second to save Claire’s wife as well? Not necessary! She may be more of a desk job spy, but manages to pull some Black Widow magic at the last second and takes Eileen down. Colter actually talks her out of killing Eileen; instead, she reports the security breach to her superiors.

Several Threads Are Left Unresolved in ‘Tracker’ Season 2 Episode 13

At the end of the episode, Reenie passes on an ominous message via telephone. She says that an “Agent Bartholomew,” a.k.a. Eileen’s supervisor, wanted to thank Colter for his service. Reenie and Colter agree that this message is about as likely to be a veiled threat as it is a sincere congratulation. Colter shrugs it off for the moment. He’s done his job, and he’s even bought a ticket to see the musical Six before he leaves Manhattan! Colter! A pop musical about the wives of Henry VIII? Love that for him. Hopefully, he will share his thoughts next week. He tells Reenie that he’s expanding his horizons. (Six is only 80 minutes long, however. It’s very possible that he walked up to the TKTS booth and asked for whatever musical had the shortest runtime.) Before he gets his “Ex-Wives” on, he meets with Logan in a park and collects his reward. He also gives the shaken husband a note from his wife telling him to meet him in Fiji. How is this guy going to afford a trip when he just handed Colter Shaw $20,000? Unclear! But at least the future of their tampered relationship looks bright.

While there’s nothing dramatic like a cliffhanger after that, there’s no resolution to Colter’s run-in with this counterterrorism operation either. He told Reenie that he would wait for Bartholomew to contact him directly. So we wait. Let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time Colter has gotten caught in the crosshairs of the government this season. Remember the black site he snuck onto in Season 2, Episode 2 and how the agents seemed to know something about Colter and his father?

What on Earth is Tracker cooking up for the final stretch of the season? Are the multiple government agencies that Colter’s gotten tangled up with connected? Reenie did reference the Manhattan Project, and how its different arms were kept in the dark about what the others were doing. (To be fair, we’ve all seen Oppenheimer. We know that wasn’t always successful.) And what happened after Randy’s computers went berserk in a “breach situation”?! These storylines feel majorly unresolved, but in a way that feels exciting about what’s to come.