‘Tracker’: Melissa Roxburgh on Digging Deeper into the Shaw Family and Whether She’d Return for Season 2
Roxburgh spoke to PopCulture.com about her ‘Tracker’ role, the Shaw family, and her thoughts on returning for Season 2.
Tonight’s new Tracker saw a Shaw family reunion when Melissa Roxburgh guest starred as Colter’s sister, Dr. Dory Shaw, and she spoke to PopCulture.com about her hopes for the future. In the episode “Beyond the Campus Walls,” a grad student goes missing, and Colter consults Dory, a professor at the college, to get more intel. It’s revealed that the two haven’t talked too much in the past year. Not only that, but when they try to set up a dinner, Colter flakes and Dory isn’t so surprised, more just disappointed.
While they do eventually have dinner together, they vent a lot about what went wrong in their family and why. At one point, Dory said, “I just want my brothers back.” Jensen Ackles will be appearing in next week’s episode as their brother Russell, meaning that we will be seeing more complicated Shaw sibling dynamics. As for whether fans could look forward to seeing all three of them on-screen together, Roxburgh admitted she’s “curious about the story too. I really want to see what happened and where it goes.”
“And so Jensen, I did an episode of Supernatural at the very beginning of my career,” Roxburgh shared. “So I would love to be in the same room as both of them, and I’m sure it’ll happen at some point. But yeah, on one hand, I have a friend that I’m working with and then someone that I worked in the past. I think it’s just so funny how life works that way.”
“I don’t know how exactly they’ll rebuild everything, but I have a sneaking suspicion, or hope, I guess, that they form a little trio and they solve something together,” she continued. “And Dory would be the research one, of course. She wouldn’t necessarily be out there in the field, but she’d be the one helping them figure stuff out and leave behind the computer, because she’s the professor one. So she would be the knowledge, and she would be able to help them in that capacity, which I think could be super fun.”
The explanation as to why their relationship is so complex stems from their dad dying and beyond. Colter gave Dory files on their father, and during dinner, they relived the past, going over what happened when he died: Dory took the first chance she had to leave while Colter stayed behind to help their mother, and Russell? He was nowhere. Even though there are a lot of unresolved issues between the family, Melissa Roxburgh thinks it will eventually get resolved.
“But obviously, as TV goes, you need a little drama first,” Roxburgh said. “So I think that she carries a lot of guilt about leaving, but also knowing that it was the right thing for her to do. So I think that she’s caught in this place of she’s built this life for herself that she’s really, really proud of, but she just wants Colter to be in the same place as her, and she wants him to be healthy, and happy, and she’s not sure if he is. And she gets to learn a little bit more about him by seeing what he does in this episode. I think that she has this whole idea of what his life is like, and she feels bad for him and then sees that he’s actually doing good work out there, and she gained a bit of respect for what he does.”
Since Tracker has been renewed for Season 2, and there is still a lot to explore with Dory and the Shaw siblings, could this mean that Roxburgh would be down to return? “Of course,” she shared. “I think there are some talks. I’m not too sure how in progress they are, but I would absolutely be so, so excited to come back and play.”
Tracker will be part of CBS’ 2024 fall schedule, so hopefully, it won’t be long until fans see Dr. Dory Shaw again. In the meantime, they will just have to look forward to how Colter handles Russell because, from the sounds of it already, things are even more complicated with those two. New episodes of Tracker air on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS. The Season 1 finale airs on Sunday, May 19.
