Tracker Season 3 Fixes the Biggest Mistake From Season 2

In just two episodes, Tracker season 3 has set up a potential long-term arc that already beats season 2’s big mystery, both in terms of how interesting it is and the impact it might have on the larger story. Tracker season 2’s Gina Picket cold case was, frankly, a resounding dud. It was obviously introduced to flesh out Colter Shaw and humanize him, but the story failed to land. Tracker season 2 spent too much time telling us why we should care about the Gina Picket case, rather than giving us a reason to.

Ultimately, the Gina Picket plot didn’t warrant the twists and the screen time the show gave it. At the end of the day, it was a sad but open-and-shut case of a girl who a serial killer had murdered; the end. Luckily, the long-tail arc that Tracker season 3 has set up is already far more interesting than the Gina Picket case, which always felt forced.

The Process Plot Setup Is Already More Interesting Than The Gina Picket Case From Season 2

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The two-part Tracker season 3 premiere introduced the shadowy group known only as The Process, and, from the jump, it was dark, but in a way that felt more natural to Tracker than season 2’s strange preoccupation with serial killers and cults. It’s a conspiracy story that has real legs.

Not only does The Process plot offer a premise that can organically incorporate plenty of plot twists, but it also feels wholly relevant to our modern era of unchecked tech moguls pushing unethical privacy violations on the public, and of our personal data increasingly being sold to the highest bidder and abused.

As much as our society is obsessed with serial killers and true crime, the reality is that there are very few serial killers, and it’s not something the vast majority of people can relate to. The Process is a wild story – but it’s also one that you could easily imagine happening in reality, considering how algorithms already manipulate and control everything we do.

Though Colter and Russell felt they had taken down and stopped The Process by the end of Tracker season 3, episode 2, it obviously won’t be that easy. For starters, any hacker group brilliant enough to create The Process algorithm would certainly not have made it so vulnerable that it could be stopped by a couple of guys shooting the computers and servers; they would have had failsafes and backups.

Secondly, The Process’s third potential member, Jillian, is MIA, so the plot will likely come back around at some point this season. When it does, it has the potential to impact the Shaw brothers on a deeper level than they ever thought possible.

Tracker Season 3’s Overarching Mystery Can Tie Back To Ashton Shaw’s Murder

Considering how The Process operates, it’s entirely possible that it will somehow connect to the death of Ashton Shaw. Tracker season 2’s finale revealed that it was Otto Waldron who had pushed Ashton off the cliff that night, and that he’d been asked by Mary Shaw to talk to Ashton. In the most recent Tracker season 3 episode, Colter and Russell both agreed that Ashton hadn’t been mentally well by the end – but also that something had happened that summer to break him.

Everything points to Ashton getting involved in something dangerous during his time as a professor at Berkeley. We know that he was recruited by the government to work on a top-secret project, and he was almost certainly killed for it. As it’s been operating for about ten years, the timeline doesn’t quite add up for the top-secret project to be some version of The Process, but that doesn’t mean the algorithm couldn’t have later tied in to whatever the government was doing in 1992 that made Ashton Shaw take his family and flee.

As The Process leader, Schneider, asked Colter, “How well do you know your family? What are the chances that someone has a secret to hide?” The answer to that, of course, is that there is a 1,000% chance. Family secrets have shaped Colter and his siblings’ entire history. Tracker season 3 can now connect its current conspiracy to the past in a way that answers old questions while pulling Colter (and, hopefully, Russell) into an even deeper mystery.