Well, this was a weird one.
Throughout its first two seasons, there were plenty of odd, creepy, and dark cases, and you’ll be able to add this one to the list of hours that may have missed the mark a bit.
I have nothing against the dark hours, but there was something about this one that just felt incomplete.
Halloween may have passed, but CBS’s scheduling prevented Tracker Season 3 Episode 3 from airing before the big day. And after a month’s worth of seeing The Conjuring and its various sequels on television, this episode fit right in with the feel of those.
But unlike the famed movie franchise, this story was unfortunately a mess.
I’m perfectly fine with the amount of violence and otherness that Tracker deals with, but sometimes the cases resonate and are entertaining, and sometimes they just aren’t.
And it’s a shame because things started interestingly enough.
A massive New England storm cutting off the power at a psychiatric facility, and a client killing a nurse before escaping into the wind, was an intriguing place to start.
Was it all a coincidence? Did everything fall into place for Heston to escape, so he took his chance?
Or was there something larger at play?
Heston’s parents seemed to be two people who’d already mourned the loss of their son a long time ago, and they were reaching out to Colter under the guise of wanting to protect the world from their son, when there was probably an amount of guilt coloring the edges as well, justified or not.
Heston was unwell, and hearing his parents recount his history, he appeared to suffer some kind of psychotic break, and it ended up in an arson attack that killed an innocent family.
It was interesting to hear multiple people comment that he never should have been moved from the maximum security prison to the psychiatric facility, and it took almost the whole hour to figure out why that came to be in the first place.
Colter’s partner during this hour was serviceable enough but unremarkable.
He did the patronizing thing most cops do when they meet Colter, and then they realize that he’s better at their own job than they are, and he doesn’t have to follow pretty much any rules to get what he’s after.
The middle part of the hour dragged on as Colter and Dundee followed clues that led them to a dead body —a situation that happens a lot on Tracker, to the point it’s getting worryingly repetitive.
The dead body in this case belonged to an orderly we knew next to nothing about, but whose keycard was used to help break Heston out.
It was all a little convoluted, or maybe just boring? Sometimes those two things can be one and the same, but either way, the case dragged a lot in the middle part of the hour, and then became predictable from there on out.
The best hours of Tracker are the ones that genuinely surprise you, but this one wasn’t like that, as, instead, you were following the clues, and it was pretty easy to parse things together as the story went along.
Once the connection was made to Sister Carlotta, the second they stepped onto the church’s property, and Jared popped up, I correctly assumed that he and the nun were in cahoots.
And again, perhaps it’s because The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It has been playing all month, it seemed pretty apparent that we were heading to a scenario not where Sister Carlotta was trying to help him, but instead, where she was trying to eradicate what she perceived to be the evil inside him.
The one thing that was interesting, or perhaps more aptly terrifying, was the whole hiding behind religious fanaticism as a means to murder people.
They weren’t grabbing Heston to perform an exorcism; they took him and a completely innocent Emily to kill them in some warped kind of sacrifice they believed would help the world, or something like that.
The final act, with them strung up on chairs in front of this burning pit, was super creepy, and I had a feeling that Colter and Dundee weren’t going to get there in time to save Heston, which was partly correct, though it played out a bit more sinister than that.
When Dundee got stabbed in the chest, I thought for sure he was a goner because that stab wound looked lethal, but also, how many men did Carlotta have in her little religious sect?
It was scary to think how meticulously this whole operation went, from Carlotta helping facilitate Heston’s transfer to the psychiatric facility, to the breakout, and then setting up the subsequent ritual as well.
And she would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for Colter, because Dundee would have never cracked that case on his own in a million years.
With Dundee down, Colter had to take on everyone alone, and even when you know Colter’s not in any real danger because it’s The Colter Shaw Show, do you ever have that moment where you do wonder what if?
Colter was outnumbered, even if he didn’t realize it, but nothing can stop Colter when he’s locked in, not even a little fire.
The way people were walking through that fire was lowkey comical. First, Heston breaks free of the zip ties and sprints through it just to get shot up, and then Colter also breezes through it to get Emily out.
Heston mustering up all his strength to kill Carlotta with his bare hands was a lot, but three seasons in now, it should never be surprising when Tracker takes it to super dark places.
The ending wrap-up was when they really lost me, though, first with Dundee not only alive but just lying on the stretcher, talking just fine and waiting around for someone to take him to the hospital like he hadn’t been stabbed deeply in his chest.
And then Heston’s parents, not even remotely moved by the fact that their son had just been murdered that day, was weird. You can understand that they’d likely already made peace with the loss of their son years ago, but still.
Their reaction felt odd, and coupled with the hour as a whole, made for one forgettable episode that was a tonal rollercoaster.
If there was a less dark aspect of the hour, it was Reenie hiring Mel and expanding the team.
Now, on the one hand, one has to wonder why we’re essentially replacing Velma — Reenie’s new right-hand man and someone with a connection to Colter — with a new person at this stage in the series.
Maybe I watch too much television (I definitely do), but my first thought was not to trust Mel.
She was buttering Reenie up like crazy, and my mind was spinning with all the ways her mother’s death was going to come back to connect to an old case of Colter’s or something that would eventually out her as a mole who was trying to destroy Colter’s business from the inside out.
Or she just joined the team so she could use Colter to find her mother’s killer.
There was something off about her and her eagerness, but again, maybe it was also the bad vibes from the whole episode infiltrating an innocuous storyline, and by next week, we’ll all realize Mel is the best thing that ever happened to the show.
We’ll have to wait and see how Mel is integrated into the team, what her role looks like, and how the chemistry flows between our new foursome, but I’ll be keeping my eye on Mel for the foreseeable future.
Tracker Notes
- I’m definitely harping on the death aspect too much early in the season, but there’s just so much of it!
- Randy is so unintentionally hilarious at all times, and the show is so much better for realizing how seamlessly he fits into everything.
- After two episodes heavy on the Shaw Family drama, not a peep about it here, but that’s to be expected. We get our little crumbs, and then we’re starved for weeks.
Alright, let me have it in the comments. Am I doing too much by mistrusting Mel?
Are you excited for a new addition to the team?
Did you enjoy the episode more than I did?
Let’s have a conversation!
You can watch Tracker on Sundays at 8/7c on CBS.
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