Tracker Season 1 Finale Recap With Spoilers: “The Storm”
The first season of Tracker has finally come to an end. Justin Hartley‘s CBS procedural had the distinct honor of being the network’s post-Super Bowl series, and it did quite a lot with the momentum. Over the course of the season, Tracker earned a very early Season 2 renewal, got bumped to a better time slot for the fall, and has become one of the most-watched shows on television. On the heels of guest spots from Melissa Roxburgh and Jensen Ackles, Tracker‘s Season 1 finale, “The Storm,” is bringing on Hartley’s former This Is Us scene partner Jennifer Morrison for an episode that will hopefully tie a bow around the events of the entire season. We’ll break it all down with FULL SPOILERS below.
Two young people are out on a small boat in the middle of the sea, dropping research equipment as a massive storm approaches. The girl on the boat is the daughter of Lizzy (Jennifer Morrison), a longtime friend of Colter’s. Despite a high-paying job on his radar, Colter drops any potential clients in order to help Lizzy find Katie. She tells Colter that the sheriff has expanded the search radius but there has been no sign of the boat, Katie, or her boyfriend Dylan in the two days since the storm arrived. Katie and Dylan went out to drop storm trackers in the water and Lizzy explains that both young people know how to take care of themselves on the water. She mentions a girl named Rachel, the third person in Katie’s storm chasing group, who wasn’t with them that day.
Colter calls Reenie and we learn that she’s quitting her job with the law firm. He asks about Russell, who mysteriously split from him after the job they did together in the penultimate episode, and Reenie says she hasn’t been able to get any information about the Horizon military contractor he’s been working with. Colter heads to the surf shop to talk to Rachel about the group, she was recording the data for Katie and Dylan while they were out collecting it. She shares some audio from the conversation she was having with Katie over the radio when something strange happened and she lost communication. They were cut off on the radio 20 minutes before the storm would have reached the boat, and there was no distress signal. They would’ve had time to get back to shore if there were no issues.
Out on the water, Colter and Rachel collected the buoys that Katie and Dylan were dropping. They find Dylan’s body caught up in a kelp bed, but there’s no sign of Katie anywhere. The sheriff and deputy introduce themselves to Colter and try to tell him they have things under control. He informs them that Dylan’s body looks like he’d been in a fight before his death, leading to a potential crime and not just someone missing. There were also cuts in his drysuit, which can be done to help a body sink. Colter believes someone else was out there on the water, and the sheriff asks him to just focus on finding Katie and not “get people riled up” before the summer tourists start to arrive.
Colter tries a different approach with the deputy while the sheriff isn’t around. He mentions two brothers, Xavier and Bo Samson, who had some kind of fight with Katie and Dylan recently. Dylan apparently used to hang out with the Samsons before getting close to Katie. Colter approaches the Samsons and they mention the recent spat was about Katie getting Dylan’s “head all turned around.” They try to pick a fight but Colter is quicker and manages to leave without anything else happening. Bobby fixes the audio from Katie’s call and it confirms that someone else was out there. She said that someone was coming before the conversation was cut off. Bobby also manages to track their phone information to find a random building near the docks where both Katie and Dylan were a few days ago. Investigating the address, Colter finds an old refrigerator running and a young woman’s frozen body in it. It’s not Katie’s, but it belongs to a girl who went missing in Spokane, Washington three years ago. Colter notices that there was a camera watching the fridge, the same kind of cameras that Katie and Dylan used. Unfortunately, the SD cards had been removed. Colter believes Katie was trying to figure out who killed Haley, and that she had some kind of lead that traced back to the Samsons and their parties they run for the rich folks that come in during the summers.
Katie and Dylan’s apartment had already been broken in to by the time Colter arrives to search for information. People turned the place upside down looking for something. Colter finds a phone hidden in a place where Lizzy told him Katie tended to hide important stuff, and clearly the Samsons missed it. There’s serious distrust in the police in town because Katie and Dylan didn’t go to them for help with Haley’s murder. The deputy tells Colter that he wants to find Katie and would’ve helped if she’d come to him, regardless of what issues the sheriff might have had. A recorded phone call on the burner includes audio of Dylan speaking to a guy named Talbot, who owns a massive summer property in town. Dylan knew that Haley died at one of Talbot’s parties and was trying to catch him with the body after he refused to come clean. Reenie looks into Talbot, a rich guy under investigation for racketeering and sex trafficking.
Colter starts exploring Talbot’s property in town and a duo of security guards attack him and force him to leave. But Colter’s playing the long game and he was just sticking close enough to the house to give Bobby time to hack into the wifi through Colter’s phone. Reenie beats Colter to the punch and has already found Talbot at another getaway. She confronts him in a room with other people, asking about Haley’s murder and his dealings in Sandy Point. She assures him that he’s going down for what he’s done, and that she’ll be there to watch it when it happens. Reenie tells Colter that she’s confident he’s involved in Haley’s death and Colter notices Xavier Samson having a meeting with the sheriff. Bo shows up behind Colter with a gun drawn and Colter tries to convince him that he doesn’t have to go down for his brother’s crimes. He believes Bo kept Katie alive when his brother instructed him to get rid of her. He says instead of shooting her, like he was told, he left her behind. Colter investigates and finds Katie hiding in an old boat, unable to walk because of a leg injury but still alive. She tells Colter that Xavier killed Dylan and she jumped out of the boat to get away. Bo caught up to her and ditched her on the shore and she’s been hiding out. Before they can leave, Xavier shows up to try and stop them. Colter sets a trap and takes him down, holding him at gunpoint, waiting for Katie to knock him out with a rock. The sheriff shows up to Lizzy’s house and says that Katie was found and is coming home after getting patched up. She invites him inside and he holds her hostage. They call Colter and the sheriff tells him he has 15 minutes to bring Katie home before he kills Lizzy.
The sheriff feels like he needs to get rid of Katie because of the “trouble” she caused by trying to reveal the truth about Talbot and Haley. A knock on the door reveals the deputy, holding Colter as a prisoner, saying that Colter wanted his help taking the sheriff down. “That didn’t work out so well,” the deputy says. He’s instructed to handcuff Colter and put him on the couch with Izzy, while the sheriff goes to the squad car and takes care of Katie. In the squad car, however, is an FBI agent, waiting for the sheriff. The deputy helped Colter set everything up and Katie has been kept safe. The building where Haley was being kept belonged to the sheriff’s family, he was keeping Haley on ice so he had leverage over Talbot if he ever needed it. Talbot gets taken by the FBI as well, and Reenie is outside his building to watch it all go down, as she promised.
Reenie also tells Colter that Russell turned up, sending her a picture from a bar in Argentina and inviting her to join him. She gets a second invitation, this time from Colter, asking her to come up and spend a few days with him. She’d “love to” but wants to go home and relax for a few days so she can figure a few things out. While saying goodbye to Lizzy, Colter learns that his father and her mother were having an affair all those years ago. It’s yet another thing he didn’t know about. Lizzy says that when her mom died a year prior, she found a box of Colter’s dad’s files amongst her things. She says that Mr. Shaw had visited her mom shortly before he died. They had a brief argument before he handed over the box and left. Lizzy sent the box to Colter’s mom when she didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know that either.
Colter has a lot of information to sort through, and he’s going to take a little break to process it all. For the first time in a while, he’s going to spend some time doing nothing. The season concludes with “Gimme Shelter” turned up loud and Colter running into the ocean with a surfboard.
