[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Tracker Season 3 premiere “The Process.”]
Tracker begins its third season with simply great television: a six-minute scene of Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) and his brother, Russell (Jensen Ackles, back for the two-parter), just sitting in the Airstream talking about their family (before turning to the case-of-the-week).
“Our show has a lot of action, which is great and also great television, but I think we earn all of that with the storytelling and the character work that we do,” Hartley told us when he stopped by TV Insider’s office ahead of the premiere. (Watch the full interview above.) He calls that scene “really heartfelt.”
For showrunner Elwood Reid, who wrote the episode (Ken Olin directed), this was unlike other times when they usually want to get out of the Airstream because it can be claustrophobic. “It was mostly shot very tight, and the conversation goes all over the place. When I first turned it in, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s too long. It’s going to be boring. We’re in the f**king Airstream,’ and I was like, ‘These guys can pull it off,’” he recalled. “It was so interesting because sometimes when you get what I would call two alpha actors together, they try to compete at the same level. They both took these really interesting lines, and it felt just like two brothers talking about all this stuff. It felt very natural.”
There wasn’t much direction when it came to it because, as Reid shared, Hartley and Ackles know what they’re doing. “After we did it, we watched the cut a couple times and we played the silences. You don’t get a lot of that, particularly on network TV where it’s just two people talking. And it seemed the silence has really worked. We took the music out,” he said. “I was really, really pleased with the way it turned out. But that’s what you get when you have two actors of Justin and Jensen’s caliber. We just let ’em do their thing. I can’t take much credit for it.”
Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
Russell tracks down Colter in the middle of a bar fight after Reenie (Fiona Rene) reaches out since the rewardist is ignoring her calls. The brothers then, in Colter’s Airstream, talk about what Colter learned from Otto (Alex Fernandez), who pushed their father off the cliff to his death that night when they were younger. Their mother (Wendy Crewson) had been planning to leave their dad and turned to Otto for help. Their dad wasn’t having it, and when Otto tried talking to him that night, things got physical. It’s news to Russell.
Colter then apologizes for believing their mom, who wanted to keep the brothers estranged and led Colter to believe Russell had something to do with their dad’s death. As Russell sees it, their mom didn’t have a choice because their father had a lot of problems and was losing it.
Hartley said that apology “was pretty amazing. Two grown men who go about their business in different ways, and just one guy apologizing from the heart to another guy to his brother, and then his reaction, which was just, ‘Apology accepted and move on.’ … There’s no bells and whistles on this part of Tracker. We’re just sitting down, two dudes talking, two brothers talking, and it works,”
Colter needed to say that and Russell needed to hear it “a lot,” according to Reid. “I think that was something that we kind of owed from last season. That moment was really interesting because when Colter says it, he’s looking at Russell and reading Russell. And I think, for me, it’s one of the bigger emotional moments of their arc because I do feel like they’ve forgiven each other. Remember, Russell knows that Colter was not brainwashed or poisoned, but he was pissed at Colter for believing that he would be capable of [killing their father]. And they didn’t overplay it. No one was crying or hugging or touching each other. It was just there. Those guys were very present. We just got out of the way and let the guys do their thing.”
There is more to the conversation Colter had with Otto that will be revealed. But he does believe what Otto told him because, as Reid credited to Fernandez’s performance, Otto “was unburdening himself with something that he’d carried with him. Justin took the same emotion into both of those scenes [with Otto in the finale and Russell in the premiere].”
Now, it’s a matter of, “What were the circumstances going on around their family that would cause their mother to do this extreme thing? And that’s something we’re going to explore a little bit in this season, hopefully culminate the season with. We’re going to get some answers to what that might’ve been,” promised Reid.
That’s where what happened that summer, that their mother doesn’t want to talk about, and the talk of people from the government supposedly harassing their family comes into play.
“Because of the extreme situation that their family was in, Russell has probably seen more things or maybe understood things differently than Colter does. And then in a later episode, he gives a lead about somebody that may know something about what was going on with the father,” Reid teased. “Because the question is, why did this guy who was a smart, well-respected guy go off the grid? Why did he, as we saw in the pilot, become a little bit unhinged? I think that’s something that Colter has questioned a lot, and Russell may or may not — and I know the answer to this in the series is he has done a little research on, what were the forces swirling around our family that caused our dad to kind of go off the deep end and mom, too? Because mom is hiding some secrets. And now the question becomes for this season whether she’s protecting them or hiding something. And both of those things could be true.”
That lead from Russell won’t be coming with a return from Ackles, at least not yet. Reid wants to bring him back, but it very much depends on scheduling.
Watch the full video interview for more from Justin Hartley as he breaks down the premiere.
Tracker, Sundays, 8/7c, CBS