Tracker is on a roll.
Tracker Season 2 Episode 14 is the show at its best, meaning an exciting case of the week that wasn’t overly complex, with appearances from all the major players and some nice tie-ins to Colter’s personal journey.
If we had a little Shaw family drama to sweeten the pot, this may have been my favorite episode of the season.
Colter made his way down south to a small town outside the Big Easy, and while I love and champion Colter’s taking on cases in big cities, I also love small-town adventures.
The opening sequence of this one suggested some teenage bullying and intimidation gone very wrong, but it ended up being much deeper and tragically darker than that.
By all accounts, Anton seemed like a bright kid who was very misunderstood by his peers.
Getting bullied and having to resort to keeping a baseball bat by the door is no way to live, and it’s truly a shame that was the kind of experience he had to endure.
Whenever his “friend” Cal said he was weird, I wanted to scream. I guess because he liked to play the saxophone, music enamored him, and did not pick on other kids because they were different from him, he was clearly the problem.
I have my thoughts on Colter and his having a partner, but the weekly team-ups with people are usually a good time, and he and Detective Veach worked together perfectly.
For starters, she trusted Colter and his way of working without question, and that’s far from the case a lot of the time. We’ve seen cops push back or try to get Colter out of the way, but Veach wanted him there, and she was willing to let him take the lead at times.
Having grown up in that town and knowing all its inner workings, Veach was also the voice Colter needed because it would have taken him much longer to put things together without her.
Once they were able to rule out that a classmate took Anton, the only decent lead they had was about an older woman with a past criminal charge for kidnapping.
A promising lead!
It was funny to see Colter phone Randy for help and immediately get the surveillance. Then he could call Reenie and eventually unseal those records. It would have taken far longer than a day if they had to go through “official” channels.
It takes the whole team for Colter to do what he does so effectively.
Most things are not as they seem at first glance, and much like Colter, once he and Veach went through Sherry’s house and saw that huge Bible, I had a feeling she was not into the voodoo or magic the show was trying to peddle us.
Yes, we saw her with the markings on her face, but that felt like a red herring if I ever saw one.
Unsurprisingly, they had a case in New Orleans and chose to incorporate magic. Still, I must admit I was a bit frustrated at first because I expected them to lean into the voodoo aspect of the city, which is often mischaracterized in the media.
Voodoo isn’t inherently “evil,” like many movies would lead you to believe. It’s a religion meant to serve as more of a connection to spirits. It has nothing to do with hurting people but instead trying to help.
Tracker didn’t touch that, so thank God for that. Instead, they leaned into the idea of actual dark magic, namely rituals, spells, and sacrifices.
The series does like to explore topics like this, so it wasn’t wholly surprising that the story took a turn, but it was shocking to see that a sacrifice seemingly took place under the jazz bar Sherry and Anton were at the night before.
Anton working at the bar at 15 was a major red flag, but they were hitting us over the head with Anton’s obsession with his music. So, working at the bar and being in the atmosphere was important to him.
Sherry probably thought she was doing right by him, and with his father working late, at least he was somewhere she could look after him. A place she thought he’d be safe.
That barn-like shed was unique to cities with secret underground passages and lairs for speakeasies and the like. The structure Colter and Veach ended up at was the site of something terrible, with a dead body left behind.
Colter comes across more dead bodies than is normal for someone who’s not a cop.
I started to get suspicious of Hugo when he came onto the scene and acted as if he never even knew that structure was there.
Colter and Veach were preoccupied, but that was a lie if I had ever heard one! That was not some super, secret trap door Hugo would have never encountered in a million years.
It took Colter approximately seven seconds to find and open the door, so when I saw Hugo acting like he was in total shock, my antennas went up.
Maybe he was covering someone? Or perhaps he had some involvement somehow?
It wasn’t clear then, mainly because it wasn’t as if he was running, which is what most people would have done in that situation. Colter and Veach weren’t onto him, so he could have made a break for it right then and there and been long gone from town before anyone was the wiser.
But he was never going to do that. Not when he’d put in some serious work to kidnap and kill teenagers so he could obtain eternal life.
Infinity was a barbaric group hiding behind the “magic.” Perhaps they truly believed there were ways to achieve salvation and immortality, and that’s pretty wild to think about.
Hugo was taking these kids from across the tracks, maybe thinking no one would notice them missing, and that was precisely what Veach was telling Colter when they first met about the town and why she stayed.
Yes, there was darkness there, but there were also people there who needed protection—those forgotten.
Veach was dedicating her adult life to never being a person who left those kids behind.
The smartest thing Hugo did was send Colter and Veach to the wrong church once he figured out where Sherry and Anton were hiding out, but boy, I did not understand why they were talking out their ENTIRE THEORY within earshot of everyone.
Considering the proximity of the murder and almost murder to Hugo’s establishment, the last thing they should have been doing was making sure he got a whiff of what they were figuring out.
Alas, Hugo fooled them but not long enough, and suddenly, they were transporting us to a scene from Kill Bill: Volume 2.
Tracker LOVES to kill an innocent person who was just trying to do something good.
Pastor Josiah getting a bullet to the head for trying to protect his sister and a child from an unhinged man looking to sacrifice him for eternal life kind of pissed me off.
I understand that Tracker does its best to raise the stakes and show that what Colter is doing isn’t all rainbows and cutesy reunions at the end of the hour. But I’m getting annoyed seeing people who genuinely have no business even getting hurt being killed because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The church gunfight was pretty intense, and I thought Veach was a goner there for a second. Though I loved how Colter was with her, and he may not have been praying, he was certainly sending up all the wishes he could that she would be okay.
I’ve loved some of Colter’s one-and-done team-ups, but this may be my favorite.
This was another hour where Colter had to kill the bad guy, and he didn’t have much choice because that guy would have killed Sherry, Anton, and Colter if he thought it meant he was on the path to immortality.
I’ve never been happier for a character I just met to live than I was seeing Veach alive in the hospital!
I hope she and Deon make a real go of things and live happily ever after while Anton gets a scholarship to a fancy music school because they’re all good people who deserve it.
And if Tracker decided to venture down to N’awlins again, I’d certainly welcome it.
Tracker Notes
- We have to talk about Reenie’s new client. He was as shady as it gets. He’s obviously going to be a problem down the line, and hopefully, it will intersect with Colter somehow.
- I liked the subtle nods to Colter’s untraditional childhood. He doesn’t know what teenage kids get up to because he didn’t spend his teenage years in a way that many people can relate to.
- Still no word on Bobby, and I am trying not to panic.
This was a great hour, and I can’t wait to hear what you guys thought.
Please leave your comments below so we can talk about it!
You can watch Tracker on CBS at 8/7c on Sundays.
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