⚠️ SPOILER ALERT: This article contains plot details from the Season 3 finale of CBS’s “Tracker.”
CBS’s “Tracker” closed its third season Sunday with a finale that gave star Justin Hartley’s Colter Shaw his clearest picture yet of his father’s dark past — then immediately pulled the rug out with a twist that sets his brother Russell on a dangerous collision course with Season 4.
The episode, titled “The Best Ones,” serves as the second half of a two-part story in which Colter and Russell (Jensen Ackles) work to dismantle the chrono stasis project — a covert government program that experimented on gifted children to exploit their abilities for military operations. The finale picks up inside the lab where two children, Danny and Lola, remain in danger. Danny possesses remote viewing abilities; Lola has precognition. The brothers face off against Vickers, a former Delta Force operative turned contract killer hired to erase all traces of the operation, before Colter gets both children and their handler, Dr. Jukic, safely into witness protection.
Russell’s arc carries the episode’s real weight. He takes a bullet wound during the mission, hides it from Colter, and quietly calls their associate Reenie for help. By the episode’s end, Russell has re-entangled himself with the Horizon Group after his former boss surfaces with a classified file about Colter’s father. “What’s in that file, what he did to Colter, it’s all true,” the boss tells Russell, who reads it in visible horror — then agrees to carry out one final job in exchange for it.
Hartley described Colter’s emotional state as something short of resolution. “I don’t know if it’s a complete resolve, like ‘Everything’s okay, and now I feel better,’ but it’s information that he needed in order for him to move on with his life and go about his business,” he said ahead of the finale.
The episode arrives as the show navigates an evolving competitive landscape. For its first two and a half seasons, “Tracker” ranked as the most-watched broadcast drama in the U.S., but it now sits second, behind CBS’s freshman hit “Marshals,” with 16.4 million Live+28 multiplatform viewers, and seventh among all network and streaming series for the 2025-26 season.
Season 4 will look different in every sense. The show, produced by 20th Television, will relocate from Vancouver — where it shot all three prior seasons — to Los Angeles, secured by a record $48 million California tax credit, the largest the state’s film commission has ever awarded to a relocating series. Production begins in late June. Showrunner Elwood Reid called the move a tribute to Vancouver crews while embracing the opportunity to bring the show home to California.
