Entertainment
‘Tracker’ Finally Revealed the Truth About Ashton Shaw’s Death
Mystery solved, folks! After last season’s jam-packed finale, “Echo Ridge,” Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) finally returned home on this week’s Tracker for the full truth behind his father’s death. Since the very first episode, Ashton Shaw’s (Lee Tergesen) murder has been at the forefront of speculation, but it’s not until now that we fully understand the events leading up to his strange death that stormy night in Northern California. “Chrono Stasis” reveals the full turn of events and opens the door for a much bigger threat going into Season 4 — depending on how the next episode turns out, anyway.
“Chrono Stasis” Settled ‘Tracker’s Biggest Mystery Once and For All — And Opened the Door to Another
In the very first episode of Tracker, we saw what happened on the ridge all those years ago from a young Colter’s (Prestyn Bates) perspective. A half-crazed Ashton Shaw had been pushed off a cliff, with his brother Russell (Jensen Ackles in the present, Matthew Nelson-Mahood in the past) watching silently from above. For all we knew, Russell killed Ashton to save Colter and their sister from their father’s mania. Given that their mother, Mary Dove Shaw (Wendy Crewson), went so far as to convince Colter that his brother was responsible, that was a safe bet. But after their Season 1 reunion revealed that Russell was not the killer, we had to wait until Season 2 to learn a man named Otto Waldron (Alex Fernandez) was behind their father’s big sleep — at the behest of their mother. Since then, Colter hasn’t given Mary Dove the time of day, only returning to Echo Ridge this week for answers at Russell’s urging (and just in time for Tracker to swap filming locations). While there, Colter’s mother breaks the silence on what we have been pondering since last year’s finale: no, she didn’t ask Otto to kill Ashton, he did that all on his own.
As it turns out, Ashton’s time with the Chrono Stasis program fundamentally changed him. When he returned from Alaska, he wasn’t the same man he was when he left, and he grew increasingly unhinged (see Season 1’s “Klamath Falls”). Not only did Ashton’s erratic behavior make him a danger to his children, but he became physically abusive to his wife as well. It was for this reason that she fought to get her children away, asking Otto Waldron (Alex Fernandez) to confront Ashton the night of his death. But despite what Colter had believed, Mary Dove never asked him to kill her husband.
All she wanted was to get her children away from a man raving about the government coming after him for his opposition to their highly experimental (not to mention illegal) work. Instead, Otto saw Ashton as a threat that could only be dealt with by force, so he pushed him off that cliff. As for why Mary Dove lied for years about Russell’s involvement, she was fearful that the shadowy government forces that robbed Ashton of his sanity might set their sights on the brothers if they decided to investigate any further. In her view, if the brothers were no longer on speaking terms, they would not be a unified threat to the folks behind the Chrono Stasis program — the same forces now at Colter and Russell’s heels.
‘Tracker’ Has Pivoted From Solving Ashton’s Murder to Unraveling His Legacy
Now that all the cards are on the table, Tracker is gearing its finale up to be a massive undertaking as the Shaw brothers do what their father never could: take down Chrono Stasis for good. This whole thing kicked off when they tracked down Dr. Serena Jukic (Jeri Ryan), their father’s old colleague who worked with him in Alaska. According to Jukic, the program was a DARPA-funded operation that aimed to explore the full range of potential “cognitive abilities.” This led to experiments with remote viewing, astral projection, and other pseudo-scientific notions that ultimately resulted in the use of child subjects — some of whom were abducted from their homes and families, including a young boy named Danny Kellerman. Although Ashton was removed from the program in the early stages of this development (and after the death of one child subject), Jukic stuck with it for years, though she regrets it deeply.
Season 3’s penultimate episode ends with Colter and Russell breaking into a government facility to rescue Danny, though he isn’t the only one who has been molded by the U.S. government. Considering how long this program has been going, and the sheer amount of manpower and resources that have been poured into it, it’s unlikely that the Shaw brothers will be able to take it down with only one more episode to go. Frankly, if they did, it would be a mistake. Tracker has always had some sort of mystery lingering in the background, but with the truth behind Ashton’s death finally revealed, well, the natural continuation of this thread is to expand the Chrono Stasis plotline further. Perhaps there’s a way to connect these experiments here to “The Process”? Or maybe it will relate to the government operation the Shaw brothers previously stumbled upon in Season 2’s “Ontological Shock”? Whether Tracker wraps up this entire plotline in the next episode or it carries on further, we can finally close the book on Ashton’s murder.
Tracker airs Sundays on CBS and is available the next day for streaming on Paramount+.
- Release Date
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February 11, 2024
- Showrunner
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Elwood Reid
- Writers
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Ben H. Winters, Hilary Weisman Graham
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Justin Hartley
Colter Shaw
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