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.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
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+.
