Tracker Season 1 Episode 11 Recap: Beyond the Campus Walls

Colter heads to Wyoming to find a missing graduate student on Tracker Season 1 Episode 11, “Beyond the Campus Walls.”

The student, Blake, had been working on a high-pressure grant project before he disappeared. Everyone — and I mean this to an almost comical degree — assumes Blake got burnt out and took off without a trace because of the stress.

His mother, who also happens to work at the school as a custodian, doesn’t believe that, though. 

Even she doesn’t have it all quite right, however. She tells Colter that her brother had a psychotic break when he was about the same age as Blake. So she’s worried that, perhaps, the same thing has happened to her son.

Before Colter really gets into his investigation, he makes a stop at his sister’s classroom. In a convenient coincidence, Dory (Melissa Roxburgh) happens to be a professor at this university. So, he stops by not only to say hello, but to show her documents about her father.

It turns out the two haven’t spoken in about a year, which Dory gives Colter a hard time about. She’s tried. She’s called. But he doesn’t answer and doesn’t call her back.

Now that he’s here, though, he shows her a folder that reveals their father had a government job they never knew about. There’s clearly more to the story of their father’s paranoia, but Dory has chosen to move on while Colter remains hung up on the past.

They make a plan to have dinner, which Dory pushes, saying she’ll even take care of all the details. But, of course, Colter gets involved in his investigation and misses it.

Granted, this is a high-stakes investigation, so you can’t really blame him. 

Colter learns that Blake had been working hard on his research, with his lab partners noting how much he enjoyed the work. But then Colter meets Professor Hewitt, who’d been overseeing the project and who claims that Blake had been falsifying his research.

That would be motive enough to run off and disappear, and Hewitt says he’d revoked Blake’s lab privileges. Still, Colter feels something’s off. He’s good at reading people, among other things, and he manages to pull Blake’s friend Jada aside to get more information.

Jada reveals that Blake had been partying, which wasn’t like him in the least. This references the scene we see at the very beginning of the episode, where Blake awkwardly waits for a girl and mistakenly grabs the wrong one, which results in him getting punched and thrown in a pool.

With some help from Bob and his tech skills, Colter finds that Blake had been planning to meet a woman from the internet. He finds the girl pretty easily, and she’s nothing like what her pictures show.

This woman was seducing him and convincing him to send nude photos, but it was all a catfish scam that had dark intentions. It turns out she and her husband were working together to blackmail Blake, but they were doing so for a client. 

 The client? Professor Hewitt. Obviously.

It all comes back to the research, which had major monetary stakes. Blake was never falsifying research. Instead, it was Hewitt whose numbers weren’t showing the progress he’d been claiming to investors.

This is where the fact that Colter’s sister works at the university comes into play. She’s able to help Colter figure out where Hewitt would be hiding Blake on campus — in the school’s old bomb shelters.

Colter and Dory arrive just as Blake’s life is really on the line. Hewitt does seem to have a crisis of conscious, a little, as the blackmailer he’s hired insists it’s time to simply kill Blake.

He asks him to hand over the gun so he can do it himself, and kills the blackmailer instead. Colter busts in just afterward, and Hewitt has a gun to Blake’s head. 

Colter takes the perfect shot to injure Hewitt without killing him, and Blake is saved. It’s another happy ending, and Blake proves to be even more brilliant than everyone knew when he reveals where he’d really been hiding the evidence that would hurt Hewitt.

Colter seems impressed, but he doesn’t stick around long to chat with Blake and his mother. 

He finally spends some time with his sister. Colter and Dory have a difficult, somewhat cryptic conversation about their parents and their brother.

Dory desperately wants Colter to get back in touch with their brother Russell and put everything behind them. The two also have different ideas about their mother’s involvement in everything that happened in their childhood.

Colter sees her as a victim, while Dory believes their mother was ultimately enabling their father all along. 

It’s all a setup for what’s to come since it’s already been revealed that we’ll be meeting Russell soon. Russell will be played by Jensen Ackles on Tracker Season 1 Episode 12, “Off the Books.”

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Tracker airs Sundays at 9/8c on CBS.

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