Tracker – Season 1 Episode 11 “Beyond the Campus Walls” Recap & Review

Beyond the Campus Walls

Episode 11 of Hacker Season 1 sees Shaw travel to track a missing college student in Wyoming. Black Barker went missing the night after he had an altercation with another student at a party. His mother, Polly, is worried to death and has offered a reward to Shaw for his services.

Barker is part of a high-pressure grad project that is doing research in protein cell folding under Professor Lyle Hewitt. There is interest from the big pharma companies, thus making him a valuable commodity. Lately, Blake has been having trouble with anxiety. However, the exact cause of the issue is unclear.

Although she is reluctant, Polly reveals that her brother ran away like this when they were little. His body was discovered days later. Could Blake also have similar issues? Shaw’s sister, Dory, works as a professor at the university. He approaches her for help on their father’s case, even though they haven’t spoken to each other for a year. Shaw has found new information about a project that their father was working on. However, Dory is more interested in the present and requests him to meet her for dinner.

When he meets Lyle, Shaw learns that Blake has been falsifying the results of his research. Although there wasn’t a direct confrontation, it must have played a part in his disappearance. He doesn’t get much info from the professor but is able to isolate Jada, Blake’s lab partner, to get insights. She mentions Blake’s presence at the party which piques Shaw’s interest in it. Shaw works together with Bobby to figure out who Blake is seeing using his phone. Meanwhile, Shaw visits the bar and spots the cowboy hat lying on the road that Blake was wearing on the night.

He goes inside the house and finds a device with lewd photos of Blake taken by himself. Shaw also finds sex toys in the cabinet and reaches the location of the store they were brought from. Bobby reveals to him on the phone that Blake was talking to a girl recently. She invited him to that party but perhaps never showed up. This explains why Blake grabbed at the wrong girl at the party since he had never met her before in real life. 

Her name is Irene Hertzyl and now, Shaw also has her photo with him. When Shaw goes into the store, Irene greets him and he confronts her. Irene is shocked to see him asking questions about Blake. Irene confesses that she was blackmailing Blake. It was a job she and her husband, Chuck, got off the dark web. She doesn’t know any more details about it but remarks that the client needed “leverage” over Blake.

When Shaw spots blood on the rug in the store, he compels Irene to show him CCTV footage from the night. There, he sees Chuck bashing Blake’s head on the counter and taking him someplace. Irene doesn’t know where he has gone. Shaw forgets about the dinner with Dory and shows up at his RV disappointed. He requests Bobby to communicate with the client on the dark web and sets up a meeting. The person turns out to be Dax, Blake’s other lab partner.

He reveals that it was Lyle who set everything up, including the falsified numbers. Shaw is forced to work with Dory, who posits that Lyle might be keeping Blake in one of the bomb shelters underground. Lyle and Chuck try to blackmail Blake to give up the location of the pen drive with all the evidence as Shaw and Dory close in on them. Lyle kills Chuck and holds Blake at gunpoint when Shaw confronts him. Shaw calmly talks to him but Lyle attacks him, forcing Shaw to attack him as well.

Blake is reunited with his mother and Lyle will be going to prison. Dory and Shaw finally have dinner. She asks him to be more frequent in his visits as they discuss what happened after their father died. Shaw stayed back even as Dory rode away with their uncle to the city. Shaw stayed back because he wanted to be with their mother to support her, although Dory says that she was partly culpable. Dory also insists that the siblings must remain together for the future and Shaw shouldn’t be stuck in the past. 

The Episode Review

The makers keep postponing Colter’s confrontation with his past and the revelation of what actually happened. Even though he faces many situations that bring him closer to doing so, the episodes just aren’t crafty enough to accommodate everything.

This one goes along similar lines as most of the other instalments this season. Although it does keep consistency to a great extent, Tracker is becoming increasingly monotonous. The predictability is killing any chance of a surprise or twist in the episodic plots. If you can see beyond that, this one is above average.