Tracker-Noble Rot

S02E04-Noble Rot-Episode Recap

Previous to the episode ‘Noble Rot,’ here are some access links to previous Tracker episodes;

• Season One Recap Article
• Tracker Family History
• Season 02 Episode 01: Out of The Past
• Season 02 Episode 02: Ontological Shock
• Season 02 Episode 03: Bloodlines

Here is the next installment of Tracker titled ‘Noble Rot.’ The episode aired November 3, 2024. All the juicy details are below. Enjoy!

Introduction

It’s nighttime and we see a woman running through rows of vines, and she is very unsteady on her feet. She is being chased, and we see someone behind her with a flashlight and the sound of a man’s voice yelling. She falls but manages to get up and run further. The second time she falls, she doesn’t get up.

The next scene opens with Colter getting details of this week’s Tracker case while on the phone with Velma. It is a woman named Quinn Ridgely, who co-owns, with her wife, a new software company. The job was called in by Reenie, who is at a retreat property in Napa Valley.

Colter meets up with her and her plus one, Elliot Rusch. Elliot leaves them to talk. After Reenie and Colter have a brief awkward moment, she explains she wanted him to meet Elliot so there wouldn’t be any surprises. Colter says he’s surprised about one thing, that his older brother Russell isn’t with her. Russell told him about their dinner date. Reenie explained that Russell isn’t the ‘wine and corporate retreat’ kind of guy. She confesses to Colter that “it isn’t like that between her and Russell.”

When Colter asks about what event they are at, Reenie tells him it is a Corporate Leadership Summit. When she was with her previous employer, she won a big case for the host of the retreat, which scored her an invite to the event. Colter begins to ask questions about the case and Reenie fills him in that Quinn Ridgely’s wife Gray, believes it is corporate kidnapping. Reenie is doubtful. There are no demands made and no ransom request. The owner of the estate has many high-profile guests at this retreat and doesn’t want any bad press, so the police have not been called in. She has been missing for 12 hours but there are no signs of her being on the property.

Cast

The Tracking Assignment

Reenie gets Colter to take a case involving a woman missing from a high-end wellness retreat in Napa Valley, designed for CEOs.

–>Quinn is Missing

Reenie takes Colter to Quinn and Gray’s villa. Gray explains that she was on a sunset hike with some of the other CEO’s the night before. When she got back, the shower was running but Quinn didn’t respond when she called her. She busted through the locked door and found the room trashed, blood on the floor and Quinn was missing. Colter asked her why she would think it was corporate kidnapping. Gray said it had happened before with one of their top engineers in their firm, and they paid the money to get him back.

Colter wants to know if they have been targeted in any other way and Gray tells him it hasn’t been easy. Their company went from garage-band to rock-star status overnight. They developed some controversial applications to expose deep-fakes, and what started as a graduate project, blew up so fast they had a hard time navigating it all. Having to endure numerous threats, didn’t help when both her and Quinn have different ideas about the future direction of the company. They had some fights about it.

 –>I Don’t Think She Was Taken

Reenie takes Colter to see the bathroom. Judging by the clues left behind, it looks like the broken mirror may have been caused by Quinn and there was blood on the inside of the window handle. Colter thinks she wasn’t taken. She left on her own.

Reenie takes Colter to introduce him to the host and owner of the estate, William Locke, and his head of security, Peter Reynolds. William tells them that they have their entire security team out looking for Quinn and have also reached out to a corporate kidnapping consultant. Colter tells them he doesn’t think she was kidnapped and is probably somewhere on the estate. Peter disagrees, saying their search was thorough. When Colter requests access to their security footage, he is denied on the basis that NDA’s have been signed and the footage is off-limits. He can however, work with their security detail and search every inch of the property necessary to find Quinn.

Colter believes the owner, and his head of security, are hiding something.

–>What Are You Hiding

Bobby is loving some new high-top running shoes he was unboxing when Colter and Reenie called asking if he would be able to hack into the resorts system so they could view the security footage.

After some poking around, Bobby told them that their system is not connected to any outside network so the only way to view anything is if they find a way to get into their on-site mainframe. Bobby was able to tell them, based on a power consumption map where the mainframe is located. 

Reenie charms the security guard away from the entrance. Colter gets inside and starts looking at the security footage when Reenie joins him, and they find that it’s been tampered with. Using Colter’s phone, Bobby is able to access the files and finds the deleted segment and plays it for them. Reenie takes pictures just before the Security Guard returns and finds them.

–>Evidence Tampering

The security guard takes Colter and Reenie to Peter Reynolds, head of security. No sooner do they enter his office than Elliot Rusch arrives (after getting a text from Reenie) and advises Peter that he is there to act as his lawyer.

It’s all a ruse to put fear into Peter that he can face jail time for tampering with the security footage evidence that shows Quinn being led away by someone. Reenie tells him the way out of this situation is to answer their questions, namely, who is he protecting?

–>Look Out Point

It was the host and owner of the resort, William Locke. They confronted him and he explained that Quinn came to him for help. She and Gray had a huge fight about selling a big stake in the company. Gray wanted to sell to the highest bidder and Quinn was having an ethical dilemma. Quinn was aware that he had helped people sort out their stresses in the past with the use of therapeutic drugs, in this case toad venom. He gave her the drugs and told her to take it by the look-out point. He said he didn’t tell the truth at first because he was freaked out that she had gone missing.

Colter tells him to take them to look-out point.

–>The Cistern

When they get close to the look-out point, Colter sees that Quinn went off in a different direction. He saw broken branches and blood drippings. They came upon an old cistern covered in boards. The area has no security camera because it is a construction site ready to break ground for the building of new villas on the property.

William told Colter that his security team had already searched that area and found nothing. Colter could tell that some of the cistern boards had been tampered with, so he pulled them off and climbed inside. He found Quinn’s eyeglasses and a severed foot.

–>More Than One Body

Colter predicts that the severed foot has been buried in there for at least three months. Therefore, it isn’t Quinn’s, but there is no sign of her. Colter looks at the evidence in the cistern and tells William there was more than one body buried down there. They think that whoever was moving the bodies were forced to, because of the new construction project starting the following week.

They think Quinn stumbled on them as they were moving the bodies. Anything could have happened to her. Colter sees tire tracks of a utility vehicle and asks William where his maintenance shed is. William tells Colter he can work with Reynolds, who knows the property well.

William tells Reenie he needs to involve the police and will need a lawyer. She tells him she will draw up the contract.

–>We Have a Problem

Outside of the maintenance shed, Colter meets Rona, one of the groundskeepers. He begins examining one of the utility vehicles and Rona tells him the area is not for resort guests. Colter follows her inside, tells her is not a guest and starts asking questions about who drove the utility vehicle the night before. He also notices rust rings on the floor indicating the place where metal barrels have been moved. He asked her about those as well. She wants to know who he is, but Colter simply tells her it’s his job to investigate, and leaves.

As soon as he does, Rona calls someone to tell them they have a problem.

As soon as Colter is outside, he reaches out to Bobby, who was in the wings waiting for Rona to make a call to see if he could trace it. He does, and the call she made was to a phone in the barrel room in the basement of the facility.

–>In the Barrels

We see Colter moving through the wine cellar until he comes across the metal barrels he was looking for. He takes the lid off one of them and there is a dead body inside.

A man comes up behind him with a wooden mallet, and Colter uses the metal barrel lid to attack him. Once the man is down, Colter asks him who is behind all the dead bodies, and where they are holding Quinn. He gives up the name of his employer, Jesse Pardue.

He has Quinn.

–>Not At Home

We see Quinn tied up. Jesse Pardue and Rona talk and now he knows that Colter is looking for the bodies.

Quinn starts bargaining for her life, and tells Pardue if he lets her go, she will give him more money than he could ever need, if he will give her a few days until her company sells. Rona wants him to take the deal, but Pardue knows he is out of time.

Colter and Reynolds are on their way to Pardue’s house, but the police arrive first and discover no one is there.

Colter reaches out to Velma, who is already investigating Pardue, and asks if there are any remote job locations in the files. She knows of one and sends them the location. Colter and Reynolds turn the truck around and head to that location.

–>Out of Time

Pardue keeps calling his guy that Colter subdued in the wine cellar, so he can ensure the dead bodies were moved. He isn’t answering.

Pardue is out of time and knows he has to kill Quinn, but Rona intervenes and asks that he reconsider Quinn’s offer. With that kind of money they could go where no one would find them. Even if the police keep looking, Rona said he could explain what happened, he didn’t kill anyone, he just hid the bodies of the men who died on his construction sites. Purdue knows that he is to blame. Cutting corners on safety was his idea, and that made the work unsafe. The result was migrant workers he hired, were killed.

He attacks Rona and drags Quinn outside so he can kill her. He intends on putting her body through the wood chipper so there is no body for anyone to find.

–>The Wood Chipper

Reynolds and Colter arrive at the site and split up. Colter finds Pardue dragging Quinn towards the wood chipper and orders him to stop. As he begins to negotiate for Quinn’s life, Reynolds comes up behind Pardue. In the split second when Pardue turns towards Reynolds, we hear a gun shot and assume it is Colter who shot him, but in fact, Rona entered the scene.

There is no way to know if her shot would have killed him, because he falls into the wood chipper.

EMS arrives on the scene and attends Quinn. Her wife shows up via a police officer and they are escorted away, while Colter has a talk with Reynolds. He thanks him for his help and apologizes for misjudging him earlier. Reynolds tells him he was right, all the dead bodies were missing migrant workers. Now the families of this murdered workers have closure.

It’s a comment that Colter doesn’t remark on, but we are left to wonder if he too wishes he had closure regarding his Dad’s death.

–>I Can Count on You

In the closing scene of the episode, Elliot and Reenie show up to give Colter his payment from Gray. Elliot extended his thanks, he enjoyed the adventure and helping to find a missing woman. He compliments Colter on the work he does. Reenie takes a moment alone with Colter to thank him, telling him she can count on him.

There is such a delicious push-pull with these two. There is no way to predict if romance is on the horizon with them, but I think it’s safe to say that Russell is out of the picture.

The Shaw Family History

We learned nothing new about the Shaw family saga in this episode. When Reynolds comments that the families of the migrant workers will now have some closure, Colter doesn’t remark on it, but we are left to wonder if he too wishes he had closure regarding his Dad’s death.

In Closing

–>Overall Opinion of the Episode

There were a few contrived plot points that took away from the story;

• Medicinally applied Toad Venom to treat stress. I didn’t do any research on this, so I’ll generously take it on faith that this is a real thing.
• No matter how stressed out Quinn was, it made no sense to me why she would climb out a window on the 2nd storey of their villa, when she could have just used the front door.
• While I understand the host and owner’s reluctance to admitting his participation in administering “toad venom” for one of this guests, but the moment she went missing, it was always in his best interest to share what he knew rather than having to be forced to do so.

I will go on record saying that I always take it on faith that the magic Bobby performs in every episode, is technically possible. If it isn’t, they build it in so convincingly that it never feels contrived. As a fan of this show, I appreciate that.

The performances were terrific as always. The story was engaging and the overall arc was complete from start to finish, but I also saw the hint of some subtext. The Coulter / Reenie saga continues. They seem to tease one another regularly regarding their other relationships like Billie or Elliot.

Which brings me to another point regarding Reenie and Russell. Judging from this episode, it sounds to me like they’ve shut that down. Which is really too bad. Russell’s constant pursuit of the elusive Reenie was delightful to watch.

Extra Episode Photos

Preview for S2E05

Coming next week for Tracker is episode “Preternatural.” Colter takes a job locating a missing teen with a unique spiritual gift in an inhospitable mining town.

Reminder

Don’t forget to watch Tracker on CBS/Paramount+ Sunday Evenings at 8:00pm ET/PT.

• Please note, all photos used in this article are courtesy of CBS, Paramount+ and/or IMDb.