TRACKER closed its third season Sunday night when Episode 22, "The Best Ones," aired on CBS from 9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT, bringing Jensen Ackles back as Russell and sending Justin Hartley’s Colter Shaw into a last, dangerous case. In the hour, Colter and Russell searched for the victim of a nefarious research project, a hunt that pushed the brothers into what the episode framed as one of the series' darkest investigations yet.
The finale was written by Elwood Reid and Travis Donnelly and directed by Ken Olin. The episode arrives with TRACKER described as the #1 show on television, and it is produced by 20th Television; viewers can stream the episode live and on demand via Paramount+ Premium, with the episode available on demand the following day for Paramount+ Essential subscribers.
Throughout the hour, the story kept the focus tight: Hartley’s Colter remains at the center of a long-running search for answers about his family, and Russell’s return provided both muscle and history for the investigation. The episode unfolded as a procedural hunt — leads, confrontations, and a race to locate a person tied to experiments that the plot presented as deeply unethical and secretive.
Behind that hunt sits the broader strain that has carried Season 3: Colter is still grappling with long-buried truths surrounding his family after the explosive revelations in last season’s finale. The season-ending revelations in "The Best Ones" feed directly into that storyline. Supplementary reporting tied to the season indicated new information about Ashton Shaw and a covert government program experimenting on gifted children, and the finale made that program the hinge for its central mystery. Executive producers on the series include Justin Hartley, Ken Olin, Elwood Reid, Connie Dolphin, Sharon Lee Watson and Alex Katsnelson.
Even as the episode leaned into procedural momentum, it refused easy answers. The finale’s case — searching for a victim of a secret experiment — raised a tension that runs counter to the show’s status as television’s top series: a prime-time hit was asking viewers to sit with abuse and secrecy rather than tidy resolutions. That friction is what made the hour feel heavier than a typical season-closer; the brothers uncover new leads and painful truths, but the investigation opened more questions than it settled.
For viewers, the immediate consequence is clear: Ackles’ return as Russell was real and consequential, and the finale ends by widening the scope of Colter’s search rather than closing it. The single most consequential unanswered question left by "The Best Ones" is not whether the brothers will keep fighting — it is whether they can find and protect the people the episode exposed as victims of the covert program, and whether the new revelations about Ashton Shaw will redraw what Colter thought he knew about his own past.
