Deja View: Ian Tracey, Rogue, Continuum, and Bates Motel 

If you’ve been reading us a while (thanks!), you know that I have a pack of Canadian actors who are near and dear to my heart, perhaps none moreso than the fabulous Ian Tracey. He’s been on my radar about 15 years, back to The X-Files and Poltergeist: The Legacy. If you’ve never seen Da Vinci’s Inquest (which ran eight seasons) or Intelligence (which ran two), get on that.

He was a series regular in both, and they’re seriously amazing TV (DI isn’t available on DVD in its entirety, but Intelligence is). After Intelligence wrapped in 2007, Tracey took a much-deserved breather, working in a recurring basis as Adam Worth on Sanctuary and appearing here and there in a few one-off things, but otherwise we didn’t see him onscreen much.

Over the last 18 months, he’s been back with a vengeance, and I couldn’t be happier. Last year, he was the doomed hunter dad in the Supernatural episode, “Adventures in Babysitting” and a railroad thug who met the wrong end of Cullen Bohannon’s gun in the first season of Hell on Wheels. In the closing episodes of Continuum‘s first season, he was Jason, a maybe-unhinged fellow traveler who gave Kiera a heads up on the impending bombing, and SPOILER ALERT, he’ll be back in season two.

Film fest attendees may have spotted him opposite The Vampire Diaries‘ Sara Canning in a noirish short film called Corvus that’s been making the circuit for the last year. The folks over at Reelz Channel had him twice this spring. First, in the cheesarific True Justice, where he was a skeevy black market surgeon, and last month, he was Hector, a plant manager trying to do the right thing when catastrophe struck in the mini-series, Ring of Fire.

And now, for the first time in years, he’s back in rotation as a series regular, on DirectTV’s Rogue, where he plays Mitch, the detective ally to Grace. There’s more than meets the eye between them and I look forward to finding out exactly what that is. Fans who’ve been watching Tracey for a while will be tickled to see him walking the same beats he did on Da Vinci’s Inquest (both filmed in Vancouver), even sitting in one of the booths at Vancouver’s Ovaltine Cafe nine years after he sat there as a completely different character (or maybe that’s just me). There’s a great new interview with him here on the DirecTV site, where we find out that we’ll soon see him working opposite his son, Keenan, for the first time.

I’ve been thrilled to have him back on my TV, and color me doubly thrilled when he sauntered into Bates Motel for a moment last night as Remo, Dylan’s new co-worker/subordinate in the wake of Ethan’s death. Hopefully, we’ll see him again in later episodes. I have to think he must be on board for an arc because he’s been back in such a big way.

(Bonus–we also got David Cubitt, another fave who’s been laying low since Medium ended, as Norman’s doomed dad).

I adore Tracey. He has a sensitivity and swagger we don’t get that often, and it’s been a lovely evolution to watch him move from playing scary guys in his early work to the multi-layered, flawed heroes he gets to play now. He’s an infinitely interesting actor and I’ll watch him in anything. I’ve missed him, and I’m super happy to have so many places to find him again.

Rogue airs on DirecTV’s AUDIENCE Network Wednesday nights at 9/8c and Bates Motel airs Monday night on A&E at 10/9c. Continuum‘s second season returned to Showcase in Canada on Sunday and will return to Syfy in the U.S. on June 7th.