How the Spy Thriller 'Treadstone' Connects to the 'Bourne' Franchise
This story contains mild spoilers for USA's Treadstone.
Is it possible to do Bourne without Bourne? That's the question hanging over Treadstone, the ambitious action-thriller series that debuts October 15 on USA Network with a premiere episode that pings between far-flung international locations, stretches across multiple conspiracy-filled time periods, and clobbers the viewer with kinetic hand-to-hand combat. As the slightly awkward wording in the opening credits for the series indicates, Treadstone is "based on an organization from the Bourne series of novels by Robert Ludlum." That means all the confusing narrative scaffolding that supported Matt Damon's Jason Bourne adventures must now stand on its own.
Though Treadstone is the inaugural TV spin-off of the larger Bourne universe, which began with Robert Ludlum's 1980 novel The Bourne Identity and has carried on in book form even after the author's death, it's not the first attempt to build out the series without Damon. 2012's The Bourne Legacy tried to swap Jeremy Renner into the lead role, introducing a new super-spy and the experimental pills known as "chems," but the movie got mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office, setting the stage for Damon's return in 2016's underwhelming Jason Bourne. By 2017, Damon wondered in an interview if "maybe people are done with the character."
Treadstone, which was conceived by producer Ben Smith as being "concurrent" to the films, shares many qualities with a Bourne movie: Memories get erased, individuals discover previously unknown fighting capabilities, and CIA agents bark out lines like, "Clear the room!" At points, it can be a little overwhelming. To help you through the first few episodes, we've got a dossier of intel below you can upload into your brain for later activation.
What is Operation Treadstone?
It's right there in the title, so obviously Operation Treadstone is important to the plot of USA's Treadstone. If for some reason you don't have a synopsis of The Bourne Identity embedded in your brain, here's what you need to know: The CIA created a super-secret program that trained elite assassins who could be "activated" at a moment's notice to carry out the bureau's nefarious bidding. The program involved breaking down the personalities, erasing memories, and eliminating the moral codes of its human subjects, turning them into unblinking killing machines. If you've seen The Manchurian Candidate -- or Zoolander -- you get the picture.
Highly skilled and hard to control, Jason Bourne was the asset that got away. Through the Bourne series, the everyman assassin learned more about his training, discovering previously blocked memories and sinister details about the program along the way. Meanwhile, various CIA bureaucrats were always tracking Bourne, poring over security cam footage and computer screens, and covering their tracks on an institutional level. There was always a sense of sprawl to the Treadstone conspiracy, like it couldn't be contained by the script of a single movie.
Freed by the longer runtime of a series, Treadstone digs deeper into the program's history, opening with a flashback to East Berlin in 1973, where "awakened" agent John Randolph Bentley (Jeremy Irvine of War Horse) escapes Soviet capture. The plot then jumps to the present day, where a series of men and women, including an oil rigger in Alaska (Sense8's Brian J. Smith) and a piano tutor in North Korea (Han Hyo-joo), discover that they may in fact be "cicadas," the word used in the show to describe the on-the-verge-of-activation assets. (The first episode is titled "The Cicada Protocol.") Who exactly is pulling the strings and why? That's the central mystery Treadstone sets out to explore.
What is Operation Blackbriar?
In the second episode, Omar Metwally's put-upon field agent Matt Edwards makes one of the more specific references to Jason Bourne himself. "I was on the ground in New York when Blackbriar got blown," he tells a former Treadstone doctor, referencing the events from 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum. At another point in the episode, he swears he "saw the hunt up close," referring to the search for Jason Bourne, the elusive bee in the intelligence community's bonnet.
Blackbriar was basically the government's attempt to reboot Treadstone under a new name. (It's not that different from The Bourne Legacy, when you think about it.) After having their cover blown by Bourne, the CIA reconceived the program as Blackbriar and went right back to their shady activities. Later, after Bourne also exposed Blackbriar, the CIA attempted to reframe the program in congressional hearings as an operation designed specifically to hunt down Bourne himself. But that was just a cover-up. Makes sense, right? Not really -- the Bourne mythology is notoriously convoluted -- but it doesn't have to all click together. That's how conspiracies work.
Do you need to know the Bourne movies to enjoy Treadstone?
As fun as it can be to tease out the specifics of the Bourne world, the Treadstone material is not what most people enjoy about the Bourne movies. You remember them for Paul Greengrass's constantly shaking camera work, Tony Gilroy's surprisingly clever spycraft dialogue, and scenes where Bourne blows up a building by sticking a magazine in a toaster. The Treadstone backstory is fun, packed with espionage jargon and plenty of deception, but it mostly exists to give the Bourne character a larger force to fight against and a dark history to atone for. Treadstone was never the point.
In the same way, USA's Treadstone could conceivably be enjoyed without an advanced degree in Bourne studies. There are plenty of tense action sequences, plot twists, and scenes where guys say stuff like, "We need to contain this." (CIA agents always want to contain it, but they're so bad at containment!) The problem is that the show, at least in the first four episodes that were made available for review, lacks a Bourne-like center to guide you through the chaos. Creator Tim Kring, who helmed the similarly complicated serialized ensemble show Heroes, clearly knows his Bourne history. All the pieces, including some brutal fight scenes with unconventional weapons, are there. Treadstone simply can't remember how to put them together.
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