The Jason Bourne spinoff Treadstone retconned the spy’s original backstory and, in the process, the TV show managed to mangle the entire appeal of the iconic antihero. Despite what Daniel Craig’s early 007 movies might make viewers think, Jason Bourne is not like James Bond. While Bond is a jet-setting super-spy who is happy to be employed by the British Government, Jason Bourne spends the entire original movie trilogy on the run from the US Government (or, more specifically, the CIA) after the organization's attempts to assassinate him fail and leave him with amnesia.
Gradually, Jason Bourne’s backstory reveals that the trilogy’s antihero was a decorated soldier and the son of a CIA analyst who enlisted in the CIA himself. Bourne’s father was part of a program codenamed Treadstone that saw the CIA secretly train hitmen to carry out illegal assassinations worldwide. When Bourne’s father realized that his son was being courted for the program, he attempted to blow the whistle on this illegal, amoral operation, and the CIA assassinated him for his troubles. Ironically, Jason Bourne ended up choosing to Treadstone and became an assassin precisely because the CIA made his father’s assassination look like the work of terrorists.
Treadstone’s Soviet Origins Don’t Work For Jason Bourne
As the above synopsis makes clear, the Bourne trilogy is unapologetically critical of the security state. Bourne’s backstory questions whether the CIA acts in the best interests of American citizens and depicts the organization as a corrupt, all-powerful force in the lives of everyday civilians. However, 2019’s deservedly short-lived TV spinoff Treadstone retconned Bourne’s backstory almost immediately and shifted the blame for the eponymous program onto another country. The revelation that Treadstone was secretly a Soviet program was a cringe-worthy retcon that rendered Bourne’s fight against the CIA pointless, as well as de-fanging the sharp political commentary of the original trilogy.
In Treadstone, viewers learn that there never would have been an operation named Treadstone if it were not for the shadowy Soviet scientist Dr. Gustav Meisner and his similar program, Cicada. In Treadstone, an innocent American CIA agent is kidnapped by KGB agents and turned into a sleeper agent for the Soviet Union before the CIA even considers setting up a program to train super-assassins. In this version of events, the only reason that Operation Treadstone even exists is to counter this threat from the scary Soviet villains, and the CIA is far less morally culpable for their crimes as a result.
Bourne’s Retconned Backstory Changed Its Politics
As a character, Jason Bourne’s entire story is the tale of an assassin who realizes he was brainwashed by a government that killed his father, lied about this, and then tried to kill Jason himself when he grew a conscience. Treadstone’s revelation that a nefarious foreign government was secretly responsible for all of this bloodshed ruins this twist. If Bourne is the product of a secret CIA program, then the Bourne trilogy is a sharp indictment of the intelligence community’s overreach. However, if he and the CIA are hapless victims trying to keep up with Soviet schemes, it is another of many American thrillers about spies heroically fighting foreigners.
Bourne’s Treadstone Retcon Ruined Its Relevance
Operation Treadstone has real-life analogs in the CIA’s history, which are rendered irrelevant if the program’s entire existence is all the fault of the Russians in Treadstone. From the assassination of Patrice Lumumba to the many failed attempts on Fidel Castro’s life, the CIA’s history of illegal killings dates back to long before 1973, when Treadstone’s CIA agent was abducted by Soviet agents and forced into the Cicada program. Much like the Rambo franchise changed its hero from a disturbed, traumatized veteran whose life was ruined by war to a badass mass murderer who killed villains with his bare hands, Treadstone erased the real-world relevance of the Bourne trilogy’s CIA depiction.
Fortunately, Treadstone was canceled after one season, meaning the spinoff did not have long to tarnish the reputation of the Bourne series. A later Bourne sequel could retcon this witless twist, particularly since Treadstone season 1’s storyline mostly revolved around CIA agents turning out to be secret Cicada sleeper agents and, as such, didn’t contradict much from the original movies. However, the choice was still one that hurt the Jason Bourne series as a whole, with Treadstone’s corny new backstory making one of the most politically charged blockbusters franchises into a standard-issue Cold War conspiracy thriller.
