#Treadstone

[frasier-crane-style]

Treadstone (2019) is "from the world of Jason Bourne" (and "based on an organization from the novels by Robert Ludlum," the credits tell us). It doesn't at all manage to capture the nervy energy of the movies, but don't worry--it's bad in its own right, too.

Tim Kring is the showrunner and he seems to be aiming for a repeat of his Heroes success, with a vast and diverse cast sprawling across the globe. But whereas the fun of Heroes was watching the characters intersect and slowly join together for an apocalyptic climax, almost everyone in Treadstone is off in their own little world. One storyline is set in 1973! Characters regularly disappear from the narrative for entire episodes on end and when they reappear, it's a chore to remember where we last left them and what they're up to.

The main thrust of the plot would seem to be a North Korean plot to buy a nuclear missile from Russia that's aimed at Washington DC--though the only person that seems to care about this is an intrepid reporter, while other agents are tasked with pressing concerns like investigating a shot-up 7/11 or taking over the contraband pain pills business in the Midwest (no sir, I am not joking).

Where you'd think all the individual threads would come together at the end of this ten-hour series to stop the threat once and for all, the show leaves pretty much nothing resolved, everything on hold for a canceled second season.

The storyline would seem to involve Russian sleeper agents called Cicadas who are being reactivated to cause trouble--or maybe they're American sleeper agents--and aren't they all a bit young to have anything to do with the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991? Han Hyo-joo was born in 1987. Did the Russians train her to snap necks as a toddler?

Maybe I'm being facetious, since the CIA turns out to be corrupt and involved in a nasty plot involving American big business, a Russian obligarch, and a North Korean coup. Why, if the bad guys were running the CIA, could they not have just ordered the good CIA agents to stand down? Or prevented them from knowing there was a plot in the first place? I guess they're just bad at their jobs.

After all, we're told that the longer a Cicada is inactive, the more their programming breaks down... which would seem to miss the entire point of a sleeper agent, if you ask me... leading to virtually every protagonist being a Treadstone agent who is able to defy orders and do whatever they want. Just in case you thought Jason Bourne was a one-in-a-million fluke.

I feel like I'm underselling how hard it is to keep track of everything that's going on... the Bourne movies had complicated plots, but they earned being complex, they felt like they were really depicting, with verisimilitude, how these characters would operate in the real world. Treadstone features a character recovering his lost memories because he takes drugs with a hippie. Now, why didn't Matt Damon ever think of that?

I'm just going to list every main character and you tell me if you think they should've pared this story down somewhere.

*John Randolph Bentley is a CIA agent in 1971 for a sort of Jason Bourne: Origins story. He breaks out of a Soviet brainwashing factory after being held there for nine months, then has to prove that there's no way he could've been brainwashed.

*Petra Andropov is the woman responsible for brainwashing Bentley and she also fell in love with him. In the present, she's an old lady guarding the nuclear missile everyone (well, one person) is worried about. Despite the missile being key to the bad guys' plot, the show states that she's been forgotten about and the missile left to rust--no one thought to check up on it before they needed to use it?

*Tara Coleman is the reporter who somehow ends up being the tip of the spear for tracking down the nuke and stopping Washington from getting nuked.

*Matt Edwards is the CIA agent who starts off a little concern about Washington glowing in the dark, but then gets sidetracked by a Cicada/Treadstone agent who went a bit nutty.

*Ellen Becker is a CIA chief who is basically on looking at big monitors and going "Jesus Christ, that's Jason Bourne" duty.

*Doug McKenna is another Cicada/Treadstone agent whose wife turns out to be his handler, because she fell in love with him while brainwashing him. Did we really need two takes on this rapey dynamic?

*Soyun Park is a Cicada/Treadstone agent in North Korea. Since she's a woman, her spouse is just a normal dude and she angsts instead about taking care of her kid.

If this doesn't sound like a lot of characters, keep in mind, almost none of them are sharing a subplot. They all have their own storylines which barely intersect with everyone else's story. I get that the intent is to show all or at least most of the tentacles of this vast conspiracy, but did we really need to know all these aspects of the conspiracy? Did it have to be so vast that it includes the opiate crisis, North Korea, Soviet nukes, the year 1973...

I think if they had just edited it down to a few characters whose story was all wrapped up at the end of the season, they could've been onto something, but the show as is just takes on so much and covers so much ground that none of it comes together. It all just ends up feeling like random noise. Say what you will about 24, but at least it has an ending every season.

[figures4fun]

Being the director of S.H.I.E.L.D has its perks. Like knowing about clandestine C.I.A assassin organizations from which to recruit from.

[dahjinseok]

HAN HYO JOO in the BEHIND THE SCENES for TREADSTONE (2019) dir. Tim Kring

[day-of-cake-and-presents]

Happy Birthday Julian Kostov!

Born August 25th, 1989

Best Known Roles: Fedyor in Shadow and Bone, Max in Temple, and Yuri in Treadstone

[badbitchstromboli]

bro this show treadstone is trash and also boring as fuck

[ricisidro]

#Treadstone, tv series on #AmazonPrimeVideo, based on Robert Ludlum's spy novels #JasonBourne set amidst the black ops program #OperationTreadstone — a covert program that uses a behavior modification protocol to turn recruits into nearly-superhuman assassins.

#action #thriller

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[wornoutspines]

Treadstone (S1) | Season Review

I was in the mood for spy thriller Jack Ryan / Reacher type of entertaining so I look to Treadstone #Treadstone #JeremyIrvine #BrianJsmith #TracyIfeachor #RobertLudlum #TimKing #ConspiracyThriller

Inspired by the organization in Robert Ludlum‘s Bourne series of books, and developed for television by Tim Kring (Heroes, Touch). The stars many familiar faces and names, such as Brian J. Smith (Sense8, Stargate Universe), Jeremy Irvine (Now is Good, Beyond the Reach, Railway Man), Tracy Ifeachor (The Originals, Quantico), Michelle Forbes (Mockingjay), Omar Metwally (Mr. Robot, The Affair,…

[bkenber]

Tony Gilroy on 'The Bourne Legacy' and how it Differs from What Came Before

WRITER’S NOTE: As the opening paragraph indicates, this article was written over a decade ago. Writer/Director Tony Gilroy and actor Jeremy Renner dropped by the AMC movie theater in Century City on July 9, 2012 to answer questions regarding their upcoming summer blockbuster, “The Bourne Legacy.” The emcee of this Q&A was Dan Gilroy, Tony’s brother, who also co-wrote the screenplay for it. The…

[tidepoolalgae]

plot twist for Crawford: Bourne doesn't know any place

[celtib]

so i'm imagining a Worm fanfic. post-Golden-Morning, Taylor Herbert is a one-armed college student in Zurich, just having had a frustrating time dealing with red tape at the American consulate. she's outside in an alley trying to manage a junker of a car when this guy offers her $10,000 to drive him to Paris.

[bylillian]

Rewatched The Bourne Legacy.

….is Marc Spector/Jake Locksley part of Treadstone?

Why hasn’t anyone covered the obvious Hydra/Treadstone connection in a fic?

[figures4fun]

[dahjinseok]

my princess ♡

[jugeullae]

HAN HYOJOO + BLOOD

TREADSTONE (2019) HAPPINESS (2021) MOVING (2023) BLOOD FREE (2024)

[expectiations]

River Song’s Last Words

Cover artwork, cast and story details are today revealed for The Death and Life of River Song: Last Words, a brand-new box set of apocalyptic audio drama, due for release August 2024. 

River Song may be the Doctor’s wife, but there’s so much more to her than that. Alex Kingston played the time-travelling archaeologist on Doctor Who between 2008 and 2015, and has reprised the role in many Big Finish audio dramas since, exploring what River gets up to when she’s not with her Time Lord husband.

The first box set in her new series, The Death and Life of River Song: Last Words sees River, after cheating death as a digital consciousness uploaded to the Library, brought back to life in a cloned body and sent to Earth in the future, not long before it’s set to be ravaged by solar flares.

Joining Kingston in this epic story’s cast is Greg Wise – who listeners may know from The Crown and Sense and Sensibility, as well as the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing – as ultra-rich tycoon Garrison Clay. He’s the man behind River’s temporary resurrection, and he has a mission for her.

And, Jamie Parker – best known for playing Harry Potter in the West End show Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as well as roles in TV series Treadstone and The Crown – plays Sam Avner, a mysterious man who becomes an ally to River.

The Death and Life of River Song: Last Words is now available for pre-order exclusively here, as a limited edition four-CD box set (plus digital download) for £29.99, or as a digital download only for £22.99.

Wrenched from her digital afterlife in the Library, River Song finds herself on sixty-first century Earth, resurrected in a clone body. Billionaire tech mogul Garrison Clay has a mystery to solve, and he’s selected River as the person to solve it.

Armed with only her sonic screwdriver and a fake ID, River heads out into a world soon to be ravaged by solar flares... where danger stalks her at every turn.

The story is divided into four episodes, or books, all scripted by Robert Valentine:

Book 1 – Apokalypsis

Book 2 – Fate & Fatality

Book 3 – The Black Hours

Book 4 – Book of the Dead

These four books together, as well as revealing an important chapter in River’s (after)life, serve as a prequel to the 1975 TV story The Ark in Space, with humanity preparing to flee the doomed Earth. Robert Whitelock guest stars as Lazar and Christine Kavanagh as Vira – characters originally played on television by Kenton Moore and Wendy Williams.

Also on the cast list of Last Words are Jane Booker, Shogo Miyakita, Jamie Zubairi, Jacob Daniels, Andrew James Spooner, Glen McCready, Issy Van Randwyck, and Nicholas Boulton.

Producer David Richardson said: “Robert Valentine has done something remarkable with this four-hour drama, which tells the story of the last days of planet Earth before it is destroyed by solar flares, a story told from the perspective of a woman temporarily brought back from the dead. It’s heart-breaking and exciting and doom-laden and, perhaps when you least expect it, uplifting and inspiring.”

Writer Robert Valentine added: “Originally, I thought I was going to be writing the final ever River Song story. Quickly I realised that I wasn’t, but I thought it would be fun to write something that feels like it’s the last we’ll ever see of River, and actually give that problem to her. Her life is usually intertwined with the Doctor’s, so I thought, what is her life like after her great relationship is over?

“And, the brief was to do a prequel to The Ark in Space, which is a Doctor Who classic, at the same time. When I went back and rewatched it, I realised that I wouldn't be allowed on this ship, I would have been one of the ones left behind. So I thought, let's give River a mission that leads into The Ark in Space, but with sympathy for those people who aren't on the Ark.”

Big Finish listeners can also pre-order a bundle with Last Words as well as Volumes 2 and 3 of The Death and Life of River Song, which are both due for release in 2025, for just £80 (collector’s edition CDs + downloads) or £66 (downloads only).

All the above prices include the special pre-order discount and are subject to change after general release. Please note: the collector’s edition CD box sets are strictly limited to 1,250 copies and will not be repressed.

Big Finish is currently operating a digital-first release schedule. The mail-out of collector’s edition CDs may be delayed due to factors beyond our control, but all purchases of this release unlock a digital copy that can be immediately downloaded or played on the Big Finish app from the release date.

[greenelight]

if    you    would    have    told    the    aspiring    actor    that    his    husband's    former    handler    would    soon    become    a    very    close    friend    of    his    ,    he    would    have    called    you    insane.    was    it    wrong    for    him    to    judge    @satellitewar    [    as    emily    kelso    ]    simply    because    she    was    tied    to    his    work    in    treadstone    ?    absolutely    it    was    ,    but    it    made    sense    why    he    felt    that    way.    that    organization    kept    sebastian    from    living    the    quiet    life    he    so    rightfully    deserved    &    made    it    hell    for    them    to    be    able    to    enjoy    a    somewhat    normal    relationship    when    they    were    trying    to    make    things    work    long    distance.    now    ,    mason    understands    that    his    anger    was    misplaced    when    targeting    poor    emily    &    he's    learned    &    did    his    best    to    open    his    heart    to    the    woman    ,    especially    now    that    she    no    longer    is    connected    to    treadstone.    she    means    a    lot    to    sebastian    &    he    wants    to    make    peace    with    her    if    that's    what    he    wants    ,    though    now    he    does    it    because    he    actually    wants    to    &    sees    the    woman    beyond    her    original profession.    she's    smart    ,    a    workaholic    &    maybe    a    little    socially    clueless    ,    but    she    is    good    deep    down    &    mason    makes    note    of    that.

sebastian    had    to    run    &    get    more    hors    d'oeuvres    for    their    hang    out    ,    leaving    the    two    of    them    alone    with    their    glasses    of    wine    in    hand.    this    was    the    perfect    opportunity    to    ask    emily    about    what    working    with    sebastian    was    like    ,    especially    when    it    comes    to    the    small    little    crush    he    knew    she    used    to    have    for    him.    mason    predicts    the    eyeroll    that    emily    immediately    gives    him    ,    the    blush    on    her    cheeks    definitely    from    the    query    &    not    the    delicious    wine    sebastian    had    poured    them    earlier.    ❝    i    knew    you    were    going    to    ask    me    all    these    questions    one    day    ,    ❞    she    manages    with    a    pout    &    all    mason    can    do    is    grin    wickedly    in    response    ,    sipping    his    wine    as    if    he    is    nothing    but    innocent    in    his    query.    ❝    i    mean    ,    can    you    blame    me    for    being    curious    ?    you    did    say    how    infuriating    he    could    be    when    it    came    to    direction    ,    so    i    can't    help    but    wonder    why    that    did    something    for    you    ?    d'you    like    bad    boys    ,    em    ?    you    like    chatty    brits    ?    ❞    mason    snorts    as    he    tries    to    control    his    laughter    ,    almost    spilling    his    wine    in    the    process.    ❝    i    mean    ,    no    shame    if    you    did.    i    clearly    do    ,    since    i    married    the    man    ,    but    c'mon.    it's    just    us    girls    here    .    .    .    ❞    he    winks.    ❝    you    can    be    honest.    &    then    you    can    tell    me    more    about    this    new    target    of    yours.    going    for    blondes    now    ,    i    hear    ?    ❞