'Treadstone': 5 burning questions about oil rig worker turned sleeper agent Doug McKenna we need answered
The sleeper agents of ‘Treadstone’, the USA Network spinoff from the ‘Bourne’ series written by Robert Ludlum, have mysterious pasts that we know nothing about. From the books and the show so far, we know that Operation Treadstone is a CIA black ops program that generated and managed a cadre of sleeper agents stationed around the world.
It recruited soldiers and turned them into superhuman assassins, using a behavior-modification program. The operatives, such as Jason Bourne, the eponymous character from the books, also possessed a heightened awareness of their surroundings, lightning-fast reflexes, and other physical attributes.
While we know that Bourne, whose real name is David Webb, was a former US Army Delta Force captain-turned-covert operative who volunteered for Operation Treadstone, did everyone else? From the show, we know that John Randolph Bentley (Jeremy Irvine) did not consent to the experiments the Russians performed on him in the 1970s.
Could the same be true for Doug McKenna (Brian J. Smith)? McKenna, who was born on September 16, 1987, in Lexington, Kentucky, is shown to be an oil-rig worker in Alaska in the first episode. His mundane-yet-peaceful life is brought to a grinding halt when all the lower-level staff on the rig are fired, only to be replaced by Russian workers.
At a bar, where he tries to drink away his woes, Doug gets into an altercation with one of the new Russian workers, who was rude to the woman sitting next to him. While it seems only obvious that the burlier Russian man would soon make Doug regret his actions, something strange happens.
Doug not only fights back but expertly so. In fact, he beats a whole host of Russian workers with the speed and reflexes of Agents in ‘The Matrix’. Surprised at what he managed to do, Doug leaves.
He runs into the same woman from the bar again -- a woman he felt he had met before. When she offers to patch up his wound, Doug accompanies her to her home. There, Doug notices a small black-and-white photo with a red circle around the face; something very similar to what SoYun (Hyo Joo Han) finds inside a videogame console in Pyongyang.
Before he could ask anything, the woman who brought him there began to sing the French nursery song ‘Frère Jacques' (Brother John). Doug begins to get a headache and before he knows it, he’s passing out. As the scene closes, we can see the woman say that maybe this time it would work.
From what has been evident in the series so far, ‘Frère Jacques’ is a trigger that wakes up the sleeper agents. Petra sang it to Bentley and SoYun heard it in the videogame. The next time we see Doug, he’s lying on the snow, with no recollection of what happened.
In the second episode, we see Doug underwater, his foot chained to the floor. As he struggles to find a key, he is attacked by another person similarly trapped in the same tank. During the fight, Doug injures his ankle.
Suddenly, he wakes up and finds himself on a domestic flight, going back home. He figures what happened may have been a dream. But when he checks his ankle, he sees a scar that has long healed.
Doug goes home to his wife, but even her loving presence is not enough to distract him. He keeps thinking about what happened. He then realizes he has the photo with him -- the same one he saw at the mysterious woman’s place. When he flips it over, he sees an address.
The last we see of Doug is driving down to the address. Doug’s story is as bewildering as it gets and we have a few questions. One, who is Doug going to meet? Two, is she a target or is she someone who can shed more light on what Treadstone really is?
Three, who was the woman who woke Doug up? Four, was the water tank dream just a dream or was it a memory from his past life, from when he was training to be a Treadstone operative? And five, is Doug somehow related to Bentley?
Let us hope the next episode of ‘Treadstone’ answers these questions before raising 20 new ones. 'Treadstone' airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on the USA Network.