After a third time of watching Bourne Legacy, I began to take notes. I was thinking further about what was driving Aaron Cross, Eric Byer and how the entire Outcome program operated.

Now, the film pretty much begins in media res - Aaron begins his desperate trek across the snowy mountains. When he meets Agent 3, he tell him that he was off the grid for four days, with implications that he had a mission which failed. Also, he was in desperate need of meds.

What was Aaron doing there though? The movie informs us that the mountains were a training site. I imagine Alaska is not a huge concern for US foreign intelligence agencies.

This "training" had no handler. When Aaron Cross goes off grid for four days, there is nobody chasing after him wondering where he has gone to. Eric Byer himself didn't even know that he was there until they tracked his signal.

Now, it is one thing for an agent to be killed in a mission. It is another, very stupid thing to let him be killed in training. Even if we just go by the amount of money invested in the oucome Program, Aaron is a bit too valuable to go wandering off into snow.

Unless he wasn't valuable to Outcome.

Now, I do not question that Aaron Cross is immensely badass, smart and strong. But if we take LARX 3 as the ideal agent, there are some things Aaron is lacking in:

1.       He does have a sense of morality in him, to the point where he begins to question what he is doing. He is not the 100% loyal foot soldier they want.

2.       He has a tendency to ask a lot of questions. He makes chatter with Dr Shearing and Agent 3, even volunteers up his name to the latter.

Now, these two are no big deals. But considering that this is the same program which was willing to shelve Agent 3 for as small a thing as falling in love, I'd say it might be enough.

Dr Shearing mentions that the program had 9 agents which eventually became 6. I think that even before the purge due to Jason Bourne, the program found it necessary to trim some less than perfect branches along the way.

Plus, they now had the shiny new LARX agents coming up. With this, there was no reason why they shouldn't just get rid of any lesser agents.

With Aaron Cross, they had an agent equipped with the most cost effective way of purging himself. They do not need to send expensive UAVs (the one in the movie was actually meant for Agent 3). They do not need to risk other agents. They just send him far from civilization with limited medication. As his intelligence level goes back to normal levels, so does his chance of survival. Even if he does make it out of the snow, his mind would be compromised. Originally, he had trouble even telling people his birth place and last name. There was no way he was able to tell anybody about the advanced genetic enhancements he got.