As a long time Resident Evil fan, you become accustomed to bad news and the mediocre launches. Thus when Resident Evil was announced for Netflix it was easy to shrug off. By no means was it good news, but at the same time, there is little point in freaking out over Netflix producing another over-hyped mediocre show laden with progressive overtones and undertones.
It was easy to write off the new show as probably going to butcher the lore while at the same time interjecting some form of Marxism or feminist ideology into the mix. With the accidental leak, of the series description we can at this point at least infer complete lore butchering has been completed.
Resident Evil
The town of Clearfield, MD has long stood in the shadow of three seemingly unrelated behemoths – the Umbrella Corporation, the decommissioned Greenwood Asylum, and Washington, D.C. Today, twenty-six years after the discovery of the T-Virus, secrets held by the three will start to be revealed at the first signs of outbreak.
Going full lore buff the first major issue is the T-Virus was not discovered but created. The Progenitor Virus was rediscovered in 1966, and done so in Africa during an expedition by people who would go on to found Umbrella. Despite their best efforts, all attempts to get the virus to cultivate anywhere else were met with failure forcing production to occur at a singular facility in Africa.
In 1978 James Marcus the lead researcher and one of the three founders of Umbrella combined the Progenitor Virus with Leach DNA creating the Tyrant Virus aka the T-Virus. In its earlier form, it possessed a very high mortality rate making it next to useless as a bioweapon. Leading Birkin to later perfect the virus’s mutative effects after betraying Marcus with Wesker.
Now does the description refer to the creation of the T-Virus by Marcus, a strain created by Birkin or the 1998 Raccoon City Outbreak? If the latter then the show would take place in 2024 which is a problem considering Umbrella was shut down in 2003, by congress, and the military seized all their facilities.
If it is a Birkin Strain origin then it would take places sometime in the 2000s depending on the strain, which would mean there would be no Umbrella or Neo Umbrella facilities to support the town. If we’re talking Progenitor origins then it would mean a viral outbreak occurred before the Raccoon City outbreak negating the significance of the event in the series lore.
As for the secrets, I can spoil them here and now as they’re not really secret. The US government was running their own bioweapon’s program in parallel to Umbrella with minor cooperation whose extent is only hinted at in a few games and the canon 3D movies.
It is unknown if the US military had in their possession a strain of the T-Virus or not given the tight security Umbrella placed around the viruses. Contrary to the lore butchery that went on in RE2 Remake, Umbrella sold B.O.W.s not viruses. Viruses were so tightly guarded Wesker would have to launch an assault on Umbrella’s Rockfort facilities to get his hands on some samples.
At any rate, get ready for a series where shockingly the US military was experimenting on people in an asylum they kidnapped. With a heavy dose of “it was women” lore revisions.
