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Episode 5 of Resident Evil begins in 2036 with Umbrella guards closing in on Jade. With a helicopter circling, the leader removes their helmet and Jade looks on in shock. Back in 2022, Billie is still alive and hasn’t turned yet. Wesker tries desperately to get through to Jade but instead, Evelyn calls him into her office where she points out that Simon is her son. Remember to take a shot every time Evelyn mentions her wife! Anyway, Evelyn has Angel held captive, bloodied and tied to a chair. She points out Umbrella’s history and believes Wesker should step up and lean into his past, showing a whole litany of interrogation tools. And by tools I mean weapons. As for Billie and Jade, they chill out back home. However, Jade is still hung up over Angel’s revealing details – and Tijuana. She points out that Wesker isn’t being fully truthful with them and the lack of birth certificates is obviously a concerning factor. In order to put this to bed, the girls decide to team up and go searching for their birth certificate. And yes, there’s another pop song playing while they do. In order to hack into Wesker’s laptop, Jade relies on her hacker friend from school, Simon, to remotely jump in. He manages it too and finds an email addressed to Billie, warning that Umbrella are coming for her. It’s a dead-drop mail and they need to leave asap. Billie is unsure what this means, but as the pair go searching for their bag, Simon hacks into the cameras and decides to loop the footage so they’re in the dark. The two girls end up playing a treasure hunting game across the house, looking for clues. This eventually brings them to a bag stashed underneath the floorboards, complete with passports for Anna and Mila. There’s also ten grand for them and a handgun too. Billie and Jade disagree over Umbrella’s true intentions but do continue to work together, eventually finding a hidden compartment leading down to the basement. There, they find Wesker’s secret lab, which is full of toys from their past and numerous vials of their blood, which is being kept refrigerated. There’s even a laptop and files linking back to Raccoon City in 1998. This happens to include a video file for a woman called Lisa, as Wesker finds a strange creature with an eyeball on its back. However, there’s more drama to come. Despite taking the files, the girls inadvertently trigger protocols in the lab that cause fires to rage across all the shelves. It’s all destroyed, and quickly extinguished. Wesker shows up and the girls immediately confront their father over what he may be hiding. When Albert loses his patience, Billie knocks him out and eventually ties him to the chair. The chair intended for Billie. And then we get the best (see: worst) line in the entire show. “At high enough doses, it infects the body with something called the T-Virus,” Wesker confirms. “And what, that’s like… Covid?” Billie replies. Honestly writers, just stop with the COVID references, it’s not cute. Anyway, it turns out Wesker has actually genetically modified their cells to make them better than others. The girls are Umbrella’s experiment and Wesker is there to keep them safe and watch over them. And as the episode closes out, we jump back to 2036 one more time and see who the masked soldier actually is. It’s Billie! “Hi sis.” She says.
The Episode Review
Comparing Covid to the T-Virus is the final nail in the coffin for this poor show. The writing has been bad across the board, although the puzzles in this episode at least show that the writers have played some of Resident Evil, or at least glanced at the wiki page. Beyond that though, there’s just very little that can actually be compared to the games. This is a teen drama flaunted through a distorted IP that’s been twisted and changed until it no longer resembles the original. Literally if you changed the familiar names of Raccoon City, T-virus and all the rest of it, you wouldn’t even know this is based on a videogame. Resident Evil has been a real disappointment and while there are faint glimmers of promise, most of that has been squashed by poor writing, contrivances and uninspired dialogue.
