Resident Evil Village: Time for a spoilery lore discussion
By Devin Shea
Now that you all have had sufficient time to fight your way through the village to save your wee babeh, I really want to talk to you about some of the things we couldn’t talk about during the review of Resident Evil Village. This game is stunning and spooky and filled to the brim with action, but the one thing I wanted to talk about during the review, I couldn’t but ya’ girl isn’t holding it in anymore. We are going to discuss the game’s story, Ethan’s story, Mother Miranda’s story and how the hell any of that connects to Umbrella. If you haven’t played the game but want to, DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE. I am about to spoil the absolute crap out of this game for you.
Again… SPOILERS AHEAD for Resident Evil Village. If you continue reading, you cannot comment below about how angry you are that I spoiled it for you. THIS IS YOUR WARNING.
Before we can talk about what the story of Resident Evil Village means, let’s recap what occurred.
Three years after the events in Dulvey, LA, Mia and Ethan have been relocated to a town in Eastern Europe by Chris Redfield. Ethan has received some military training by this point and Mia is on regular medication after being infected for so long. They have a six-month-old daughter named Rosemary and Ethan is still very nervous while Mia seems really irritated at his fear. None of that matters when Mia gets pew-pewed by Chris and Ethan and Rose are to be transported. Enter Murphy’s Laws and Ethan wakes up from a car crash in the snow and Rose is gone. He makes his way to a village where Lycans are tearing people apart and their village leader, Mother Miranda, isn’t protecting them anymore.
Since the “baby showed up” she has been on a rampage and almost nobody is left. Mother Miranda has Rose and Ethan must fight the four lords of the village to get his daughter back. Why must he fight them? They each have a flask filled with Rose’s….body parts. Mother Miranda has ripped Rose into four separate pieces to test her theory that if she puts her back together and Rose lives, she will be a good vessel for her dead daughter, Eve, to return. How is that possible? Well, when Eve died from the Spanish Flu, Miranda found herself in a cave, ready to die and be with her daughter when she accidentally came across some mold that can maintain someone’s consciousness even when the body has been destroyed and regenerates devastating wounds.
Does that sound familiar? Well, it should because that is the mold from Resident Evil 7. It turns out that the Mold in Dulvey was discovered by Miranda and she began to experiment with it on the people of the village. In her research, she also created a parasite called the Cadou by exposing nematodes to the Mold. How did it get to Louisiana? After many years of trying to find a proper vessel for Eve (creating the four lords and lots of Lycans in the process), a company called H.C.F. contacted Miranda, offering to help. They collected Mold samples and Eve’s DNA but only produced bastardizations of Eve in the form of the E-type B.O.W. H.C.F. is the company created by Albert Wesker who was tasked with stealing a sample of the T-Veronica virus and became a rival company to Umbrella.
After monitoring the events in Dulvey, Miranda realizes the survivors of the incident have had a baby and she sees it as the perfect opportunity to try a new vessel. She poses as Mia in the Winters’ home but is found out by Redfield and dispatched. Unfortunately, she can also pose as a corpse and she would bide her time until she could kill the transport and steal Rose. A few of Miranda’s other experiments were her four lords. The first is Karl Heisenberg who was an involuntary success. He seems to be from WWII-era Germany and an engineering genius. He was experimented on with the mold and Cadou parasite thus having the ability to manipulate magnetic fields to move anything metal around him.
Alcina Dimitrescu was introduced to Miranda around the 1950s where she was infected with the Cadou parasite. Because she had a hereditary blood disease, a side effect of her mutation was the need to consume blood regularly. She grew to a very large size to contain her mutations enough to stay “human.” Bela, Daniela and Cassandra were different in their mutation as they were created of insects that consumed their bodies and reformed to the vampiric humanoid they ended up being. The insect they were made from was very sensitive to temperatures below 50F, therefore, Ethan is able to weaken them by decreasing the temperature in the room.
Salvatore Moreau is the lowest Lord on the pole in Resident Evil Village as his mutation turned him into a horrific and waterlogged beast that stayed within the confines of Moreau Reservoir. He conducted his own Cadou experiments in his lab and created his own creatures. He lacks any form of self-worth and constantly thinks of himself as a failure in the eyes of Miranda. The last of the lords is Donna Beneviento, a self-isolated woman who didn’t speak to people due to a large scar on her face. Her father (and inevitably Donna, as well) was a dollmaker and made her a doll named Angie that she could talk to. After Donna’s father died, she only talked to Angie until Miranda “adopted” her. Giving her the Cadou, Donna split the parasite among her dolls to bring them to life. She also used the Mold to affect plants to create a hallucinogenic property.
After realizing what has happened and what is going on in this village, Chris plans to blow the village(along with Miranda and the Megamycete) to hell and back when he finds Mia locked in a cell. He frees her, tells her to go to the other members of the Hound Wolf team and he will go get Rose and Ethan. After Ethan has successfully dispatched all of the lords, Miranda confronts him at Heisenberg’s factory. It is a short encounter as she rips out Ethan’s still-beating heart and leaves him for dead to complete the ceremony. During his death spiral, Ethan is confronted by Eveline. Eveline tells Ethan that Jack Baker actually killed him and when he died, the Mold mutated his body and that he shouldn’t even be walking. Throughout RE7 and Resident Evil Village, Ethan gets hurt repeatedly, miraculously healing himself; even plopping his hand back on after Mommy Dimitrescu cuts it off during a chase.
With this knowledge, Ethan heals and heads to fight Miranda and get his daughter back. Ethan wins the fight against Miranda but he is so badly damaged that his body has begun to calcify, much like what happened to the Bakers. He gives his daughter to Chris Redfield, steals the bomb trigger and blows himself and the village away, cleaning the slate and saving his family. Years later, Rose Winters runs away from her security detail to visit her father’s grave. We then learn she has extraordinary abilities inherited by her father and she is being trained as a possible weapon.
One thing I didn’t mention in the synopsis was a series of files that Chris found right before Ethan’s fight with Miranda. In the 1950s, an injured young man was found by Miranda in the snow. She took him to the village and nursed him back to health, talking of her research and ideas and showing him the Mold. He became inspired by her experiments and decided to put his own ideas into action. Miranda wanted to bring back one person from the dead, but this man wanted to change the course of human evolution. That man was Oswell E. Spencer and he was one of the founders of Umbrella. He saw the Mold as less effective and went on the hunt for a virus, eventually discovering the Progenitor virus, which then became the T-virus. When we see the Umbrella insignia in the village, it was that symbol that inspired the Umbrella design…not the other way around.
That information BLEW my mind. All this time, I wondered how Resident Evil Village would fit into the Resident Evil mythos and here in front of us was the genesis of the entire saga itself. Miranda and her discovery of the Mold set into motion a series of events that affected and destroyed the lives of so many people and whole cities to boot. That one little letter from Spencer to Miranda changed everything I knew about this game and the history of Resident Evil. While the death of Ethan Winters was bittersweet, the thing that stuck with me the most was this revelation of the past and what that means for the future.
On top of this information we find out in Resident Evil Village, we also see that the B.S.A.A. was sending soldiers into the village but Chris finds they aren’t actually soldiers but B.O.W.s themselves. As of the events in Dulvey, Chris was working with B.S.A.A. which was called in by Blue Umbrella but something happened that made him come to distrust the organization. He chose to fight the Megamycete outside of the organization and not with it. The fact that the B.S.A.A. is creating and employing their own B.O.W.s brings up the question of their own morals and intentions. At the end of Resident Evil Village, Chris intends to head to their European headquarters to confront the organization.
Given that we are pushed to the edge of two cliffhangers, it is left up to the player to wonder where the franchise will head next. We could easily see Chris head to the B.S.A.A. headquarters to find out what is going on and I certainly hope we do. The last we saw of Jill Valentine, she was being rehabilitated by the B.S.A.A. after being used by Albert Wesker as a weapon in Africa to fight Sheva Alomar and Chris. I would love to see a new game with another OG S.T.A.R.S. member involved. We also could see another generation’s story with the introduction to a very special Rosemary Winters. We have yet to really know what she can do and with her being trained by Chris Redfield, we know that she won’t be one to tangle with.
I know most people would love to have a Resident Evil 4 remake from Capcom, but after what we all learned and experienced in Resident Evil Village, I hope that Capcom will continue to let this ball roll and continue Chris’s and Rosemary’s story.
What do you hope to see next from Capcom in the franchise after Resident Evil Village? Let us know in the comments if you would like to see more from Chris or Rose.