In contemporary zombie movies, there’s a heavily cribbed script for how to address (and fail to dress) a zombie-inflicted wound. Typically, a victim either gets publicly bitten, which results in either a quick self-sacrifice or frantic arguments between those who want to off them right away and those who want to momentarily spare them; or, drawing out the latter, a victim hides their bite, hoping that it won’t actually affect them, until it’s too late. In all of these variations, the turning tends to take mere minutes, even if those minutes of screen time are actually compressing several hours or maybe even a couple of days.
The Resident Evil series may not be operating on a wildly different timeline, medically speaking; by the third episode, Billie’s zombie-dog bite is still relatively fresh, maybe a day or two old. But whether abiding by decompressed TV storytelling or boldly digging into an area that a lot of horror movies pass through quickly, this show has lingered between initial infection and full-blown zombie sickness. “The Light†puts a specific time frame on it: It takes about three days. That’s how long it took in the Umbrella factory where the previous incident was covered up, that’s the figure Wesker cites in a board meeting where he tries to warn of the dangers of Umbrella’s Joy drug, and that’s how long it seems to be taking to transform the child whose parents Jade meets while on the run in 2036. With Billie in 2022, we see the process in particularly slow motion: increased strength, numbness to pain, hallucinations, sensitivity to bright light.
It’s pretty normal by viral standards but just drawn-out enough to offer some cruel hope to victims and their families alike. And despite their place further down the apocalyptic timeline, the family that Jade meets and travels with does have some capacity for denial. When Jade informs them that Umbrella sent the drone whose attack intercepted and interrupted their escape ferry, the mother reacts with a wary “they wouldn’t!†They’re just trying to play by the rules and stay alive; no wonder they hold out hope that they could cure their son. So much so that the father even sacrifices himself by holding off subterranean Chunnel Beasts (technically, they encounter them on the way to the London/Paris Chunnel, but isn’t it more fun to think of them as Chunnel Beasts?) to save the life of his doomed child, out of hope that the mysterious Brotherhood has a cure. Jade may have the opportunity to find out for herself: At episode’s end, she’s cornered again by Umbrella, only to be sorta-rescued and fully knocked out by what appears to be Brotherhood soldiers.
Before that happens, Jade parts ways with her traveling companions, warning them before and after an attack from a truly gnarly giant mutated spider that they should leave their infected son behind: “He’s not yours.†Her words are doubly chilling; she’s obviously speaking from experience when she insists that once someone is infected, they aren’t the same person and are no longer capable of love. The younger Jade hasn’t quite reached this conclusion yet, but she’s watching in horror as Billie continues to succumb to her illness (and the show offers Billie’s POV through blood-soaked, vomit-heavy hallucinations/premonitions). Jade neg-nags her hacker pal Simon for more files on Umbrella’s misdeeds, but the company has updated its security. Also, it turns out that Simon’s mom is Evelyn Marcus, the Umbrella CEO.
This brings us to the weakest point of this episode: the bald-faced Umbrella corporate machinations. This includes Evelyn Marcus as the hard-charging CEO and Albert Wesker as the more principled but personally compromised underling. The episode opens with Evelyn giving an on-camera interview … and do real-life CEOs ever say anything as glibly nefarious as “they say you can’t put a price on joy … but sure you can, if you bottle it!†without at least attempting to couch it in altruism or bland cheerleading? When the writing for Evelyn does aim to at least make her not seem like an obvious villain, it’s just warmed-over careless-disruptor shtick: “It’s not about the stock price … it’s about changing the world.†(And it follows her laughing off the Joy pill’s potential for mind control with “Who hasn’t popped a Xanny and gone hunting for Louboutins?â€) Shouldn’t she be placing greater emphasis on the supposedly ultra-low risk of overdosing on Joy, feigning concern rather than dismissing it with cutesy lines? Yes, real CEOs probably are this evil. But they mostly do not publicly telegraph their own evil in such smirky, subtext-free ways. If they do, it sure isn’t especially compelling or insightful here. It’s just a lite version of the cartoonishly evil Umbrella that made fun, ridiculous villains in the Resident Evil movies.
Boardroom chat just isn’t as bracing as reframing a zombie virus as a slow-motion demise. Three days may not seem like an especially long time to go from wounded and worried to impulsive and violent, but Resident Evil does a skillful job of teasing out the dread, whether it’s for the fate of the near-strangers left in the tunnels, who we may never see again, or for Billie, who looks like she knows full well not to believe her sister’s insistence that everything will ultimately be okay.
Resident Evil Afterlife
• For a shadow-friendly series that has included scenes of characters running around darkened sewer tunnels, Resident Evil has done a remarkable job avoiding modern television murk-o-vision. Director Rob Seidenglanz stages the creature attacks in the 2036 section with the right mixture of showing and concealing, and there are some nice match cuts between 2022 and 2036 victims of the T-virus infection.
• A previous T-virus mishap is said to have occurred in “Old†Raccoon City; hence the New Raccoon City near Capetown where the 2022 characters live. This doesn’t really matter, but it feels a little bit like the writers are leaving some room in their continuity for some previous form of Resident Evil media to co-exist in this TV show world, like maybe one of the games could be taking place in that first iteration of Raccoon City. (It’s probably just an excuse to have data for Jade and Simon to draw upon in the first place, but sort of fun to think about.)