Like Paul W. S. Anderson’s first Resident Evil movie (and less so the sequels), Netflix‘s Resident Evil series will use the settings of the games to offer us some new characters in situations with a familiar backstory. In a new interview with EW, Resident Evil showrunner Andrew Dabb describes where exactly it all fits on the timeline. Set twenty years after the first game, it’s around the time of Resident Evil: Village.
“We are now essentially 20-plus years from the first Raccoon City,” he says. “Everyone knows it was destroyed in a very tragic incident, but very few people know exactly what happened, which makes sense, given that it was a bit of a cover-up in the U.S. government.” Fourteen years after the T-virus went global, humans have found “a tense stasis with the zombie apocalypse…They’ve managed to carve out some civilization. People have lives. They may not be the lives they had before. In fact, I can guarantee they are not.”
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Amid both undead and monsters like giant caterpillars, Jade Wesker has become “like Jane Goodall for zombies,” Dabb says. “She’s studying them. She’s trying to learn how they operate. This is a new organism. Our zombies are not the risen dead. They’re infected by a virus. All of us have had a crash course in viruses the last few years. This virus changes. It evolves and it has its own agenda.”
Meanwhile, in the past timeline, we’ll see Umbrella rebuild under a new CEO, and a mystery unfold involving younger Jade. Says Dabb, “The idea is you’ll see things in the future story line. You’re like, ‘Wait! How did that happen?’ And then that episode, or a couple of episodes later, you’ll get the answer. In some ways, the future story line itself is a mystery. How did people get here? How did these relationships change? And it’s all explained, but it’s explained in a way that we’ve jigsawed it together. If you’re watching it, you’ll be able to see how all the threads start to weave together as we move through the story.”
We’ll find out more when the show debuts July 14. Will you watch this new iteration? Let us know in comments.
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