On August 27, 2020, Netflix finally announced the plot for their Resident Evil TV show; much to the surprise of fans, it will follow the Wesker kids as they navigate New Raccoon City. While the expansive franchise that includes video games, movies, comics, and novels mentions the children of Albert Wesker, their storylines and origins remain underdeveloped. The new show may offer the opportunity to provide some answers to their mystery.
Capcom introduced Resident Evil in 1996 with the first installment of the video game franchise. Albert Wesker appears as the Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S) captain, who travels to Raccoon City to investigate the bizarre cannibalism taking place. He is a malevolent force throughout the video game series with a plot to obtain the T-Virus that creates the zombie-like creatures. In Resident Evil 5, it is revealed that he is involved with the experiments of Project W that began in order to create the most advanced human being. As a result, each child who survives the T-Virus is given Wesker's last name. There are twelve known children who share the last name Wesker and one that does not, Jake Muller, the biological son of the eugenicist.
The series will not follow Jake Muller due to his small role in the overall Resident Evil video game series. Furthermore, due to the fact that the title of the location is New Raccoon City, this also means that the events of the series occur after the video games which saw the explosion of the original Raccoon City. In the movie franchise, he appears throughout its entirety as the main antagonist who runs Umbrella Corporation and targets Milla Jovovich's character, Alice. Regardless of whether or not Albert Wesker makes a reappearance, the show seems set up to follow new children of Project W who have not been introduced in canon thus far.
Who Are Jade & Billie Wesker?
After countless trials with hundreds of adopted children, Dr. Oswell E. Spencer isolated the number of ideal candidates. He then injected each of them with the T-Virus, which caused eleven of them to die according to the video games. The story line shifts in the film franchise and becomes far more complicated than the original plot proposed by the video games. In fact, it is nearly an entirely different story on Wesker. In Resident Evil lore shared between the video games and films, Albert is driven towards creating the ideal human race, one that is immune to the virus and/or gains superpowers from it.
The Netflix series will not follow the original Wesker children due to the fact that their story takes place in the original Raccoon City. Netflix's Resident Evil will tell the story of the new Wesker children, Jade and Billie, who are part of an entirely different timeline, far removed from the events of both the video games and films. Due to the fact that they have survived the trials of Wesker's experimentation with the virus, it is likely that these two individuals will have strength beyond what the series has seen before. The story jumps ahead to a second timeline that will likely see their powers grow stronger or weaker, depending on their reaction to the virus as well as the unpredictable nature of the body's reaction to it. Along the way, Jade and Billie uncover the truth of their past and present.
A sibling rivalry seems entirely possible here; one may have to decide between good and evil to create a familiar dynamic. This will be Resident Evil's attempt at creating a brand new story line just as they did when they first shifted from video games to movies, but Netflix's show seems to be retaining some form of connection through the canon character of Albert Wesker. As of this writing, Netflix has not announced a release date or any cast members for the upcoming Resident Evil series.