The franchise's lore takes a sharp left turn. The post This Resident Evil Requiem Retcon is Either Horrible or Genius appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Resident Evil Requiem introduced a few questionable retcons, but one of them is bordering on nonsensical. If the game is taken at face value, the series’ overarching antagonist has been whitewashed and given a redemption arc. It’s bad to the point where it lowered the game’s rating in my eyes and I’m coping by trying to make anything else fit, and now I need you to come down my rabbit hole.
Resident Evil Requiem appears to give Hitler 2.0 a redemption arc
The most egregious retcon in Requiem involves Oswell E. Spencer, CEO and President of the Umbrella Corporation (until its dissolution). Spencer’s actions (direct and indirect) are the source of almost every terrible thing that happened in the Resident Evil universe. He was a narcissist, megalomaniac, psychopath who worked for almost six decades to eugenically alter the human race and rule over it as a “god.” He directly ordered multitudes of people to their deaths in human experimentations, and hundreds of thousands to millions died as a result of viruses and Bio Organic Weapons that he led the creation of.
Throughout the series, we see things that would make Josef Mengele and Unit 731 queasy, all to serve Spencer’s goals of eternal life and forced human evolution. Even during his last days, reduced to a feeble old man, Spencer continued to personally participate in human experimentation in a vain attempt to prolong his life. When Albert Wesker kills him in the Resident Evil 5 Lost in Nightmares DLC, Spencer’s last words were “Ironic, isn’t it? For one who has the right to be a god! To face his own mortality…,” which indicates he adamantly believed that his evil acts were justified.
Of all the villains in Resident Evil, Spencer is one of the most unrepentant. However, in Resident Evil Requiem, a major plotpoint is his redemption arc. The game softens Spencer’s intentions, and it’s stated that witnessing the destruction of World Wars drove him to change the world. He supposedly wanted to end humanity’s violent ways through forced evolution, and all his actions were just misguided altruism.
According to Requiem, while Spencer is also killing and maiming human test subjects in a desperate bid to buy himself more time to become a god and rule over humanity, he also adopts Grace out of the goodness of his heart and hands Alyssa Ashcroft the key to Elpis, a wonder anti-viral that completely reverses the effects of the Progenitor-based viruses that he spent decades cultivating. The retcon wouldn’t be so egregious if not for the fact that the game definitely takes a sympathetic tone toward Spencer, and glosses over the fact that he’s one of the most evil people who ever lived.
What was Spencer’s actual motivation with Elpis?
So we’re left with a few possibilities:
Spencer is a good(ish) boy
We can take the game at face value and accept that Spencer had a change of heart and wanted to make what little difference he could at the end of his life. He adopted Grace and purposefully gave Alyssa clues during their interview that would help someone figure out the password to release Elpis. Of course, this doesn’t make a ton of sense. Spencer had access to multiple fully equipped labs since The Connections took over ARK. Why would he not have just replicated it elsewhere?
Also, eliminating Progenitor-based viruses is great, but there are plenty of other bioweapons in the Resident Evil universe. For example, Spencer knew about the Mold for decades before creating Elpis. Of course, Capcom could just continue the retcon in the Resident Evil 5 remake and force it to make sense, which, unfortunately, is what I’m betting on.
If that’s the case, it’s pretty boring. Not every villain needs to be Darth Vader or Thanos, where there’s enough gray in their motivations for the audience to feel sympathetic to them. Some people are just evil. Retconning Spencer and transforming him into a blubbery mess because he adopted an orphan (while conducting human experiments in his basement) is akin to saying Hitler wasn’t so bad because he liked dogs.
Spencer is a bad boy
Alternatively, there’s the argument that Elpis is Spencer’s revenge on those who stole Umbrella’s legacy from him, namely the Pregenitor Virus and its derivatives. When it was revealed that Elpis is an anti-viral, Victor Gideon hypothesized that Spencer’s plan was to destabilize the global balance of power by rendering most Bio Organic Weapons in nations’ arsenals useless.
This argument falls apart when you consider that the game heavily frames Spencer’s actions as altruistic. The password to release Elpis is “Hope.” He also says things like “Happiness cannot be achieved at the expense of others,” “I took her (Grace) in to make amends,” “I hope it only serves as a requiem for those who have passed.” Also, if Spencer wanted to release Elpis as revenge, he wouldn’t have hooked it up to a tamper-proof computer that destroys it if you get the password wrong one time. He would have made it much easier to access. He died in 2006, so he could have just uploaded the formula to MySpace or something.
Spencer played the long con
But what if Requiem isn’t really retconning Spencer’s past? The computer used to release Elpis presents the password hint, “What does the creator desire?” The answer to the question is, of course, “Hope.” However, that doesn’t necessarily refer to humanity’s hope. My theory is that Spencer needed someone specific to visit ARK and be present when Elpis was released.
It’s possible that Spencer’s research into memory transfer came to fruition before his death, and that he laid out plans for his rebirth. If this is the case, I would assume Wesker would be the most likely target. Spencer lured Wesker to his mansion and knew that he would likely be killed. Spencer also knew Wesker had an insatiable craving for power and could have arranged for false data about Elpis’s purpose to be leaked. He knew Wesker would jump at the chance to inject a virus that would give him mind control and counted on him finding it. Elpis might indeed be an anti-viral, but it might also be a catalyst for Spencer’s revival.
Lending credence to this theory is the fact that soldiers are sent in to retrieve something in ARK in Requiem’s epilogue cutscene. It can be assumed it’s Zeno’s head, but why? I think the secret lies in the fact that the subtitles call these men “Unknown Soldiers,” rather than marking them as part of The Connections or another entity. Spencer may have already had plans in place to recover Zeno/Wesker from ARK, dead or alive. If that’s the case, Resident Evil 10’s antagonist might be similar to Liquid Ocelot, with Wesker and Spencer vying for control of one body.
Of course, this is all probably massive cope on my part, but it’d be a great twist and give us a real chance to get some closure concerning Wesker and Spencer in one last big fight (and also be the first time we get to take on Spencer face-to-face).
The post This Resident Evil Requiem Retcon is Either Horrible or Genius appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
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