‘Resident Evil’ – Season 1


Sorry about the ‘blog silence’ yesterday… It was my youngest daughter’s birthday and when you add a full working day to that, there really wasn’t much room for anything else. Anyway… I’m here now so…

Did I really just watch eight episodes of ‘Resident Evil’ just so I could see the giant crocodile in the season finale? And more importantly… Why didn’t I just skip the other episodes and go straight to the season finale…? These were two of the questions I found myself asking last night as the end credits rolled and I had to face up to the fact that I’d just wasted a lot of time working my way through Season 1 of ‘Resident Evil’. I guess that will teach me for trying to get my money’s worth out of the subscription and there’s also the fact that if there are zombies in it… you guessed it 😉 I also didn’t mind the movies that much (mindless, head exploding fun for the most part) so a rebooted TV show sounded like it could be worth a watch. Well, shows what I know… 

Season 1 of ‘Resident Evil’ is set over two time periods. In the ‘present’, Jade struggles to survive (and understand) a world overrun by infected humans along with mutated fauna. If this wasn’t enough, Jade must also stay one step ahead of an Umbrella Corporation taskforce with orders to bring her back to face a mysterious figure from her past.

And in the ‘past’ of 2022, a young Jade Wesker looks to start over in New Racoon City, with her father and twin sister, but there are secrets lurking in the Umbrella labs that will send Jade and her sister down a dark path...

Giant crocodile to one side (which was admittedly awesome), ‘Resident Evil’ felt like a real missed opportunity to tell the kind of ‘survival horror with zombies and mutants’ that Resident Evil can be absolutely brilliant at, given a chance. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, those moments in the ‘present’ can be full of the post-apocalypse (and all that entails) which makes for some great TV with loads of zombie chases and monsters lurking in the dark, all that good stuff 😊 Where the problem lies though is when the focus moves away from the good stuff and onto scenes from the ‘past’ that are meant to build up to the present but don’t move anywhere near fast enough to be able to do that effectively. There’s simply not enough time or room for the two strands to meet, over the course of the season, (and given that there is little to no chance of a second season…) and that leads to an incredibly disjointed affair; it got to a point where I’d go off and do something while the Racoon City thread played out but make sure I was back for the cool zombie fights. And that’s no way to watch a TV show, is it?

When it was good, ‘Resident Evil’ really worked but when you have two plot threads that really don’t complement each other (and aren’t even trying to work together) then from where I’m sat, you’re looking at a season’s worth of trouble and that’s what we got here. Maybe this was deliberate, with one eye on future seasons, but all we can go on is what we have here and, well… it’s not great. I really did enjoy the crocodile though...

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