Resident Evil season 1, episode 4 recap: The Turn

Kicking off the halfway point of Resident Evil is season 1 episode 4 titled, “The Turn”… Billie’s timer is about to run out and Jade finds herself surrounded by a dangerous cult.

Resident Evil Season 1 Episode 4 recap – 2022

We’re just a few short hours away from the countdown hitting zero and Billie turning into a zombie from the bite that she got back in episode one. This seems to be the perfect time for the sisters to decide to go to a party that Simon invited Jade to.

After all, where else would you want your potentially contagious sister to be than a crowded house party? Of course, it turns out this isn’t a house party.

It’s a group of teenagers hanging out in what appears to be an abandoned construction site. The site is complete with a skateboard half pipe in the middle of the lot, and a DJ on some scaffolding.

You know, normal teenager party stuff. Billie, perhaps worried about the doom clock her sister is running, asks to borrow a skateboard and try out the halfpipe.

She pulls off the stunt without dying, but Jade misses it because she’s talking to Simon. Billie then finds a quiet piece of scaffolding to sit and mope.

The party is interrupted by the appearance of Angel, the reporter who Jade spoke with on the computer. Angel seems to have broken into New Raccoon City for the specific purpose of talking to Jade and finding out exactly who was bitten by an infected animal in order to interview them.

By following the Instagram’s of every teenager in New Raccoon City, Angel was able to track down Jade. Of course, being an adult man he stuck out at the teenage halfpipe scaffolding DJ construction lot party, and it quickly broke up around him, leaving him to talk to Jade and Billie.

According to Angel, the original Racoon City, was the first instance of the virus getting out. The entire city was nuked by Umbrella and the US government in a coverup to keep the thousands of infected from getting out into the wider population.

On top of that, he tells the two sisters that according to official records, their father has been dead since 2009, and that neither of them technically exist. Seeing the bite marks on Billie’s shoulder, he realizes that she is the bite victim.

The sisters run away from Angel, who is apprehended by New Racoon City police. Billie freaks out in response to the new information about the infected, knowing that it’s about to happen to her any second.

But Jade pulls out the countdown to show that it ran out five minutes ago, and yet, she’s still not a zombie. And now… back to the future.

Resident Evil Season 1 Episode 4 recap – 2036

Adult Jade along with Umbrella representative, Baxter, have been taken prisoner by The Brotherhood. That’s the name of the group that took them both at the end of the previous episode.

The Brotherhood, turns out, is a religious cult that views the rise in Zeroes and the collapse of society as a cleansing of the world from the chosen few, themselves specifically. Jade and Baxter’s role in this new society, along with many other humans, seems to be as fuel for their working hoard of Zeroes.

One of the cult members is the classic Resident Evil character Chainsaw Man. He’s a man with a chainsaw and a potato sack over his head and cuts up of the food for the Zeroes.

Now, the idea of being Zero food is something that obviously upsets Jade, but also intrigues her as The Brotherhood seems to have figured out a way to get the Zeroes to perform manual labor for the cult. It turns out their secret is a special, specific female Zero who the other Zeroes seem to listen to.

A Queen Zero of sorts, which to Jade signals that the virus is evolving if the Zeroes are displaying higher brain functions like organization. That’s the very thing she was studying back in the first episode, remember?

It turns out that Baxter is pretty good at breaking out of places, and he promises Jade that if she helps him break out, then Umbrella will leave her alone. Once the two of them are out of the cell, along with the rest of the Umbrella foot soldiers, everybody obtains a weapon.

Jade picks up the chainsaw left by a dead Chainsaw man who was killed in the initial escape. Also happening in the initial escape is hitting every button possible in an effort to find a way out of the compound.

This of course releases every Zero in the place. Now there can be an extended zombie killing sequence.

While Baxter and Umbrella go about shooting plenty of Zeroes, Jade takes the chainsaw and cuts off the head of the Queen Zero, wanting to further explore the idea of organization among the Zeroes. The hoard overruns pretty much everyone, cult members and Umbrella alike.

Even Baxter is taken down by the swarm and for the moment is presumed dead. Only Jade seems to escape the compound making it back to the surface alone leaving her pretty much exactly where she was at the end of the last episode.

Except this time, she has a head in a bag.

Resident Evil Season 1 Episode 4 recap – In summation…

We’re halfway through the show at this point and the weaknesses are starting to show through. Namely, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the question of why did this need to be a TV show?

Zombie stories, by their nature, tend to be relatively short. None of the Resident Evil movies get anywhere close to two hours long.

Most Zombie stories that are longer tend to be pointedly about something else (like The Walking Dead). But so far, Resident Evil has really been about following the beats of a zombie movie, just taking a lot longer to do it.

It feels like the parallel storylines one before the start of the outbreak and one after the full-blown zombie apocalypse, was the start of a new take. But in practice it seems like it’s just trying to hide how long it takes to have anything actually happen.

Billie was bit in the first episode, and now we’re halfway through the series and she hasn’t turned yet. As for the apocalypse scenes, this is where we’re supposed to get the full action zombie sequences.

But we only really get one five-minute sequence per episode. While they’re not bad zombie sequences, the spaces between those action sequences are starting to feel longer and longer.

Do you think Baxter is dead? Why hasn’t Billie turned yet?

Let us know you thought of Resident Evil season 1 episode 4 in the comments below!

You can watch Resident Evil season 1, only on Netflix!