Characters / Resident Evil - Umbrella Corporation

Resident Evil Character Index
Recurring Characters: Leon S. Kennedy | Ada Wong
Groups: Umbrella Corporation (Albert Wesker | Paramilitary) | S.T.A.R.S. | Monsters (Mainstays, Irregulars, Mold) | The Baker Family | The Four Houses
Mainline games: Resident Evil 0 | Resident Evil | Resident Evil 2 | Resident Evil 3: Nemesis | Code: Veronica | Resident Evil 4 | Resident Evil 5 | Resident Evil 6 | Resident Evil 7: Biohazard | Village
Spin-offs: Gun Survivor/Dead Aim | Outbreak | The Umbrella Chronicles | The Darkside Chronicles | Revelations | Revelations 2 | Operation Raccoon City
Other media: Degeneration | Damnation | Vendetta | Infinite Darkness | Death Island | The Marhawa Desire | Heavenly Island

AKA: Umbrella Pharmaceuticals

"Commitment, honesty, integrity. These are the core values that create the foundation for Umbrella Corp."

Umbrella is a multinational conglomerate active in a variety of industries; this namely includes (but isn't limited to) the production of pharmaceuticals and the transportation industry, producing a long line of famous cruise ships and aircraft. Umbrella's large array of subsidiaries was typical for large-scale corporations, though it was purposely built to mask a dark purpose.

In truth, Umbrella is an ancient conspiracy built on a eugenics movement orchestrated by an expedition of European aristocrats and virologists after a fateful adventure in West Africa. Hearing legends of the Ndipaya tribe of warriors and their worship of a retrovirus with alleged superhuman mutagenic properties, the group battled the (hostile) tribe and discovered the Stairway of the Sun, a plant from which the retrovirus was cultivated. Dubbing the retrovirus "Progenitor", founder Dr. James Marcus would derive the t-Virus from his research, a viral agent capable of realizing Umbrella's core goals. Forming alliances with shadowy cabals within the US government, Umbrella struck out into a bioweapons industry to finance their unethical research of super soldiers.

Umbrella's background and actions lay the groundwork for all the events of the franchise, in addition to making up most major antagonists.

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In general

• Ancient Conspiracy: The company is founded by aristocrats with eugenics goals in mind, hoping to evolve the human race with its founders ruling as gods. Many executive employees also take to such ideals with their own interpretation of godhood and utopias. And yes, it's every bit as insane as it sounds.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The founders and executive staff of Umbrella are mostly made up of nobility or those of royal birth.
• Ax-Crazy: At best, the average Umbrella employee is at the least mentally ill or gravely amoral, which makes sense considering the indoctrination process in training. The upper management, however, is comprised entirely of megalomaniacal sociopaths and psychopaths with absolutely no regard for human life.
• Bad Boss: The nicest that can be said of Umbrella is they pay very well. Otherwise, their grossly poor safety measures despite their work in bioweapons, and complete disregard for basic worker complaints means the average Umbrella grunt isn't going to live a long life. On a lesser note, most Umbrella bosses, even the less (openly) psychotic ones, are shown to be very stern and berating pencil pushers.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Every last woman and man in a commanding position at Umbrella is this, by virtue of being in the know of its illegal activities and being contractually obligated to remain silent.
• Cult: The series goes into great detail about how joining Umbrella comes with rigorous training that amounts to indoctrination: all employees must swear an oath to Umbrella's strict ideals of power, obedience, and discipline. It's a small wonder the company produces so many psychopaths and troubled individuals.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Given all of Umbrella's massive research into viruses and other pathogens to use for creating a perfect human race, it never seems to dawn on any of the executives or founders that they could have used perfectly legitimate avenues of research (namely engineering a virus that improves humans without creating monsters like Lickers, Tyrants, and zombies) to achieve those goals and get filthy rich as a side benefit. That being said, two of the founders of the organization are megalomaniacal sociopaths, one of whom arranged the death of the other three, the other attempting to overthrow the former, so it's fairly likely they just wanted to do things their way, and didn't care for how many casualties their research created. That said, it's shown occasionally that Umbrella did function publicly as a normal, reputable pharmaceutical company as well as secretly creating monsters, until the fallout of Raccoon City destroyed them.
• Disaster Dominoes: They caused three different events that would lead to their own downfall.
  • Killing James Marcus. James was one of the original founders of Umbrella, and spent his life studying his T-Virus leeches. Then Spencer had him assassinated by a hit squad with Wesker and Birkin taking over his work. Then his T-Virus leeches took his original body, multiplied, and caused an outbreak at the Arklay Mountains. The result being that Chris took it upon himself to find the European branch, which in turn had Claire herself trying to find him in Raccoon City, only for it to be overran by zombies and T-Virus monsters.
  • Sending a hit squad for William Birkin. Birkin had been obsessed by his work on the G-Virus, and Spencer has sent a squad to apprehend him. Then one of the soldiers accidentally shoots him, and take the G-Virus. William would resurrect as a G-Virus monster, and kills all but one of the squad members, and his feeding on his G-Virus samples, and breaking T-Virus vials. This started the Zombie Apocalypse in Racoon City, which would be quarantined for a week.
  • Hiring Wesker. Wesker makes it no secret that he has no loyalty to Umbrella, and he makes it clear he intends to bring them down. Eventually, he did, and he had so much much evidence on Umbrella that the US Government had them shut down.
• Evil, Inc.: Umbrella is one of the most infamous examples in fiction, being half and half legitimate and beloved pharmaceutical enterprise and terrorist organization that sells man-made monsters and viral WMDs.
• Evil Genius: Most of its employees are scouted with exceptional talent in mind...and a lack of ethics.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Umbrella is first and foremost a pharmaceutical enterprise dedicated to improving human conditions. As it's shown throughout the series, 99% of employees that get into that line of company work will be working on their B.O.W. research in some capacity.
• Eviler than Thou: First inverted, then Played Straight. When Spencer recognized Marcus was plotting to usurp him, he had Wesker and Birkin send a strike team to kill him and steal his research. His Queen Leech survived, however, and its actions led to Umbrella's sudden downfall.
• Meaningful Name: Interestingly enough, their name is a satirical pun on the term “corporate umbrella”, an industry phrase for a mega-corporation with vast control over a wide variety of smaller corporations under its wide “umbrella” or sphere of influence. In other words... the corporate subsidiaries are owned by the mother company.
• MegaCorp: The evil bioweapons and delusional goals aside, Umbrella has tremendous influence in the production and sale of cosmetics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, industrial machine production, consumer products, health foods, and the transportation industry and tourism.
• Mundane Solution: Umbrella is a company with massive amounts of funding, revolutionary bioweapons, and all manner of Genetic Abominations, so how did the U.S. government take them down? They suspended Umbrella's business license, killing the company's stock value. Without a legitimate source of income to fund their research and pay their employees, the company collapsed pretty much overnight. Note that this is according to RE4. Later games somewhat retconned it to make Umbrella's fall a little more dramatic, but it's still what the public knows.
• Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: Whenever they’re not trying to orchestrate the murders of countless innocents, they’re orchestrating the murders of their own business partners and colleagues to further their individual ambitions. In fact, the fallout from their constant, competitive infighting is directly responsible both for the Arklay Express and Raccoon City outbreaks, both of which would greatly contribute to Umbrella shutting down for good within six years after the events of the latter. All in all, it was frankly a miracle on their part as to how they managed to remain a coherent company for all those years without collapsing sooner from the strain of all the backstabbing.
• Predatory Big Pharma: Umbrella's pharmaceutical branch was a front for developing bioweapons from diseases as bad as Ebola.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Umbrella had strong ties to the U.S. government, particularly with the Pentagon and the White House. They were able to use these ties to delay the nuking of Raccoon City and hold-off federal prosecution for at least several years before the company's collapse.
• Sigil Spam: They put their logo on everything. It even pops up in RE5, which takes place years after the company has been shut down. Though as Village reveals, it wasn't originally theirs, but was taken from some ruins in Miranda's village when Ozwell Spencer studied under her.
• The Sociopath: Apart from some truly rare exceptions, properly joining Umbrella comes with being completely amoral. It's telling that even the "nicer" or more morally nuanced employees fall under Moral Sociopathy.
• Stupid Evil: No matter how often Umbrella manages to get something good going for itself, it will almost always come crashing down because they’re too busy either killing each other off for a promotion, turning genetically bred hellspawn loose upon the public or trying to cause the end of the world every so often out of a deranged desire to play god to get anything productive done, like ironing out the kinks in their viruses and using those lemons to make lemonade. To make things even worse, this also crops up even when they’re just at work making bioweapons and pathogens, due to both their tendency to make precious few (if any) amounts of much needed antivirals and vaccines to counteract their viruses in the event they get out of control, and the fact that every Bioweapon Beast that they manage to field or sell on the market usually has some serious performance issues. Like killing everything and everybody in their line of sight, having an easily exploitable weakness, degenerating into a mindless berserker if damaged enough, or, in at least two cases, becoming smart enough to go rogue.
• Villainous Legacy: Though Umbrella canonically dissolves not even a quarter way into a multi-media franchise now comprised of over nine numbered entries, their legacy lays the foundation for the bioterrorism that plagues the world since their downfall.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Before the Raccoon City incident, Umbrella was viewed as just a well-respected pharmaceutical company. Even after the incident, it tooks years and a trial before the Supreme Court before the company's true face was shown to the public.
• Would Hurt a Child: Sickeningly so. Not only does Umbrella have absolutely no compunctions about experimenting on children, Survivor and the 2019 remake of 2 illustrate they cultivate social programs solely to produce children as expendable livestock for their B.O.W. research.

Founders

Oswell E. Spencer

Dr. Oswell E. Spencer, Earl Spencer

Voiced by: Adam D. Clarke (5), Time Winters (Resistance), Issei Futamata (JP, Resistance)

Appearances: 5

Mentioned: Resident Evil (remake), 2, Code: Veronica, 0, Umbrella Chronicles, Survivor, Dead Aim, Revelations 2, 3 (2020), Resistance, Village, Wesker's Report II, Heavenly Island

"I was to become a god! Creating a new world with an advanced race of human beings. However, all was lost with Raccoon City."

An aristocratic British earl and multi-billionaire. Spencer was the CEO and president for most of Umbrella's existence, personally being its original founder and financer. Later revelations also illustrate Spencer as the one who came up with Umbrella's eugenic movement and inspired his fellow founders, essentially making him the main antagonist of the franchise.

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• Aristocrats Are Evil: He's an English earl (a high-ranking title analogous to ‘Count’ in the rest of Europe) and his last name is a possible reference to the venerable Spencer Family, of which Princess Diana was a member.
• Asshole Victim: After all the atrocities he's masterminded throughout the series, it's difficult to feel pity as he painfully loses all his power and gets brutally murdered by Wesker.
• Ax-Crazy: A very subtle case admittedly, but behind his delusional desire to become a god among supermen is a completely disturbed old man who easily contends with Marcus in psychotic paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Many of Umbrella’s more messed-up company policies can be traced back to him being a complete psychopath.
• Bad Boss: He's not as eager to murder his employees For Science! as Marcus, but make no mistake that Spencer is equally terrible with his tendency to betray and murder almost everyone he knows in his life. Alex, in particular, has nothing but venomous contempt for him posthumously, indicating he absolutely gave her no reason to so much as like him during all those years she stood by him.
• Big Bad Wannabe: He certainly has the resources and motives to be a proper Big Bad, but the issue is he's too much of an Ax-Crazy lunatic to ever see them through. His actions throughout the franchise are blatant career suicide, and he ends up alone and powerless for it. By the time Wesker and the BSAA found him, he is a dying old man on life support, whom Wesker kills easily.
• Celebrity Resemblance: His voice actor, who is a self-admitted Star Wars fan, based his voice on that of Ian McDiarmid's role of Emperor Palpatine, with Spencer himself being modeled after the man.
• Characterization Marches On: Marcus' Diary 1 from Zero talks about Spencer like he's a greedy man who "thinks of "Progenitor" as nothing more than a money-spinning tool.". In RE5, both his conversation with Wesker, and specially the Albert Wesker file, make it clear that Umbrella was just a means to an end, any monetary gain was secondary to his true goal, which is to create a new superior race of humans.
• The Chessmaster: A notable subversion later on in his life, by the time of Umbrella's collapse. While Spencer thinks he's running the whole show and exudes the vibe of a cunning master manipulator, he's eventually revealed to be a completely delusional Smug Snake. His successes owe to the competence of subordinates like acting president Sergei, and without people like that, he's easily outgambitted and played at every turn by the likes of the Weskers.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He betrays most people he knows: He kills Marcus through Wesker and Birkin, sends a U.S.S. team after the latter for attempting to leave Umbrella, kills George Trevor by locking him inside his twisted mansion, and lastly betrays Albert by admitting he is his creation. It is unproven, but he also likely had Edward Ashford assassinated in 1968, and made it look like an accident. Needless to say, very few people that have come into contact with him have survived the experience.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The example of this trope in the franchise. Spencer is the man behind the worst of Umbrella, building a corporate empire on the blood of his enemies, allies, and subordinates alike.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: This concept is brought up by Wesker to illustrate how insane Spencer truly is. Wesker points out that selling bio-weapons to terrorists is hardly profitable, because of the huge investment in resources it takes just to make one B.O.W. means that the profit earned from the sale doesn't offset the cost of the investment. This is to say nothing of how illegal human experimentation is, and Spencer's shady business practices run the risk of ruining Umbrella with endless law suits if he's ever found out. Wesker points out that the legitimate practices of Umbrella earn more money for Spencer than the bio-weapon research does, so he doesn't understand what motivates Spencer to waste his time on the T-Virus when he already has more money than he could ever need. Once Wesker finds out in Resident Evil 5 that Spencer had delusions of grandeur, and wanted to see if the T-Virus could create a new race of metahumans — metahumans that he would rule over as a god — leading Wesker to be disgusted by Spencer's arrogance.
• Cutscene Boss: After waiting for numerous games to meet Ozwell E. Spencer in the flesh, Wesker kills him in a cutscene and makes up for it with a fight against him instead.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: The years have clearly taken their toll. He was even the page image for a time. He's reduced to being confined to a wheelchair and life support system in his twilight years due to his old age. He expected Alex Wesker to reverse this condition by engineering an immortality virus, though she swindled him and took off with that research for herself.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Love might be pushing it, but his letter to Mother Miranda in Village reveals that he truly respected her, cherished the time he spent with her, regretted leaving without saying goodbye, and hoped that she would one day succeed in her goal of bringing her daughter back to life. He went as far as claiming to have devoted his mega-company's logo as a tribute to her.
• Evil Brit: An English nobleman who became a founder of a company dealing in bioterrorism.
• Evil Cripple: He's in a wheelchair when Wesker finds him, and even in that state, he murdered innocent people and his own employees in a desperate bid to procure a virus to reverse his condition.
• Eviler than Thou: Downplayed with Mother Miranda. While not antagonistic towards one another, quite the opposite with Spencer being fond of her and inspired in part by her, he came to realize her vision clashed too much with his. Where she merely wanted to resurrect her daughter and not spread her Mold and influence beyond the Villages, he had a Utopian vision for transforming the entire world, wanted to become a god and create a virus to bring it about. Eventually departing her company amicably to go found the Umbrella Corporation to make his vision a reality, while remaining in touch from afar.
• Evil Old Folks: He's at least over 50 from when we first canonically learn of his character. Needless to say, he is pure evil.
• Freudian Excuse: It is all but outright stated the horrors of World War II and the Cold War broke something in Spencer to make him the way he is.
• The Ghost: His presence is mentioned and felt throughout the franchise, though he does not appear until 5.
• Godhood Seeker: Such was his life's dream to his last breath.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He's The Man Behind the Man to all of Umbrella, including Alexia, Sergei, Birkin, Alex Wesker, and the series' most recurring villain: Albert Wesker. Yet, he is rarely seen throughout the series and doesn't even interact with the protagonists.
• Immortality Seeker: Naturally comes with his ambitions of becoming a god on earth. He notably had Alex Wesker work to create a virus that would render him immortal. Alex stabbed him in the back after she made a supposed breakthrough.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How Wesker kills him, using his bare hands.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: All of the terrible things that Umbrella has done over the years can be traced back to him, directly or indirectly. But karma bit him in the ass big time in the long run. First off, due to the backlash of the Raccoon City outbreak his company ends up on the chopping block, and through a combination of bankruptcy and their facilities being raided, ends up collapsing completely by mid-2004, with Spencer becoming a wanted fugitive in the process and forced to go into hiding. Then, he proceeds to have Alex Wesker create an immortality virus only for Wesker to backstab him and suck him dry of everything he had, leaving him with nothing, culminating in him being killed by Albert Wesker, the man closest to living the dream that Spencer had envisioned for himself. And as a final insult to the man, the remainder of his company was eventually reformed into Blue Umbrella, who now seek to undo the horrors inflicted upon the world as a result of Spencer’s dark legacy.
• Kick the Dog: He not only had George Trevor's family kidnapped and injected with the Progenitor Virus, he also built a tombstone for George in where he predicted his fruitless attempt to escape his own mansion would end.
• Mad Scientist: It goes overlooked since he is primarily a businessman, but he is a skilled virologist, having been tutored personally by Mother Miranda.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: He's behind all the bad stuff in the series, whether directly or indirectly, but he's little more than a pitiful old man, whining about how he was unable to achieve godhood.
• The Man Behind the Man: To Sergei, who's his Dragon-in-Chief, Alexia, and Birkin (who he employs), and in an odd way, Wesker, who he created.
• Meaningful Name: He shares a last name with Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who conceived Social Darwinism.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If Spencer didn't order Wesker and Birkin to assassinate Dr. Marcus, none of the events relating to Umbrella's downfall and afterward would have happened.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Par excellence. All the evil that Umbrella inflicts can be laid at his feet, yet he never actually does anything on his own; he just gives orders from behind a cushy desk, far, far away from all the blood and tears. Justified since he's disabled and pushing ninety. Without his Dragon-in-Chief Sergei, he'd be no threat; appropriately, after Sergei bites it, Umbrella is finally brought down and Spencer has nothing left with Alex turning on him not long after.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Ordering the assassination of Marcus and theft of all his research. While Spencer himself isn't much of a better person than him, given what a psychopathic monster Marcus became in his isolation, and his scheming to take over Umbrella, as well as experimenting on children and Umbrella employees, it's hard to say he didn't have it coming. Ironically, this incidental good act of Spencer's would turn this trope on its head when the Queen Leech single-handedly ruins Spencer's life and ambitions.
• Pet the Dog: His treatment of Patrick, his head butler who has shown Undying Loyalty to him through his employment, after Patrick fulfills his final task, is to relieve him of his duties and send him away, thereby keeping him alive, instead of having him killed, in stark contrast to all others he's betrayed in his life.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Part of his motivation for having Marcus assassinated seems to be that Marcus was indiscriminately experimenting on and murdering Spencer's Umbrella employees.
• Promoted to Playable: The asymmetric multiplayer of Resident Evil 3's remake, will feature Spencer as one of the playable Masterminds.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Although he managed to keep it together well enough to help make Umbrella into an N.G.O. Superpower, his megalomaniacal obsessions and the rampant paranoia that would lead him to backstab everyone around him at the first opportunity saw to it that his company and aspirations alike would ultimately crash and burn, despite taking decades to make its mark. In the end, he’s left with nothing and ends his life as a pitiful recluse, angrily rambling to Wesker in his final moments about his destined divinity, ignorant of the part he played in its destruction.
• Smug Snake: What Spencer is at his core is not the omnipotent godlike entity he clearly thinks of himself as in his mind, but a delusional narcissist surrounded by competent and talented subordinates. His relentless dickishness and paranoia in betraying said subordinates directly leads to his downfall. When it's just Alex left, he's run out of any ideas other than demanding immortality for himself, showcasing his lack of imagination and creativity (something she endlessly mocks him for).
• The Sociopath: A master manipulator as his masterminding many of the events behind the scenes within the franchise shows excellently, needlessly sadistic as his kidnapping and brutal treatment of the Trevors would prove alongside the other kidnappings and murders he would orchestrate over the years, extremely narcissistic to the point that all of his efforts were to achieve godhood for himself, and so utterly callous and unfeeling that he sent many to their deaths without a flicker of remorse.
• Spell My Name With An S: The games are inconsistent on whether his first name is spelled "Oswell" or "Ozwell".
• Stupid Evil: For all his cunning and genius, his vision to become a god leading a race of genetic supermen is this. If he refined the viruses he had his employees and business partners cook up, he could have become a medical revolutionary, rendering things like disease and age a thing of the past along with enhancing the human condition as a whole, meaning that he could have had his world of supermen in due time and while if not praising him as a god, would have spoken his name in high praise nonetheless. It is even hinted that he had Edward Ashford assassinated because he wanted to take this path and make Umbrella a legitimate pharmaceutical company instead of a developer of bioweapons. While some of this can be somewhat excused by the fact that many of his employees backstabbed each other on a dime, not only did he partake in this with his order to kill Marcus, but his work colleagues' tendencies to turn on each other could have been mitigated by a greater understanding of the bigger picture, and the greater profit it would have entailed.
• Transformation Horror: What ultimately held Spencer back from taking any of the viral samples Umbrella had researched over the decades. Despite Spencer's pretenses that he was one of the "worthy people" who the T-Virus would not reject, Spencer was afraid that the virus would turn him into an ugly abomination.
• The Unfought: The heroes never even meet him alive. He's already been killed by the time Chris and Jill bust into his chamber.
• Villainous Legacy: As a co-founder and the head of a ruthless pharmaceutical corporation that produced dangerous viruses and monsters, Spencer opened a proverbial Pandora's Box in his personal quest for godhood. Many equally ruthless people have taken up Spencer's work for their own purposes and biohazardous outbreaks will likely continue to plague the world for generations to come, making Spencer directly or indirectly responsible for countless deaths long after his own.
• Visionary Villain: Possessed the power and will to attempt to bring about his own Utopian vision for how the world and humanity should work, inspired in part by the horrors of the Second World War and the threat of the Cold War, along with his own megalomania. He doesn't quite succeed and ends up destroying Umbrella and himself, but his plans are hijacked by the Weskers, and even in death Spencer sets in motion quite a Villainous Legacy that the world is suffering from in the present. With a number of villainous successors out to carry on at least in spirit what he started, making bioterrorism, viral bioweapons, and genetic engineering normality in the world.
• We Used to Be Friends: There was once a time when he would spend happy, carefree days with his childhood friends Edward Ashford and James Marcus at the Spencer Estate and innocently discuss with them how to change the world for the better. Both were killed when their desires no longer aligned with Spencer's.

James Marcus

Dr. James Marcus

Voiced by: Ian Downie, Hiroshi Ito (Japanese, HD Remaster)

Appearances: 0, Umbrella Chronicles

Mentioned: 2, 5

"Attention! This is Dr. Marcus. Please be silent as we reflect upon our company motto. Obedience breeds discipline. Discipline breeds unity. Unity breeds power. Power is life."

The second of Umbrella's founders and the chief catalyst for the setting of the Resident Evil franchise. Marcus was once Umbrella's leading virologist and the man who discovered the Progenitor Virus, refining it into the t-Virus. As a power struggle formed between Umbrella's founders, Marcus was viewed as the greatest threat to Spencer with his scientific breakthroughs and was assassinated. His life's work was subsequently stolen and Marcus was erased from Umbrella history to hide the conspiracy against him.

Somehow, Marcus returned from the grave in 1998, seeking vengeance against Umbrella. His legacy would lead to the destruction of Umbrella and lay the foundation for modern bioterrorism.

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• Asshole Victim: After everything Marcus did, one simply can't feel bad for his undignified fate.
• Ax-Crazy: Being increasingly isolated from the world and resentful of Spencer, Marcus took to brutally torturing and experimenting on his own staff out of paranoia and seeing his t-Virus infected leeches as his children.
• Bad Boss: In his descent to madness, Marcus used dozens of Umbrella employees and trainees sent to him over Spencer as test subjects. This undoubtedly played a role in further falling out with Spencer and his eventual assassination.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Although Marcus wouldn't live to see it, his dark legacy would ensure every last person in Umbrella that crossed him would die as undignified as he did.
• Dead All Along: Marcus died in 1988. Although Marcus seemed to have come Back from the Dead in 1998, it was actually a mutant, the Queen Leech, having absorbed his memories from his corpse and taken his form, becoming delusional and thinking it was Marcus reborn.
• Evil Old Folks: He was even older than Spencer, being 80 at the time of his assassination. And one could argue he was even eviler than Spencer himself.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Of all the evil people involved in R&D at Umbrella, Marcus was so particularly terrible a legitimate case could be made for his assassination due to the threat he posed to everyone around him.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: A major reason he became so insane was being holed up in a decrepit facility dedicated to mad science, cut off from society with nothing to keep him company other than his leeches...
• Greater-Scope Villain: Marcus was the one who created the t-Virus, which also lead to the creation of the virus' derivatives, the rise of B.O.W.s in warfare, and the destruction of Raccoon City.
• I Was Quite the Looker: You can find a sepia graduation photo of him where he looks identical to the Mysterious Young Man, and Billy assumed the latter was his son or grandson. The Queen Leech morphs its appearance from younger to older Marcus, indicating that he used to look like that.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Marcus had a habit of callously dumping the corpses of his unfortunate test subjects into the sewers. After being assassinated by his own pupils, his corpse was dumped into the same sewers.
• Mad Scientist: Like almost everyone involved with Umbrella. The medieval torture dungeons found in the training facility speak for themselves.
• The Only One I Trust: In the midst of the gulf formed between him and Spencer, Dr. Marcus expressed that the only two people he trusted in the world were Wesker and Birkin. Spencer would command them to assassinate Marcus.
• The Paranoiac: Taken to horrific extremes well beyond that of even Spencer's paranoia. As documents note, Marcus' insane paranoia is what led him to indiscriminately murder his workers, fearing the possibility of their siding with Spencer. Towards the end of his life, he expressed he only trusted Wesker and Birkin (who ironically are the two he should have trusted the least).
• Posthumous Character: Is long dead by 0. Though he seems to have come back to life, the Marcus we see now is not actually the real person. Rather, it's the Queen Leech after absorbing his memories and taking his form.
• Predecessor Villain: He created the t-Virus, making him responsible for, at the very least, everything up to Raccoon City's destruction. He also turns out to be this for 7 with the reveal that his most trusted student and assistant, Brandon Bailey, founded the Connections, the organization which created that game's Big Bad.
• The Sociopath: Marcus had absolutely no regard for human life, was extremely barbaric in his cruelty, and possessed an inflated sense of self-worth. It's implied he only trusted Wesker and Birkin, the only two people he ever trusted with Bailey separated from him, for their usefulness to him.
• The Starscream: He plotted to overthrow Spencer as CEO of Umbrella during the height of their tensions.
• Torture Technician: He has a literal medieval dungeon complex under his training facility filled with all manner of torture devices from iron maidens to waterboarding. The sight is so horrific it causes Rebecca to retch.
• Villainous Legacy: He was the scientist who originally created the t-Virus by injecting the original Progenitor virus into leeches and extracting the mutated viral strain from them. The t-Virus would go on to play a crucial part in producing Umbrella Corporation's various Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W.s) (most notably Tyrants) and become a base for future weaponized viruses such as the t-Veronica virus, the t-Abyss virus and the t-Phobos virus. A variation of the t-Veronica virus became a base for the Chrysalid Virus (C-Virus).
  • The Queen Leech, driven by the late Dr. Marcus' burning desire for revenge, caused the viral outbreaks at the Umbrella Executive Training Center and the Arklay Laboratory. After this, the villainous nature of the Umbrella Corporation was gradually exposed to the public, leading to the company's downfall years later. One could argue that the outbreaks also led to the ultimate failures and death of Spencer, the man responsible for Marcus' murder.
  • Dr. Marcus' creation of the t-Virus and the decline of the Umbrella Corporation are two of the most important reasons why the bio-weapons Black Market was created. In a sense, Dr. Marcus is, even now, the biggest reason why Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke in the world of Resident Evil.
  • Two of his students, Albert Wesker and Brandon Bailey, would go on to found organizations that would work together to create Eveline, making Marcus the Predecessor Villain of 7.
• Unperson: Following his assassination, Marcus was practically erased from Umbrella history to hide the conspiracy against him.
• Wicked Cultured: If the Queen Leech's impersonation is anything to go by, Marcus was a talented opera singer.
• Would Hurt a Child: One of the more horrifying examples in Umbrella. When animals weren't enough, Marcus developed an interest in live-human experimentation, turning to his students for livestock. The trainees he butchered for his experiments were all child prodigies or teenagers at most.

Edward Ashford

Edward Ashford, 5th Earl Ashford

Mentioned: Code: Veronica, Darkside Chronicles, 5

The last of the three recognized founders of Umbrella, associated with Spencer and Marcus as a mutual friend. Much unlike his fellow founders, he plays a minimal role in the events of history and very little is known of his personality or ethics.

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• Aristocrats Are Evil: To what extent is unclear past the fact he was a core part of the eugenics circle that founded Umbrella.
• Being Evil Sucks: Yasuhiro Seto, the director of Darkside Chronicles, has stated in his blog regarding the Ashford Family: "The Ashford family bloodline was cursed ever since Edward, the fifth generation family head, founded the Umbrella Corporation. This curse also affected his heir Alexander, and his children Alfred and Alexia." This curse would eventually cause the gradual decline and eventual extinction of the once proud Ashford family.
• The Ghost: He is never seen despite being mentioned on and off in regards to lore. We only see a painting of him.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Spencer orchestrated his death when his views no longer aligned with his. Whatever those views were, we still do not know.

Brandon Bailey

Brandon Bailey

Mentioned: Umbrella Chronicles (novelization only), 5, Village

One of Umbrella's founders, though uncredited as such in public and more recognized as the director of Umbrella's West Africa operations. Bailey was a virologist closely affiliated with Dr. James Marcus, being his protege and chief assistant. Together, Bailey would co-found the breakthrough of the t-Virus. Viewed as a great threat to Spencer alongside his mentor, Bailey was subtly moved to company work away from Marcus, allowing Spencer to murder his mentor without his knowledge. After Marcus' death, Bailey was left aimless on his work, it being stolen and Bailey himself ostracized from Umbrella.

Leaving his company, Bailey would become a crimelord, founding The Connections, a feared criminal organization involved in bioterrorism. Collaborating with an enigmatic woman named Miranda and the H.C.F., a paramilitary criminal unit led by Albert Wesker, they would pioneer the E-Type B.O.W. in their nefarious ambitions.

Spencer seemingly caught up with Bailey and finally had him killed, though his true fate is currently left ambiguous. By Wesker's account, he is deceased, though the BSAA does not rule out the possibility he lives in hiding as late as 2017.

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• Ascended Extra: Bailey was originally just a character mentioned in a file found in Resident Evil 5 that stated that he was a protege of James Marcus that was deeply affected by his death. In a file found by pre-ordering Resident Evil Village however, it's revealed that he left Umbrella and founded The Connections, the organization that created Eveline and caused the events of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
• Asshole Victim: If he was actually killed by Wesker or Spencer's hands, it's hard to feel bad for a man that was so readily eager to murder, whether it be loose ends to keep quiet or the African natives he terrorized. And that's not even getting into the fact he became a dangerous crimelord and bioterrorist responsible for many deaths and tragedies.
• Bad Boss: He was described as very overbearing and demanding by his construction workers.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: After Marcus was killed and his operations shut down by Spencer, Bailey was left depressed and aimless in life. Unfortunately, he chose to fill this void by becoming a mob boss and bioterrorist.
• The Dragon: To Marcus, whom he kept in touch with from Africa until his assassination.
• The Ghost: His appearance has yet to be revealed.
• Greater-Scope Villain: By founding The Connections and producing the B.O.W. Eveline in close collaboration with Mother Miranda, Bailey is effectively responsible for all the events of the seventh game and a major behind-the-scenes antagonist of Village.
• He Knows Too Much: Spencer plotted to kill him with all of Africa HQ after Raccoon City was destroyed, citing him as a loose end in covering Umbrella's innocence.
• Irony: He unknowingly worked with his would-be hitman, Albert Wesker, through the H.C.F.
• Minor Major Character: Brandon Bailey is only ever brought up in files and backdrops of lore, but he has played an impressively large role in many notable events in the Resident Evil universe: he co-founded Umbrella, directly collaborated with the t-Virus' creator, and would later go on to work on B.O.W.s. with the very woman that inspired Spencer's ideals.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Spencer drilled this into him when the Ndipaya tribe proved too pesky for lesser alternatives. He took to even murdering his construction workers for silence. It's probably why Bailey also hit it off so well as a murderous crimelord after his work in Umbrella.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Spencer had him assigned to Africa permanently to keep him out of the way after having Bailey's mentor Marcus killed. Bailey took advantage of this to form his own organization that would go on to pick up where Umbrella left off.
• Uncertain Doom: By Wesker's account/hitlist, he's dead, but due to the decentralized nature of his criminal organization, the BSAA actually believes he could be at large even now.
• Walking Spoiler: The reveal in Village that he founded the Connections and may have faked his death prior to 5 turns him from a generic backstory character to a potential major player in the story.

Chief directors

Sergei Vladimir

Colonel Sergei Vladimir

^{Click to see him mutated}

Voiced by: Patrick Seitz

Appearances: Umbrella Chronicles

Mentioned: Umbrella Chronicles: Prelude to the Fall

"All for Umbrella!"

Perhaps the most important non-founder in Umbrella politics. A former Soviet colonel, Sergei Vladimir is Umbrella's chief of security, founding and managing its paramilitary units, namely the U.B.C.S.. He is also Spencer's most trusted right-hand man, being privy to the company's darkest secrets: Sergei is deeply involved in the prized Tyrant program, being the original genetic model for the monsters and masterminding the revolutionary T-A.L.O.S. project. After Raccoon City, Sergei was promoted to acting president of Umbrella, directing its last holdout, the Caucasus Laboratory south of Russia, until the company's downfall.

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• Ax-Crazy: As expected of an Umbrella operative that unfailingly worships Spencer, Sergei takes madness to new heights: He fanatically worships Umbrella's eugenic goals, citing the Tyrants as his "brothers" and engages in regular sadomasochistic self-harm. Lampshaded by Chris, who dismisses him as "another Umbrella psycho." Sergei partly acknowledges his insanity and simply states the people that go down in history as "heroes" are never stable.
• Badass Longcoat: His greatcoat is very badass.
• Body Horror: Sergei's horrific form after going One-Winged Angel to battle Wesker looks almost otherworldly: his arms have fused together into one long, flailing tentacle with a sort of ribcage-claw at the end of it, his veins have grown through his skin to wrap around him, and his jaw is distended by a huge, maggot-filled tumor that has grown from it. After you beat him, you get a file from Wesker noting that most humans who transform because of the t-virus are mutating on a psychoactive basis — that is, the resultant abomination is shaped by the victim's mentality and thoughts. Think about what that says about Sergei as a person.
• Cleanup Crew: Sergei founded the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service and Monitors, who both specialize in cleaning up/hiding the evidence of Umbrella's screw-ups.
• Cold Ham: Sergei is very theatrical despite never raising his voice.
• Colonel Kilgore: Demonstrated by how he greets Chris and Jill on their arrival at the testing area for T.A.L.O.S. development.
  Sergei: Welcome! As fellow soldiers, I'm sure you understand the thrill of battle and the rush that comes with the feeling of being alive after a good battle.
• Combat Sadomasochist: He gets off being hurt as much as hurting others, as evident by his self-harm habits. In his final battle with Wesker, he laughs at getting beat up, indicating a total loss of sanity.
• Dirty Commies: If his constantly addressing you as "Comrade" is any tipoff, he was a former Soviet military officer. Obviously, the collapse of the Soviet Union left him without a job until Spencer hired him.
• The Dragon: A direct one to Spencer, being his most trusted subordinate and Umbrella's acting president.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Sergei is in large part of what held Umbrella together; after his death, it collapses soon after. Spencer is still nominally in control of the organization, but Sergei is the one who is actually running the show, doubly so after being promoted to acting president.
• Empowered Badass Normal: He was elite Russian military long before he became Umbrella's first Tyrant.
• End of an Age: His defeat and death officially mark the point of the overarching story where Umbrella truly dissolves, paving the way for the narrative's focus on their legacy and the uprising of bioterrorism in the world.
• Establishing Character Moment: Nonchalantly shows up to Wesker during the investigation of the Umbrella Training Facility, cutting himself up with a blade while scolding Wesker for insubordination before siccing a hyper-intelligent Tyrant on him as punishment. This illustrates both his immense authority and insanity in one scene.
• Faux Affably Evil: Despite being a complete psycho, he never raises his voice or loses his calm politeness. Even when cornered to the last, he simply commends Wesker for making it so far.
• Foil: To Wesker. They're both mutant gunmen entrusted to do Ozwell Spencer's bidding, but Sergei remains The Dragon to Wesker's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder-afflicted Wild Card. He'd be Wesker's Evil Counterpart if the latter weren't already a Villain Protagonist. They also acted as Psycho Prototypes to Spencer's plans. Wesker was a Psycho Prototype (or at the very least the sole surviving byproduct besides Alex Wesker for Project W, a eugenics program dedicated to using the Progenitor Virus to transform people into Übermensch super humans, whereas Sergei was the Psycho Prototype to the Tyrant Super-Soldier line.
• Former Regime Personnel: He was recruited by Umbrella following the collapse of the USSR.
• Genius Bruiser: Despite his hulking appearance and blind loyalty to Spencer giving the impression of a Dumb Muscle brute, Sergei's far from stupid, which he would have to not be to earn the former's genuine trust.
• Handicapped Badass: Blind in one eye, due to action in Afghanistan. It doesn't slow him down at all.
• The Heavy: In The Umbrella Chronicles, where almost every major event is determined by his actions. More broadly, he fills this role to Spencer. Spencer's the mastermind, but his age and crippling leave him reliant on Sergei to do just about everything for him. Actually justified; see Undying Loyalty below.
• It Can Think: Despite what his mutant form looks like, Sergei can still talk normally and rationally (well, for him) think as he always has. Justified as Sergei is the original Tyrant template and, thus, one in a million that is perfectly compatible with the t-Virus.
• Licking the Blade: Repeatedly cuts himself with his double-edged knife, before licking up the blood.
• Lightning Bruiser: His mutated form, despite giving the impression of Clipped-Wing Angel, is strong as hell and unbelievably mobile, the latter of which Wesker even admits to being a problem in their brutal fight.
• The Man Behind the Man: As the head of Umbrella security, Sergei is behind many of the events in Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, as well as much of The Umbrella Chronicles.
• Obviously Evil: So, the huge Russian guy in the greatcoat with the booming voice is evil, huh? As aforementioned, his Establishing Character Moment really hammers it in.
• One-Winged Angel: Transforms himself into an utterly hideous monstrosity during his last stand against Wesker.
• Psycho Knife Nut: Introduced totting about what looks like an oversized Haladie, which he uses to cut himself with. According to the non-canon Japanese novelisation, it’s custom-made from Thunderbolt Iron found at the site of the Tunguska Event. Sergei keeps several more on his person & he’s also one hell of a good throw with them, as Wesker can attest.
• Psycho Prototype: You know those Tyrant B.O.W? Well, they were originally made from his genetic template, meaning that he's the first Tyrant. And boy, is he insane.
• Psycho Supporter: He is devoted to Spencer's eugenic goals to an insane degree, hoping to usher in a new age with the Tyrants as his "brothers."
• Renegade Russian: The note towards Nikolai, a.k.a Silver Fox, indicated that he planned to revive the Soviet Union.
• The Spymaster: Almost all of Umbrella's behind-the-scenes actions are run by this man.
• Super-Soldier: He's actually the prototype to the Tyrant enemies. You can pretty much guess what that means...
• Two First Names: Vladimir is a very common given name in Russia, but plain given names as surnames are actually extremely rare in Slavic languages since in most cases, surnames based on given names end with a suffix like -ov/-ev, or -in, similar to how most English patronymics end with -s.
• Undying Loyalty: To Umbrella as a whole, and Spencer in particular. It stems from their giving him a place after the collapse of his homeland. Wesker mocks him for being resolved to go down with it even as all hope is lost.
• We Have Reserves: He callously brushes off all the disasters Umbrella suffers with this, stating that they can always start over. To a degree, he is correct in that it depends solely on him living; after he dies, the show ends.

William Birkin

Dr. William Birkin, "G"

^{Click to see G1 (Darkside Chronicles)}

^G2

^G3

^G4

^{G4 (2019)}

^G5

Voiced by: Diego Matamoros, TJ Rotolo (2019 remake, Darkside Chronicles); Toshihiko Seki (JP, since Operation Raccoon City)

Portrayed by: Neal McDonough (Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City)

Appearances: 2 (and 2019 remake), 0, Outbreak, Umbrella Chronicles, Darkside Chronicles, Operation Raccoon City, Resistance

Mentioned: Survivor, Code: Veronica, Resident Evil (remake), 5, 6, Revelations 2, Degeneration, Wesker's Report I & II

"This is my life's work! I'm not handing over anything!"

The director of NEST, a subterranean laboratory complex where research on the G-Virus of his own design was conducted. William Birkin is an important person in both Umbrella and world history: originally a promising disciple of Dr. James Marcus alongside Albert Wesker, he betrayed and assisted in the murder of his mentor at Spencer's demand, seizing control of his research on the t-Virus. From it and further experiments on Lisa Trevor, he would derive the G-Virus (Golgotha Virus), a monstrously potent viral agent.

Hoping his breakthrough would earn him a position as one of Umbrella's leaders, Birkin was rebuked but nonetheless obligated to share his work. Dissatisfied, Birkin plotted to sell his research to the U.S military and leave Umbrella. Intercepted by the U.S.S., a fatal showdown saw Birkin inject the G-Virus into himself to survive his injuries.

As a revived monstrosity, "G", Birkin immediately sought out the U.S.S. members that struck him down. The ensuing rematch saw massive amounts of the Tyrant and Golgotha virus leak into the sewers, setting the stage for Raccoon City's destruction and Umbrella's demise. The mutated Birkin himself would roam Raccoon City in search of compatible hosts to procreate with.

Disclaimer: As the 2019 depictions of Birkin's forms apart from his egregious fourth form do not differ significantly from their original counterparts, their image templates will supersede those of the originals.

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• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The 2019 remake more visibly shows the pain and anguish he goes through, snapping at the Umbrella agents attempting to take the G-Virus, and crying for help when he's already mutated into his first form.
  Birkin/"G": HELLllp MEEee!!!
• Adaptational Badass: His fifth and final form in the original version is merely a pathetic Clipped-Wing Angel. However, in The Darkside Chronicles, G5 is much more powerful and aggressive. Its tentacles have claws that could attack Leon and Claire by whipping at them and throwing wreckage at them. It can also up recently consumed zombies to fight and stretch its maw forward to attack.
• Adaptational Context Change: In the original incarnation of his "death," HUNK is angry because his subordinate may have hit the sample of the virus they were coming for in the process of shooting Birkin. In the 2019 remake, the anger is instead because they were supposed to take him in alive for Spencer.
  HUNK: What the fuck were you thinking? Our orders were to bring him in alive!
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Heavily downplayed since he’s still just as horrible of a person (if not even more so with the addition of the Umbrella orphanage and all the horrific things he and his wife did to its children) as in the original, but in the 2019 remake, his Papa Wolf tendencies come out in some brief moments of lucidity, such as saving Sherry from Chief Irons and later saving both her and Claire from Mr. X. By his second mutation after tearing Mr. X nearly in half, these tendencies are completely gone.
• Adaptive Ability: Thanks to the G-virus, he adapts to any mortal damage and gets back up stronger, faster, and tougher. However, it does have its limits; his G5 form is implied to be a last-ditch effort by the virus to keep him alive after massive amounts of damage, and even that can't protect him from the self-destruct's explosion.
• Admiring the Abomination: He was utterly fascinated with the mutagenic virus he created after recovering its base form from Lisa Trevor after attempting to use the Nemesis-Alpha macroparasite on her. This culminated in a crossover with Blasphemous Boast: according to supplementary material, the "G" in G-Virus stands for Golgotha, said to be the land where Jesus was crucified. As a sort of sick antithesis, the antigens he created for the G-Virus are actively referred to in-game as the Devil Vaccine.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: His final form is fought in a train carriage, with him starting at one end and moving forward. If you don't shoot him enough, he'll eventually leave you no room to avoid his fatal bite attack.
• Alien Blood: In the remake, Birkin and his G-offspring bleed distinct orange-colored blood while t-Virus monsters bleed more conventional red blood.
• Always a Bigger Fish: In the remake, the T-103 has Claire and Sherry trapped but Birkin appears and runs him through with his clawed arm before nearly bisecting him, killing him with one strike.
• Asshole Victim: His self-inflicted transformation into G to survive his injuries is horrific, but he was a thoroughly atrocious person in life, developing the t-Virus and G-Virus, having his mentor murdered, and doing terrible experiments on Lisa Trevor and many other victims. Turning into G does not improve his personality. The 2019 remake does downplay this by showing off the redeeming quality of his love for his daughter and having two Villainous Rescue moments out of being a Papa Wolf for Sherry.
• Ax-Crazy: Especially noticeable in the remake; transforming into a monstrous creature has made his mind unstable, wanting to kill or infect anyone he comes across.
• Babies Ever After: Horrifyingly this is what the G-virus monstrosity he's become wants. Like any organism it wants to reproduce, but cannot spread to other hosts as easily as the T-virus can, due to a lack of contagion (thank goodness). It impregnates Chief Irons and Ben, but because they're not related to its original host's DNA, they rejected its G-embryos, in a bloody mess. After these failures, G then starts going after Sherry aggressively at this point, because as William's daughter, she is compatible.
• Bad Boss: Zigzagged and played straight. Files before the outbreak have him warmly complimenting Irons for his loyalty to him over Umbrella, promising him anything he wants after he sells G to the US military. When the heat from Umbrella gets too hot for Irons to control, Birkin viciously badmouths Brian and calls him expendable. As the U.S.S. finally closes in, he proceeds to unleash his laboratory's Hunters to silence his research staff.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: Temporarily. In the remake, the beating Claire or Leon gives to G1 seems to give Birkin a bit of a short-lived reprieve from the monstrous urges of the viral transformation, leading to him fleeing the battle and two separate moments protecting Sherry from other both literal and figurative monsters. This comes to an end when he mutates into G2.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Regardless of adaptation, Birkin believed that the G-Virus would cure him of his fatal gunshot wounds. Good news for him is that he was right in that regard; the bad news is that it doesn’t stop there, and eventually overrides and destroys him in both body and mind, to the point that being shot was the lesser of the two evils.
• Big Bad: Of Resident Evil 2, and all retellings of the story. While he did work for Spencer, the game's conflict begins and ends with him. Spencer is never even mentioned. He started the outbreak and the whole mess starts when he betrayed Umbrella. Mr. X was sent in to clean up the mess Birkin created, and in every retelling of the story, Birkin outlives him and proves to be a greater threat. He's a personal enemy to Claire and Leon by the end as he almost kills both Ada and Sherry, and he is the Final Boss in all versions of the story.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Birkin and Wesker went to college, trained and worked at Umbrella together, and hung out together in Resident Evil 0. A file in 5 confirms that Birkin was the one who gave Wesker the virus that made him super-human.
• Big Bad Ensemble: He and Mr. X are the main villains along with Irons, but they never work together. Birkin proves to be the greater threat in the remake by far as he almost kills Mr. X and kills Irons.
• Bishōnen Line: Zig-Zagged. G1 to G2 are ugly, misshapen monsters, but when Birkin goes G3 the mutations seem to stabilize somewhat, and while still monstrous, he looks much less disjointed and all-around contorted than the last two stages. However, G4 and G5 revert this by making him even more powerful, yet even more disfigured.
• Blob Monster: His final form is a gigantic amorphous blob with dozens of teeth and Combat Tentacles.
• Body Horror: To a terrifying degree after he injects himself with the G-Virus, being the series' most iconic example of escalating One-Winged Angel. His final form doesn't even look remotely humanoid, as he's degenerated into a mass of pulsing mutated flesh with eyes and teeth.
• Body Motifs: Eyes are the most prominent feature on all G-Virus mutations related to him. His earliest appearances in the original game are marked by the sight of the giant eyeball on his right shoulder, and they just go up from there, sprouting all over his body as he grows more hideously mutated. Even his spawn bear a giant eyeball on their forms. In the remake, they serve as the weak points you want to attack.
• Boss Banter: His first form actually talks to you as you fight him, alternating between begging you for help or a Mercy Kill, and aggressively threatening you.
• Boss Rush: In Darkside Chronicles, G2 through G4 are fought back to back.
• Breakout Villain: Not so much Birkin himself, but his "G" forms and fights are among the most iconic monsters and setpieces in the franchise.
• Carry a Big Stick: Birkin's first form wields a section of piping as a makeshift club.
• Characterization Marches On: Birkin, as observed through notes in the original version of 2 and his on-screen appearances in 0, is depicted as rather level-headed and confident. Starting from Umbrella Chronicles, he's an irritable and nervous wreck, something especially emphasized in the 2019 remake of 2.
• Child Prodigy: Earned his doctorate and was employed by Umbrella at 15.
• Climax Boss: In scenarios where he isn't the final boss, he is this. His 3rd and 4th forms especially are fought after some huge plot revelations, and it becomes personal for both Leon and Claire by this point. For Leon, Birkin's almost killed Ada; for Claire, he almost killed Sherry.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: One of the series' most notable examples. His final form is a massive blob with More Teeth than the Osmond Family — and a complete lack of mobility. Justified, as this form results from healing badly following his fourth form's destruction.
• Creepy Asymmetry: His body is horrifically mutated by his fight for control with the G-Virus, causing his right arm and torso to swell into a massive, grotesque wall of flesh and bone (with a big ole eyeball growing from his shoulder). That unevenness carries into all of G's forms as it becomes more and more monstrous, eventually assimilating Birkin's human half and leaving the remnants of his face on the left side of its chest.
• Death by Irony: In the remake, what finally does him in is getting his eye impaled by a steel pipe, not much different from the one he tried to kill Leon/Claire with while in his first form, causing him to recoil just long enough for Leon to disconnect the wagons and send him back into the incinerator born from the self-destruct mechanism.
• Death from Above: In the remake, G4 will periodically climb far up the wall and subsequently launch himself like a meteorite towards the player, dealing colossal damage if he hits.
• Death of Personality: William Birkin resists the murderous impulses of his viral mutation to a limited and fleeting extent while in the G1 phase, but by the time the creature he's become mutates to G2, he becomes completely consumed, and his personality and resistance from the inside fades permanently.
• Deceptive Disciple: To Dr. Marcus. Ironically, Birkin and Wesker were his most trusted trainees. They had Marcus gunned down, then Birkin laughed about it.
• Did Not Think This Through:
  • In the remake, his first boss fight has him begging for help, even as his mutations try and force him to kill the player. He makes it obvious that he regrets injecting himself with the virus. His behavior also had streaks of this even before he infected himself, as he knew what the virus was capable of in the form of clinical trials and how badly it can damage a person. He essentially went all in and infected himself despite knowing that his virus was extremely imperfect and prone to doing its hosts more harm than good because he was so dead set on surviving his wounds and not letting Umbrella take his work from him that he didn’t care about anything else.
  • Also stupidly betraying Spencer by trying to sell the G-Virus he created as an Umbrella employee through Spencer's funding to the U.S. Government and ignoring the warning emails he received from Umbrella HQ on the matter, thinking it was going to end well, and not with a U.S.S. team storming NEST to retrieve what is legally Umbrella's property. Even already knowing the sort of person Spencer was when he had Birkin's old mentor Marcus assassinated through the U.S.S., with Birkin present and assisting in this.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The first of three final bosses for Darkside Chronicles.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: His head in both his fourth and fifth forms looks pretty phallic.
• Emergency Transformation: He injects himself with the G-Virus to heal from his bullet wounds, as well as to take revenge on his murderers.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Pre-G-Virus, his wife and daughter were this to him. He may be an evil mad scientist, but he genuinely loved his family. Even as G in the second stage, he still recognizes his wife as she shows him her wedding ring in Darkside Chronicles. In the remake, he also saves his daughter twice from Irons and X in the first stage before the G half decides to take over completely.
• Eviler than Thou: In the remake, he kills off the other major villains, Mr. X and Irons, to become the sole main threat in Claire's scenarios.
• Evil Evolves: With every defeat as G, he mutates into an even more gruesome and powerful form.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Worked on the Progenitor virus and its variants with Marcus, designed the G-Virus and callously experimented on human beings in order to do so.
• The Extremist Was Right: William Birkin originally injected himself with the G virus hoping it would heal his recent gunshot wounds. While it turned him into a walking monstrosity, come Sherry in Resident Evil 6 it turns out if he had managed to finish it his plan likely would've worked.
• Eye Scream: Hurting his giant eyes with whatever is available, may it be gunfire, acid, flash-bangs, or grenades, is the one surefire way to make him hurt in massive quantities. Tot to mention having his final one skewered by a steel pipe serve as the final strike delivered against him before he dies for good.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: As a monster, he famously has an immense eye on his shoulder.
  • And another one on his thigh.
  • And in his fourth form, one on his back.
  • In his fifth form, he pretty much has them everywhere.
• Fighting from the Inside: In the remake.
  • G1 Birkin will occasionally pause to flail his pipe at nothing or scream for help in a vaguely human voice; notably, during his first bossfight in Leon's story he outright turns away from relentlessly attacking Leon and purposefully flings himself over a railing into the drop below after taking enough damage, implying the trauma gave him a chance to reassert control.
  • He also has a few notable moments after his mutation such as tearing apart Mr. X when the T-103 tries to attack Sherry and Claire in an elevator, or attacking Brian Irons when he threatens Sherry. In both cases he ignores the virus' drive to propagate in order to protect his daughter, even though it's a visible struggle to do so. This drops off after his G2 transformation, however, as the virus reduces him to a mindless monster.
• Final Boss: Of Resident Evil 2 and its 2019 remake on nearly all playthroughs. The only exception is Leon's first run in the remake, where Mr. X takes on the role after the G3 fight.
• From a Single Cell: It's seen more in the remake, but in general it seems that his monstrously powerful Healing Factor gets stronger and stronger as he takes damage to the point that his fifth form simply can't be killed by gunfire. The only thing that puts him down for good is being fed to the encroaching fireball of the exploding Umbrella facility, resulting in him being obliterated in the train carriage exploding, and anything left consumed by the inferno.
• Genetic Abomination: By the time he reaches his G5 form, all semblance of Birkin’s former humanity has been irrevocably destroyed by the virus, having degenerated him into a constantly mutating, shapeless mass of teeth, eyes, and tentacles that is almost completely indestructible and while not mind-shattering to look at, would definitely scar the psyche of everyone lucky enough to survive the encounter.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In 3, Outbreak, Outbreak File 2, Operation Raccoon City, as well as any spinoff set during the outbreak. As the direct cause of the t-Virus outbreak and source of the G-Virus monsters plaguing the city, he's the real reason for all the cast's suffering, but he's only fought as a villain in 2.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Towards Alexia Ashford, who was hired at an even younger age than he was.
• Healing Factor: Every time he's damaged, his mutations increase, closing the wounds and altering his body still further. It isn't perfect, though, and the mutations are at times far from beneficial; when his fourth form is almost destroyed, the only way for his healing factor to bail him out is to transform him into a limbless immobile blob.
• Hell Is That Noise: With his first form, he sounds like he's moaning in agony. Come his third and fourth forms, he's making truly abominable roars and screeches.
• Heroic Willpower: Manages to retain enough control of his mutated body to defend Sherry twice, killing Chief Irons and Mr. X, before the mutations take full control. During his early boss battle, he also fights against G's control, making his movements clumsy and even forcing him to hold somewhat still so the player can take shots at him.
• Idiot Ball: Only in the original story. It's unclear as to why Birkin didn't simply hand HUNK a different viral agent disguised as G, given HUNK's unit was only there for the virus and couldn't care less about Birkin. This is addressed in the remake: HUNK's team is now under orders to take Birkin in alive, meaning there was no way he was going to fool them.
• Implacable Man: Goes through four different One-Winged Angel forms and one Clipped-Wing Angel before he's finally stopped, tracking Sherry the whole time.
• Irony: The G-virus does work the way he envisioned it to, as proven by his daughter Sherry gaining Healing Factor with none of the nasty side effects. He just didn't know how to introduce the virus to his body the right way, even though he had all the means to do so. Ironic that the creator of the virus couldn't get it to work correctly, while a random bystander (Leon or Claire) accidentally did.
• It Can Think: More obvious in Darkside Chronicles, as he recognizes his wife when she shows him her wedding ring. Even upon reaching his fifth form, he still has the smarts to call out Sherry's name, realize what Leon and Claire are trying to do in their battle on the train, and shield the connector between train carriages from gunfire. In the original game, he realizes that there is a bomb on the train and attempts to get off before it detonates. He still retains his relative intelligence even in the remake, as he switches between threatening Leon/Claire and begging them for help in their first run-ins with his first form, ambushes them in his second form by attacking them through the ceiling, prioritizes Annette over Leon after she takes him out of commission briefly with a couple of acid cartridges, seeing her as the main threat out of the two. In his fourth form, he realizes that his prey is trying to escape him and drags himself on top of the escaping train car in a vain attempt to destroy it. Finally, he realizes that his number’s up before the explosion of the facility overtakes him.
• It's Personal: After multiple bad encounters with Leon and Claire, it’s implied that he develops a grudge over them shooting at him and fending him off. Even after infecting Sherry, he still comes after Leon and Claire, which only strengthens this implication.
• Karmic Death: In two ways. Birkin's transformations cause a Death of Personality by his second form, leaving him a nearly mindless insane beast, and he dies in his own lab's self-destruction. In short, he suffers the same fate as so many of the people he experimented on before dying horribly. In the remake, Birkin is killed after his final form's giant eye is impaled by a pipe and he falls into the flames behind him.
• Karmic Transformation: Birkin's transformation into G is horrifying and causes him constant agony. This is exactly what he and Wesker did to Lisa Trevor in the Remake of Resident Evil 1. Worse, this is what his experiments did to all those orphans Brian Irons illegally trafficked to him.
• Klingon Promotion: He and Wesker murdered their mentor, Dr. James Marcus, on Spencer's orders. Afterward, Wesker became Spencer's spy, and Birkin received Marcus' old job and control of his research.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Despite his few redeeming traits he was a truly horrible human being, all in all, destroying dozens if not hundreds of lives to perfect his laboratory tinkering, so to see him infect himself with his own creation out of desperation, his untested, undiluted creation out of all things, it leaves him a mutated, unhinged wreck of a man before snuffing out his sense of self completely and devolving into an utter mess of a creature. To make this more karmic, the G in G-Virus was short for God, the religious connotations being obvious, yet when he tested it out on himself he ended up as nothing more than a screaming, bestial pile of primordial sludge when all was said and done, an evolutionary dead end.
  • Despite James Marcus having been an Asshole Victim himself, there is a certain well-deserved irony in Birkin's transformation and death being the result of a U.S.S. team being dispatched by Spencer to steal his ill-gotten life's work from his laboratory, one of them gunning him down with an MP5 submachine gun in the process. Just as Birkin oversaw a U.S.S. team for Spencer assassinating his old mentor Marcus in his lab in 1988 with MP5K submachine guns before dumping his body down into a sewer and proceeding to steal his equally repugnant life's work, with Marcus's corpse eventually transforming into a hideous monster as a result of the virus he was working on.
• Last-Name Basis: Despite having recurring family members that share his last name, he is much more often referred to by his last name. Downplayed in the remake, where Annette and Irons refer to him as William.
• Lightning Bruiser: From G1 to G4. He's surprisingly agile for something as immense as he is, and he always hits extremely hard.
• Loss of Identity: As Annette points out to Ada, the G-Virus is completely taking over William and after several days he would've lost any memories of ever being human. As a Rule of Symbolism William's head is gradually being absorbed into this ungodly malformation. By the third major mutation, he's gone.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Upon becoming a mutant, he has various forms of claws, extra limbs, spikes, eyes, mouths, Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, and a Healing Factor. Not to mention he keeps morphing into a more and more horrible behemoth. His final form is a truly horrifying fleshy blob without any resemblance to a human.
• Mad Scientist: This is the man who created the G-Virus and many of the monsters in Umbrella's arsenal of Bio-Organic Weapons.
• Married to the Job: It's stated that while he loved his family, his research, especially work on the G-Virus, seemed to be more important to him.
• Mighty Glacier: His fifth form’s only means of locomotion is slithering slowly across the ground like a slug. However, if he gets within biting range, you’re done for, and he’s almost completely invulnerable by this stage, only the explosion of the Umbrella facility blowing him to pieces and incinerating the remains finally managing to kill the undying bastard for good.
• Monster Is a Mommy: A bit of an inversion in terms of the trope's usual turn of events. He has a daughter from when he was human, but also his sole driving goal as the G-mutant is to infect others, creating G-Spawn as a side-effect.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Starting from G3, his form appearances visually emphasize masses of fanged teeth. Heavily downplayed if not subverted in their remake depictions, which eschews the notable fourth form's appearance altogether and removes G5's teeth to emphasize its appearance as a fleshy mass.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Birkin starts growing additional limbs since his first form, but they only truly become prominent in his third form.
• Multiple Head Case: During Claire's route in the 2019 remake, a second head is seen sprouting next to his original one after he ran Mr. X through with his claws as part of his mutation to G2. This gets averted later on, with Birkin's head getting absorbed as the virus takes over the body completely.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: William's resilience after going G-monster is truly remarkable. He gets shot to pieces on numerous occasions and in the remake even reduced to Ludicrous Gibs after his fight with Claire on the train, and yet comes back for more. In his final form, he's almost completely indestructible, the best weaponry Leon and Claire have to bear against him only makes him flinch but little else. It takes being obliterated by the explosion of the Umbrella facility to truly ensure his death.
• Odd Friendship: Talkative, nervous, skinny Birkin and stoic, confident, badass Wesker were definitely this.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: For the entire running time of 0, he was trapped in the Umbrella Training Facility with Wesker, who departed before him for his objectives. This means Birkin, despite not being a badass like Wesker, braved the monster-infested facility to find its self-destruct terminal and escape all on his own.
• Oh, Crap!: "G", regardless of its form, is coherent enough to recognize an explosive when it sees it and react accordingly.
  • In the ending of the original game, G's "main" eye widens and its pupil narrows, just moments before the train explodes, as it realizes what is about to happen.
  • In the remake G briefly reacts when explosives are thrown right in front of its feet.
• One-Letter Name: His One-Winged Angel forms are technically known as G, though most fans as well as several characters in-universe still refer to him by his full name for simplicity's sake.
• One-Winged Angel: To an ungodly degree. He goes through four dangerous forms and one Clipped-Wing Angel form before finally dying.
• Papa Wolf: In the 2019 remake, he manages to come to his senses enough to direct his unsavory urges on Irons, who at the time was holding his daughter hostage, before leaving Irons to his fate and leaving Sherry alone. Later he saves both Claire and Sherry from Mr. X, impaling the Tyrant and nearly tearing it in half.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • Once he becomes G, his murder of Brian Irons. In the original, Birkin either rips Irons in half or infects him with a Chest Burster. In the 2019 remake, Irons gets infected, but only after Birkin finds Irons about to attack Sherry. He also brutally bigger-fishes Mr. X.
  • He was on the wrong end of this in the backstory of Resident Evil 2, courtesy of HUNK's team.
• Pet the Dog: In the remake, he saves Sherry's life twice before the G-Virus takes over completely. In Darkside Chronicles, he also remembers his wife enough to not try and hurt her until she pulls a gun on him.
• Pipe Pain: Birkin's G1 form introduces himself by tearing off a section of piping big enough to give Mike Haggar pause.
• Pre-Final Boss: In Leon's first run in the remake, the battle against G3 is Birkin's last appearance, with Mr. X taking on the role of Final Boss.
• Pursue the Dream Job: More than anything wants to be made an executive in Umbrella, believing his G-Virus will secure him the promotion and all the benefits that come with it. William fails to appreciate this breakthrough gives him no leverage, because he's just a senior researcher. All his work belongs to his employers, and for defying them, view him as expendable.
• Puzzle Boss: In the 2019 remake, Birkin's G2 form can't be defeated with normal combat methods. Instead, the player needs to stun him with sufficient firepower before swinging a loaded cargo crane into him at high speed, ultimately knocking him into an abyss.
• Pyrrhic Victory: He did eventually get The G-Virus to do what he wanted it to do just not in himself, but his daughter. Turns out the vaccine didn't completely eliminate the virus from her body but gave her accelerated healing with (so far) none of the drawbacks he had.
• Rasputinian Death: Holy shit. Let us count the ways!:
  • In the original game, he's shot multiple times by Leon, his hand gets shot at by Ada and Leon, Leon fights him while descending, Claire fights him while descending, Claire fights him while reaching the Umbrella train, and then gets shot by multiple rockets before getting caught in an explosion that finally kills him.
  • In the remake, Claire and Leon fight him while he's in a frenzy, they drop him into the abyss using a large metal crate, use every single firearm on him they have, and they stab him in the eye with a metal pipe before the self-destruct explosion kills him.
• Recurring Boss: Comes back in one One-Winged Angel form after another, forcing you to face him no fewer than five times.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In the remake, whenever his eyes turn red, it serves as an indicator of two things. One, it suffered a critical injury, and two, it's royally pissed off about it.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: When he was human, he was red To Wesker's blue, being a rather fidgety and very emotional man to Wesker's completely stoic nature
• Revenge Before Reason: In the remake, it seems that he knew full well what the G-Virus would turn him into and what it would drive him to do to his daughter. And he still used it on himself. He was that determined not to let Umbrella get their hands on it. This is best exemplified by what he shouts through his anguish after he injects himself and marches off after the U.S.S. team, likely his last rational thoughts before he mutates:
  William: G is MY creation!
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Upon his mutation, the names on top of his kill list were HUNK and his accomplices. They found themselves very badly outmatched upon their reunion and only HUNK survived Birkin's vengeful assault.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: The guy seems to be made of Hammerspace after his infection, to the point where he pulls a gigantic arm from his shoulder like it was nothing, and that's not getting into the fact that he manages to grow from G1, who is 7-8 feet tall, to G5, who is the size of a train car, and in the remake, also capable of spreading Meat Moss wherever he goes.
• Skull for a Head: Upon his second form, his new head really starts looking like this, especially for his third form. In particular, this trope is emphasized for G3's redesign in the remake, despite it otherwise looking identical to its original depiction.
• Slasher Smile: His third form always looks like he’s smiling which is pretty uncanny when paired with the red gums and his skull-like head, but in the remake, he goes even further when he and Leon/Claire prepare to fight him again, he manages to contort his already feral grin into an honest to God psychotic leer when he faces down Leon/Claire in the Laboratory. It says a lot about his current mental state by this point.
• Smug Snake: Files, especially pronounced in the remake, thought he could easily dupe Umbrella like his friend Wesker. He's proven spectacularly wrong.
• The Sociopath: Birkin is a notable subversion in that while he checks the boxes for a standard Umbrella sociopath, being completely indifferent to others' suffering and thinking highly of himself, his love for his wife and daughter are a core part of what makes an otherwise heinous villain sympathetic.
• Split-Personality Takeover: In the remake, Birkin taking the virus in his system has unbalanced him enough to give him a Split Personality, which will actually take over temporarily during the battle with his first form to taunt and threaten a bloody death on Leon/Claire, but by the time he goes to his second stage, the G-personality takes over permanently.
• Stealthy Colossus: In his G5 state, he’s a huge slimy mass of mutated flesh and bone that throws subtlety up and over the moon. And yet he manages to sneak on the train and hide himself to the point that up until he revealed himself and attacked Leon and Claire, they had absolutely no clue he was there. Neither did Mr X when the latter tried to kill Claire & Sherry and G1 got behind him and tore him in half.
• Super-Strength: Starts out strong and gets stronger with each transformation.
• Teen Genius: He was 16 when he was hired by Umbrella.
• Teens Are Monsters: Had no problems committing horrifically unethical experiments at 16. Though considering Umbrella's training methods for their science employees, it makes sense.
• Tragic Monster:
  • An unusual example - he was by no means a sympathetic character before his transformation, but try telling that to his distraught family, especially since you spend half the game hanging out with his woobie of a daughter who never learned to properly tie her shoes.
  • The remake gives him an Adaptational Angst Upgrade in this department: He willingly injects himself with the G-Virus, and emotionally breaks down when the U.S.S. arrives to apprehend him, only to be shot at in self-defense. And after injecting the G-Virus, he struggles to retain his sense of self and attempts to hold back impregnating his own daughter with the G-Embryo. The G-Virus catches on to what he's doing and gains control. Suffice to say, the player encountering him several times before finishing him off may be considered mercy killing.
• True Final Boss: G5 only appears in the B Scenarios/Second Runs and is the shared climax of both protagonists' stories.
• Unstoppable Rage: It’s fair to say this is his default state of mind when he goes G-monster, but his fourth form in the remake is utterly berserk, dropping all displays of subtlety and throwing a violent tantrum out of desperation and frustration. When he gets to G5, he is quite literally a physical representation of this trope; having devolved into nothing but an impossibly pissed-off Advancing Wall of Doom.
• Villainous Breakdown: Birkin absolutely snapped when the U.S.S. came for the G-Virus, and attacked HUNK and his men, setting off the events of RE2. His breakdown is especially noticeable in the 2019 remake, thanks to the Adaptational Angst Upgrade, and he seems on the verge of tears upon waking up after injecting himself.
  • The 2019 version of his email to Irons perfectly illustrates an escalating breakdown:
    Transcript 1: As thanks for your unwavering support, I have deposited a small sum into your account, to use as you see fit. I hope I can count on you to maintain surveillance over your subordinates, especially the ones who survived that mansion. Get rid of them if you must.
    No. 2: I ran into some trouble with Umbrella headquarters. The suits want to take the fruit of my research away. But don't worry, this will all blow over soon. You just keep doing what I tell you to and everything will be all right.
    No. 3: You are to up the security around my lab. Your muscleheads are to shoot any suspicious person on sight. Doesn't matter if they kill them, or even if they're Umbrella employees. I'm so close to completing G, and no asshole is going to get in my way.
    No. 4: Get your shit together and do your fucking job! I TOLD YOU I need more security in the sewers! Don't you know how critical of a time this is for me!? As for the money, I can pay you whatever once I take over, but not before. Why don't you get that!? Never forget how expendable you are.
  • As G, he's mostly a wild beast, but after his third phase is destroyed the beast starts to get even more inhuman and unhinged, becoming frenzied and outright desperate. In his fourth form, he starts hurling himself on top of the train elevator repeatedly during his fight with Claire in a panicked attempt to destroy it after it starts becoming clear to him that his prey stands a good chance of escaping his clutches. It gets even more obvious towards the end of the G4 fight, where he's rendered to crawling across the floor and still desperately trying to kill Claire. By the time he gets to his fifth form, he becomes so infuriated that he rips through the train Leon and Claire are boarding, adamantly refusing to let them escape and wanting only to kill them in the most violent of ways.
• Villainous Friendship: He and Wesker legitimately appear to have been friends. For what it's worth, the courtesy can be extended to their (thankfully not evil) children.
• Was Once a Man: William was perfectly human before he took the G-Virus into his system, but by the end of his life, there was nothing left besides occasionally screaming his daughter's name that would make you believe he was a human being once without knowing his backstory.
• White Shirt of Death: The last we see of him as a human, he is wearing a blood-soaked white lab coat from being gunned down by the U.S.S. soldiers. It carries over, badly ragged, to G1 but is discarded after.
• Why Won't You Die?: Noted with exasperation with each subsequent adaptation, especially by Claire. Considering G’s growing frustration and increasingly brutal attacks upon her and Leon, it’s fair to say that he feels the same sentiment about those two.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: The G-Virus has a profoundly negative impact on his already nebulous sanity.
• Wolverine Claws: Ridiculously large ones from either his nails or his bones in his third form.
• You Don't Look Like You: The 2019 remake has a very different interpretation of his fourth mutation. Instead of the twisted hexapod predator of the older games, this version is a degenerating, tumorous biped (which does occasionally run on all fours), visibly devolving towards its final form.
  • In comparison to his artwork, Birkin's flesh was colored almost completely black in RE2, as was his second form's head despite being bone (though, this was excusable for his fourth form, where it was depicted by the artwork to have said coloration). This applies as well for Darkside Chronicles, almost making his third form look somewhat natural.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In the remake, once "G" catches on to William's interfering one too many times, it reacts accordingly and promptly grows a new head in order to overcome his influence. It sticks.
• You Will Not Evade Me: In his fifth form, the clever thing sneaks himself onto the train and waits until it’s in motion before ambushing Leon and Claire. In Darkside Chronicles he takes it even further, as instead of trying to devour the two as in the original and remake, he just parks himself there, uses his tentacles to protect the connector between the train cars, and downright refuses to move even an inch while swatting at his opponents.

Nathaniel Bard

Nathaniel Bard

Voiced by: William Hope (2020), Jin Urayama (Japanese).

Appearances: 3, (and 2020 remake), Outbreak & File #2 (as Dr. Ethan)

The reluctant director and chief scientist of NEST-2, a facility adjacent to NEST that focuses on the research of B.O.W. development and combat data^note originally known as Dead Factory in the original Resident Evil 3. Outside of his duties there, Bard works at the Spencer Memorial Hospital. Feeling somewhat guilty about the Raccoon City outbreak, Nathaniel goes against Umbrella and works on a t-Virus vaccine within the confines of the increasingly doomed city.

It is important to note Nathaniel Bard as a character, along with most of his lore, was formally introduced in the 2020 remake of Resident Evil 3, canonically superseding the unnamed hospital director responsible for overseeing the creation of the t-Virus vaccine in the original game. The director was later fleshed out slightly as Dr. Ethan in Resident Evil: Outbreak, which established him as independent of but being bribed by Umbrella.

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• All for Nothing: Despite risking - and giving - his life to defy Umbrella and mass-produce the vaccine in order to save Raccoon City, all the stores of the stuff kept underground are destroyed along with the city by the government, meaning he may as well have not produced it at all. At best there's some residue left in the vial Nicholai shot, which can be used for future vaccine research, but even that's far too late for Raccoon City.
• Ascended Extra: Originally an unnamed, minor character that was later given a crumb of backstory in Outbreak, he is substantially fleshed out for a leading supporting role in the remake of 3.
• Asshole Victim: Nathaniel's corpse is found shortly after listening to a tape where he humiliates one of his subordinates, with Carlos being left appalled by his terrible personality and unable to show any pity towards his fate, being more concerned about finding the vaccine.
• The Atoner: In his video log, he explains that he wants to restore "some small shred of honor" to his name after having been an Insufferable Genius his entire career and having had a role in Umbrella's unethical experiments. To do so, he orders his subordinates to quickly mass manufacture large quantities of T-Virus vaccine, "enough for the surviving citizens," after the outbreak, in defiance of Umbrella's orders.
• Chair Reveal: When Carlos finds him dead in his private lab, he's sitting upright in a swivel chair. Carlos turns it around to reveal he's been shot.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: William Hope's own likeness has been tweaked into something of a cross between James Cromwell and the late James Rebhorn.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: He really isn't happy when he finds out that it's U.B.C.S. and not S.T.A.R.S. coming to get him, and insults Carlos and Tyrell over the video call. Turns out he was right to be unhappy that U.B.C.S. was coming for him, considering Nicholai kills him.
• Everyone Has Standards: While an abrasive and self-serving jerk, Bard has several moments to show a sense of principle and reason.
  • While viciously dressing down a nurse who looked at confidential documents, he pressures her to forget, or at least vehemently deny, having looked at his information, and then he leaves it at that. Considering how Umbrella typically punishes employees who fall out of favor, this makes Bard practically come across as a saint in comparison.
  • He was aghast when he heard that Umbrella wanted all evidence of their t-Virus projects in Raccoon City destroyed, even if that meant killing as many survivors as possible. As a result, he defies Umbrella's commands and successfully creates a vaccine for the t-Virus.
  • While recognizing the effectiveness of the Nemesis parasite, he regards it as too dangerous to be relied upon. He even cites how much more difficult parasites are to deal with and control.
• Foreshadowing: In a letter found at NEST 2, he complains to Umbrella Europe that using a parasite in the creation of a bioweapon (Nemesis) will set a dangerous precedent since he considers viruses to be much more controllable. Obviously, the Las Plagas parasites wouldn't be discovered until 2004.
• He Knows Too Much: According to Tyrell, he is privy to many of Umbrella's darkest secrets. Dr. Bard becomes a dangerous liability to Umbrella when he creates a vaccine for the t-Virus against the wishes of his superiors.
• Insufferable Genius: He is disliked by the hospital staff because he never tires of flaunting his superior intellect and achievements to them.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: More like a heart of bronze. He blatantly insults those working under him, flaunts his achievements/intellect in front of their faces, has numerous affairs behind his wife's back, implied to have committed sexual harassment, and a file implies that he created the vaccine just to improve his own public relations with an American senator. Even so, he does have the basic human decency to try and dissuade outsiders from getting involved with Umbrella’s darkest secrets, knowing that prying too much will only get them killed. He’s so horrified by the depravities Umbrella has committed over the years that he decides to cut ties with them as soon as possible.
• Nominal Hero: He is a massive asshole and complicit in Umbrella's B.O.W. research. While he does have some standards that lead him to develop a cure for the t-virus, it's implied a large part of it is restoring honor to himself for his evil deeds.
• Posthumous Character: He is dead when finally found in person, shot in the head. Jill is certain that Nicholai is responsible.
• Properly Paranoid: In his video log, Dr. Bard constantly looks over his shoulder in the fear of Umbrella loyalists overhearing him. Considering his final fate, that fear proved reasonable.
• Redemption Equals Death: Despite his many flaws, he is clearly sickened with the horrors he has seen Umbrella commit, and decides to directly defy his superiors to create a vaccine in an attempt to save the city. He gets shot by Nicholai, when he is hiding in the hospital.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist: His asshole tendencies aside, it's obvious he never really liked working for Umbrella and being involved in their B.O.W. projects.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: After the outbreak, he was told by the higher-ups at Umbrella to scrub the vaccine research and destroy all evidence of both it and the T-Virus. Instead, he ordered another scientist in NEST 2 to mass produce huge quantities of the vaccine to distribute to the population, despite probably knowing he'd be (and was) killed for it.
• Small Role, Big Impact: In the remake, he is the scientist responsible for creating the vaccine that saves Jill's life after she was infected with the t-Virus by the Nemesis. Jill would go on to be a thorn in Umbrella's side for years afterward and become a founding member of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance to fight global bioterrorism.
• Token Good Teammate: With a big emphasis on the "token" part. While he is no angel compared to someone like Linda Baldwin, having a tsunami of flaws, in comparison to every single high-level Umbrella researcher or executive, who are evil psychopaths and have no trouble throwing lives away to make a profit or just to test their new toys, the fact he is willing to express unease with their atrocities, and later does make a major attempt to save innocent lives clearly shows he had a human side.

Alex Wesker

Alex Wesker, The Overseer

^{Her first mutation}

^{Second mutation}

^{As Dark Natalia}

Voiced by: Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (credited as Lucy Todd), Rika Fukami (Japanese)

Appearances: Revelations 2, Resistance

Mentioned: Umbrella Chronicles (indirectly), 5, Heavenly Island

"Fear what you will become, and become what you fear..."

The former director of Sonido de Tortuga and ruler of Sein Island. A brilliant virologist and close subordinate of Lord Spencer himself, Alex Wesker is the only other known survivor of the eugenics program - Project W - besides her brother. Unlike Albert, she was privy to her origins, holding Spencer in deep contempt for, among other things, a terminal illness due to being incompatible with the program's mutagenic goals. As Umbrella collapsed following the Raccoon City incident, Alex stood by Spencer's side to fulfill his goal of gaining immortality. After making a breakthrough in her research, she betrayed Spencer by taking most of his remaining money and the fruits of her labor for herself.

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• Abusive Parents: Invoked. One of her ex-employees on Sein Island speculates she must have had this to be as fucked up as she is. While we don't know what her actual parents were like, considering her life was mostly brought up by Spencer...
• Ascended Extra: Originally mentioned in files from Resident Evil 5 DLC Lost in Nightmares and hinted at for years through backdrops of Project W lore, she finally debuted in Revelations 2 as the main villain.
• Ax-Crazy: She draws notable parallels to Marcus in her torture methods and complete disregard for any life but her own. And while she is normally a very collected and devious mastermind, after being revived by the T-Phobos virus, she becomes an absolutely unhinged abomination and shrieking madwoman with nothing on her mind aside from killing Natalia. Alex has also gone so insane that she starts believing the girl to be a copy of her.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Her main goal was to achieve immortality by imprinting her mind into a new body. Regardless of the ending, even though it's not quite as she predicted, she does succeed.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Her iron-fisted rule of Sein Island was characterized by her oppressive surveillance of everyone and everything, which was even deliberately invoked to potentially inspire fear for her t-Phobos program. Fitting considering her title as the Overseer.
• Body Backup Drive: This is her plan to achieve immortality: to transfer her consciousness into a new body. She chooses to do so on Natalia and actually succeeds, in both endings - fully shown in the bad one but still heavily implied in the canonical good ending.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Her note, "Parting Words to My Dear Father"
  Alex: You poor, decrepit old man. You wanted to create a new world, and rule over that world as a god. But for all your ambitions, you couldn't overcome man's most formidable enemies— age and disease. You had everything, but your crumbling body betrayed you. And then your own "son" snuffed out whatever pitiful entrails of life you had left, leaving you to become nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history. You failed, old man. But fear not. Your dream will live on. I will take the wealth of knowledge, power, and test subjects you have given me, and succeed where you failed. I will create the new world, and I will rule over it as a god. Your legacy will have been long forgotten, but mine has only just begun. May your soul - if you ever had one - rot in torment for all of eternity, and let hell be filled with the sound of your teeth gnashing incessantly.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: Set up as this in Resident Evil 5, having disappeared off the face of the Earth with all of the research she'd been doing for Spencer. Now we know what she was up to.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Like her brother, Alex has a treacherous streak, betraying a lot of people she has worked with such as Spencer and Neil.
• Clone Angst: She imprinted her mind into Natalia, and planned to commit suicide in her original body, allowing her consciousness to awake in Natalia and live on as a form of Legacy Immortality. Unfortunately for her, it was a Bungled Suicide thanks to the T-Phobos virus reviving her, and in the next six months, she completely lost her grip on sanity as she became obsessed with killing her "copy".
• Color-Coded Characters: White, in contrast to Albert's black.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Her appearance is significantly different in Resistance, now looking like Scarlett Johansson.
• Dark Action Girl: Downplayed. Unlike Wesker, she didn't get any superpowers out of the same viral strain that gave her his; instead, she contracted a terminal illness, meaning she has absolutely no fighting capability in her human state. Regardless, after her self-inflicted mutation, she puts up a ferocious fight.
• Dark Messiah: She was viewed as a "goddess" by the natives of Sein Island for her contributions to the mining colony. By the time they knew better, it was too late.
• Disability Superpower: Alex receives the same Prototype virus that Albert received from Birkin prior to his death in 1998. Though she survived the procedure, she did not develop any superpowers like"brother" because of an incurable illness she contracted prior to receiving the virus.
• Elegant Classical Musician: She's very skilled with the piano.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Her only redeeming trait is the genuine love and admiration she has for her late brother, Albert. As her dialogue indicates, it's to the point of worship. She even commissioned a painting of him in her mansion.
• Evil Is Hammy: She often makes grandiose speeches citing Franz Kafka, but it's really taken up to eleven after her mutation, where she absolutely chews the scenery while raving on about wanting to transcend humanity. She takes after her brother.
• Evil Is Petty: She found and tore apart Lottie, Natalia's prized stuffed bear, out of spite.
• Evil Twin: After her failed takeover of Natalia's mind, she manifests as a sultry alter-ego of her in a black dress within her mental landscape. As seen in Natalia's DLC story, she is trying to take over her mind where she originally failed; though she fails at the end of said DLC, she swears she will succeed. It's left ambiguous if she's fully successful by the end of Revelations 2.
• Evilutionary Biologist: One of the worst in the series, being single-handedly responsible for the torture and murder of thousands, including the decimation of an entire island's population.
• Fan Disservice: You can see her boobs when she mutates herself with Uroboros. It doesn't help to detract from the horrific sight.
• Faux Affably Evil: Her sophisticated and charming demeanor - which she used to trick the residents of Sein Island - only barely conceals the sociopathic monster beneath the surface.
• Grand Theft Me: A variant of this trope: She intended to live on in Natalia's younger body as part of her plans for immortality. The variation comes in that Alex Wesker always intended to commit suicide in order to kill off her original body, which would in turn cause her consciousness to awake inside Natalia as the new Alex Wesker. As outright shown in the Bad Ending and heavily implied in the Good Ending, she ends up succeeding.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Of BIOHAZARD heavenly island. Years prior to Spencer's death, Alex set up a facility at Sonido de Tortuga Island to engineer a virus to prolong Spencer.'s life She abandoned the experiment but the virus and B.O.W. she left there eventually causes a lot of death including attracting the attention of Umbrella's rivals.
• Guide Dang It!: She's unlockable in Raid Mode, but requires beating the campaign and the Omega Raid stage in Raid Mode (which is at default set to very hard).
• I Don't Want to Die: When she is about to shoot herself, she experiences extreme fear for her own life, causing her T-Phobos to mutate shortly before she killed herself anyway.
• Immortality Seeker: Spencer gave her as many resources as she required to conduct her experiments to gain immortality. After she abandoned him, she continued working on it. Files in-game, and her own dialogue towards Natalia, suggest she's obsessed with gaining it.
• Incurable Cough of Death: She's occasionally seen coughing, a sign of her failing health.
• Interface Screw: In the first phase of her fight, she will occasionally launch smoke bomb projectiles that obscure the player's vision.
• Kick the Dog: Security on Sein Island was deliberately lowered so unfortunate tourists could incidentally come by and join Alex's experiments...
• Last of His Kind: Following the death of Albert, she is the last of the Wesker children, up until her death.
• Laughing Mad: Post-mutation, she's prone to maniacal cackling.
• Lemony Narrator: Serves as a narrator for Raid Mode, "encouraging" the player with odd quotes like "Run, my little hairball! Spin those wheels!".
• Light Is Not Good: Her clothing is bright white and she is one of the evilest villains in the series.
• Like Brother and Sister: She seemed to actually love her "brother", Albert Wesker, like a true sibling. Barry Burton took an immediate dislike to Alex once he learned about her connection to his treacherous former comrade in S.T.A.R.S., leading him to actually call Alex "She-Wesker".
• Man-Eating Plant: In Resistance, her unique B.O.W. is a giant, man-eating plant called the Yateveo.
• The Mole: While she was Spencer's favorite among the Wesker children and appeared loyal to him, she actually had been collaborating with her "brother", Albert Wesker, since he had abandoned Umbrella, and would eventually abandon Spencer after getting him to bankroll her immortality research.
• Obviously Evil: Some natives from Sein Island think she's evil from the moment she arrives. They are damn right.
• Oh, Crap!: When Alex manages to corner Natalia and start strangling her, she temporarily awakens the second Alex inside the girl. The first Alex quickly realizes her mistake and takes off screaming.
• Older Than They Look: Normally, she is a case of Younger Than They Look since she looks like she's only in her late twenties or early thirties when she's actually in her fifties, but after her T-Phobos mutation, she resembles an old witch, with a part of her face looking old and shriveled and her body stuck in a hunchbacked position.
• Parental Favoritism: Spencer's favorite of all the Wesker children.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Her swindling and betrayal of Spencer.
• Samus Is a Girl: Since her gender was left ambiguous in Resident Evil 5, many fans thought she was a male.
• Satanic Archetype: After she revealed her true colors to the natives of Sein Island, she went from being seen as a prosperous messiah to being literally called the Devil. Even Neil calls her that.
• Smug Snake: For all of her posturing, her work was a miserable failure and of questionable veracity to begin with. All she managed to do was get thousands of people killed and get killed herself.
• The Sociopath: Alex is unbelievably cruel, narcissistic, and has a complete disregard for all human life. However, she does genuinely love Albert, making her a subversion.
• Sophisticated as Hell: While normally acting sophisticated and waxing poetry, she irregularly calls Natalia, a child, a "bitch."
• Sore Loser: Gabe is able to fix an abandoned helicopter and prepares to evacuate the survivors out of the island they're trapped in. Alex considers such an act to be "cheating" and decides to tamper with the controls and automatically advance Gabe's virus from the bracelet via remote. This causes Gabe to lose control and inadvertently crash the helicopter, killing him and rendering their evacuation plan all for naught. Also, let's just say she didn't take it very well when she mutated and Natalia was still alive.
• Spanner in the Works: Her plan was going along perfectly until something happened that she did not anticipate: she experienced a moment of pure fear right before she shot herself, which caused the T-Phobos virus in her body to revive her and turn her into a horrific monstrosity.
• The Starscream: Like her "brother" she would eventually betray Spencer after he funded her and provided test subjects in order to get a means of obtaining immortality for himself.
• Torture Technician: Alex heavily takes after Marcus in her torture techniques: Sein Island is filled with medieval torture devices like the Iron Maiden, Brazen Bull, and spiked deathtraps among others. Many files in Revelations 2 also extensively document her heinous torture of the poor islanders.
• Unskilled, but Strong: She doesn't exhibit much creativity in her mutated forms other than using her freakish strength to hit hard.
• Villainous Breakdown: She lost it big time after she revived from her failed suicide and realized that there was a second version of herself still in existence.
• Villain with Good Publicity: She invested a fortune into upgrading and modernizing Sein Island's mining economy, which gained her a good number of admirers from the island's native populace. Only a handful of individuals, like Evgeny, were wary of her.
• Wicked Cultured: Given her frequent quotations of Franz Kafka. She is also a talented classical pianist as evidenced by her hauntingly beautiful rendition of Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.
• Wicked Witch: While her power comes from science rather than magic, her characterization seems heavily rooted in classic witch iconography, between her hag-like appearance post-mutation (especially when she's wearing her cloak) and her obsession over kidnapping a little girl and her little bear, too.
• Woman Of Wealth And Taste: Her living quarters and the mansion under the mines are very exquisite and distinguished from the drab and colorless looks of Sein Island.
• Would Hurt a Child: Besides her plans for Natalia, some of the most disturbing notes on the island are from children that endured her torture.
  Prisoner: Dear Momma, I dunno if you'll ever get to read this. But I need you... They call us experiments. They torture us every day. Every. Day. What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening? It hurts so bad. Every day I'm scared of what will happen next. Momma please, please help...
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: She says as much when deciding to kill everyone on Sein Island. Also, said verbatim when she injects Neil with Uroboros instead of fulfilling their end of the bargain.

Alfred Ashford

Alfred Ashford, 7th Earl Ashford

Voiced by: Peter Oldring (2000) and Richard Cansino (2009)

Appearances: Code: Veronica, Darkside Chronicles

Mentioned: 2

"The Ashford family is among the world's first and finest. My grandfather is one of the original founders of Umbrella Inc."

A British nobleman and governor of Umbrella's Antarctic facility and Rockfort Island, an island that serves as a training ground for Umbrella's paramilitary units and brutal prison for traitors and enemies. He is the son of Veronica Ashford, 1st Countess Ashford, born through genetic engineering along with his sister, Alexia. Almost completely insane as a result of many tragic circumstances, Alfred is shunned from Umbrella's major politics - but kept useful as director of Rockfort, where his terrifying and unpredictable nature keeps its unfortunate prisoners and workers on edge.

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• 0% Approval Rating: As the latest successor to a formerly extremely influential family, Alfred was given a great degree of authority within Umbrella even if he was kept out of its major politics. And every last file from those working under him all over complained about what a tyrannical and inept boss he was.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite being such a monster, his death in both the original and Darkside Chronicles is painted as pitiable, if not downright tragic.
  • In the original, he dies in Alexia's arms mortally wounded, dying peacefully as he's finally relieved of the loneliness and madness that defined his life. She comforts him until he passes and swears vengeance on his killers.
  • In Darkside Chronicles, he's killed by Alexia instead for not waking her from stasis on time. It's portrayed as tragic how Alfred's sliver of hope in living was dedicated to a monster that never loved him, symbolized by the shattering of the winter globe he clutched onto upon his death. Even Claire is disgusted by her account of what she did to him, despite the trouble he gave her up to then.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The Ashford family is, in Alfred's own words, "one of the world's first and finest". He's a sadistic lunatic who keeps an illegal prison complex where people are unjustly imprisoned by Umbrella, where he tortures and executes his prisoners on a whim. If that's not enough, he also conducts illegal bio-weapon experiments, often testing his products on humans.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: When he's crossdressing as Alexia. This is more evident in The Darkside Chronicles. While Code: Veronica uses Alexia's character model, the former game uses a unique model◊.
• Ax-Crazy: Alfred is a violent, schizophrenic madman with a sadistic streak. Files around the prison note that he fully understood the sadistic impulses of the prison doctor and even encouraged them, going so far as to drop by and watch as he tortured people to death. Then there are his interactions with Claire and Steve, which consist of him randomly ambushing them with a sniper rifle and luring them into death traps. Alfred clearly likes blood, and both the novelization and Darkside Chronicles emphasize just how insane he is.
• Bad Boss: Files scattered around Rockfort Island reveal how much his subordinates hated and feared Alfred for his cruel and unpredictable nature.
• Blue Blood: The Ashford family's origins begin with the English noblewoman Veronica Ashford (title "1st Countess Ashford" in some sources), meaning her descendant Alfred, following the line of his male ancestors, is the 7th Earl Ashford.
• Cain and Abel: Subverted in the original game. The game initially plants the seeds that Alexia was not as devoted to Alfred as he was to her, as she describes her brother in rather condescending terms in her personal notes. The lyrics of the twins' signature lullaby "Berceuse" is about a king who loves and marries his queen, while being too naive to notice that his queen is hiding a secret and then it's implied the queen assassinates him without him ever knowing the truth. This sets up the expected reveal that Alexia plans to kill Alfred once he's of no use, but the opposite plays out. Alexia in fact only ever trusted Alfred with her secrets, relying on him to protect her while she partially froze herself for 15 years. She didn't foresee Alfred would eventually mentally deteriorate from loneliness over that time and forget the plan on his own. Then when she finally does wake up, Alfred did not die from her hand at all but was dying because of the various confrontations with Claire and Steve. And even though she called Alfred easily 'replaceable' in her own notes, her actions say otherwise. She immediately reacts to his death by sending giant tentacles to assault Claire and Steve's snowmobile, all the while cradling and stroking her brother's dead body and humming their lullaby. When the player controls Chris Redfield for the latter half of the game, they come across a security camera focused on the cryofreezer room, where it's shown that Alexia had gotten dressed and went back to Alfred's body, now cradling him even closer to her, lightly patting him and singing to him as if he was just sleeping. The shows despite how haughty or condescending she was to Alfred in her notes, when faced with the reality that he is gone, she finds it difficult to let him go too. Played absolutely straight in Darkside Chronicles, where she is Cain to Alfred's Abel when she murders him for the pettiest reason.
• Camp Straight: Alfred's flamboyant manner and laugh, as well as him crossdressing and mimicking his sister's voice very successfully all paint him as quite Camp. However, he is decidedly very much into his sister, with Word of God confirming that Alfred and Alexia have shared a kiss at least once, and the official novelization makes it explicitly clear that Alfred is sexually attracted to Alexia.
• The Caligula: Alfred is almost even described as such in how he neglectfully and tyrannically managed his domains.
• Clone Angst: Zigzagged; it's implied that he was also disturbed when he found out that he was an accidental by-product of Alexander's attempts at cloning Veronica, but it's never made clear just how much this actually bothered him.
• Cold Sniper: Sort of; he is still childish and insane, rather than the stoic personality a Cold Sniper usually has. However, he is definitely not a Friendly Sniper, as he enjoys trying to shoot Claire and doesn't really like her.
• Creepy Crossdresser: He crossdresses as Alexia to fill the loneliness in his heart, talking to himself in private as if she were there. When Claire and Steve stumble across this, he suffers a massive Freak Out upon being pulled back into reality.
• Creepy Twins: He was brought up as a genetic experiment with his twin sister Alexia. Both are creepy in their own ways, him much more obviously so.
• The Dandy: Alfred is always dressed to the nines in an outfit that, at a glance, resembles a social club or military uniform. The novelization takes pain to emphasize how overblown it is, describing it as being more of a "child's vision" of such a uniform than an actual uniform.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to his narmtastic hammy depiction original game, his insanity is portrayed very realistically and disturbing in Darkside Chronicles. Next to none of it can be described as funny in its depiction there.
• Disc-One Final Boss: He's initially presented as the final boss of Code: Veronica. However, when he dies, Alexia wakes up and reveals that she's the real end boss.
• The Dragon: He is the man that enforces Alexia's will, and his life is dedicated to that role.
• Enfante Terrible: He was a relatively normal, happy child until he discovered his origins. After that, he flew off the deep end and assisted in his sister's insane eugenic conspiracy, starting with experimenting on his father Alexander.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He truly loves his sister. To a disturbing degree.
• Evil Brit: He speaks with an upper-crust English accent, and is a ruthless, murderous, deranged sadist.
• Evil Is Hammy: In grand Resident Evil condition, he's a bad guy who loves to make melodramatic speeches and grand gestures. In his case, though, they're used to highlight how out of touch he is with reality.
• Exhausted Eyebags: He sports these in Darkside Chronicles. From how bad it looks, it's very evident he's under an insane amount of stress.
• Freudian Excuse: He was brought up as a neglected afterthought in a heinous genetic experiment of an evil eugenics conspiracy. Not only does he discover his origins and how little everyone around him thinks of him, but his beloved sister also leaves his life for her own ends. For over the next decade, Alfred has to deal with the weight of being the only remaining successor to a royal family and manage his obligations toward Umbrella. It's really no surprise why he's so fucked up, and he's probably one of the most sympathetic examples of madness in the series.
• Giggling Villain: Alfred constantly emits high-pitched, girlish giggles of glee when he feels he has the upper hand. Severely downplayed if not totally subverted in Darkside Chronicles.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Let's just say that spending fifteen years as the only one left in the family didn't go so well for him.
• Half-Identical Twins: He is the spitting image of his female fraternal twin, which is justified in a handwave about him having been an accidental side-product of the cloning-based pregnancy that created Alexia.
• The Heavy: He drives most of Claire and Steve's misfortunes throughout Code: Veronica. His sister, by comparison, only makes up a fraction of the last segments of the game.
• Informed Attribute: Alfred is supposed to have above-average intelligence - not a genius like his sister, Alexia, but still smarter than the typical person. This does not come across during interactions with him, which instead portray him as more of a crazy lunatic. Even Alexia describes him as a "loyal but not very bright soldier ant".
• Insane Equals Violent: Alfred is one of the most overtly "crazy" characters in Resident Evil, and is also a bloodthirsty sadist obsessed with war.
• Large Ham: His first appearance involves him ranting about being the illustrious commander of the Umbrella base where Claire is trapped (which she, rightfully, points out is an unimportant little backwater) and bragging about how the Ashfords are one of the world's "first and finest families", as well as founding members of Umbrella Inc. He doesn't get any less hammy from there.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: That Alfred is a cloning experiment was a late-game revelation in the original Code Veronica.
• Miles Gloriosus: Invoked; Alfred is obsessed with war, with his trademark "uniform" and his vast, sprawling collection of war memorabilia, war media, weapons, and other war-related "toys", but is himself cowardly and completely inept in combat. He's so useless that he can't hit the broad side of a barn with an expensive laser-pointer-equipped sniper rifle.
• Misplaced Retribution: Tries to kill Claire due to falsely believing that she was responsible for the destruction of his base.
• Morality Pet: Rather, a humanity pet to Alexia. Hell, the reason she blows up Claire and Steve's snowmobile and has the latter turn Tragic Monster is to avenge his death. Subverted in a very evil way in Darkside Chronicles, which fully pushes her into being a character with absolutely no redeeming qualities.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Alfred has an impressively girlish laugh when he's amused.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The Darkside Chronicles puts his crimes and insanity in a much darker light. But, even before then, he was never as harmless as the player thought, with files emphasizing that he's a sadistic monster who enjoys killing and torturing those under his power.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He surrounds himself with memorabilia of an idealized childhood, including myriad creepy (and often mutilated) dolls, has a private playroom he uses as a personal retreat - complete with carousel - has an Ominous Music Box Tune as a leitmotif, behaves in a childish manner by throwing tantrums and making vainglorious remarks, and in general comes off as a crazy child despite being in his late 20s to early 30s. In the novelization, it's even called out that his clothing looks more like a child's vision of the kind of uniform he's trying to emulate than an actual uniform. The Darkside Chronicles ramps this up a notch or three, most notably in the horrifying and hideously childlike graffiti he's spread throughout his training facility.
• Sadist: If it wasn't already made apparent, Alfred loves the suffering of others. He even encourages his employees to be as brutal as possible to Rockfort's prisoners.
• Sanity Slippage: If he had any, to begin with; his sanity starts to seriously decline badly over time when his sister put herself in a cryogenic sleeping state for 15 years to the point he dresses up and pretends to be her very often so he will not feel alone or abandoned. The attack on Rockfort Island which caused a t-Virus leak was the last straw, causing him to lose what little semblance of sanity he had left — the novelization even declares that this made him start hunting the survivors down in the wake of the attack, which is why Claire and Steve are the only ones alive on the island other than Alfred.
  • Emphasized in The Darkside Chronicles: the game invents the fictitious character of Tanya as a way to preserve The Reveal of Alexia as being hidden away in cryostasis, with the explanation that Alfred made Tanya up as a way to subconsciously hide Alexia's true fate even from himself.
• Self-Made Orphan: After discovering his origins, he helped Alexia kidnap and turn Alexandar into Nosferatu. While he's not dead, he's obviously out of his life after being chained up under the Antarctic base.
• Siblings in Crime: He and his sister did everything together, including their illegal and inhumane human experiments.
• Sissy Villain: He's a giggling, effeminate, cowardly, androgynous bad guy that also cross-dresses as his sister.
• Sniper Rifle: His preferred firearm, though he's a really, really bad shot.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Zigzagged in The Darkside Chronicles. It's seemingly played straight when he survives his encounter with Claire and Steve at the Antarctica base, albeit heavily injured, instead of taking the mortal wounds he did in Code: Veronica. Then subverted when it's revealed he was murdered by his sister Alexia after releasing her from stasis.
• Split Personality: He is schizophrenic, after all. Ever since Alexia left, he took to dressing in her clothes and talking to himself as her in the mirror.
• Undying Loyalty: To Alexia, whose personal notes reveal his absolute dedication. Even Alexia herself takes note of it.
• The Unfavorite: For being born without his sister's ungodly intellectual capacity, he was viewed as a sketchy successor to the Ashford family after her supposed death. It extends to his place in Umbrella; while he's given control of two bases among other privileges, his work is deliberately detached from what's really important in the company.
• Twincest: It's never outright stated or shown in-game that she and her brother had a sexual or romantic relationship, however Shinji Mikami himself confirms that the twins kissed offscreen just as their infamous dragonfly torture FMV cutscene cuts off, confirming their relationship was more intimate than a typical sibling one. In the novels, Alfred's actual lust for his sister is more than implied.
  • Alexia referred to Alfred in her personal notes as both a 'soldier ant' and a 'loyal drone'. The former refers to how Alfred typically supports and protects her or acts upon her will; while the latter's reference to drones is interesting because drones are the only male ants in an ant colony, whose only purpose is to breed with the ant queen.

John Clemens

John Clemens

Appearances: Resident Evil (remake, as a zombie}

Mentioned: Resident Evil (and remake), 2, Umbrella Chronicles, Darkside Chronicles, Wesker's Report II

After William Birkin moved over to NEST, John Clemens was the director of the Arklay Laboratory of the Spencer Estate until 1998. Despite his brilliance, he was disgusted by Umbrella's B.O.W. research but resigned himself to his lot in life. John notably had a romantic relationship with corporate spy Ada Wong, who uses his name as a cover story for being in Raccoon City.

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• Adapted Out: He isn't mentioned at all in the 2019 remake of 2. There, Ada only lies to Leon she is an FBI investigator.
• Ambiguously Evil: How bad he was is a mystery. He's head of R&D at Arklay, which suggests on some level he is definitely amoral. However, Umbrella was concerned over his "troubling" personality, implied to be standards.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: He is a zombie in the same room his final letter to Ada is found. Bonus for his name being John.
• Driven to Suicide: Subverted. He thought of it but couldn't bring himself to do it.

Vincent Goldman

Vincent Goldman

Voiced by: Michael Naishtut

Appearances: Survivor

"No one can oppose me now!"

The commander of Sheena Island, an island off the coast of Europe that houses at least one native village and a number of Umbrella facilities. A truly evil man even by the standards of Umbrella, Goldman is heavily involved in the production of Tyrants, masterminding the heinous development of the Hypnos-T Type as well as mass-producing T-103s for Umbrella's benefit.

When Ark Thompson, a spy sent by Leon S. Kennedy, infiltrated Sheena Island to uncover his activities, Goldman assumed he was a corporate spy from Umbrella to expose his corruption after one too many complaints over his actions. Enraged, Goldman unleashed Sheena Island's B.O.W.s on the populace, hoping to kill everyone and escape with a cover story to keep his job.

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• 0% Approval Rating: All his employees and co-workers hate him and want nothing more than for him to be ousted from his position.
• Ambition Is Evil: He is absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of personal power, having secretly murdered a number of coworkers competing with him for high-end job positions within Umbrella. Vincent has also used the t-Virus to murder almost everyone on an island in order to preserve his reputation within Umbrella.
• Arch-Enemy: The first and foremost sworn arch-enemy of Ark.
• Bad Boss: He is a tyrant that rules through intimidation, ignoring any complaints or concerns his workers may have over ethics. After learning that the Sheena Island locals were planning to report his mismanagement to Umbrella HQ and that a spy impersonating him was on the island, Vincent used the t-Virus to infect everyone on the island while making the outbreak look like an accident. He planned to return to Umbrella HQ and reap the rewards as the sole survivor of Sheena Island.
• Big Bad: He is behind everything in Survivor.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Inverted. His mother pleads with him to leave Umbrella and come back home.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Another inversion. Notes around Sheena Island express how much his employees were freaked out by him and remorseful of what he forced them to participate in. It reached a point his workers formulated a plot to expose his corruption, something Goldman was paranoid of.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's fairly well-mannered despite being absolutely ruthless as a human being.
• Hate Sink: Goldman, even by the lofty standards set by Umbrella, is twisted on a whole other level; he is a murderous Corrupt Corporate Executive that specifically targets children and tortures them in the most heinous ways imaginable. Unlike many villains in the same company and league of depravity as him, there is nothing cool or funny to offset his heinous actions; actions that are treated with absolute seriousness in-universe.
• Karmic Death: In the "enter hospital" route, he is impaled and killed by one of the many Tyrants he has created.
• Lack of Empathy: Considering that he would murder others without a second thought, it should be quite obvious he could easily advise the scientists working under him to not consider the teenagers as human beings when they conduct hormone extraction.
• Not Quite Dead: He's supposedly dead at the beginning of the game where near the end of the game, it was revealed that Ark is trying to stop him from escaping, but if you enter the hospital after the first encounter against Licker. Otherwise, he's really dead, and even if he survived, the island-wide explosion makes it sure that he never will.
• The Sociopath: He distinctively has no humanity, a fact that drives the narrative of Survivor as the residents of Sheena Island rise up against his cruelty.
• Would Hurt a Child: He has arranged the vivisection of countless teenagers in order to extract the β Hetero Nonserotonin hormones from their brains for use in the development of the Hypnos-T Type. After an attempted prison break, Vincent personally executed all of the teenagers who failed to escape.

Morpheus D. Duvall

Morpheus D. Duvall

^{Tyrant form}

^{Second form}

Voiced by: Angus Waycott

Appearances: Dead Aim

"Establishing a kingdom where beauty has absolute authority is the dream which I must make a reality!"

A former senior executive of Umbrella. Duvall was known to have held a number of high positions within the company in the mid-1990s: a leading role in R&D Division and directing the Atlantic facility Bio-Sphere and its adjacent waste disposal facility. Despised for their gross negligence in work safety for their self-serving interests in beauty treatment, Umbrella desired to fire Duvall but found it difficult due to his influence in the company. After the Arklay incident, however, Umbrella scapegoated Morpheus for the outbreak and terminated their contract.

After being fired, Duvall devised a eugenics project of their own, hoping to exterminate most of the human race and establish a kingdom in Africa where only the "beautiful" live in worship of them. To achieve the finances necessary for this, Duvall turned to bioterrorism—attacking Umbrella facilities and cruise liners for viral agents to aid in their insane plan.

Through their actions, they ironically became a chief culprit behind Umbrella's demise despite them wanting nothing more than to be rid of them. By hijacking the Spencer Rain, Duvall incidentally killed what was left of Umbrella's potential black market buyers, rendering them unable to pay off their legal bills.

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• Advancing Boss of Doom: Their final form has no real attacks other than plodding along toward Bruce. If Morpheus is able to close in on him, Bruce is crushed to death.
• Agent Peacock: Their mannerisms after his Emergency Transformation might be a little more than effeminate, but they're able to throw down just as well as a Tyrant.
• Ambiguous Gender: Duvall was biologically male at the start and is addressed with male pronouns, but the very feminine form they take after injecting themselves with the t+G-Virus and their general obsession with beauty suggest that Duvall doesn't strictly conform to being male at the very least.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: Sort of. After transforming with the t+G-Virus, their gender seemingly inverts and gives a broad appearance of a fairly attractive woman. However, it's in the details where their new appearance falls under Fan Disservice, such as rib bones and the spine being visible on the body.
• Ax-Crazy: They were planning on a viral catastrophe in both the United States and China out of spite, murder an entire cruise liner of people, and want to end the world to rebuild it in their own image of "beauty." By the time they're fully fighting Bruce and Ling, they're all but hunting them down to explicitly murder them like an elegant stalker, and it's pretty clear that once their plans started falling apart they went super unhinged.
• Badass Longcoat: Though their most impressive feats come after he ditches it.
• Bad Boss: They do not give a shit about the safety of their employees; this actually led to them getting fired from Umbrella. Their gang doesn't fare any better, being incidentally killed by Morpheus' acts of bioterror.
• Barrier Warrior: Their bio-electric abilities generate a force field of sorts which deflects bullets, rendering them unable to harm him. Only a weapon capable of shorting out the bio-electricity can injure him.
• Body Horror: Their final form is basically a mass of green flesh with a face turned upside down.
• Born Lucky: They're the one in a million perfectly compatible with the t-Virus. Thus, upon taking the t+G Virus, an experimental cocktail of both that and the G-Virus, they transform into a perfect Tyrant.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: Their second form as a blob is frankly embarrassing as a final boss, having pitiful speed and only one means of attack. Compared to the all-out Lightning Bruiser they were not long before, they go down very easily.
• Cutscene Incompetence: In the fights against Bruce, they show themself to be an out-and-out Lightning Bruiser, but when they chase Bruce and Fong Ling at the end of their first fight, they run only as fast as they’re going.
• Emergency Transformation: At the beginning of the story, they were mortally wounded by a grenade thrown by Fong Ling. Later, Morpheus injected themself with the stolen t+G-Virus sample in an effort to heal up and gain revenge on Bruce and Fong Ling.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Morpheus was on the R&D staff of Umbrella, though their position there hasn't been disclosed. They were also going on and on about using mad science to cull humanity long before Spencer's delusions of godhood were revealed.
• Fat Bastard: In their final form, they're basically a gigantic, bloated sack of flesh that can only move by dragging himself along on their arms.
• Full-Frontal Assault: They run around completely nude after injecting themself with the t+G-Virus, though the female Tyrant form is subject to Barbie Doll Anatomy, so there aren't any details visible.
• Hellbent For Leather: Their most noticeable article of clothing is a black leather coat.
• Identical Stranger: Morpheus has a close physical resemblance to the Leech Queen from Resident Evil 0. This, along with Morpheus’s already negative reputation in Umbrella may have contributed to his role as The Scapegoat.
• I Lied: They have no intention of honoring their deal even if paid the ransom money. When China caves, they immediately motion for the ballistic missiles.
• In Their Own Image: Their ultimate goal was to create a world based on their own ideals of beauty and elegance. In order to do this, Morpheus wanted to destroy the world as it is now, which they saw as cold, ugly, and unworthy of saving.
• It Can Think: One of the more terrifying things about Duvall is the fact that, unlike William Birkin, they're very much in control of his thought processes after mutating.
• Karmic Transformation: A batshit insane narcissist that views themself as the most beautiful specimen to grace the world - turns into and dies as a disgustingly hideous Humanoid Abomination.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Long hair? Check. Pretty? Check. A guy? Um...kind of.
• Made of Iron: Takes a grenade explosion near point-blank head-on, and gets back up minutes later to make sure Bruce and Ling die for it. Though in this case, they're Dented Iron, as the wounds were still fatal enough that they had to take their own t+G-Virus sample and become a Tyrant to hope to survive.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: After being fired, Morpheus was determined to gain revenge on the Umbrella. With the help of a gang of loyal followers, they stole several t-Virus samples and a t+G-Virus sample from Umbrella's Paris laboratory and constructed an underground missile silo beneath an abandoned Umbrella facility. After these preparations, Morpheus caused a t-Virus outbreak aboard an Umbrella-owned cruise liner and publicly declared that they had missiles equipped with the t-Virus aimed at both China and the U.S.A., threatening to launch them unless a ransom of five million US dollars from each country is paid.
• Narcissist: They consider themself to be the pinnacle of beauty and have undergone plastic surgery to maintain their youthful appearance. The feminine form they end up with after injecting themselves with the t+G-Virus is implied to be a result of their obsession with beauty.
• Oh, Crap!: Ling drops a live grenade down by Bruce and Morpheus. Bruce sees it and runs for a distance despite the gun at his head. Morpheus sees Bruce seeing it, wonders if he's being duped, then sees the grenade himself — and just turns right back to Bruce looking like they just shit their pants in terror at what's about to happen.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Their goals of forming a beautiful kingdom of beautiful people start with the near-extinction of humanity.
• One-Winged Angel: They undergo this twice in the story, first mutating into the female Tyrant form that they stay in for most of the time. Toward the end, they undergo a second transformation that is much less pretty on the eyes, going from an easy on the eyes Monster Girl to an obese, crawling, flipped on its back monstrosity with a seemingly skinless human face.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The sheer spite Morpheus had for Umbrella led to them stealing their research and promptly wiping out one of their cruise liners. A ship that was basically filled with executives and big spenders. One petty man that would've gone under their radar wiped out the top brass of the company in the midst of the lawsuits that Umbrella was facing from every corner, making Morpheus a strong case of Irony in probably being one of the major deathblows to Umbrella once and for all.
• Sanity Slippage: An Umbrella spy in his gang informed his superiors of his concern about Morpheus' declining sanity, stating he excessively buys beauty treatments to relieve stress and goes on and on about culling humanity of the "ugly."
• The Scapegoat: Umbrella used him as a scapegoat for the 1998 Mansion Incident and fired him on the grounds of "gross negligence," a believable cover story given his track record of such.
• She-Fu: After their transformation, Morpheus does a lot of graceful cartwheeling and kicking when battling the heroes.
• Shock and Awe: Somehow, as a result of the cocktail of the t- and G-viruses he injected himself with.^note This is explained by supplemental material. The t-Virus generates electrical energy by destroying cells - enough energy to reanimate corpses into zombies and to make certain organ systems redundant; however, it also uses the host's own cells as "fuel" for the reanimation, leading to rot. The G-Virus both improves this ability to the point that the host can produce electricity by destroying its own cells; and provides the Healing Factor necessary to counteract the cellular damage.
• Small Role, Big Impact: When you look at the game series as a whole, anyway. Though they only appear in a seemingly minor and unimportant spinoff game, their killing or transforming of the high rollers who were set to bid on Umbrella's bioweapons is heavily implied to have ended up depriving the company of funds it desperately needed, leading to its dissolution. For want of a war chest, the business was lost...
• Statuesque Stunner: After their transformation, they become both taller and more feminine.
• White Hair, Black Heart: They have long white flowing hair, something that visually carries over to the Tyrant form. And needless to say, Morpheus is about as insane and evil as it comes.

Researchers

Albert Wesker

See his page

Alexia Ashford

Lady Alexia Ashford

^{Click to see her first mutation}

^{Second mutation}

^{Third mutation}

Voiced by: Leila Johnson, Karen Strassman (Darkside Chronicles)

Appearances: Code: Veronica, Darkside Chronicles

Mentioned: Resident Evil (remake), 5, Umbrella Corps, Wesker's Report II

A noblewoman of the Ashford family, formerly Umbrella's top researcher. The adopted daughter of Alexander Ashford, her real parentage was the result of a cloning experiment referred to as Project CODE: Veronica and was biologically the daughter of Veronica Ashford, 1st Countess Ashford. This was to make up for the fact Alexander was deemed grossly incompetent and ill-fit to lead the Ashford family; feeling ashamed at dishonoring the Ashford name, this was his gesture at atonement.

Unlike her brother Alfred, Alexia was born a hyper-intelligent prodigy, quickly rising up to become Umbrella's star scientist and eclipsing William Birkin. After discovering her origins thanks to Alfred, Alexia went off the deep end with a god complex. Forming an insane eugenics conspiracy of her own, she faked her death and went into a 15-year stasis to mature her variant of the t-Virus, t-Veronica, with her body and start her plans for world domination there.

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• Adaptational Intelligence: Downplayed. The Darkside Chronicles allows her to better maintain her faculties in even her breeder pod and dragonfly forms. The original game made her silent, and the comic made her feral.
• Adaptational Villainy: In The Darkside Chronicles, she lacks the sympathetic qualities she had in Code: Veronica, with her genuine care for her brother Alfred replaced with Alexia killing him herself.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: She genuinely holds a noble title, but she's a sadistic monster to whom the lives of other people mean nothing.
• Ax-Crazy: Despite outwardly keeping a lid on it, she is just as much of a violent maniac as her dear brother and only gets worse as t-Veronica’s mutations take their toll on her body and already-tenuous sanity.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Her final forms look like an ant queen and then a dragonfly, respectively.
• Bloody Murder: Her blood bursts into flames when she throws it at people.
• Blue Blood: As the daughter of an Earl, she would technically be referred to as Lady Alexia.
• Cain and Abel: Subverted in the original game. The game initially plants the seeds that Alexia was not as devoted to Alfred as he was to her, as she describes her brother in rather condescending terms in her personal notes. The lyrics of the twins' signature lullaby "Berceuse" is about a king who loves and marries his queen, while being too naive to notice that his queen is hiding a secret and then it's implied the queen assassinates him without him ever knowing the truth. This sets up the expected reveal that Alexia plans to kill Alfred once he's of no use, but the opposite plays out. Alexia in fact only ever trusted Alfred with her secrets, relying on him to protect her while she partially froze herself for 15 years. She didn't foresee Alfred would eventually mentally deteriorate from loneliness over that time and forget the plan on his own. Then when she finally does wake up, Alfred did not die from her hand at all but was dying because of the various confrontations with Claire and Steve. And even though she called Alfred easily 'replaceable' in her own notes, her actions say otherwise. She immediately reacts to his death by sending giant tentacles to assault Claire and Steve's snowmobile, all the while cradling and stroking her brother's dead body and humming their lullaby. When the player controls Chris Redfield for the latter half of the game, they come across a security camera focused on the cryofreezer room, where it's shown that Alexia had gotten dressed and went back to Alfred's body, now cradling him even closer to her, lightly patting him and singing to him as if he was just sleeping. The shows despite how haughty or condescending she was to Alfred in her notes, when faced with the reality that he is gone, she finds it difficult to let him go too. Played absolutely straight in Darkside Chronicles, where she is Cain to Alfred's Abel when she murders him for the pettiest reason.
• Child Prodigy: Owing to the genetic experiment that conceived her, she was brought up as a hyper-intelligent prodigy, quickly rising to become Umbrella's number one scientist despite not even being eighteen at the time.
• Clone Angst: She was created by taking the DNA from the corpse of her ancestor, Veronica Ashford, and using it to fertilize the egg of an unnamed surrogate mother, in hopes of creating a near-clone that would inherit Veronica's brilliance. She did not take it well when she learned this.
• Combat Tentacles: She has the ability to manipulate a t-Veronica-infected plant, which produces enormous vines that she uses as living weapons.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She hands Wesker his ass on a platter when they square off. The updated version of Code: Veronica, which gave him a Curb Stomp Cushion by letting him throw in a punch, which wasn't actually any better, as said punch didn't even phase her.
• Cute Monster Girl: In her first form, she is still very attractive, so much so she cameo'd in an official crossover calendar of Capcom girls.
• Dark Action Girl: As soon as she transforms into a mutated version of herself she easily establishes herself as a force to be reckoned with, throwing down with and curb-stomping Albert Wesker and coming damned close to taking down Chris and Claire with her.
• Enfante Terrible: As a result of her horrible upbringing, she was brought up as a cold-blooded sociopath with a god complex. It reached its peak when she drugged and experimented on Alexander, turning him into the monster Nosferatu.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Her deep trust and love for her brother, as twisted as it is, is the only spark of humanity she still possesses after going mad from the revelation.
• Evil Brit: Like her brother, she has a pronounced English accent and she's a sadistic, tyrannical monster who wants to take over the world.
• Evil Genius: And how. She graduated from university when she was ten and immediately joined the family business as a creator of viral weapons and B.O.Ws. She ultimately graduated to creating a virus expressly designed to aid her in taking over the world.
• Evil Is Hammy: She may be smarter than Alfred, but she's no less fond of melodrama.
• Evilutionary Biologist: She focuses her Mad Science expertise on biology, creating the t-Veronica virus by merging t-Virus with a reconstituted virus discovered inside an ant queen's fossil. She even infects herself with her creation to evolve herself into a superior being.
• Eye Awaken: There's a nice nod to RE2 when Alexia picks herself back up after Chris defeats her the first time, just like Mr. X.
• Faking the Dead: She had rumors spread that she'd been killed in order to keep her rivals and enemies misguided whilst she was in cryogenic stasis. Only Alfred was privy to the knowledge that she was still alive.
• Final Boss: Interestingly, from a gameplay perspective, of Code: Veronica. Wesker is the final boss from a narrative standpoint, however, as his showdown with Chris is the last on-screen fight.
• Freudian Excuse: Less pronounced than her brother, but still present. It's stated the isolation from her peers and indoctrination into Umbrella's ideals drove Alexia into a depression. She grew a resentment for the "ignorant masses" she perceived as not understanding her, which included her father Alexander. It's pretty easy to see from here, and without much genuine love in her life, why she became a near full-blown sociopath.
• Full-Frontal Assault: In her first One-Winged Angel form, she is completely naked◊, although due to her mutations, nothing explicit is shown.
• Giggling Villain: She certainly uses less breath on speaking than she does on childish laughing.
• A God Am I: She views herself as a queenly goddess and humanity as ants beneath her.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: How much sanity she actually had, to begin with, is questionable, but she at least had some integrity when she was growing up. However, after learning about the nature of her birth, let's just say that she really went off the deep end.
• Gone Horribly Right: Her "father" Alexander used Veronica's DNA in the hope that a clone-daughter of Veronica would have the genius needed to challenge William Birkin and restore the Ashfords to prominence in Umbrella's upper echelon. To stack the deck, he tweaked the genome of his unborn daughter in hopes of boosting her intelligence even more. Alexander's efforts paid off, but the intelligence-tweaking also made Alexia into a sociopath and when she learned that she was a clone, she sought revenge by conducting hideous experiments on him.
• Karmic Death: In Darkside Chronicles, Alexander was the one who built the Linear Launcher after learning about Alexia's obsession with the T-Veronica virus and her desire to use it to Take Over the World. Having given Alexander a Fate Worse than Death years ago, Alexia's life and dreams were fittingly ended in turn by her father, through Chris and Claire.
• Large Ham: She is just as flamboyant and fond of flashy statements and spectacles as her brother.
• Mad Scientist: She created the T-Veronica virus, turned her own father into Nosferatu and then infected herself with it to become a super-human.
• Mook Maker: During her second One-Winged Angel form, she births small poisonous insectoid enemies to attack Chris.
• One-Winged Angel: Three times. First, her skin sloughs off and turns her into a naked version of herself with partial vine/exoskeleton armor, then she fuses with one of the infected plants to become a grotesque ant queen-like monster and finally, she becomes some sort of twisted dragonfly monster.
• The Only One I Trust: She says this of Alfred before going into stasis, entrusting her safety only to him.
• Playing with Fire: When Alexia mutates into her first form, she throws her blood around as a projectile and when it comes into contact with the air, it bursts into flames.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Much like her brother, Alfred. With her, it's especially justified in that she never matured mentally without any loving guidance and went into cryostasis for fifteen years, emerging as a woman around her 30s with the same mindset of a sociopathic teenager.
• Self-Made Orphan: She used her father as a guinea pig for her experiments with the t-Veronica virus, which mutated him into Nosferatu.
• Shout-Out: Alexia's multiple forms borrow heavily from Parasite Eve, particularly her opera theme music and pyrotechnic abilities. Her metallic hide is also similar to Witchblade.
• Sibling Murder: She kills Alfred in Darkside Chronicles after he releases her from cryostasis.
• Siblings in Crime: She relies on Alfred to assist her in everything she does, referring to him as her "loyal drone" in a manner that's both affectionate and condescending. Downplayed in Darkside Chronicles.
• Silent Antagonist: She speaks a few lines when she finally appears before Chris, Claire and Wesker, but once she mutates, she goes mostly quiet, only making grunts when getting shot at and being knocked out (and only in her first form).
• The Slow Walk: To showcase her arrogance, she never moves past this pace when brawling with Chris and Wesker in her first form.
• The Sociopath: Almost fits this, as she loves Alfred. Anyone else, she doesn't give a damn about. She even experimented on her father. Played absolutely straight in Darkside Chronicles, though.
• Statuesque Stunner: She is 5'9 tall, being one of the tallest Resident Evil female characters thus far, and she originally held the record of the tallest female character for a long time ever since her debut, until the presence of Excella Gionne (tied with her) and Alex Wesker (who exceeded both of them) with Alcina Dimitrescu eclipsing them both at the height of 9’6, being the tallest sentient human in the franchise as of this edit. In addition, Alexia is also noted to be very beautiful.
• Stronger Sibling: To Alfred, especially in terms of intelligence.
• Take Over the World: Her ultimate goal in life. Alexia intended to use the T-Veronica virus to convert everyone in the world into mindlessly loyal drones, with herself as the queen ant.
• Tangled Family Tree: Officially, she is the daughter of Alexander Ashford. In reality, she's a pseudo-clone of Alexander's great-great-grandmother, Veronica Ashford, created by harvesting DNA from Veronica's corpse and using it to inseminate the egg of an unknown surrogate mother. This means she's technically Alexander's great-grandaunt.
• Transformation Exhilaration: Contrary to most Resident Evil villains - who usually have a Painful Transformation before they get their Power High - Alexia is giggling with glee as she shifts into her One-Winged Angel form for her boss fight in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. This is Downplayed in the original event during Resident Evil – Code: Veronica where she laughs before transforming and simply looks smug during the transformation itself.
• Twincest: It's never outright stated or shown in-game that she and her brother had a sexual or romantic relationship, however Shinji Mikami himself confirms that the twins kissed offscreen just as their infamous dragonfly torture FMV cutscene cuts off, confirming their relationship was more intimate than a typical sibling one.
  • Alexia referred to Alfred in her personal notes as both a 'soldier ant' and a 'loyal drone'. The former refers to how Alfred typically supports and protects her or acts upon her will; while the latter's reference to drones is interesting because drones are the only male ants in an ant colony, whose only purpose is to breed with the ant queen.
• Villainous Legacy: Despite her death, her life's work, the T-Veronica virus, made its way into the global bio-weapons black market as a result of Wesker extracting it from Steve's corpse. The drug lord Javier Hidalgo used this virus to save his daughter's life and the scientist Carla Radames used this virus as a component for the C-Virus.
• Villainous Rescue: In the comic adaptation of Code: Veronica, which is a little different from the game. Claire finds out about Alexia's existence after she captured her and Steve after wrecking their snowmobile. (As opposed to when Chris cuts her free from the cocoon as in the game, due to thinking Alexia was just a split personality of Alfred.) When Steve, who had just been injected by Alexia with the T-Veronica virus, breaks Claire out of the chains she's shackled to and disappears, she immediately goes looking for him and encounters a hunter. Claire has no weapons at this point and prepares herself for the end. Then Alexia shows up and kills the hunter, before immediately knocking Claire unconscious again and telling her that dying that way would be too quick and painless, before trapping her in the cocoon and saying she has something else in mind for her.
• Vocal Dissonance: In Darkside Chronicles she keeps her normal voice even after her second mutation.

Alexander Ashford

Alexander Ashford, 6th Earl Ashford; Nosferatu

^{Click to see Nosferatu}

Voiced by: JB Blanc (Darkside Chronicles)

Appearances: Code: Veronica (only as Nosferatu), Darkside Chronicles

The son of Edward Ashford and father of Alexia and Alfred. Deemed an incompetent scientist and successor to his prestigious family, he created his children in a cloning experiment to atone by making an able successor. He succeeded with Alexia - but was used as a guinea pig for the t-Veronica virus when she discovered her origins, turning him into the monster Nosferatu.

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• Ambition Is Evil: Subverted: He is partly responsible (even that is debatable) for the events of Code: Veronica, but he didn't have any malicious intent: he just wanted to create a proper successor to the family name after he felt like he shamed it.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Nosferatu's exposed, beating heart is an obvious weak spot, and the player is specifically given a sniper rifle to use against him so they can focus fire on it. It's the key to beating him quickly and without getting poisoned.
• Crazy-Prepared: Darkside Chronicles reveals that he was the one who had the Linear Launcher created to stop Alexia after he realized how far she was planning to go with the T-Veronica virus, and he left a posthumous recording begging whoever was watching to "help" her.
• Gone Horribly Right: He was able to clone the Matriarch of the family, Veronica, into two new children: Alexia and Alfred and through a chain of events he couldn't change (such as where the children lived and screwed up their social growth), led to the creation of the Veronica virus with himself as a test subject.
• In a Single Bound: In the Darkside Chronicles encounter, at least, he can use his three tentacles to leap about the battlefield and make diving attacks on the player.
• Mad Scientist: He created Alexia and Alfred from a piece of Veronica Ashford. However, he was not as smart as his father or his children, which is actually why he created the twins in the first place.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: As Nosferatu, he uses elongated insectile limbs to attack the player, due to his normal arms being chained behind his back.
• Poisonous Person: Spews noxious purple mist that delivers a virulent venom into its victims. There's actually a side-quest that triggers where Chris has to find a unique antidote for Claire if she was exposed to the poison during the battle, which is very hard not to trigger.
• Psycho Prototype: He was the first person infected by the T-Veronica virus, both so Alexia could have revenge on her father, and to see what would happen if a human was infected by the T-Veronica virus.
• Tragic Monster: After his children found out how he created them, Alexia used him as a guinea pig for her t-Veronica virus turning him into the monster Nosferatu, then left him chained up in a cell to rot.

Annette Birkin

Dr. Annette Birkin

^{Click to see her original appearance}

Voiced by: Jennifer Dale, Deborah Sale Butler (Darkside Chronicles), Karen Strassman (2019 remake, Resistance); Marika Hayashi (JP, 2019 remake)

Appearances: 2, (and 2019 remake), Darkside Chronicles, Resistance

Mentioned: Wesker's Report II

A prominent Umbrella scientist, married to William Birkin and mother of Sherry Birkin. While highly complicit in her husband's evil research, she seeks to stop him after he mutates into a monster that threatens the world outside the doomed Raccoon City.

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• Adaptational Heroism: Combined with Adaptational Personality Change. Annette is originally depicted as a mentally unstable woman with an unhealthy obsession to safeguard her husband and his legacy out of blind loyalty to him and never turns against him despite how much of a monster he's become. Darkside Chronicles drops her mental instability in favor of making her more sympathetic through her resolve to put a stop to William and the G-virus even if it costs her her life. The same goes for the 2019 remake which portrays Annette as rational, level-headed, and determined to put an end to the nightmare she helped create by doing everything she can to ensure that William and all traces of the virus never make it out of Raccoon City. Though this is balanced by her also being a researcher involved with the Raccoon City orphanage, making her complicit in the horrible and lethal experiments Umbrella committed on children.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The original version of Annette was notorious for being borderline insane and prone to making illogical, spur-of-the-moment decisions that more often than not ended very badly for her. Darkside Chronicles and especially the 2019 remake have drastically altered her character by reimagining her as a rational and strategic thinker, avoiding the pitfalls that made her 1998 self so pathetically incompetent.
• Adaptational Ugliness: Annette looks much more withered in the remake compared to her absurdly youthful and fresh-faced depictions in the original and Darkside Chronicles. Possibly justified due to the insane stress of the situation she's in, as Resistance and promotional material have her looking better.
• Adaptational Villainy: As a Mastermind in Resistance, Annette's redeeming traits are tossed out the window in favor of an amoral scientist who has no qualms with getting results, even if it means siccing her G-infected husband on innocents.
• All for Nothing: Her efforts to prevent the G-virus from being stolen are for nothing, as samples are retrieved by HUNK for Umbrella, Ada for Wesker's Organization, and the U.S. government (in the form of Sherry) for Simmons and The Family.
• Anti-Villain: Morally reprehensible in her and William's unethical research, to the point that Umbrella considered the G-Virus more worthwhile than their lives, and a personal obstacle to Leon in the original game. The remake even ups her villainy by making her one of the researchers responsible for the orphanage, thus responsible for the numerous deaths and tragedies there. She still ultimately (though mostly retroactively) ends up being one of the few B.O.W. researchers in the franchise with something of a moral code in trying to prevent all hell from escaping Raccoon City.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: In the big cutscene in the middle of the game, Ada Wong crosses the way of Annette Birkin. Annette disarms her with one clear shot to tell her about William Birkin's fate.
• Cat Fight: In Resident Evil 2, she and Ada get into a struggle as Ada wrestled Annette for the gun (Annette had held her at gunpoint), and slapped her enough for her to fall over the railing into the water below. Darkside Chronicles escalated this to both women engaging in a gunfight, and this time Annette's on the winning end. In the 2019 Remake, she takes the more pragmatic route and uses a waste disposal machine to ram Ada Wong into the sewers, rather than confront Ada head on.
• Decoy Antagonist: Ada makes it out that Annette is the Big Bad and behind everything, unaware that it was her husband William who caused the events of the game and Annette merely following behind the events that he set in motion.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For as many problems as the Birkins (unwittingly) created, Annette's portrayals past the original game turned her into a more sympathetic character that would willingly sacrifice her life so the G-Virus doesn't end the world. And even in the original, once she finds out the G-Virus infected her own daughter Sherry, Annette drops all pretenses of being some Mad Scientist and shifts all of her priorities to save her; the remake downplays this by making her extremely hesitant to let Sherry die but deciding that the greater good of the world was a better option than risking everything for her daughter.
• Failed a Spot Check: Believes sending Sherry to the police station was the correct decision as it should be the safest refuge in the outbreak. She didn't anticipate Chief Irons, whom she's had correspondence with, to go from depraved, to bat-shit-insane, allowing the headquarters to completely fall to the outbreak.
  • While not necessarily canon in any way, the SD Perry novelization paints this mindset in a slightly different light. Instead of simply just assuming Sherry will be safer at the station, Annette reasons that even though Irons is relatively incompetent from her point of view, the officers under his command were more likely to be better at handling the situation and keep her safe. However, just like the above point, Annette never quite counted on Irons going bat-shit insane and not only actively screwing with his officers by hiding keys and vital ammunition caches in completely random and nonsensical locations, but he began gunning them down one by one, only further ensuring the precinct's fate of falling to the chaos. Basically, no matter how she looked at it, Irons was going to be a wrench in the proverbial gears that would tear down the city's last stronghold.
• Good Parents: Despite the amount of focus she placed on her work, it was evident that her daughter was her first priority as she gives Claire all of the needed information to create an antidote for her.
• Happily Married: By all accounts, in the original. In the remake, Annette confesses late into the game that she and Birkin were more married to their work than each other.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Zig-zagged. In the original game, she takes several shots at Ada (who was standing perfectly still to boot) and misses her every time. The final shot would have hit her had Leon not dove in front of her. When Ada chases her down moments later, Annette manages to shoot Ada's gun out of her hands from several feet away.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: In Darkside Chronicles where she shoots away Ada's gun from a distance above before she even came into sight.
• Karmic Death: Though she might have done some bit of good in her final moments when she administered the cure to Sherry, Annette still caused untold suffering to many people, including hundreds of orphaned children. So the fact that she died at the claws of a man mutated by the very virus she helped to create is only fitting.
• Kill It with Fire: In the remake, she traps Ada in a waste disposal machine and attempts to incinerate her.
• Lack of Empathy: In the remake. Her For Science! tendencies make her very immoral, frequently not seeing the forest for the trees. She willingly took part in using orphans for research on the G-Virus, and immediately writes off her own daughter as a lost cause after William infects her. Her justification is that he stands to infect millions more if he's not stopped, but still, that's just cold. She even chastises Sherry for leaving the house, even though the entire city is overrun and she's in danger no matter where she is. However, her conscience does finally kick in eventually, and she helps Claire cure Sherry before dying.
• Last Breath Bullet: In the original game during the Leon A scenario, the self-destruct system rocks the foundation and causes several large pipes from the ceiling to collapse on top of her, which mortally injures her. Moments later when Ada confronts Leon for the virus sample, Annette shoots Ada before collapsing, and in the Claire B scenario, she tells her grieving daughter to forgive her for her erratic behavior and confesses her love before expiring. In the remake during Leon's scenario, it seemed like Annette died due to her injuries following the G-3 William fight, only to shoot Ada in the shoulder minutes later and then die... or at least pass out momentarily for the Claire B scenario. Fortunately, this results in Leon's G-Virus sample being lost (as far as we know) after he tries to save Ada from falling. Unfortunately, Ada was already turning down from shooting Leon and this forces her to undergo a Disney Death that leaves Leon devastated.
• Made of Iron: It takes a lot to bring Annette down. In the remake, William throws her hard enough into a wall to dent it, causing internal injuries that eventually kill her, but in both scenarios, Annette refuses to stay down until she's accomplished her objectives.
• Married to the Job: In Claire's scenario in the remake, when she says she should have killed him sooner, Claire says that monster or not, William was still her husband. This prompts Annette to admit that they were more married to their work than each other.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Like her husband, Annette is a brilliant scientist who helped create a devastating bioweapon. That said, she still has some moral clarity, as she's horrified William actually used the G-virus and tries to prevent him from getting to the outside world.
• Motherly Side Plait: She wears her hair this way in the Remake, and suitably loves her daughter in spite of her overall failures as a parent. As a bonus, she suffers the typical fate of characters with this hairstyle, leaving Sherry orphaned.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In the remake, she's there to find William right after he injected himself with a spare sample of the G-Virus, and see his mutations start compared to the original storyline having her run off to get him medical aid. When she has the opportunity to kill him right then and there.. she can't do it thanks to her love for William, turning her into an Unwitting Instigator of Doom and knowing all too well that It's All My Fault, as William breaks containment causes him to kill the U.S.S. squad and the virus samples spread throughout the city like wildfire. Her attempts to be The Atoner, unfortunately, throw her into tension with both Leon and Claire.
• Never My Fault: Downplayed in the remake. In Leon's scenario, Annette is confronted by Leon over the viral outbreak and the mutation of William Birkin. Annette doesn't deny that she's responsible for the mess since she could have easily killed her husband after he injected himself with the G-Virus, but she keeps insisting that she didn't mean for the whole mess to happen in the first place. Leon doesn't buy Annette's attempt to downplay the severity of the events.
• Not Now, Kiddo: An adult version of the trope in the remake. During her first encounter with Claire, Annette seemingly ignores her as she mumbles and talks to herself regarding the evolution of the G-Virus and its effect on her now mutated husband, William. It's only after Claire keeps prodding her that she finally introduces herself, but she then refuses to answer her anymore by saying she "doesn't have time to play twenty questions" and that Claire should mind her own business in regards to Sherry.
• Oh, Crap!: When she realizes the T-Virus has managed to contaminate the Raccoon City water supply, she's frantically making phone calls to Sherry's school, ordering her daughter to leave immediately for home, retrieve the G-Virus hidden in her pendant, then seek refuge in the Police Station. She refuses to go into details about why. It's not a case of Poor Communication Kills, in an hour or so, tens of thousands of people will become sick, and increasingly violent, before mutating into zombies.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In the remake, if you play Claire's campaign first, her behavior in Leon's campaign will seem rather odd initially. She is aggressively protective of the G sample and attempts to kill Ada repeatedly to stop her from getting it, despite Ada being a government agent out to stop it from spreading, which is Annette's ultimate goal. Only it turns out Ada is a mercenary planning to sell the G sample off to the highest bidder, which Annette knew all along, though Leon and the player did not.
• Properly Paranoid: She's right about Ada, at least.
• Pet the Dog: In the remake, after initially writing a G-virus-infected Sherry off as a casualty, she finally comes around and helps Claire cure Sherry and apologizes for her callous behavior before expiring from her wounds inflicted by William.
• Redemption Equals Death: She bites it during either scenario and in all of the games she's been in, though in most cases she's either able to give Claire the information she needs to create a G-virus antidote for Sherry or administer the anti-virus herself. The remake expands upon the reasoning and circumstances behind her demise:
  • In both scenarios in the remake, it's to atone for her (and William's) part in the outbreak, starting with her former husband.
  • In Claire's story for the remake, she personally cures Sherry with the "Devil" vaccine and gives Claire the last ID chip they need to escape before expiring from her William-inflicted wounds.
  • In Leon's scenario, Annette shows up just in time to shoot Ada to prevent her from acquiring the G-virus sample, before succumbing to her wounds.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Darkside Chronicles.
• Underestimating Badassery: Inverted on the underestimation part; in Darkside Chronicles Annette was fully aware of how capable Ada was, how ruthless she was when it comes to retrieving the G-virus, and warned Leon and Claire about her. Of course, Leon didn't believe her.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Her focus on her work with her husband meant leaving Sherry alone a lot.

Frederic Downing

Frederic Downing

Voiced by: Crispin Freeman

Appearances: Degeneration

WilPharma's head researcher and the developer of a vaccine for the T-virus. Downing's also a former Umbrella researcher who's out to make a profit for himself, which he does by becoming a black market broker and an instigator of bioterrorism.

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• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Offers continually increasing amounts of money to Leon and Claire in exchange for his life before outright pleading to be spared.
• Batman Gambit: Counting on Curtis Miller's desire to prevent further biohazardous outbreaks similar to that of Raccoon City, Frederic gave the G-virus to him and set up a time bomb to explode in the WilPharma facility, resulting in the incident there.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Subverted when it is revealed he developed the T-vaccine. It becomes a Double Subversion once it becomes clear he planned to sell both the T-virus and the vaccine together. To do this, he secretly helped to cause the Harvardville Airport outbreak, bombed the Air Dome Laboratory, and manipulated Curtis into using the G-virus—intending to use the ensuing incidents as sales presentations for those viruses.
• Dirty Coward: Once Angela has him at her mercy, he attempts to buy off the heroes, offending them even further, and then begs piteously for his life.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's polite, courteous, and understanding to people—so long as they don't know he's willing to manipulate and murder others in order to line his own pockets.
• Friend in the Black Market: Having stolen T and G virus samples right before the Raccoon City disaster, Frederic found a number of potential buyers for the viruses—but he wanted to sell them as sets with their respective vaccines in order to maximize the black market value of said viruses.
• Greed: His calling in life's trying to enrich himself without getting caught.
• Manipulative Bastard: He used Curtis Miller's desperate desire to reveal the truth about the Raccoon City disaster to his advantage. Aside from letting him in on that truth, Frederic assured Curtis that he wouldn't make Harvardville meet the same fate as Raccoon City before providing him with the G-virus to use on himself. As such, the latter became a scapegoat who masked the real purpose of the Harvardville attacks—a sales pitch designed to sell the t-virus and G-virus to a military dictatorship's leader. Had General Grandé's middleman not been arrested in Los Angeles, there would been no evidence exposing Frederic's involvement since Leon wouldn't have mentioned his deception to Claire—who may have not noticed he cut the cord of a phone outside the Air Dome Laboratory.
• Silver Fox: He has light gray hair, but he is rather dignified and handsome… not that it stops him from being a greedy schemer, though.

Yoko Suzuki

Yoko Suzuki

Voiced by: Laura Thorne, Lia Sargent (File #2)

Appearances: Outbreak & File #2

A former Umbrella researcher at NEST. While much of her life and activities there are left to interpretation, what is known is Yoko was traumatized by her experiences and was used as a lab rat after being deemed a liability, wiping her memories out in the process. Her best ending sees her regain her memories and escape Raccoon City with Linda to testify against Umbrella. For more on her from a gameplay perspective, see Outbreak's page.

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Linda Baldwin

Linda Baldwin

Appearances: Outbreak & File #2

A renegade scientist working for Umbrella, Linda is making plans to escape the city when the survivors encounter her. She holds the key to curing the t-Virus if she can be successfully brought out of town.

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• Earn Your Happy Ending: Players must tend to her aid when evacuating her to Rodriguez's chopper. Failing to do so would require players to go to the overpass and fight Nyx. Upon defeating Nyx, the players must use a metallic sign board for her to cross to the overpass. From there, the players can assist her to a military truck which both use to escape.
  • Invoked when saving her would imply she is able to recreate the cure for the t-Virus as she could remember its components and procedure for synthesis. In Yoko's good epilogue, she is seen accompanying Yoko when they testify against Umbrella in Supreme Court.
• Carrying the Antidote: While she does not carry the cure as it was destroyed by Mr. X, she apparently has the memory how to recreate it. Saving her would imply she recreates the cure after Raccoon City.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: If you do not create the makeshift bridge needed for her to cross the overpass, she will be left for dead once Raccoon City is destroyed. A non-canon bad ending scene then plays where it is implied the t-Virus spread around the world as the headlines of a newspaper says "Worldwide Bloodshed".
• Heel–Face Turn: In Yoko's good ending, she testifies against Umbrella in Supreme Court.
• Let the Past Burn: Once the players escape Raccoon City, she throws her Umbrella ID Card off the cliff to symbolize her cutting ties with the organization.
  Linda: What's done is done. We can't get it back. However, we may be able to start again from the beginning. That's the one gift we humans have, we can rebuild.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In the last part of "End of the Road," if you rescue Linda but don't give her a hand, she slowly limps after you. It is possible to use her to detonate landmines.
• White Sheep: Linda remains the only example in the entire series of an Umbrella researcher or scientist who isn't at least a clinical sociopath. She's genuinely helpful at all times, the obstacles she puts in your way are not her direct doing, and her survival is a net positive for both your characters and the world.

Carter

Carter

Appearances: Outbreak & File #2

An eccentric ally of Linda's. Like her, he seeks to make it out of Raccoon City with a t-Virus vaccine. He's most remembered for taking remote control of a Tyrant, Tyrant R, and being killed by it.

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• Early-Bird Cameo: His model is recycled in "Below Freezing Point" as a survivor found in Birkin's lab.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: You can't really accuse Carter of being stupid, or even malevolent; using the Tyrant to punch a way out of the labs is actually a halfway decent idea and it works up to a point. The problem is that he just won't shut up about his admiration for the Tyrant's raw power, right up until it crushes his skull.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Tyrant R that goes out of control causes all sorts of trouble for the Outbreak cast, and later, Ada Wong.
• Read the Freaking Manual: Downplayed example. While he was smart enough to keep the Tyrant's detonator in hand at all times he apparently didn't realize you had to hold the button down to use it...

Monica

Monica

Voiced by: Shannon McLean

Appearances: Outbreak & File #2

An ambitious and ruthless NEST researcher. In the wake of the attack on William Birkin, Monica murdered several of her former co-workers at Birkin's laboratory and tried to escape with some of his discoveries. It didn't go well for her.

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• Asshole Victim: Killing her own fellow co-workers after acquiring the G-Larva, she then gets attacked by the mutated William and impregnated. Like any other Umbrella employee, nobody seems to be bothered after she suffers a very gruesome death.
• Dark Action Girl: Was this close to escaping Birkin's laboratory, and lasted a good while in the outbreak while murdering her former co-workers along the way before her demise.
• Karmic Death: She ends up getting killed by the very project which she's murdered several people to get.
• The Rival: To Yoko, evident by her resentful account of her during their hostile reunion.

Greg Mueller

Greg Mueller

Appearances: Outbreak & File #2

An Umbrella researcher quite a league up from the other renegade scientists in Resident Evil: Outbreak. Greg Mueller is heavily involved in Umbrella's B.O.W. work, having created the Thanatos Tyrant. Not wanting the corporation to mass-produce it, he began a plan to betray them, first by commissioning a Raccoon University researcher, Peter Jenkins, to create a vaccine before killing him. Desiring to have leverage over the vaccine, he unleashes Thanatos upon the U.B.C.S. and various survivors trying to make it out with samples of the vaccine themselves.

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• Asshole Victim: He's one of the certain people on Nicholai's hitlist that definitely deserved death.
• Boom, Headshot!: How he dies, courtesy of Nicholai.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: A cruel man wearing glasses.
• Mad Scientist: For a split second, he sounds reasonable, when talking about how much of a disaster the t-Virus project was. Then he starts rambling about how bioweapons must be "beautiful, unique, and godlike".
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Specifically didn't want his Thanatos to be mass-produced, like the T-103 variants.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: He's a major thorn in Umbrella's side, but he's evil, and everything he's going against them for is terrible.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He shoots Peter Jenkins in the back of the head when he produces the vaccine.

Dr. Cameron

Cameron

(right) possessing Roger

^{Click to see her actual form}

Voiced by: Yurika Hino

The main antagonist of Biohazard 4D-Executer, a Japan-exclusive CG film released in 2000. Cameron was an Umbrella researcher working on a t-Virus strain, accidentally infecting herself in the process. Her inappropriate attempts at curing herself mutated her into a horrific monster capable of infecting other living organisms and manifesting her personality in them, granting her an effective form of immortality. However, she does not enjoy this and desires nothing more than to return to being human. Umbrella is interested in what became of her and sends a U.B.C.S. squad to investigate.

It is interesting noting unlike Resident Evil: Gaiden and Operation Raccoon City, Biohazard 4D-Executer, largely owing to not violating canon in any capacity, has never been denounced from canon much like the novel BIO HAZARD The Wicked North Sea, meaning that Cameron is semi-canonical to the prime continuity despite never appearing since her debut.

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• The Bad Guy Wins: She kills the entire U.B.C.S. squad sent for her and escapes Raccoon City under Roger's form.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: She manifests her mind primarily through swarms of cockroaches.
• Body Horror: Her actual form is just a hair off most Eldritch Abominations. Furthermore, whenever she possesses another organism, it's not a pretty sight at all as she twists and contorts their bodies apart.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Despite her immortal state, she desires nothing more than to go back being human.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Not so much the U.B.C.S. operatives sent to rescue her, who were left in the dark over the job, but the Monitor - Roger - that she kills.
• Predecessor Villain: Conceptually, Cameron can interestingly be viewed as a precursor to several franchise developments that would not exist for over a decade since her inception: The nature of her monstrous forms after taking over hosts serve dead-ringer visual precedents to the Uroboros monsters, namely the Revenants from Revelations 2. Her mutation of parasitic immortality is also what Alex Wesker, the main antagonist of the aforementioned game, exactly seeks as her end goal.

Luis Serra-Navarro

See his page

Other notable employees and affiliates

RED QUEEN

RED QUEEN

Voiced by: Tara Platt

Appearances: Umbrella Chronicles

"I am RED QUEEN. My primary objective is the management and protection of Umbrella assets."

A highly advanced and self-aware computer A.I. designed to protect and oversee Umbrella assets. The main part of the system existed in U.M.F.-013, which was transferred to Caucasus Laboratory during Raccoon City Destruction Incident. Later on the A.I. was connected to T.A.L.O.S. to control the B.O.W.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Though she never gets a chance, her objectives are to protect Umbrella assets, protect Umbrella officers, and a third she doesn't get a chance to say, in that order. All she gets to do on-screen is lock Wesker out of the system.
• Canon Immigrant: Until her appearance in this game, she was exclusively a film-verse character.
  • In the Rebirth secret chapter, before she introduced herself to Wesker, the computer screen briefly showed that there was another computer system besides Red Queen, which was called...WHITE QUEEN. However the name was never mentioned again in the series, so we'd never know what it was used for.
• Master Computer: It served as the guardian for all data files accumulated by Umbrella's many branches and divisions across the world. Every single bit of bio-weapon research, every dirty secret, she held custodianship of it all. That's why Wesker seeks her out so he can found Tricell, anonymously sending copies of incriminating data from her files to the US government to get Umbrella closed whilst exploiting the bio-weapon data to help develop Tricell into Umbrella's replacement.
• Names Given to Computers: Ostensibly a type VI, though the name is possibly a shout-out to the Red Queen Hypothesis ^note , an evolutionary theory named from a line in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that states organisms must constantly evolve in order to maintain the evolutionary advantage and even survive at all.

Brian Irons

Chief Brian Irons

^{Click to see his original appearance (1998)}

Voiced by: Gary Crawford (2 1998), JB Blanc (Darkside Chronicles), Sid Carton (2 2019); Akio Hirose (JP, 2 2019)

Appearances: 2 (and 2019 remake), 3, Darkside Chronicles

Mentioned: Outbreak, 3 (2020 remake), Operation Raccoon City (web promos)

The unbelievably corrupt police chief of Raccoon City, who is on Umbrella's payroll to keep the company safe from legal issues. He mostly serves the Birkin family, however, specifically ordered by William to conspire against Umbrella for him in exchange for anything he wants. Irons used his bribe money to fund an extravagantly hedonistic life, adorning his offices with expensive art pieces and financing the construction of a torture cellar where he takes young women. Already convicted with a history of domestic violence and rape, Irons moonlights as a Serial Killer, raping, killing, and stuffing beautiful blonde girls to simultaneously satisfy his perverse, sadistic desires and love for taxidermy.

With the apparent downfall of Raccoon City, Irons decided to murder anyone he fancied before perishing, completely sabotaging the R.P.D's efforts at turning the tides. This coupled with his obstruction of any investigative efforts from S.T.A.R.S. means Brian Irons is mostly responsible for the destruction of the city.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Strongly implied within the RPD, especially among S.T.A.R.S. A file in the remake from Chris warmly addressing his comrades asks if they were "hanging in against old Irons." He also enjoys terrible reception with Umbrella personnel, with NEST's sewer manager threatening to file a complaint about Irons threatening to kill him over jokes. However, outside his major affiliations, he is somehow a Villain with Good Publicity known for charitable work.
• Adaptational Jerkass: His insanity and violent tendencies are much, much more pronounced in the remake with what little pretense of sophistication he had originally eschewed entirely.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In Welcome to Raccoon City, he's only guilty of being a Mean Boss and overly concerned with his self-preservation. While that isn't exactly nice per se, that's about as good as it's ever been for him in any media.
• Adaptational Personality Change: He's an almost completely different character in the remake. In the original game, Irons has completely fallen to despair and insanity by the time you meet him, is convinced he and everyone in Racoon City is doomed, and is now just indulging in his vices before it's all over. While Irons is plenty crazy in the remake, he at least appears to still have some measure of resolution and self-preservation as he's plotting to steal something from the underground Umbrella laboratory for an undisclosed reason.
• Adaptational Ugliness: Very much downplayed since he was never a looker, but the original Irons was a relatively average-looking middle-aged man who would have been easier on the eyes if he wasn't so out of shape. The remake version, thanks to the more detailed facial animation, looks like a creepy, almost grotesquely bloated alcoholic old man who hasn't slept in days.
• Adaptational Villainy: As evil as Irons was in the original game, he didn't participate in experimenting on and killing hundreds of orphaned children like in the remake.
• Adapted Out: The original subplot of venturing into the human taxidermy sex dungeon of evil under the sewers is not present in the remake. This is most definitely not a case of Adaptational Nice Guy, as Irons' actions there are still alluded to and further Adaptational Villainy is in place to make up for it.
• Age Lift: The original game, and its adaptation in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, portrays Brian Irons as a middle-aged man, with weathered features but dark hair. In the 2019 remake, he's much older, with completely grey-white hair and a mustache.
• The Alcoholic: Rather fittingly for such an unstable monster with a big chip on his shoulder, Irons was implied to drink heavily even on the job judging from the copious amount of alcohol bottles strewn around his offices.
• Ankle Drag: In Claire's B run, Irons will be grabbed down a hole by the ankle and ripped in half by G-Birkin.
• Ascended Extra: In the original game, he's more or less a Plot-Irrelevant Villain. He has two scenes, only acts openly antagonistic in one of them, and is promptly killed by Birkin after delivering some exposition. In the remake, Irons serves as the Arc Villain for Claire's scenario in the police station, being the person she has to go against after he kidnaps Sherry.
• Asshole Victim: While he dies a horrible death in Claire's scenario, you'll be glad that he's gone.
• Ax-Crazy: His madness is his defining trait across all Resident Evil media featuring him or alluding to him. In the remake of RE2, he even uses a fire ax to chop down a door while chasing down Sherry.
• Badass Normal: A dark variant. Despite his questionable grip on reality, it should be noted Irons was practically the last man standing within the RPD without any allies or a scratch on him in his crusade to kill anything that moves.
• Bad Boss: Even before he went all out Ax-Crazy and butchered his staff For the Evulz, it's hinted Irons was a terrible police chief through numerous documents across the Raccoon City timeline.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Before becoming a police chief, Irons hunted and killed animals just to sate his curiosity, actions that would herald his sadistic and crazed nature later on. And when he isn't doing his job as police chief, he's out hunting animals and keeping their bodies to taxidermy them. One of the signs that outright tells that he enjoys them is through his journal which mentions that he got off from killing and gutting a Siberian Tiger.
• Blatant Lies:
  • In the original game when he first met Claire, he tells her that Kathrine Warren will turn into a Zombie in the hour if something wasn't done to her dead body. In reality, he actually murdered her himself and planned to stuff her corpse.
  • In the Remake, after a lengthy and traumatizing demonstration of horrific physical brutality on Sherry's new friend, he claims he'll absolutely take Sherry to her mother when she demands him to. Unsurprisingly, this is the farthest thing Irons has on his sick mind.
• Body Horror: He dies Aliens style if the G-embryo bursts out of him. Exactly how this works depends on the game; in the original game, he is split nearly in half just under his right shoulder, whilst the graphics in Darkside Chronicles, for example, make it look like it absorbed his skeleton and then shucked off his skin. In the remake, the G-Embryo instead simply pops out of his chest.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: In the remake, you can find various magazines and periodicals praising Irons for his charm and philanthropy. Given that the player later learns that he’s used the funds that Umbrella (and later William Birkin) have provided him with to buy a variety of local businesses and build an orphanage, it’s very likely that the articles written about him were vetted (or even written) by Irons himself.
• Cluster F-Bomb: In the remake, Irons frequently spews profanities under the stress of the situation. When desperately chasing after Sherry after she escapes him, he descends into a horrific Villainous Breakdown with his dialogue filled with this trope.
• Chest Burster: He's one of the two potential hosts for the G-Spawn in the original game and the ultimate host in the remake.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Interestingly, yes, in the remake. He's heard commenting that he would have let Sherry go right away if she hadn't dropped her locket, which is actually the key needed to access the G-Virus.
• Death Trap: Somehow and for some reason, Irons decided to install a nerve gas agent into the RPD's eastern wings.
• Dirty Cop: A two-fold version; not only is he a psychopathic rapist and a Serial Killer using his power to get away with it, but he's also a servant of Umbrella, breaking the law for their benefit.
• Dirty Coward: Generally prefers using violence to those who are subdued or weaker than him like gunning down helpless civilians and his own coworkers while they're at his mercy like in both the original and remake or kicking and pistol-whipping Claire while she was handcuffed before chasing down a helpless little girl with the intention of punishing her like in the remake. Both versions also target young blonde women by luring them into a false state of security and then killing them when they least expect it.
• Disproportionate Retribution: At one point, the man managing the NEST sewers tried to cheer up an extremely stressed Irons with jokes. His response was to pull a gun on him.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Ignoring the fact that he's already a raping nutcase in the original game and that his journal entries in the remake are way less subtle about his fetish, Irons' kidnapping of Sherry in the remake makes him come across as somewhat of a child predator. He needs Sherry's locket to gain access to the G-Virus, but it's never made clear what he needs her specifically for. He obviously intends to make her sorry after she escapes her hostage room in the orphanage, where the Game Over screen says "you are trapped" instead of the usual "you are dead" if she gets caught by him in the cat-and-mouse sequence. What in the holiest of fucks is he doing to this poor kid?!?
  • He claims he would've let Sherry go if she just hadn't dropped her locket. And one of his diaries in the original game states that he let the mayor's daughter escape so he could enjoy hunting her down later.
• The Dragon: The remake emphasizes his role as being this to William before the outbreak. He is highly complicit in his insane experiments (only behind his wife) and security, doing all he can to undermine Umbrella for his sake before they catch on.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: The remake shows that his subordinates dislike him and when the outbreak gets out of hand Irons locks several of his own subordinates up and threatens them with C-4 both as payback for them not respecting his authority and For the Evulz.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: His last words in the remake.
  "Damn you, William!"
• Evil Feels Good: Despite some grievances with knowing he's going to die, Irons has the time of his life during the outbreak when he decides he no longer cares, positively relishing in the terror he causes. Several notes illustrate the intense pleasure he derives from specifically killing off or torturing members of his police force.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: He is forcibly impregnated by G-Birkin and then dies Chestburster-style a short while later.
• Facial Horror: Receives a nasty burn scar on half of his face, delivered by his little kidnapping victim Sherry Birkin when she grabs a hold of sulfuric acid and throws it at his face in self-defense.
• Failure-to-Save Murder: In the remake, he blames Claire for "taking too long" to reach the orphanage when Sherry disappears and the mutated William Birkin shoves an embryo down his throat. Never mind the fact that Claire got stalked by Mr. X when leaving the parking lot and then was attacked by several zombie dogs along the way.
• Fat Bastard: He is overweight and a contender for one of the most insane and downright evil characters in the series despite his lack of ambition.
• Faux Affably Evil: The first time Claire meets him, he points a gun at her, but politely apologizes when he realizes she's not a zombie. However, he turns down an offer for an introduction saying that Claire is likely to die anyway, and waxes poetic about the beauty of the dead woman lying on his desk before telling Claire he'd rather be alone. He drops what little pretense of sanity he has the second and last time Claire encounters him, though. In the 2019 remake, when he's first introduced, he threatens Claire and Sherry at gunpoint while speaking with a matter-of-fact tone of voice. When he yells at Sherry in the remake, he sounds less like a bloodthirsty maniac and more like a cross between a more Down-to-Earth Rabid Cop and an impatient babysitter. Somehow that's more frightening than the hammy psycho from the original game.
• For the Evulz: Either this or Greed. When he's not raping and/or murdering people for kicks, he's accepting bribes from Umbrella and allowing them to do illegal experiments for monetary gain.
• From Bad to Worse: He's responsible for things getting much worse for the people in the police station, hiding ammunition from the other cops, and killing most of the people he finds.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He isn't present in Jill's story, but the remake for the third game sees Jill being fired for persistent investigation of Umbrella and under house arrest with 24/7 surveillance courtesy of Irons. It's also implied that this was meant to keep her inside long enough for Nemesis to locate and kill her. This and his actions in undermining the R.P.D. technically means Irons is mostly responsible for the way Raccoon City fell as it did.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The alternate method of his death in the original game, committed by G-Birkin.
• Hate Sink: Though he's the weakest of the villains in the game on account of his lack of resources, in both the original and remake Brian Irons is the least sympathetic character. Annette, William, and HUNK all have some sympathetic qualities or at least some tragedy to them; Irons is a torturer, murderer, Dirty Cop, sexual predator, and child murderer. Mr. X and the other monsters don't have the capacity for the calculated cruelty that Irons does. Next to Wesker and Lucas Baker, he's one of the vilest characters in the entire series.
• Hypocrite: When Claire questions why Irons is acting antagonistically toward her, he sarcastically responds she is guilty of "child endangerment" for accompanying Sherry. This coming from the same Irons that committed child genocide.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Irons is just as, if not more, monstrous than the mutated Birkin. Unlike Birkin, he's not a virus-created monster, he's just a sociopathic rapist and murderer. If anything, Irons is the one ultimately responsible for the fall of Raccoon City, as he slandered the STARS survivors so no one took their claims seriously and sabotaged the police's efforts to save the town. Were it not for him, the RPD could have had a fighting chance to contain the outbreak.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Irons once had a rookie secretary who accidentally stumbled across clues to his evil sex dungeon, for which he would scream at her and nearly even beat her over. When her curiosity finally got the best of her and she discovered the passageway to the dungeon, she was never heard from again.
  • One of the children from the evil orphanage Irons ran as a cover for Umbrella's child experiments and eventually escaped. His response? Kill every last child involved with the orphanage.
  • In the remake, he locks up Ben in a jail cell since he was asking questions about Irons and his involvement with Umbrella.
• The Hedonist: He lives to fulfill his twisted vices, with it being argued that being able to do so is all that keeps his Mask of Sanity in check.
• He-Man Woman Hater: The fact that he refers to Katherine Warren as a "pig" in his taxidermy journal and shouting obscenities to Sherry when she fights back against his clutches shows that Chief Irons has a pretty wide misogynistic streak and serves to make him an even more monstrous figure. And that's not getting into his past of being a sadistic, remorseless sex offender.
• Hypocrite: Claire can encounter an article praising his support of various charities, including but not limited to those serving abused women.
• I Love the Dead: His behavior towards the mayor's daughter's corpse is really, really creepy. He plans to taxidermy her so her beauty won't spoil.
  • The game itself doesn't show many reactions from Claire regarding his talk about the mayor's daughter aside from a seemingly hopeful, "There must be something we can do". The S.D. Perry novels, however, show Claire being rather unnerved the more he talks, and rightfully so. His casual mention of taxidermy being a hobby seems like a mournful joke in-game but nearly sends Claire into a mental freak-out in the novel.
• Irony: Brian Irons, one of the most twisted and evil characters in the series, was originally intended to be an unapologetically good-hearted ally in the developmental stages of Resident Evil 2.
• It's All About Me: He writes that he is infuriated Umbrella doesn't consider him of importance with Raccoon City going downhill despite everything he did for them, and thus decides he will spend what's left of his life having fun with himself.
  • The SD Perry novelization dials this up to eleven with his paranoia and complete insanity. While events occur very similarly to how they do in the game, Irons finds Claire's behavior "suspicious" as she "refused to give her name" (remember that he told her it didn't matter because she'd wind up a zombie anyway) before determining that she was an Umbrella spy sent to destroy him, fueling this demented fantasy all the way up to the end. When she encounters him in his torture room and pleads her innocence, not only does he NOT believe her, when she mentions her relationship to Chris, he suddenly "pieces together" that even his own STARS members were secretly agents meant to watch him and find whatever means they could to destroy everything he loved. In many ways, this makes him even MORE terrifying to think about...
• Jerkass: Irons has a Hair-Trigger Temper and was an unstable lunatic even before the outbreak. In fact, he's so vile that there are many documents specifically complaining about his abrasive attitude and uncanniness.
• Jizzed in My Pants: A file in the remake has him describing how he nearly came from gutting a tiger.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Irons had raped two fellow students during his university days and completely got away with it due to his "outstanding excellence in academics". After becoming Chief of Police, he took bribes from Umbrella on a routine basis and blocked all investigations and claims performed by S.T.A.R.S. after the Mansion Incident in Resident Evil, which basically meant that no one could do anything against him. Once the T-Virus broke out in Raccoon City, Irons then took down the remaining survivors in the police precinct and killed the mayor's daughter just to drag everyone down with him. It isn't until mutated Birkin kills him that Irons finally reaped what he sowed.
• Karmic Death: It seems only fitting that such a debauched monster of a man — one who's victimized countless individuals for his own sick amusement — ends up being maimed, violated, then brutally disemboweled by an even bigger, literal kind of monster.
  • It's even more Karmic in Claire A Scenario in particular, as the two-time rapist is functionally raped himself before dying from "birthing" the monster he was impregnated with.
  • Adding more karma is that Irons essentially sold out everyone in Raccoon for his own profit and protection from Umbrella. As a result of that, Umbrella's own monsters wreck the town and he's killed by the same man he sold everyone else out to.
  • Adding another karma is in Katherine Warren's Ghost Survivors campaign, where he gets killed by Katherine herself after trying to kill her. This is very telling since the main game implies he murdered her. A fitting end for a monster like him killed at the hands of his would-be victims.
• Killer Cop: When everything goes FUBAR in Raccoon City, he decides to kill as many people as he wants.
• Knight of Cerebus: The Resident Evil franchise is full of over-the-top silliness to offset the genuine horror. But whenever Chief Irons is onscreen or even just mentioned in passing, there's not an ounce of comedy to be had, and people like him actually exist in real life. Do undead zombies exist? Nope. Do mutations exist? Some do, yes, but they're pretty rare for the average citizen to encounter. Do serial killers, rapists, and corrupt officials who have a history of getting away with it as Irons do exist? Oh yeah.
• Lack of Empathy: It's doubtful Irons is even capable of empathy, but an unused opening illustration in Resident Evil 3 depicts Irons' stone-faced indifference to the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members screaming at him over closing any investigation over the incident that killed most of their team.
• Mask of Sanity: A severely downplayed example, considering that even on his best days there were signs that he was barely all there in the head, but he managed to keep enough of a lid on it to garner a respectable reputation. When the outbreak hits full force and he’s abandoned by his employers, his mask shreds completely and he shows himself for the psychotically violent sociopath that he always was. However, given that he was progressively becoming more unstable even before the outbreak happened, it’s implied that his façade of humanity would have eventually dispersed regardless of the situation.
• More Hateable Minor Villain: Downplayed in regards to RE2 as he's the secondary antagonist and played straight in the series as a whole as the scope and ambition of his actions are smaller-scaled compared to most other antagonists. But where Wesker was shown in a fantastical light despite his villainy, the zombies and Tyrant were straightforward monsters, and William does have loved ones and is partly driven out of desperation, Brian Irons is an utterly depraved scumbag defined by his disgusting taxidermy fetish, being willing to kill children for the sake of bribery, and showing frequent signs of misogyny. There is nothing fantastical or remotely humanizing about him.
• Mugging the Monster: In Ghost Survivors, he ends up biting off more than he can chew when he targets Katherine Warren.
• Mundanger: In a setting where every other villain is some sort of plague-spreading mastermind with grandiose visions and god complexes, one of the most horrific and vile villains...is a completely mundane human cop with no superpowers whatsoever. Which makes Brian Iron more horrific than he supposedly is.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In the remake, Irons' struggle with Sherry to kidnap her from Claire in the parking garage causes her to drop her locket. Turns out he was after the locket, not Sherry, and this works out for Claire picking it up in the aftermath, as it is the access key to the G-Virus and Devil Vaccine samples - the latter of which saves Sherry's life.
• Nightmare Face: After Sherry throws sulfuric acid at his face, the damage done leaves half of it melted off, and distorts the corner of his mouth in a permanent scowl.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: This man does not fool around whatsoever. Especially in the remake, where he shows off his true colors the moment he appears on-screen.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: As unfortunate as it is that this bastard is still hanging around the police station, the fact that he somehow managed to survive the fall of both Raccoon City as a whole and the RPD, in particular, is quite an impressive feat.
• Obviously Evil:
  • In the origianal he creepyly muses about the beauty of the dead body he's keeping on his desk and has a creepy Dissonant Serenity about the whole situation and casually dismisses Claire as someone who will die soon.
  • In the remake, he introduces himself to Claire in the midst of a zombie outbreak threatening to shoot her without any introduction or warning. She openly questions if he's joking, but she quickly gets the memo he is very serious and does what he demands.
• Orphanage of Fear: Irons ran one of these for Umbrella as a front for child experimentation. It didn't last, but he calmly assured his employers that he would get another running.
• Pistol Whip: In the remake, he smacks a tied-up Claire in the face with his gun hard enough for her to be bleeding from the mouth.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Implicit with him being a rapist in his backstory, but his taxidermy notes in the remake really highlight just what he thinks of women (hint: he wasn't referring to a literal pig).
• Rape as Backstory: On his victims, not him.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Irons raped two women in his university days, but largely got off due to his influential academic standing. Claire would inform Chris about this aspect of him after investigating his criminal profile.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The segment in Claire's story where you play as Sherry, a helpless and unarmed child, hiding from the child-predator Irons in the shadows of an abandoned orphanage, is arguably the single most chilling 3 minutes in the saga. Lacking any of the slimy claws, fangs and superpowers of the other monsters of Resident Evil, Irons is all the more terrifying because he is a threat all too real and sadly common in our world.
• Rule of Symbolism: In the remake, Sherry splashes acid on his face, leaving it disfigured and giving him a permanent grimace. He looks no different than the other monsters rampaging through the city.
• Sadist: Fairly obvious, being a crazed serial killer among other things, but many files from Irons himself indicate just how much fun he actually has killing and tormenting anyone he sees fit during the outbreak.
• Serial Killer: Heavily implied by a document in Resident Evil: Outbreak, judging by a very suspicious headline regarding the disappearances of eight women between August and September 1998 that bear a striking resemblance to the mayor’s daughter as well as strange noises in the drains, it’s clear that this sick bastard was doing exactly what you think he’s doing even before the citizenship started eating their families and neighbors.
  • His journal in the remake includes a listing of his taxidermy projects. This includes a five-foot-long, pale "pig" - almost assuredly either Katherine Warren or a previous victim. He also describes orgasming over killing an animal. Many serial killers started out torturing animals, and many take trophies.
• Slashers Prefer Blondes: Seems to have been Irons' type. A file in Outbreak, Raccoon Today, mentions eight missing young blonde women and that women's constrained voices could be heard coming from the sewers, which is where Irons had his Taxidermy room filled with the remains of his victims.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: In contrast to his original hammy depiction, Irons is remarkably soft-spoken and cool in the remake. However, when Sherry throws a bottle of acid at his face, this goes out the window as Irons howls and curses like a bestial lunatic.
• The Sociopath: 100% selfish, cunning, and a hedonistic sadist.
• Taking You with Me: He phrases this trope while about to shoot Claire... but it's at that moment that he gets killed. There's also the fact this is his stated mission when Umbrella abandons him.
  Irons: Nobody's going to leave my town, everyone's going to die!
• Taxidermy Is Creepy: All his self-stuffed trophies are foreshadowing of the kind of sick, twisted individual he is. As mentioned above, he even comments that he was about to start stuffing the corpse of the mayor's daughter before the player interrupted him.
  • The remake somehow makes it worse - you can read his journal entries in his office, including his account of having an orgasm while gutting the bloody corpse of a tiger he had killed. The tiger is mounted in his office. Worse yet the last entry in his taxidermy log refers to a 22-year-old, 5'3", 110-pound "pig" he hunted in Raccoon City and describes how the "sweet" body is his forever.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The manhua adaptation of Resident Evil 2 has Irons catching and dissecting wild animals as a kid, a classic sign of mounting sociopathy.
• Two-Faced: In the remake, Sherry splashes some sulfuric acid onto his face, leaving half of it horribly burned. It makes him look all the more like a monster as he stalks after the girl in a way that's not so different from the way Mr. X stalks Leon and Claire.
• The Unfought: Resident Evil 2 and Darkside Chronicles set up Irons to be someone you have to fight, but William Birkin gets to him first. In the remake, his encounter is more of a stealth-based mission than an actual boss fight.
• Villain Ball: His kidnapping of Sherry in the remake was completely unnecessary for his plans. The only thing Irons wanted was her locket, but she ended up dropping it in the scuffle. Worse, holding her hostage in the orphanage brought the wrath of Sherry's mutating father down upon him.
• Villain with Good Publicity: A file in the Remake of 2 is a magazine article, praising Chief Irons for his "big contributions to the orphanage, support for abused women, art preservation, [and] animal conservation...". This is almost darkly comical when you remember the orphanage is a front for Umbrella that tests drugs on the children, he's a rapist and misogynistic serial killer, and he hunts and taxidermies endangered species (and people).
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Pre-outbreak, he was no charmer, but the security of his position and the extravagant lifestyle he bought with bribe money kept him from losing it publicly. Once the T-Virus did its thing, he snapped, hiding the RPD's ammo, and hunting the survivors through the precinct.
  • In the remake, he loses all even faint resemblance to civility when he gets a glass full of a burning material thrown in his face by Sherry.
    Irons: You little bitch...! You're gonna pay for this! You little shit!
• Wicked Cultured: Not only does he put on a faux-British accent, but he's also filled the RPD station with creepy artwork, much of which secretly obscures the keys to his personal taxidermy sex dungeon of evil.
• Would Hit a Girl:
  • Obvious for a Serial Killer and Serial Rapist of women. Irons started his streak of hurting women through two counts of rape in university. In Western localizations, this was deemed too much, and he was instead rewritten as a violent domestic abuser.
  • In the remake he brutally kicks around and pistol-whips a bound Claire after she threatens him. He really has no reason to do this.
• Would Hurt a Child: Taken to its most depraved extremes in the remake. Irons is revealed to have been involved with a project by Umbrella to found an orphanage just to acquire a steady supply of human children to use as test subjects. There, as head of security, the children would constantly live in overwhelming fear of Irons abusing them. Eventually, when one of the kids managed to escape, Irons had Umbrella soldiers execute every last child within the orphanage both to cover their tracks and so they don't risk any contamination.
  • During the outbreak, Irons regularly abuses Sherry psychologically the moment he encounters and gains ahold of her. During their scuffle in the orphanage, he constantly rambles about how the twelve-year-old will pay dearly for defying him.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Birkin angrily threatened Irons with this when his security was becoming increasingly inefficient in keeping Umbrella in the dark about G. Even Umbrella itself considered this after one too many complaints sent in about Brian's increasingly unstable personality.

Tommy Nielson

Appearances: Outbreak File #2

An Umbrella executive ordered to stay in Raccoon City to reclaim Nyx from the renegade U.S.S. operator Rodriguez. To assist in his mission, he has authority over a crew of U.B.C.S. operators.

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• Arc Villain: Of the "end of the road" scenario.
• Bad Boss: He spends all his screentime yelling at U.B.C.S. captain Arnold, chewing him out for his apathetic indifference to their mission.
• Bullying a Dragon: Despite Arnold clearly being unstable and his main form of muscle, Tommy finds it a good idea to keep insulting and lecturing him. The first time, Arnold just scares him straight, the second time he lifts him by the neck and quits his job.
• Hate Sink: With his grating voice and extremely obnoxious personality, it seems Tommy was only meant to be hated, especially considering he's the main obstacle to your freedom.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Despite coming off as a shrill weasel that Arnold could kill at any point, once his man leaves the city, Tommy takes a freaking rocket launcher to shoot down Rodriguez's helicopter. He's almost successful, releasing Nyx in the process.
• Oh, Crap!: He has a reaction of pissing himself when it seems Arnold is about to kill him for irritating him...only for it to turn out he was just sniping the zombie over his shoulder.
• Uncertain Doom: His fate in both outcomes of the scenario he's in is never made clear.
• Undying Loyalty: To Umbrella. He even stays behind as the nukes reach the countdown to continue his mission after the U.B.C.S. quit.

Patrick

Patrick

Mentioned: 5, Resistance

Spencer's loyal butler.

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• Call-Back: His memoir noting his gradual decline of humanity and remorse for assisting in Spencer's (actually Alex's) experiments on the prisoners below the estate are very similar to the researcher's memoirs from Survivor.
• Everyone Has Standards: It's hard to call Patrick evil per se, but he was deeply questioning of Spencer's works on the prisoners below his mansion internally even if he would never openly object to his master.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Patrick was left oblivious to how evil Spencer was besides his last experiments on the mansion prisoners. Of note, he recounts his happier days playing with Marcus and Edward, lamenting they've now simply passed, not knowing Spencer murdered them both.
• Morality Pet: To a degree, Spencer did seem to at least genuinely like Patrick. After he fufills his last requests, he sends him away, evidently caring about him being potentially killed by Wesker.
• Undying Loyalty: He has served Spencer and his family for generations. Even with his master's decline in ethics and health, he remains steadfast and never openly questions him when everyone else is either gone or betrays him.

Stuart

Stuart

Appearances: Revelations 2

Alex Wesker's right-hand man. He oversaw the horrific experiments conducted on Sein Island.

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• The Dragon: To Alex, whom he fanatically served and worshipped.
• Driven to Suicide: He could not bear the guilt of what he did and killed himself so he would not instinctively try to stop Alex's insane plan.
• Leave No Witnesses: He killed Alex's entire research staff and himself so they wouldn't instinctively turn on her out of remorse for their complicity in her monstrous deeds.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After Alex makes her final breakthrough, he suffers this, realizing he's complicit in the torture and murder of thousands.
• Posthumous Character: He's dead a while before Claire and Moira's story, and the player can find his hanged corpse.
• Undying Loyalty: He worships Alex as a messianic savior, up to even killing himself fearing his loyalty may waver due to his conscience.

The Keeper

The Keeper

Appearances: Resident Evil (and remake)

Mentioned: 5

"Itchy. Tasty."

A one-off, extremely memorable posthumous victim. The Keeper was an Umbrella employee that oversaw the care of B.O.W.s in the Arklay mansion, namely the Hunters. When the outbreak in the area occurred, he gradually became a zombie and chillingly detailed his remaining days.

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• And Then John Was a Zombie: He emerges from a closet as a zombie right after reading his infamous diary.
• Apocalyptic Log: He wrote the most iconic one in the series. It was even somehow recreated in Spencer's estate in ''Lost in Nightmares.''
• The Beastmaster: His role in Umbrella.
• No Name Given: He is only known as "The Keeper."
• Sanity Slippage: The contents of the Keeper's Diary extensively document his decline in sanity.

Schizophrenic doctor

Unnamed doctor, Enoch Stoker

Appearances: Code: Veronica

An unnamed doctor on Rockfort Island. He was responsible for Cold-Blooded Torture on his patients, claiming a "demon" inside his head made him kill. Alfred, for his part, was highly amused and encouraged his behavior.

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• Asshole Victim: He was infected and died when the H.C.F. raided Rockfort Island
• Ax-Crazy: He constructed a fucking torture cellar to horribly torture Rockfort prisoners before vivisecting them, claiming a "demon" inside his head existed.
• Elite Mook: He's much tougher than the regular zombie when he emerges to fight Claire.
• No Name Given: He isn't named, but he's known as Enoch Stoker in the Perry novelization.
• Posthumous Character: He's dead a while before Claire finds his zombie and journal.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: He hit it off with Alfred, who's as much of a twisted sadist. However, he feared Alfred would kill him if he ever ceased to entertain him.