Headscratchers / Resident Evil 4 (Remake)

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Obvious Codename

• The purpose of codenames is to obfuscate who you are, who you're talking to, and who or what you're talking about to anyone who might listening. Why then would Leon and whoever he's communicating with refer to the president's daughter with an obvious codename like Baby Eagle?
  • That is kind of the point since Quint used his codename Jackass and Keith used his codename Grinder when talking with O'Brian who addressed himself as Forkball back in Revelations so that they will know they are talking to the real deal and not impersonators.
  • The above troper doesn't seem to be confused by the concept of code names, just that "Baby Eagle" is too obvious a codename for the President's daughter and makes it easier for eavesdroppers to figure out who they're talking about.
  • Considering that Leon is going to Spain where the locals do not understand English whereas the two Spanish officers with Leon don't know anything about Leon's mission as well as Chief Mendez, Ramon Salazar and Osmund Saddler who know English are expecting Leon anyway, the codename ultimately does not matter. Additionally, the fact that only Leon was sent alone meant no one else knows about the top secret mission except for a selected few like Hunnigan so "Baby Eagle" can mean anything or nothing for those who don't know what is going on.
  • Leon also explicitly calls her "the President's daughter" in one of his calls with Hunnigan, so evidently the mission doesn't call for total secrecy.
  • Humorously enough, Leon's VO Nick Apostolides himself didn't understand the point of using "Baby Eagle" when they were just going to outright refer to her as "the President's daughter" in the same correspondence anyway.

Why is Leon so poorly equipped?

• In the original it was odd that Leon came into the country with just a handgun, and a spare magazine good for only one reload. Here it's even worse, because Leon doesn't even have a spare magazine. This isn't a camping trip, this is an important mission to rescue the President's daughter. It doesn't make sense that Leon would come here so poorly armed. Like I'm not asking him to have an entire arsenal at the beginning, but this seems a little goofy.
  • This is a common misconception. He was investigating an alleged sighting of Ashley, with the help of two local cops, when things went south. It didn't turn into an actual rescue mission until he found her, or good intel. Leon doesn't seem to be taking the job particularly seriously in the opening cutscene of either version. He probably expected to be able to call for backup if anything went wrong.
  • His ability to carry firearms is also limited by the fact that he's not local law enforcement and is in a country with far stricter firearm laws then the United States.
    • Presumably the operation is being conducted through INTERPOL, giving Leon a bit of latitude in that area. It's not like the local authorities will just tell the U.S. President and his investigative bodies to fuck off when his daughter has gone missing in their country, so having at least a sidearm doesn't strain disbelief too hard. It's just that he didn't expect to run into a small army of mind-controlled, Made of Iron hosts for a malevolent parasite on this rescue mission.

The Second Verdugo

• What happened to Ramon Salazar's second Verdugo in the remake? It just simply vanishes after Leon returns to the surface after falling down the hole in the throne room. He only fights one Verdugo and at the end of the castle section it's not seen with Salazar and his men as they head into the Old Chantry.
  • A document you can find states that it was sent after Ada, who presumably killed it. It can also be seen in several shots in the launch trailer for Separate Ways.
  • Confirmed by the separate ways DLC. You fight "U-3" (referenced in media) as Ada as a boss and it's called "Pesanta.

Why isn't Leon reporting anything to HQ?

• Leon's communications with Hunnigan are really short and vague. You'd think after he found the first cop dead, and especially after he literally witnessed the villagers murdering the second cop by burning him alive, he'd be immediately on the line with Hunnigan reporting serious shit is going down in the village and that Washington needs to get on the line with Madrid and send serious Cuerpo Nacional de Policía backup as two of their own are dead. Even later, after he passes out after defeating Del Lago, when Hunnigan calls to say he's been offline for 3 hours, he just dismisses it without an explanation. The original game got away with this since it was played off as more of an action movie parody but with the remake taking things far more seriously it doesn't hold water.
  • Pretty sure just like in the original game, the US government was aware that there was a traitor who helped kidnap Ashley, they sure wasn't sure where or who it was. They know they could trust Leon and the situation was dire, but under control for the time being with just him. Hunnigan probably took the "no news is good news" approach with Leon during the lake events, especially when he said he was in the process of finding the key. She might've set "sunset" as a red flag time and that's around the time Leon came-to.
  • Adding to that, Leon is SEVERELY struggling with his PTSD from Raccoon City, so he may be hiding the gravity of the situation specifically so that he's the ONLY one in the fire. He seems to feel like he's got to do everything alone, so he's essentially hiding the severity of it to keep people from getting killed
  • It's subtle and doesn't get brought up very much after the opening scene, but one big change in the remake is that Leon actively resents his new life as a government operative. In the original, he was a full-on superhero who, if anything, seemed to enjoy the gig; in the remake, he's quieter, more serious, and darkly sarcastic. That plus Leon's more adversarial relationship with Krauser would seem to support a reading that Leon's going to do the job he was told to do, but he's not inclined to play nicely with his handler.
    • You can also make the point here that what Leon says in the late game, about how he's going to save somebody this time, plays neatly into what was previously said about his post-Raccoon PTSD. Once he and Ashley are on the clock due to the Plaga, it's not enough for him to be part of the team that saved her; he's got to handle it. He's got to make it all mean something, even if it's just in his own head, especially once Ada recommends that he bail on Ashley as a lost cause.
  • The last two local cops who provided backup weren't exactly anything to write home about, and they were the ones personally assigned to escort a high-ranking operative from the U.S. government on a high-priority mission. It's understandable that Leon wouldn't expect further police involvement to be much help.

The regenerating cabin

• Chief Mendez's written account of Luis's grandfather's death says that the family cabin burned down, presumably having been set alight by the villagers. Yet, in the game itself, it's perfectly intact and doesn't even have any obvious fire damage.
  • It's been a couple of decades, since the same diary says Luis left that night. They've had time to rebuild.

What killed the first cop?

• The first cop that accompanies Leon wanders off into the forest and Leon finds him later in the basement of the Hunter's Lodge. However its never explained what killed him; there's nothing and no one in the basement with him and his hands are bound. He makes a sound that almost sounds like struggling when Leon is upstairs dealing with the sole Ganado in the house, but when Leon comes down to investigate it seems like the cop had been dead for a while.
  • The guy Leon fought upstairs wasn't the only Ganado around. Another one wanders into the basement after you find the cop. And then a bunch more come in after you kill that one. There were other Ganados in the area, if not the lodge itself, when the cop was attacked.
    • Except the Ganado that Leon encounters after finding the first cop is the same one he round-house kicked into the wall and broke their neck, given the damage the Ganado had when going down to attack Leon. That said, it is true that other Ganados would be around the area, as one opened the hidden entrance to the second floor after Leon takes care of the first Ganado.

Is there some kind of time portal in the Hunter's Lodge?

• When Leon first enters the Hunter's Lodge in Chapter One, it's clearly night. When he exits onto the path leading to the village, it's broad daylight. Did Leon suddenly lose several hours of time while he was in there?
  • It's possible that Leon and the cops reached the area in the moments just before dawn and sunrise, and the time it takes for him to walk from the hunter's lodge to the village, with some Video Game Time on the side, means the sun is up by the time Leon arrives at the village.

Exit

• After Leon rescues Ashley the first time from the church, they cut back through the village square. Why didnt they just leave the way Leon came in, though the hunting lodge? Sure, there may have been nothing on that road for miles, but it seems like better option than running headfirst into where the parasite zombies are coming from.
  • The exit path towards the cabin was their designated spot for their helicopter rescue. As for why the helicopter did not land towards the Hunter's lodge instead; if you recall the terrain around the area, it is full of trees with little open space available for a helicopter pick-up.
    • I actually answered my own question - Leon knew they were infected with the Plaga and Luis told them to meet him in the castle since he had a way to treat the infection. It's been a while but I think this plot hole existed in the original, though.

Then what?

• What would Mendez, Salazar, Krauser, or Saddler have done if they had successfully killed Leon? All of them had transformed into monstrous forms by the end of their respective fights. Is there any hint that they can, I don't know, revert? Or would Saddler have just been a giant mutated spider thing with eyeballs on its legs from then on?
  • All of those characters are blatantly insane fanatics who would be perfectly happy living on in their monstrous forms for Saddler and Los Illuminados, with Saddler himself being merely a meat puppet to the larger Hive Mind. And as for Krauser, whose mutation is the least gnarly, the Mercenaries mode hint that he could possibly turn his arms back to normal if he wanted to.
    • Even if they were stuck like that and would have preferred not to be, it would still be better than dying.
  • The Las Plagas is a different mutation from the T Virus, but some of the T Virus mutants like Alexia and the Leech Marcus did show an ability to go back and forth between human and monster form. The Las Plagas mutations might have a similar status.

Leon committing a cultural crime by stealing and selling loot?

• Just like in original RE 4, Leon is forced to trek through a hostile village to follow a poorly planned grab-&-run of Ashley. However, while trekking he's breaking into people's homes and stealing their hard-earned gifts and heirlooms they spent untold generations putting their life stories into. Leon is betraying what he learned as a cop and acting more like the British Museum by having the Merchant give him good discounts and putting what little humanity the village already had in those gems and ornaments!?
  • This comes down to Gameplay and Story Segregation, in reality Leon was probably only able to take a handful of those items home as trinkets. Inventory space is massive in gameplay, but not in the realistic version of what Leon would have been doing. The bright side of things, is that the US and Spanish governments likely would have opened up an investigation into the village in the aftermath of the game, just to see the full extent of what Saddler was up to. Any remaining treasures or heirlooms probably would have been found by the clean up crew. If not, that's just the sad nature of archeology, sometimes important things get passed down, other times they get lost to history — you win some, you lose some.
  • Leon is too busy dealing with the immediate problem that is the Las Plagas infestation to really be concerned about the ethics of selling what he finds lying around.

Ada vomiting up the parasite

• So after defeating Pesanta in Separate Ways, the parasite dies and Ada vomits it up. How did it get into her digestive tract? Everything else we see of Plagas shows them attaching to the nervous system.
  • Considering the pain she was in prior to the parasite being regurgitated, it's very likely that the plaga tore its way into her stomach in its attempt to escape once it was "deactivated" by the death of the Verdugo.

Is Ada immune to smoke inhalation?

• In Separate Ways we see Ada chasing Luis through his burning laboratory while warning him not to breathe the smoke. Luis has an oxygen meter indicating that he will die if it is depleted, but Ada makes it through the inferno and tosses Luis out on his ass without so much as a cough. Does her infection somehow make her immune to smoke, or is she just really good at holding her breath while running?
  • Because Ada doesn't have emphysema from smoking cigarettes.

"Leave the girl"?

• What exactly is the point in Ada trying to get Leon to abandon Ashley? There's no way he'd do that anyway, but what was she thinking? She's not even offering to stick with him; just saying that he might live to see her again - so he'd go his own way, leave poor Ashley to suffer a fate worse than death... and then what?
  • If one can recall this exact same moment with Robert Kendo. He knows his daughter is infected and beyond saving but he refused to abandon her. In the case of Leon and Ashley? Unlike the T-Virus and whatnot, the Parasite can be suppressed for a time until they can remove the parasites. Additionally, Ada has faith in Leon and as we know, Wesker is "watching" so Ada cannot freely move on her own too much. He hates to wait. And because Wesker was killed off at the end of RE5, Ada was much more flexible in tagging along in RE6, coming to the aid of Leon (3 times, I think) and also helping Sherry and Jake as well as random people in China.

Revealing the plan

• Why would Wesker reveal his plan to Ada? Did he really think Ada was going to hand over the amber after telling her it's a crucial part of a plan to murder over six billion people? Even a person with no scruples who's Only in It for the Money wouldn't do this when they realize the odds of surviving are not in their favor and even if they did survive there won't be an economy to spend that money in.
  • As long as Wesker succeeds in his plans, those kind of setbacks don't matter much to him. As shown, he retrieved Krauser's body and got the sample off his corpse.