Headscratchers / Resident Evil 3 (Remake)

Radiation Hazard?

• A look at the new version of Nemesis shows that it's covered with warning labels that say CAUTION as well as the hazard symbol for ionizing radiation. So what's the source of the radiation, and why would Umbrella even bother with such warning labels? If you're close enough to recognize those labels, you probably won't be alive long enough for the radiation to be a problem.
  • Potentially the radiation source is part of his deviation from a standard Tyrant, maybe in weaponising the parasite used to make him, or perhaps some unconventional ammunition he carries given his weapon selection in this instalment; as to the purpose of the caution tape and labels, presumably it's in part to hold his bodybag covering together, as well as to inform any Umbrella personnel working around him to take care? Sure, it's stupid given how he looks already, but this is Umbrella.

  • I always interpreted it as their attempt at covering up his identity in case he died. If a random civvie comes across a hulking mass littered with caution tape, they'd be likely to back off and not look further - at least by Umbrella's hopes.

Master of Unlocking?

• So the "Master of Unlocking" can't pick what appears to be an ordinary padlock and has to go to Kendo's shop to find the key?
  • Truth in Television. A seemingly run-of-the-mill padlock might be secure enough that it would take tools she doesn't have to open, or take long enough to pick that it's faster to check the shop next door for the keys. It can seem arbitrary in video games when a character with Jill's skill set still has to go looking around for keys, but lockpicking is an inexact science. You'd also expect somebody like Kendo to know and invest in good locks.

Nightmare Pistol

• Why is the pistol in Jill's zombification nightmare the Glock 19 she doesn't have yet rather than her personal Samurai Edge?
  • The most obvious answer? It's a dream. Dreams don't usually make sense. And in real life, if you concentrate on nuances around you, this can tip you off that you might be dreaming. When you walk into your room and notice the Mona Lisa painting even if you never had one, the high odds are you are dreaming. Had Jill paid more attention to the gun, she might have realized it was just a dream. But her focus was rather on her zombifying.
  • Jill uses that Glock in almost every other cutscene, so it's entirely possible that they just decided to recycle the model. You could probably fan-wank something here about what the STARS represented to her, too.
    • The only problem with that is her Samurai Edge is already in the game. She even loses it in a cutscene a few minutes later. The "it's a dream" thing seems to cover it, given how until Jill wakes up, she's wearing different clothes and her kitchen isn't strewn with half-eaten food.

Slept Through The Apocalypse?

• How the hell is Jill completely oblivious to what's going on in Raccoon City? Her building is on fire by the time Nemesis arrives. Not to mention the explosions, the riots, and the NEWS covering the outbreak. How the hell did she not know what's going on until Nemesis shows up?!
  • If you look around her apartment after the dream sequence, it's littered with empty beer and wine bottles, and there's an assortment of pills on her nightstand. She also hasn't been sleeping well and her TV's visibly broken (no sound, hazy picture). The implication is that Jill has been too zonked out from PTSD-induced sleeplessness and attempts at self-medication to pay a lot of attention to what's happening outside her window, and the game makes a point of showing that when things went loud in Raccoon, things degenerated quickly. (This is a departure from the original timeline, to be fair, although that timeline wasn't fully established until two games after the original RE 3.)
  • I've also been assuming that the fire in her apartment was at least partially Nemesis's fault.
  • Another reason for this may be the fact that she is under surveillance and practically in house arrest by chief Irons. There might have been people watching her. Then hell broke loose, with thousands of people zombifying at approximately the same time (it's a big densed city) from the first infection. Till this moment, everything was managable for authorities, but T-virus seems to be spreading and infecting not on equal scale, but on geometric curve. So there might be 2 infected, in another hour 10 infected, in yet another hour 200 infected, and before you blink, the city of 100,000 is infected. The time everything is on fire and police are overwhelmed, that is the time you are blinking. And I agree that Nemesis was the probable cause of the apartment building being on fire. By the time the alleged people watching Jill are dead or fleeing anyway, so they don't give a frick.
  • The actual full scale Hell on Earth only started within a single day, it was due to a multitude of factors but the rats infected a water reservoir, was the main thing, making the cities drinking water contaminated, basically thousands of people infected themselves simply by drinking a glass of water, on the 24th of september, suddenly the city took a dramatic downturn, generally because the reservoir was infected, every person who drank water was infected on the same timescale within a few hours to a few days, Basically, the reason nobody was aware, was because thousands were infected pretty much at the same time, and turned within a short timeframe of each other.

Opening News Broadcasts and Resident Evil 2

• How is it with all the news broadcasts we see in the beginning and the CDC quarantining the area that Leon and Claire were completely oblivious to what was going on in Raccoon City?
  • Capcom's never really said. The implication from the trucker's radio at the start of RE 2 suggests that the news footage at the start of RE 3 was from local broadcasts, and that any further out from town, there was a sustained and dramatic attempt at a cover-up. Umbrella is more explicitly in bed with high government figures in the remake, to go by what we find out about Bard, so you can chalk it up to the government knowing more or less exactly what's happening and keeping things as far under wraps as possible.

Let me just destroy probably THE most valuable thing I have.

• Nicholai, in all his smarmy wisdom, destroyed the very last sample of T-Vaccine, to be petty? he had Jill on the ground,gun aimed at her, as far as he knew Carlos was out of commission, and the only sample of a vaccine that could cure T-Viral infection in his hand, which, even if you wanted to destroy Umbrella, as his mystery employer did, having a Vaccine that would make the Virus useless to anyone but the holder of the Vaccine seems like something I would want in my pocket incase of emergancies, plus if Nicholai was as much of a money nut as he made out, he would of not wasted such a thing, it was probably worth millions if not billions to the right people.
  • He says point-blank in the ending that he's currently being paid to make sure the Raccoon disaster sinks Umbrella, and this is part of it. Nicolai is money-motivated, but he's clearly committed to his current gig. We also know from the Outbreak games that this isn't the only vaccine, and Nicolai might know that as well.
    • The canon of "Daylight" is pretty suspect, seeing as by Degeneration, Willpharma had only apparently just been able to make a working vaccine for the T-Virus, so according to the CGI movie canon, The outbreak survivors never took Daylight out of the city, plus you saw it, it was a small tube the size of a vape pen, slip it into the pocket, shoot Jill, get out of dodge, as said, screw up umbrella by making the T-Virus treatable by at least whoever paid him to sink Umbrella.
  • I seem to be handwaving a lot in RE 3 headscratchers, but anyway... Yes, Nicholai may be a money nut, or so he claims, but first and foremost, he's a sadistic psychopath. In comparison to Hunk, who seems to be a real professional, not killing if he doesn't have to and even encouraging his colleagues to leave him for the dead when the situation seems hopeless for him. Nicholai is Hunk, if Hunk was a self-centered prick. He likes money, but that doesn't stop him from shooting the vaccine just to shit on Jill even more. He promised her the vaccine if she fought Nemesis. She did not once, but twice. And the scene where he shoots the vaccine vial serves as a one big fuck you to Jill. He did record the combat data and just wanted to be an absolute winner (ensuring nobody else would have even a slightly happy ending). Had he succeeded in killing Jill and escaping RC, after hour or two, he might have realized "Hey, I could have kept the vaccine and be even richer", but that was an option his mentality dismissed when he was about to shoot the vial. Besides being good at backstabbing people, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed and he does not think ahead.

Licker acrobatics?

• In the first Carlos game sequence, he gets to the RPD before Leon and Claire do. That means a lot of things that happen in this game are nods to the consequences in the previous game. We get to see how the two policemen died when assaulted by a licker. The first one has his jaw almost torn off by the licker's claw. And the other is wrapped by licker's tongue and yanked towards the licker. Yet he somehow ends up impaled on a pipe under the ceiling. What the hell did the licker do this for? And how? The cop clearly shoots down on the floor, so the licker must be on the floor, not on the ceiling. And the cop is yanked in horizontal fashion, and continues this way, as a shadow indicates. And also face first. The impalement is from the back of the neck through the mouth. There is some pretty mumbo jumbo physics in play. The only way it could be explained that the cop wrapped with tongue and the one impaled are not the same. The impaled one had already been there when the two living ones were fending for their lives.
  • It's clearly meant to be the same cop who gets dragged by the tongue and a way of explaining what happened to them in the re2 remake. As for how, the cops likely shot the pipe as the Licker was jumping around the place. The Lickers possibly accidentally impaled the cop on the pipe and left him to hang, choosing to find other prey. You can debate the physics of it, but it's clearly there for shock value and to leave one wondering how it could happen.
  • Lickers, as shown in this version, have very little control over their tongues direction, unlike in the original timeline/movies where they had fine control over it, perhaps what had happened is that the Licker wrapped it tongue around him and pulled it's head back to try and reel him in, but being blind and having little control, didn't notice the pipe, he gets impaled.

Water Will Kill It

• After everything Jill has seen Nemesis endure up to this point,she really thinks that drowning is what will finish it off?
  • I didn't get the impression that her quip "Bitch can't even swim" meant that she thought falling in water is what would finish him. She just said what she saw. He had fallen into the river and couldn't stay on top - he literally wasn't able to swim and sank to the bottom like a rock. One would think that being almost indestructible monster he would be able to not sink by some means. Although it would be rather hilarious to see Nemesis breaststroking towards Jill. In the end it came to me like unspoken "Really? This unstoppable creature survived several explosions, falling from heights and caught thousands of bullets. But the..." and spoken "...bitch can't even swim".

Where’d the cop go?

• So where did Marvin hide when Carlos and Tyrell entered the Police Station? The two doors on the upper floor and the one leading to the West Office are locked. If Marvin had a key he would’ve give it to Claire/Leon. The gate leading to the Western Hallway was still closed, so he couldn’t have taken that route. Finally there’s the shutter leading to the Eastern Hallway, but that one is pretty heavy and an injured Marvin may have been unable to lift it. Even if he somehow managed to lift it, why would he flee to an area with no light that’s probably crawling with Zombies instead of staying the Main Hall which is one of the safest places in the whole building.
  • Marvin just went "away"; it's effectively an Easter egg. Having said that, given the options that were available to him at the time, it's possible he fled to the eastern hallway and slammed the shutter behind himself. It's a day before RE 2, so it's possible that hallway isn't as bad as it would be later.
    • I agree with Marvin escaping to the East part of the station, and adding a few details that support it. The full scale Hell on Earth Zombie Apocalypse is about 24 hours in (regarding the HS "Slept through the Apocalypse" thread). There are zombies in the police station, yes, but there is also 'a lot' of survivors. That being said, zombies have taken over the west wing, with the last two poor policemen falling victims to the vicious licker. While the survivors (possibly the zombie civillians and officers we see in RE 2 Remake) are located in the east wing. Still alive and scared. Now Marvin is running away from zombie Brad, bitten and bleeding, not knowing whom to trust outside, runs away from two unknown soldiers, shuts the door behind himself, thus protecting his survivors and colleagues. Too bad Marvin wasn't more trusting towards the soldiers, which only we know were the good guys. But he made a decission, and the soldiers were on their own mission, so they dismissed the east wing completely, oblivious to the potential survivors there.
    • Also, if you return to Tyrell he reveals that he can see survivors in the station but that they're cut off or hiding, adding evidence that most of the survivors are hiding in the East section of the station which you never explore as Carlos.

Carlos' Past

• So, in Japanese background material for original RE 3, Carlos is explicitly stated to be a former Communist guerrilla in South America, whose friends and family were killed by a corrupt government, he was captured and sentenced to death, and forced into working for Umbrella with his only other option being execution. The tone of the files is rather sympathetic towards the guerrillas and there's no indication he's changed his views (that he apparently dedicated himself to since childhood) or regrets fighting against the government (who are presented as unambiguously evil). Yet there's a chance that in the RPD, remake Carlos will comment that "it's fucked up shooting cops", even though A) he's presumably killed cops before as a guerrilla, B) he's made no such comment about all the innocent civilians he's just shot, C) they are literally mindless vicious zombies trying to kill him. So, how did he go from someone who dedicated his life to fighting against the government and saw first-hand how cruel and corrupt the "justice" system could be, to someone who apparently values the lives of cops above the lives of anyone else?