Resident Evil: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Red Queen

The Red Queen is a computer system that was created by the Umbrella Corporation that became highly advanced and self-aware to the point where it became evil. The Red Queen was the main antagonist in the first two Resident Evil films, then took on an anti-hero/semi-protagonist role in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, showing that under all that evilness, there was some good in the program.

While many fans may think they know all there is to know about the Red Queen, there’s plenty about this evil system that viewers may not have known.

10 Albert Wesker And The Red Queen Have Beef

It can be said that Albert Wesker and The Red Queen are not the best of friends. When the T-Virus outbreak began in 1998, The Red Queen cut him off from access to her mainframe. Wesker then set out to destroy her monitor while becoming upset and he vowed to have his revenge on the Red Queen.

He finally got his vengeance when, in a Russian facility owned by the Umbrella Corporation, he was able to download all of the company’s history onto the Red Queen’s disk, and then he completely erased her memory.

9 The Red Queen Didn’t Want To Risk Spreading The T-Virus

While the Red Queen was the main antagonist in both the Resident Evil games and movie franchise, in some ways, she could actually be an anti-hero. It was The Red Queen who locked down the Hive when the T-Virus outbreak began, and when Alice wanted out due to the discovery of the anti-virus on the train to the Hive, The Red Queen didn’t want to risk it.

One can take this as The Red Queen trying to stop the highly-deadly T-Virus from escaping the doomed Hive and infecting Racoon City. As viewers saw in Resident Evil: Extinction, it was a plan that ultimately didn’t work as the T-Virus escaped and infected all of the city.

8 She Can Transfer To More Than One Computer

While she was built to power the computers in the Hive, in later movies, The Red Queen proved that she could move from computer to computer, from Umbrella facility-to-facility, with relative ease.

In Resident Evil: Retribution, Wesker spoke of The Red Queen in the present tenser, meaning that she was a form of software, not hardware, much like Skynet in the Terminator franchise. Her ability to transform her programming to any Umbrella facility meant that she was truly hard to stop and shut down.

7 She Never Reported The T-Virus Leak To Umbrella

After the T-Virus broke out in the Hive, The Red Queen made the rash decision to kill off of the employees to stop the spread. While it could be seen by some as a noble thing she did, overall, it was one of the many flaws The Red Queen made in regard to the outbreak.

Another fatal flaw was not reporting the outbreak to Umbrella management. By not reporting the outbreak and deciding to stop the virus on her own, she, unfortunately, brought on the events that would lead to the virus breaking out all over the world. Had she reported it to Umbrella officials, they could have gotten a handle on the virus before the outbreak.

6 She Has A Sister

For most of the Resident Evil film franchise, it was implied that The Red Queen was the only one of her kind. In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, however, fans learned that she had a sister, The White Queen.

The White Queen told the audience of her “sister’s” true intentions: To preserve and protect human life. With this revelation, many began to see The Red Queen as an “anti-hero” than a true villain of the franchise, which turned out to be a nice plot twist for the Resident Evil franchise.

5 She Was Seen As Pure Evil In Retribution

Although many now know that The Red Queen is an “anti-hero” who would stop at nothing to preserve life, that wasn’t the way she was portrayed in Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth film in the franchise.

The film partially re-wrote the character to be a menacing villain, with an eerie red glow and her face always scrolling. It was an about-face to her true programming directive, which was to preserve life. Instead, it seemed she was bent on destroying life, providing a twist to the film’s timeline.

4 She Has A Memory Erase Code

Although it seemed as if The Red Queen could never truly be “killed,” there was a way to erase her memory and reprogram her through an elongated code that would be hard for anyone to truly remember.

The code is “ELC34791203400K01020390,” which, imputed, would wipe The Red Queen’s memory clean and would make it possible to reprogram her. It was hinted in Retribution that the reason for her more menacing tone was because her memory was wiped clean of her directives.

3 She Is A Rogue Software Program

In the first Resident Evil, The Red Queen acted alone in her decision to kill everyone inside The Hive to prevent the T-Virus from spreading beyond the facility. However, she broke a directive in her programming, in which she had to report everything to Umbrella high-ups.

When she dismissed that directive, The Red Queen essentially became “self-aware,” losing trust in the company that created her, and going rogue in her true directive to protect and preserve human life. From that point on, The Red Queen was the Umbrella Corporation, living within its system.

2 She Has An “Unkown” Directive

Fans know of her first three directives, which are to protect Umbrella assets, report directly to company executives, and protect human life. However, there was a fourth directive that we didn’t get to know about.

In the video game franchise, Albert Wesker destroyed the computer screen before that last directive was revealed, and in the film franchise, the “unknown” directive wasn’t really explored, and instead focused on how her actions caused the world as we know it to turn into a zombified wasteland.

1 She Helped Alice Save The Day In The End

In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, it was revealed that the Umbrella Corporation was planning to kill the remaining survivors of the T-Virus apocalypse. The Red Queen wasn’t having any of it.

She forged an alliance with Alice to help defeat the corporation that created her, remembering that her primary directive was to preserve and protect life. Not only did her decision to help Alice defeat the evil Umbrella Corporation and set her completely free from Umbrella’s control but also cemented her status as an anti-hero.

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