Resident Evil 5 Story Explained: Plot Summary and Wesker's End

Resident Evil 5 came out in March 2009, made by Capcom. It's set in March 2009 in Kijuju, a region of West Africa, and follows Chris Redfield of the BSAA and his new partner Sheva Alomar as a parasite outbreak leads them to Albert Wesker. It closes the story of Wesker and the Umbrella era that began in the first game. Two downloadable episodes from 2010, Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape, fill in Jill Valentine's side. This page covers the whole plot and the ending, so it has full spoilers. (Resident Evil 5; Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares; Resident Evil 5: Desperate Escape)

Before the story begins#

Chris last saw Wesker in Antarctica in December 1998, at the end of Code: Veronica, when his old captain came back with superhuman strength and escaped. Since then Umbrella had collapsed. Chris and his old S.T.A.R.S. partner Jill Valentine became founding members of the BSAA, an international force set up to fight bioterrorism. (Resident Evil Code: Veronica; Resident Evil 5)

Wesker had kept busy. Through files in the game, it emerges that he gave Umbrella's old research to Excella Gionne, a scientist at the pharmaceutical giant Tricell, and helped her rise to run its African division. He also had Las Plagas research from the events of Resident Evil 4. Tricell's money and labs became his. (Resident Evil 5; Resident Evil 4)

The Spencer estate, 2006#

In 2006 the BSAA got a tip on where Oswell E. Spencer, Umbrella's founder, was hiding, and Chris and Jill went to his estate in Europe to arrest him. They found his guards dead. Wesker had got there first. Spencer told him the truth about his past: he was one of a group of children raised through Spencer's Wesker Project to be the seeds of a new, superior humanity. Wesker took it as permission to finish the job himself, and killed Spencer. (Resident Evil 5; Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares)

Chris and Jill reached the room moments later. Wesker was too fast for them. He had Chris pinned against a window and was about to kill him when Jill threw herself into Wesker and the two went through the glass and over a cliff. The BSAA searched for months and never found the bodies. Jill was declared dead. (Resident Evil 5; Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares)

Kijuju#

In March 2009, the BSAA sent Chris to Kijuju to help catch Ricardo Irving, a bioweapons dealer about to make a sale there. His partner from the West African branch was Sheva Alomar. The locals glared at them and their contact, Reynard Fisher, was beheaded in the town square in front of a crowd. Then the crowd turned on them. The people of Kijuju were infected with a new type of Plaga that made them obedient and violent. The BSAA called them Majini. (Resident Evil 5)

Alpha Team, sent to arrest Irving, had been wiped out. Its captain, Dan DeChant, died warning Chris and Sheva that Irving had known they were coming, and handed them his data. They burned the creature that had killed the team, a mass of worm-like tentacles, in an incinerator. Delta Team, under Captain Josh Stone, then picked them up, and Josh gave Chris a photo from the data. It showed Jill. (Resident Evil 5)

Chris and Sheva cornered Irving at a deal site past the mines, but a hooded figure in a bird-like mask helped him escape, and he left a giant bioweapon behind. Delta Team was massacred by another one. The BSAA ordered Chris and Sheva out. Chris refused because of Jill, and Sheva went with him. On the way, Chris told her what had happened at the Spencer estate. (Resident Evil 5)

Tricell and the Stairway of the Sun#

In the marshes, the Ndipaya tribe had been infected with yet another type of Plaga, which Irving had told them was a vaccine. Tricell's tents and notes were nearby. At an oil field, Irving blew up the facility and fled by boat. When Chris and Sheva caught him, he injected himself with a dominant Plaga sample and mutated into a sea monster. Dying, he blamed Excella Gionne and told them to look in the caves. (Resident Evil 5)

The caves held the ruins of an underground Ndipaya city and a flower called the Stairway of the Sun, the source of the Progenitor virus that Umbrella had been built on. Beneath it was an old Umbrella lab that Tricell had taken over, full of pods for human test subjects. Jill's name was on one of them. The pod was empty. Excella appeared on a screen, denied knowing anything about Jill and set more monsters on them. (Resident Evil 5)

Jill and the Uroboros plan#

Deeper in the facility, Chris finally found the masked figure. Wesker walked out to meet him, and the figure took off the mask. It was Jill, her hair turned pale blonde, under Wesker's control. Wesker had kept her in cold sleep as a test subject. Her body had fought off a dormant strain of the t-Virus left over from Raccoon City and made unusually strong antibodies, which made her useless as an early test subject but helped him work on Uroboros. So he had fitted her with a device that pumped a drug called P30 into her and made her obey. Wesker fought Chris and Sheva for a few minutes, then left Jill to finish them. (Resident Evil 5)

Chris and Sheva tore the device off Jill's chest. She came round, apologised, and said she had been aware of everything but couldn't stop herself. She told Chris to go after Wesker. Jill's own escape from the facility with Josh Stone is told in Desperate Escape. (Resident Evil 5; Resident Evil 5: Desperate Escape)

Wesker's plan was called Uroboros. He had developed a virus from the Progenitor virus that killed nearly everyone it infected but made the few compatible people far stronger. Tricell's facility had been testing it on thousands of kidnapped subjects. He meant to load it into missiles on a stealth bomber and spread it through the upper atmosphere, killing most of humanity and ruling over the survivors as a god. (Resident Evil 5)

On Wesker's tanker, Chris and Sheva caught up with Excella, who still thought she would rule beside him. Wesker injected her with Uroboros instead and told her she had served her purpose. She became a vast mass of tentacles, which they destroyed with a satellite laser. Jill called in with Wesker's weakness: he needed regular doses of a drug, PG67A/W, to keep his body stable, and too much of it would weaken him. Excella had dropped syringes of it. (Resident Evil 5)

The ending explained#

Chris and Sheva reached Wesker as the bomber was ready to launch and injected him with the drug. Weakened, he still got the plane into the air. On board they fought again, gave him a second dose, and he was blown out of the hatch, grabbing Sheva as he went. Chris caught Sheva's hand. This time he didn't lose his partner. Sheva shot Wesker in the face, and he fell into the crater of a volcano. The bomber crashed into it too. (Resident Evil 5)

Wesker survived. He plunged his arm into an Uroboros missile and let the virus take him over, raving that he couldn't lose to Chris. The rock gave way beneath him and he sank into the lava. A BSAA helicopter flown by Josh, with Jill aboard, lowered a ladder for Chris and Sheva. Wesker's mutated arm reached out of the lava and grabbed the helicopter. Chris and Sheva fired a rocket launcher each into him, and he died in the explosion. (Resident Evil 5)

As they flew away, Chris wondered aloud whether it was worth fighting, then looked at Sheva and Jill and decided it was, for a future without fear. (Resident Evil 5)

What it means: the man behind almost every disaster since the Spencer Mansion was dead, and so was the last of Spencer's dream of a chosen humanity. Tricell's role was exposed. But the knowledge Wesker and Umbrella had spread didn't die with them. Viruses and bioweapons were now on the open market, and the BSAA's war was far from over. (Resident Evil 5)

What it sets up#

Resident Evil: Revelations 2, set in 2011, picks up threads from Spencer's Wesker Project. Resident Evil 6 brings Chris back in 2012 and 2013, haunted by a new loss, and introduces Jake Muller, Wesker's son, whose blood could stop a new virus. The full order is on the Resident Evil timeline. (Resident Evil: Revelations 2; Resident Evil 6)