Resident Evil 7 Story Explained: the Bakers, Eveline and the Endings

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard came out in January 2017 and moved the series into first person, with a new hero and a single house in the Louisiana swamps. It's set in July 2017, after Resident Evil 6, and it starts the Winters story that ends in Resident Evil Village. Ethan Winters goes looking for his wife and finds the Baker family. This page covers the whole plot, both endings and the two story DLCs, so it has full spoilers. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Before the story begins#

In October 2014 a hurricane battered the Gulf coast and a tanker called the Annabelle went missing. The Baker family, Jack, Marguerite and their adult children Lucas and Zoe, lived on an old plantation outside Dulvey. After the storm, Jack found an unconscious girl and brought her home. She called herself Eveline. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The Daughters episode shows that night from Zoe's side. Within hours of Eveline's arrival, Marguerite was vomiting insects, Jack drowned his wife in the bathtub, and Lucas was dragged off to receive what Jack called "the gift". Jack, Marguerite and Lucas came back from it changed. Zoe was infected too but kept her mind, and spent the next three years trapped with a family that wanted her dead. The Bakers had found the tanker's other survivor, Mia Winters, unconscious in their trailer. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Daughters)

Meanwhile Mia's husband Ethan had been told nothing. To him, Mia simply vanished on a babysitting job in 2014 and was presumed dead. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The guest house and the Bakers#

In July 2017 Ethan got an email from Mia asking him to come and find her in Dulvey. He went, found the overgrown Baker estate, and in the basement of the guest house found Mia locked in a cell. She was frightened and told him they had to leave before "Daddy" found them. As they looked for a way out she turned on him, violent and not herself, and he fought her off. A phone rang. A woman, Zoe, told him there was a way out through the attic. Then Mia came back with a chainsaw and cut off his left hand, and once he had stopped her, Jack Baker smashed through a wall and knocked Ethan out. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Ethan woke at the dinner table with his hand stapled back on. Jack, Marguerite and Lucas tried to make him eat a plate of human remains, while a silent old woman in a wheelchair sat with them. Ethan got free. Over the next hours he learned the Bakers could not be killed in any normal way. Jack came back from gunshots to the head and from being run over. A sheriff's deputy who came to check on the house was killed in front of him. Ethan beat Jack in the garage and again in the basement, and got the key out of the main house. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Zoe kept calling. She explained that she and Mia were both infected and that a serum could cure them, if Ethan collected the parts. In an old house beyond the yard, Marguerite, now mutated and commanding swarms of insects, hunted him through the rooms until he killed her and took what he needed. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Lucas, the serum and the choice#

Lucas, the only Baker who seemed to enjoy what was happening, captured Mia and Zoe and made Ethan play his "birthday party" in a barn of traps, the same trap room a captured TV cameraman, Clancy Jarvis, had been put through on a videotape Ethan found. Ethan beat the puzzle and Lucas ran. In Zoe's trailer she made two doses of serum. Jack, now a huge mass of Mold and limbs, burst in. Ethan used one dose to kill him for good. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

That left one. Ethan had to choose who to cure. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

If he chose Zoe, Mia was devastated, and Ethan promised to send help. On a boat through the swamp, Zoe told him the outbreak had come from Mia and a girl washing ashore from a shipwreck. Then the water erupted, Zoe was killed, and Ethan was knocked out. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

If he chose Mia, Zoe stayed behind bitterly, and Ethan and Mia set off together, only to be thrown from their boat near the wreck of the Annabelle. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Either way, Ethan had a vision of Jack, sane at last, who told him a girl named Eveline controlled everyone she infected and begged him to kill her. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The Annabelle and Mia's secret#

The story switches to Mia, waking on the wreck. A girl kept appearing to her and calling her mother. Eveline made her watch an old videotape, and Mia remembered. She hadn't been babysitting in 2014. She and her partner were company operatives escorting a bioweapon codenamed E-001, Eveline, to a buyer. She was posing as Eveline's mother on the trip. Eveline broke out, infected the crew, drowned the ship in Mold and wrecked it in the storm. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

In the Mia path, she found Ethan, gave him a vial of Eveline's tissue and held off Eveline's control long enough to lock him out of the ship so she couldn't hurt him. In the Zoe path, Mia, hurt by his choice, couldn't fight Eveline off; she handed over the vial and then attacked him, and he had to kill her. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The salt mine and Eveline#

Ethan followed a passage from the shore into an old salt mine, where he found a hidden laboratory. Its files explained everything. Eveline was an E-Series bioweapon, grown from a fungus, the Mold, that let her infect people and control their minds. The infected gained huge powers of regeneration and lost their sanity. Eveline had been built to want a family, and that want had turned into the force behind the whole outbreak. The files also showed Lucas had been reporting to the company behind Eveline all along, immune to her control. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Using the lab and Mia's vial, Ethan made a toxin that could kill Eveline and fought his way back to the main house. Eveline threw hallucinations at him, then he reached her and injected her. She wasn't a child. She was the old woman in the wheelchair. Eveline aged at an unnatural speed, and the girl was how she saw herself. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The ending explained#

The toxin made Eveline mutate into a mountain of Mold that swallowed the house. A helicopter arrived and dropped Ethan a powerful handgun, and he finished her. A soldier introduced himself as Chris Redfield and pulled Ethan out. In the Mia ending, Mia was waiting in the helicopter. In the Zoe ending, he found only her belongings and threw them out of the door. As the helicopter flew away, its side showed the Umbrella logo, now in blue. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

The ending answers what happened in Dulvey but opens two bigger questions. Who made Eveline? And why is Chris flying with Umbrella? The DLC answers both. The Mia path is the one the series continues: Resident Evil Village picks up with Ethan and Mia living in Europe under BSAA protection and reveals that Jack actually killed Ethan in the guest house, and only the Mold kept him moving. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard; Resident Evil Village)

Not a Hero and End of Zoe#

Not a Hero. Chris Redfield, working with the rebuilt Umbrella, went into the salt mine after Lucas, who had abducted members of his team. Lucas strapped a bomb to Chris's wrist and killed his hostages one by one. Chris froze the device with liquid nitrogen and found Lucas's lab, which showed Lucas had sold out his own employers, a group called the Connections, and was feeding Eveline's data to an unknown buyer. Chris killed the mutated Lucas and destroyed the transfer. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Not a Hero)

End of Zoe. If Mia was saved, Zoe was left behind and later found turned to crystal in the swamp. Her uncle Joe Baker, Jack's brother and a fighter who lived in the bayou, took her from the Umbrella soldiers, found a full cure at their base and fought a giant Mold creature, the Swamp Man, to keep her. The Swamp Man was Jack's last mutated remnant. Joe finished him with an Umbrella power gauntlet and cured Zoe. Chris arrived and handed her the phone: Ethan had kept his promise to send help. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, End of Zoe)

What it sets up#

The Connections, the Mold and Ethan's strange survival all carry straight into Resident Evil Village, set three and a half years later. Before that, the old series closed in 2013 with Resident Evil 6 and the spin-off Resident Evil: Revelations 2. For where Dulvey sits among every other outbreak, see the Resident Evil timeline. (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard; Resident Evil Village)