What did the Raccoon City Police Department actually know before Resident Evil 2 begins? All of it was already inside the building, in writing. Nobody looked.
Welcome to The Raccoon Insider Podcast, and to our second season: Fall of the R.P.D. This season is about one building. The Raccoon City Police Department, and the people who worked in it. Not the city. Not the outbreak. The station.
Everybody knows how it ends. Almost nobody has seen how it started, because no game has ever shown you this building working.
In this episode we spend one night inside a working police station. The twentieth of September, 1998. A Sunday. Six officers off sick and everybody calling it flu. A sergeant out at the sewer outflows on his own, because there was nobody left to send with him. A locked office with a fax machine that keeps starting up behind the door. And a watchman walking his rounds who has already written the last line of his diary.
In this episode:
- The April water story in the Daily Raccoon, and the year of rising readings behind it.
- Don Weller, Umbrella's own courier through the sewers, and the first infection anybody wrote down.
- Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine's mansion reports: received, filed, and discredited from the top.
- The federal reply about Chief Brian Irons that printed inside a sealed S.T.A.R.S. office.
- Irons himself: the ledger in his own handwriting, the art, the statue, and the nerve gas he signed for.
- Rodney Gray in the cells, and what he said when the questioning was started again.
- A west wing six men down, and the version going round that it is not flu.
- Sergeant Neil Carlsen's patrol report, and what Marvin Branagh made of it.
- George Scott's diary, four entries, ending on the twelfth of September.
Built from the station's own paperwork, read end to end: the Watchman's Diary, the Secretary's Diary, the Chief's Diary, Mail to the Chief, the Patrol Report, the Fax and the Security Manual, alongside the newspapers, notices and diaries the city left lying around outside the station. Where somebody left us a surname and nothing else, we say so, and the gap is filled with creative licence rather than left blank.
The Raccoon Insider makes narrative deep dives into the Resident Evil universe: established canon, the in-game files and real-world sources, strung together with a dash of creative licence to bridge the gaps the games leave blank.
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Not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with Capcom Co., Ltd. All Resident Evil trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. This is a transformative work of commentary, lore analysis and dramatised storytelling, made under Fair Use. Invented scenes bridge established canon and are dramatisation, not fact.
