Who Are The Connections?
The Connections are an international crime syndicate. They don’t have a logo, a headquarters, or a public face. They’re not a pharmaceutical company like Umbrella was. They’re more like a ghost network. A web of criminals, corrupt officials, and researchers operating entirely in the shadows.
Their business is human trafficking, money laundering, and the creation and sale of biological weapons on the black market. They’re organized criminals who happen to also be building bioweapons.
What makes them different from the villains you’ve seen before in Resident Evil is their philosophy. Umbrella wanted to create monsters. Huge, destructive, terrifying things. The Connections weren’t interested in that. They wanted something far more unsettling: control. Specifically, they wanted a weapon that could take over people’s minds without anyone realizing it was happening.
Where Do They Fit in the Timeline?
To understand The Connections, you need a little context about the world they came from.
Umbrella, the massive pharmaceutical corporation behind most of Resident Evil’s early disasters, collapsed in the early 2000s after the Raccoon City incident became public. That collapse left a huge gap in the illegal bioweapons market. Other players moved in to fill it. Tricell was one of them. The Connections were another.
The Connections is a product of the power vacuum Umbrella left behind.
The Deal That Started Everything
Sometime in the 2000s, The Connections tracked down a woman named Mother Miranda.
Miranda is a complicated figure. She’s a scientist who lost her young daughter, Eva, to a disease in the early twentieth century. In her grief, she discovered something buried beneath her remote European village: a massive underground fungal organism called the Megamycete. She spent the next hundred years experimenting with it, trying to find a way to use it to bring Eva back.
The Connections found her and made a deal. They offered her resources, funding, and scientific support for her research. In exchange, she gave them samples of the fungus and, crucially, genetic material from Eva. That trade is what made everything else possible.
Eveline: A Weapon Disguised as a Child
Eveline, also called E-001, was the result of years of genetic engineering. On the surface, she looked like a little girl. But she’d been designed to produce a substance called the Mutamycete, a form of the Mold, which she could spread to other people. Once someone was infected with her Mold, she could hear their thoughts and eventually take control of their mind entirely.
The idea was terrifying in its simplicity. No explosions, no monsters tearing through a city. Just a child, walking into a room, and quietly rewriting the people around her.
Here’s the problem with engineering a child-like mind into a weapon: you can’t fully control what that mind wants. What Eveline wanted, more than anything, was a real family. She’d been brought into existence as a tool, handed between handlers, and never given anything resembling a normal life. She became obsessed with the idea of having a mother and a home.
The Annabelle and the Disaster in Louisiana
By 2014, The Connections were worried that rival groups were getting close to stealing Eveline. So they arranged to move her to a secure facility in Central America. To avoid suspicion, they disguised the transport as a regular cargo voyage aboard a ship called the Annabelle. Two of their operatives, Mia Winters and Alan Droney, were assigned to travel with Eveline and pose as her parents.
Before she was the ordinary wife of a man named Ethan Winters, Mia was a covert operative for The Connections. She’d kept that life completely hidden from Ethan. Her job on the Annabelle was to act as a maternal figure for Eveline, keeping her calm and cooperative during the journey.
It didn’t work. Eveline fixated on Mia and wanted her to actually be her mother, not just pretending. When that need wasn’t met, she broke containment. She flooded the ship with the Mold, turning the crew into mutated creatures. The ship exploded and washed ashore in the Louisiana bayou, near a rural property owned by a family called the Bakers.
Alan Droney didn’t survive the voyage. After he was infected by Eveline’s Mold, he said something that insulted her. Because the infection had already connected his mind to hers, she heard it, and she accelerated the Mold’s growth in his body. That was it for Alan.
The Baker Family
When the Bakers found Mia and Eveline in the wreckage, they tried to help. Big mistake. That kindness destroyed them. Eveline infected the entire family with the Mold and rewrote their minds. Jack and Marguerite Baker became violent and nearly indestructible. The family home became a trap.
So what did The Connections do when they realized their weapon had gone rogue and taken an innocent family with it? They quietly backed off. They left the Bakers to survive however they could in their horrific new state, and they sent one of their operatives to monitor the situation from the inside.
That operative was Lucas Baker, the Bakers’ own son. The Connections gave Lucas a serum that freed his mind from Eveline’s control while letting him keep the physical benefits of the Mold infection. In exchange, Lucas secretly worked for them, setting up a high-tech monitoring station in nearby salt mines and feeding data back to the syndicate. He played along as a loving, obedient son while his family suffered right next to him.
The nightmare went on for three years. It only ended when Mia, still partially under Eveline’s influence, sent a message that brought Ethan Winters to the house in 2017. That’s where Resident Evil 7 begins.
What Happened After RE7?
Chris Redfield and a reformed version of Umbrella, operating as Blue Umbrella, eventually raided the Baker property and took out Lucas. By that point, Eveline had physically aged into an elderly woman because her engineered body simply couldn’t sustain itself long-term. Ethan destroyed her.
But The Connections? They walked away clean. No raid, arrest, or public exposure. Unlike Umbrella, which collapsed loudly and publicly, The Connections have never faced any real consequences for what they did to Eveline, the Annabelle’s crew, or the Baker family. They’re still out there. And because they’ve always operated as a shadow network, there’s no obvious way to dismantle them.
Why Does Any of This Matter?
The Connections are the reason Resident Evil 7 and Village happen at all. Eveline exists because of them. The Baker family’s suffering exists because of them. Even Miranda’s involvement in Village connects back to the deal she made with them years earlier.
They represent a shift in what Resident Evil’s villains look like, a corporation with shareholders, or a mad scientist in a lab coat. They’re a criminal network that saw an opportunity, exploited it, and disappeared before anyone could hold them accountable.
