Chess in the Stream: Netflix's Resident Evil Mutates Chess

As you probably already know, Resident Evil began as a video game almost 30 years ago, then a series of films starring Milla Jovovich, then a short anime series, and now an eight-episode live action series on Netflix.

This newest iteration has received generally negative reviews, and if you like your chess depicted accurately, well, it misses the mark there, too.

In Episode 6, we see a chess set as if a game has been abandoned.

Here's a close-up look at the board.

The first thing to notice is that the board is oriented incorrectly, with h1 as a dark square instead of a light. If that wasn't bad enough, the white king and queen are in reversed positions.

As near as I can tell, with the board turned properly, the position depicted above would look like this:

Yikes.

Of course, it's just a brief shot, and has no effect on anything. But if you dress a movie set to include a chessboard and pieces, it's just as easy to do it right as to do it wrong. You wouldn't show a baseball game with the runners going clockwise around the bases, or backgammon with 12-sided dice.

Perhaps the explanation is that the T-virus mutated chess the same way it mutates everything else with which it comes into contact.