AmateurCritic

Before events of OFF: Once upon a time there was a huge pandemic. Although it wasn’t that fatal, the disease seriously messed up people’s heads, to the point of trying to murder anyone/thing in sight. Especially loved ones. They didn’t seem to age, sort of like a zombie virus without active decay. It was also incredibly contagious, but that’s important later. It was so bad that most healthy people forgot that the infected were still actual human beings, so “putting down” loved ones became a normal occurrence.

The Cure: Then, during some highly experimental 80s style research, a definitely not licensed doctor discovered that the disease could be cured by slowly replacing the patient’s blood with oil. Side effects included: severe memory loss, body disfigurement, emotional instability, and childlike learning/imprinting behaviors (among other things). As a result, a Cave Johnson-esque person(can’t remember if it was the person who discovered the cure or not) decided to use the cure as a sort of re-education tool. Discount Cave basically cured these people for free, brainwashed them, stuck them in uniforms and rented them out as a semi-competent labor force.

Government: Obviously, it didn’t take long for these cured people to be selectively brainwashed for specific tasks based on demand, like blue collar or white collar work. Or the military. That’s how Discount Cave got into the government. Since he provided the armies and several countries wanted his backing, governments gave him more and more power (and money) to use his resources. He eventually used this to take control of these customer governments and integrate them into a multinational corporation/governing entity.

Holocaust: From there, he could pretty much do whatever he wanted, so he started having his minions capture millions of sick people(who the public didn’t care about) and quite a few healthy people too. He claimed the disease had infected people without anyone noticing. He turned out to be right, because the cure worked the same for the not crazy violent people as it did everyone else. Since the disease was so contagious, most, if not everyone was already infected, just not everyone went crazy trying to kill people. Discount Cave used the resulting panic to justify putting all his dissenters in trains and brainwashing them too.

Relapses: Unfortunately the emotional instability of the “cured” individuals was not conducive to constant slave labor. Resulting in more than a few “relapses”. Relapses are basically the Elsens when they become burnt. Their oil-blood explodes out their heads and they go back to trying to kill everyone. Some people find a way to stop the relapses at home, but the majority of relapsed people just got killed.

Rebellion: Some people rebelled against Discount Cave and ended up either killed by relapsers or brainwashed. Eventually Discounted Cave is killed by a rebel mole who had been his protégé. This mole was Enoch. Now without a leader/father figure, the relapse rate grew out of control and the remaining “uncured” citizens were literally ripped apart. Followed by the “relapsed” ripping each other apart.

The Room: The events in Hugo’s picture took place, but instead of Japhet helping Enoch out of a literal hole, he helped Enoch out of the metaphorical hole caused by killing Discount Cave. He somehow either got rid of the “relapsed” population or he got them back to their brainwashed selves the same way some did during the relapse outbreak.

TL;DR:

The cure to the Zombie Pandemic is used to take over the world. Enoch kills big baddie and Japhet helps.