Netflix does not make anyone wait for Night City this time. All ten episodes of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” went up at once on Tuesday, October 20th, four years after Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red broke a lot of hearts with the first season, and the early reviews are pulling in opposite directions. IGN scored the season a 9 out of 10 and said it “delivers the gory, action-packed goods, even if it doesn’t quite hit the highs of its predecessor.” Mashable went further and called it “even better than its heartbreaking predecessor,” while Kotaku came away mostly underwhelmed and Ready Steady Cut called the whole thing a bust.
This is a standalone story with a new cast, directed by Kai Ikarashi, who also directed the sixth episode of the original series, with Bartosz Sztybor back as showrunner, writer and producer. The four leads are Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown), a washed-up edgerunner once known as King, D (Nazeeh Tarsha), a nomad out for revenge, Roman Carax (Valeria Rodriguez), a 12-year-old cinephile with a camcorder, and Talia (Kimoy Lee), a teenager who has swapped most of her body for chrome. The new story trades one doomed hero for four people who keep colliding in the dark, and whether that trade pays off is what the reviews are fighting about. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2”, including its ending and who dies, and for the first season.
The new story trades one doomed hero for four people who keep colliding in the dark, and whether that trade pays off is what the reviews are fighting about.”
The first episode opens on a heist that curdles. Weak is helping his crew lift a crate from an Arasaka compound when cyberpsychosis takes him over, and Emily, one of his own crew, dies in the chaos, which ends the team for good. Roman happens to be filming from the roadside as the getaway car skids to a stop, so the whole breakdown ends up on his tape. Weak wakes in a hospital with his expensive chrome stripped out and swapped for cheaper, safer parts, and the show’s first big question is what a legend is worth once the hardware that made him one is gone. Roman, meanwhile, lives in a city where braindances, recorded sensory experiences, have all but killed traditional film, and he takes a job filming the Maelstrom gang in exchange for a 35mm camera, according to IGN.
That job puts him in Maelstrom’s hands, and a netrunner called D, who is in the building on his own business, tears through the gang and walks him out alive. D’s business is a massacre. He is a survivor of the Snake Nation nomads, whose camp was wiped out years earlier, and he wants whoever did it. Elsewhere, Avida, an old flame of Weak’s, asks him to find her daughter Talia, who has fallen in with the Maelstrom gang and replaced nearly everything that can be replaced. Talia and Roman cross paths early, and The Review Geek’s recaps have her warming to him once she discovers what a camera can do, which is the first sign that the season’s four threads are going to braid together.
The third episode is where the story finds its engine. D pulls a chip off a body at a Maelstrom hideout, and the chip carries Capri, a digital construct that GamesRadar+ describes as unpredictable and one who “revels in chaos.” According to The Review Geek, she takes over D’s body and hacks cars and electronics across the city, and D, far from fighting her, cheers her on. Talia’s father, Kiril, is an executive at the corporation Kang Tao and wants the chip back too, so a revenge story, a family drama and a corporate hunt all start tugging at the same object. Capri herself, per GamesRadar+ and The Cinemaholic, is an AI construct Arasaka built off the books, and she needs a compatible human host to function.
Episodes four and five pull Talia into it. The Review Geek has Capri turning on Talia at the end of the fourth episode and taking her over in the fifth, and Talia’s illness becomes the clock the rest of the season runs on. She is terminally ill, and the chrome that has been holding her body together is the same chrome pushing her toward cyberpsychosis. Weak, who knows that road better than anyone, promises to keep her from going over the edge, while D leans harder on Capri, who by The Review Geek’s account makes him feel like a kid again and helps him wipe out a rival gang. The pairing pays off in an unsettling way, because the one thing that makes D happy is also the thing making him dangerous.
By the sixth episode, D’s revenge has turned public. As The Review Geek tells it, he has Roman cut his footage into a message, broadcasts it on every billboard in the city, and picks up a following of fans who cheer his attacks on Arasaka. Roman, who started this as a way to earn a camera, watches his friend turn into a symbol, and GamesRadar+ notes that Roman is more witness than participant through much of it. Weak, meanwhile, learns about Soulkiller, the Arasaka program from “Cyberpunk 2077” that digitizes a mind onto a chip and can overwrite its host. It is the season’s biggest tie to the game, and IGN argues that it makes the episodes feel like a small chapter in a much larger saga.
Soulkiller also hands Weak a long shot, which is that Kang Tao might have a way to save Talia. The Arasaka scientist behind Capri, Kyoko, floats through the middle episodes, jumping between Arasaka, Kang Tao and Roman by Radio Times’ account, and her flashbacks in the seventh episode show how badly the installation process went, with only about 7 percent of test subjects surviving it and none lasting beyond 48 hours, according to The Review Geek. Avida and Weak slip into Kang Tao for data and find, in the same recap, bodies stockpiled for the project. It reads like the cure Weak wants and the trap he should fear, and the show leaves both readings open until the eighth episode.
The eighth episode is the one that breaks the story open. A source tells D that Arasaka sent a team to his clan’s camp because he was compatible with the Capri program, and that the extraction went bad when the job was subcontracted to Maelstrom, whose trigger-happy mercenaries turned it into a slaughter. D had been away from the camp at the time, so the slaughter he has been avenging happened because of him. In The Review Geek’s account, a riot D stirs up pulls security away while Weak and Avida break into the Kang Tao lab for a body to save Talia, and Kiril is waiting. The raid fails and Avida is shot, then dies in Weak’s arms. The Review Geek called it the best episode of the season so far.
The ninth episode finishes what the eighth started. With Avida gone, Talia is lost in grief, and Kiril, once he learns that Capri has settled inside his daughter, has Kyoko slot the shard into Talia’s neck. Talia lets Capri take her over on a single condition, that Capri kill Kiril as gruesomely as possible. In The Review Geek’s account, Weak tells Kiril that Avida had named Weak himself as Talia’s father, and Kiril sneers that a simple test would have settled it. GamesRadar+ reads the evidence as pointing to Kiril, though by the end the point hardly matters. Capri, in Talia’s body, starts to hunt.
The finale, “Then Everyone Went Home,” is a big, loud and strangely forgiving hour. Talia and Capri chase Kiril through the streets and wall themselves in a shell of scrap that GamesRadar+ ties to “Akira,” Weak tries to get to Kiril first and is shot, only to be saved by the urn holding Avida’s ashes, and Kang Tao lures the monster out to the Badlands for an airstrike. Kyoko answers with a device GamesRadar+ calls an “EMP on steroids,” the missiles and the pulse hit together, and Kiril and Kyoko die in the wreckage, Kiril in a death GamesRadar+ calls gruesome. Talia and D both survive.
D pulls the other half of Capri’s chip out of Talia and reunites with the construct, and he no longer wants revenge, only to see her again. As Arasaka and Militech forces close in, he thinks about David Martinez, and the finale confirms that the “D” stands for David too, before he cuts down the first wave and, at Capri’s urging, launches himself toward a distant light that might be a star or a satellite. He gives Roman’s camera a last smile. Omi later says he “went out with a bang,” and the outlets disagree on what that means, with GamesRadar+ leaning toward death, Radio Times calling it open to interpretation, and Sztybor saying he knows what happens next and is not telling.
Everyone else gets something close to a happy ending, which is the real shock after the first season’s bloodbath. Talia survives with her chrome removed, though IGN and Radio Times both note that her illness may only be on hold. Weak, who by Radio Times’ account has left his “King” jacket behind, takes her to a rehab clinic and declares that he wants to live, while Roman runs off to keep filming and the camera pans up to a twinkling star. Sztybor told IGN that “Cyberpunk originated from noir, and in noir, there is always a character versus the city,” and argued that the first season’s ending was a happy one in its own way. Gizmodo called the hopeful finish a little contrived but welcome, while Ready Steady Cut respected the attempt and found it less powerful than the original’s.
Where does that leave the season? Somewhere between its two sets of critics, and closer to the warmer one than the colder. The story does sprawl, and Kotaku’s complaint that “Roman, Talia, and D are in the same solar system, but there’s no real gravitational pull between them” lands, especially in a first half where the threads barely touch. Then the back half pulls them together, the animation never stops being a thrill, and the finale sends its people off with more mercy than anyone expected. Gizmodo said the season “will only leave a bruise you don’t remember getting once the credits roll,” which sounds about right, and for a Night City story a bruise might be a kind of mercy.
Outside the show, CD Projekt Red is using the premiere to pull the game closer. Hideo Kojima was announced as reprising his “Cyberpunk 2077” role as the braindance director Hideyoshi Oshima in the season, and the studio announced Update 2.5, a free update with content inspired by the anime, for October 22nd on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, with the Nintendo Switch 2 version to follow.
What Do You Think? Did D die flying toward that light, or did he and Capri finally get out? Was a mostly hopeful ending the right call for a show that made its name on heartbreak? And does an ensemble of four lives dilute what the first season did with one, or is that the point?
See you on the next binge!
