The new season of Cyberpunk 2077 animated series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 has been released. The new series is available to stream now, on Netflix. Today, we take a look at Episode Three.
Synopsis –
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 pulls you back into Night City, where lives become entangled to the extreme. Weak, a washed-up cyberpunk legend, is now forced to live without chrome as he searches for a sense of purpose in a world that’s passed him by. Meanwhile, the deadly nomad D sets out on a path to revenge that brings him close to corpo secrets never meant to be found. Across this ten-episode standalone series, uncover a story of family, obsession, legacy — and how your lens reflects the stories of the people around you.
The first season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners debuted on Netflix in September of 2022, to rave reviews, instantly building a devoted fanbase. It has been a long wait for those fans since the finale of the ten episode season aired nearly four years ago. That wait, however, is over. Season 2 is not a continuation of the story from the first season (and the few surviving characters), but instead focuses on a new cast of characters.
The full 10 episode season was dropped in one go onto Netflix. It would be madness (or perhaps cyberpsychosis) to try to encompass the full 10 episode season in one post, so much as we did with The Ghost in the Shell series, we are going to cover one episode per week as if it were on a weekly release schedule – after all, it’s not like everyone is gonna binge it all in one day? Right?!
Episode One introduced us to the main cast of characters, and it was a wider cast than season one. Episode Two brought some of the characters together, giving us a bit more idea of what the plot of the season was going to be, and how the characters fit in with each other.
As Episode Three opens, Roman asks a drunken D about nomad clans, who shows he is clearly haunted by the loss of his friends. King is at Maelstrom, as Talia watches on. She denies all knowledge of him as they work him over. King tries to fight them off, but his gun of choice too powerful for his cut-price chrome. They threaten to send him cyberpsycho, but Talia intervenes on the pretext that they’re supposed to be carrying out surgery on her. They blame her for getting raided by a corpo army, she draws a gun and a fight ensues. Maelstrom pretty quickly get the upper hand, but King manages to knock down one of them, retrieve his gun, and then show them he can still use it, sending Maelstrom running. So a teenage girl and a broken down old man get the better of a very dangerous street gang? A lot was done in the opening episodes to show they weren’t to be messed with, but they were run off pretty easily. In the aftermath, Talia might be showing signs of going cyberpsycho.
The man who hired King’s crew to get the chip turns out to be Avida’s husband, and hired him on her recommendation – this is two things that Avida has effectively hired King for, does she still have feelings for him, or is she playing him? There’s a whole lot of trouble going down and she seems to be connected with both sides of it. They’ve confirmed Arasaka didn’t recover it, and MaxTac don’t have it, and they believe a mysterious 3rd party somehow got hold of it.
Flashback to someone at Arasaka during the heist, trying to stop the chip, or ‘Capri’ as they call it, from being stolen using the security system. When they see the chip leaving the premises, they sneak out and grab it themselves. D and Roman are back at the unmarked Arasaka building, where the mysterious Araska employee had taken the retrieved chip to. They go around in circles, until a strange signal brings D to a specific room. The chip is plugged into a nearly dead body. D removes it, and then inserts it, which seemingly allows ‘Capri’ to take control of his body. They escape the building, leaving the mysterious Arasaka employee devastated in their wake, and a confused Roman trying to follow.
D and the entity fight over D’s meat body. The entity is wirelessly hacking things around them, and then, when realising it isn’t going to be able to force D out of his own body, leaves out into the open, and encourages D to hack too. Cars are hacked, and then assailant’s guns, the entity helping D to do it too despite his reluctance and confusion. This is a powerful entity, hacking the electric grid and creating a blackout as far as the eye can see. It seems this entity is now effectively a devil on D’s shoulder, inspiring him into causing mayhem alongside it.
Talia is at a ripperdoc clinic with King, and this scene is intercut with the mayhem that D and the entity have caused, a fleet of irate drivers chasing D and shooting at him, just pushing him to do more damage, whilst Roman can only look on. Talia is telling King that she doesn’t want his help, that she is nothing like him. Then, a large crane hook that D has caused to drop crashes down into the clinic where King and Talia are, narrowly missing them. Talia isn’t harmed, but Avida is angry at King anyway. He breaks the news to her about Talia potentially being affected by cyberpsychosis, and advises they need to get Talia to trade down the chrome. King asks about Talia’s obsession with chrome, and Avida seems to know something about that which she hasn’t yet revealed.
Roman apologises to Talia for letting her down, and she lashes out by suggesting she couldn’t have her surgery because he didn’t turn up. She softens that, however, by telling him she watched his video of her, and it was pretty nova. At the end of the episode, the entity asks D if he enjoyed the mayhem they caused, but he’s pretty out of it, and then the entity finds it is stuck to D.
Much like the last episode, episode three wastes no time, pushing the story forward with every frame. We find out more about the entity, and who was trying to get it. What we don’t yet know is why – there seem to have been a number of interested parties, but all we know so far is that it can hack seemingly anything, and has a penchant for chaos. Were Arasaka keeping it contained, or is there a hope to harness its power, tame its chaos, and use it for evil purposes? With the news that Avida’s husband hired King for the heist, we can see how all the characters are inter-related, though quite how they are going to ultimately collide isn’t yet clear. Avida has information to drop about why Talia is so obsessed with body augmentation, which presumably we’ll hear about in the next episode. Three episodes in, and the season is going well, though it definitely lacks that emotional core of the first season so far. Maybe the revelations about Talia will help with that?
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is directed by Kai Ikarashi, with character designs by Ichigo Kanno and a story written by Bartosz Sztybor of CD PROJEKT RED and Masahiko Otsuka. There are 10 episodes in total, and they were released all at once on Netflix on Tuesday 20th October.
You can watch a trailer for the series below –
CYBERSTOPIA – Discord
Cyberstopia now has a Discord server! Please join us and build a community for cyberpunk and dystopia discussion. We have sections for all the latest news, channels for discussion of The Ghost in the Shell series, as well as upcoming shows like Edgrerunners 2, Blade Runner 2099, and Neuromancer, as well as an author section with a number of cyberpunk authors talking about their work, giving updates on your current projects, etc… It’s a great place to hang out.
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