Night City makes it easy to confuse becoming a legend with having a life worth living. Mercenaries replace their flesh with increasingly powerful chrome, take gigs they have no business surviving, and hope somebody remembers their name after it all inevitably goes to hell. The first season of Netflix's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners made a devastating romance out of that bargain.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which continues the anthology series on Oct. 20, finds something far more hopeful in the same brutal world. Across 10 episodes, director Kai Ikarashi and the teams at CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger deliver another spectacular collision of corporate cruelty, dangerous technology, and people pushing themselves past their limits. The ingredients are familiar, sometimes a little too much.
But an extraordinary ensemble and the relationships that develop among its members make this return to Night City richer, more rewarding, and downright better. Edgerunners 2 initially threatens to repeat its predecessor. It opens with a heavily augmented man succumbing to cyberpsychosis after a gig goes south.
He goes on a grisly killing spree. Another warning about how too much chrome is always a bad idea? This time, the man at the center of the carnage has a life to navigate afterward.
Once a celebrated edgerunner known as King, Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown) emerges as a shell of his former self, hulking arms replaced by frail robot limbs that make C-3PO look buff. Following a burnout like this who lived rather than got obliterated by Militech somehow gives a familiar setup a compelling new direction. That shift matters because, for all its visual brilliance, the first season of Edgerunners left me emotionally frustrated.
Lucy beckoning David Martinez across a simulated lunar landscape still puts a lump in my throat. I believed in their happiness a lot more than I believed in his compulsion to endanger it through increasingly extreme cybernetic augmentation. Season 1’s focus on their doomed romance left little room for us to get invested in the supporting cast, even when Maine’s breakdown in “Girl on Fire” delivered some of the series’ most spectacular animation.
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