Spoilers ahead.
Last night, I sat down with a greasy pizza and a few bottles of beer and braced myself for 10 episodes of heartbreak. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners' second season is out, and it follows in the footsteps of Studio Trigger's beloved, and tragic, debut. My expectations were way off.
Not because it wasn't good: Edgerunners Season 2 is fantastic. Packed with a wonderful cast of troubled characters, their story brought to life with gorgeous and often unorthodox animation. The soundtrack, the voice acting... Quality-wise the bar is as high as the first season. What surprised me was the decision to bring something many may find peculiar given Cyberpunk's dire setting and desperate energy. The show is hopeful. Defiant, even.
Spoilers for the show below.
In the show's opening episode, we are introduced to characters at rock bottom. King, having suffered from cyberpsychosis, has had his augmentations stripped out of his body, and lost his home. D's in the midst of a lonely journey of revenge, while Talia is rubbing elbows with the Maelstrom gang. Roman, a 12-year-old, is broke and struggling to pursue filmmaking in a world that's left the medium behind. In the pursuit of money, he is nearly diced up.
These characters have all the reason in the world to lose themselves to despair, to burn out. Some almost do. However, as the season progresses, they each find a reason to push on, to live in spite of the odds. By the end of the season, while their problems may not have vanished, those who can choose to push on regardless of what life may throw at them. There are more smiles and laughs in the final episode than there are in the first. In the world of Cyberpunk, that's surprising. Defiant.
Violence in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 is not treated as some awesome, cathartic spectacle. Through the literal lens of Roman, it's seen as the monstrous act it is. Characters are urged to not go out and kill people - even those who arguably deserve it - consistently throughout the show. In the first season, we saw the brutal reality of killing in David's descent into cyberpsychosis. In this season, characters without that particular affliction are confronted with the futility of the act.
Around halfway through the season, a cowering lady is half-heartedly executed by a side character, and the show lingers on the scene as her head slumps down onto the ground. It's a grisly moment, a siren blaring starkly, broadcasting a very simple message: violence is not the answer.
There is a sentiment that there are no good endings in Night City, and it's a fair belief to have. Magda Zych, senior writer at CD Projekt Red, described the game's story as a 'noir tragedy', and the dystopian world of the tabletop RPG presents a similarly sad motif. Crime is rampant, people are victimised for no reason, people are chewed up and spat out. This was true in Mike Pondsmith's original vision for Night City, it was true in Cyberpunk 2077, and it's true in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2.
So there's courage in living as best you can in spite of the injustice of the world. If the first season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners could be aligned, roughly, to 2077's 'The Sun' ending (where V charges into Arasaka in a blaze of glory), Season 2 can be seen as a parallel to 'The Star' ending, where V takes what time they have left and spends it with their friends and loved ones, divorced from the grinding reality of Night City's grinding concrete. Some NPCs react to this decision during the credits with scorn; it is the antithesis of the 'burn bright, die young' Edgerunner philosophy.
I imagine this season may not have met the expectations of many viewers, who are left cold by how different it is from the first season. And yeah, it would have been entirely acceptable to rehash the same sort of story we saw in 2022 again here, and many people - including myself - would have loved it. But to choose not to do that, to steer the narrative into a totally different direction, is smart. You might even say... defiant.