Warning: Spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 ahead.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 may be its own standalone anime rather than a direct sequel to the first, but it turns out this latest adaptation of Cyberpunk: 2077’s video game world is still connected to David Martinez in more ways than one.
In D’s search for the truth about what happened to this clan, the previous protagonist came up in a very surprising place.
The first mention of David Martinez in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 comes in episode 4, shortly after D installs the chip containing the AI personality Capri into his head. Soon after, D and Roman sneak into one of Arasaka’s offices and use Capri’s abilities to reach Data Archive B — hoping for some answers about Arasaka and the Maelstrom gang’s role in the attack on D’s Snake Nation clan.
The one soul up there, an arrogant manager in charge of the office, Kitano, is reluctant to give them anything, so D tortures him with hacks until he temporarily falls unconscious. Digging into the files, Capri quickly uncovers what later turns out to be Arasaka’s list of original candidates for potential human hosts — which requires an incredibly high tolerance for cyberware.
View Green Video on the source websiteAlong with D being on said list, with his inclusion being the very reason for Arasaka and Maelstrom going to the Snake Plan in the first place as they were hunting for him, Roman points out that David Martinez is on that list as well.
Kitano reaffirms that David Martinez is definitely dead, but he and his Edgerunner gang pushed Arasaka to its limits — and that the same belief that David had, where he thought he could topple the megacorp, would kill D as well.
Interestingly, if you’ve recently rewatched the original Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, you’ll remember that Arasaka, especially the minor antagonist Tanaka, wanted David in their custody when they discovered his special cyberware tolerance with the Sandevistan (the assumed reason they wanted him was to use him as a lab rat for more tech).
By being on this list, it also implies that "Project Capricorn", Capri’s titular programme that was officially shut down, was actually one of the projects that Arasaka wanted to use David for testing in — along with the cyberskeleton project.
As Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 gets to episode 8 and D and Yupi meet with Kate Miller, David’s link to D’s story ends up being even bigger than expected.
Under the agreement that she’d be able to leave alive, as D’s gang has been on a rampage killing Arasaka higher-ups, Kate reveals how Maelstrom was mistakenly hired to capture D and accidentally ended up killing his clan. What’s more, she reveals it was the executive Tanaka who gave the orders for the operation in the first place.
As Yupi points out, this is normally where D would finally get to claim his revenge, since he finally knows the identity of the man who was behind the slaughter of his family; however, as Miller also reveals, Tanaka has already been dead since Edgerunners season 1, thanks to Maine, David, and co. By abducting and torturing him, the idea was to hack into his mind and extract secret files for Faraday.
Once security forces reached the safehouse they were in at the time, Tanaka was caught in the crossfire and was brutally killed thanks to Maine.
With that, despite being an accident, there was no one responsible left to kill in penance for D’s clan. Essentially, the actions of the old Edgerunner crew cause D’s path for vengeance to come to an abrupt, unsatisfying end.
Ultimately, D quickly killed Kate Miller out of anger toward the fact that there was nobody left to take his bloodlust out on — vaporising her with Capri’s electrical powers. As a silver lining, he did at least avenge David Martinez.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is available to stream right now on Netflix.
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