You all know I was a huge fan of the first season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. That show got me through a very tough period of night shifts, while Cyberpunk 2077 became a surprisingly solid companion during my chemotherapy.
Both properties are science fiction, but you’d have to be a real gonk not to see elements of our own possible future reflected in Night City.
Corporate power running unchecked. People becoming increasingly dependent on technology. The human body itself becoming something that can be upgraded, modified and monetised. A society where almost everything has a price attached to it.
Yet what makes Cyberpunk so compelling is that it looks beyond the sex, violence and neon-soaked excess the genre is famous for. Underneath all of that, it gives us these tiny slivers of bittersweet hope to hold onto. Because, after all:
There are no happy endings in Night City.
Goodbye, David and Lucy
Look, I’m going to miss David and Lucy. But their story is done.
If you somehow haven’t watched the first season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, I highly recommend it. The series is beautiful, brutal and will probably break your heart in the best possible way.
Rather than trying to recreate David’s crew, Season 2 is introducing us to a completely new collection of Night City misfits.
First up is Roman Carax, voiced by Momoka Terasawa in Japanese and Valeria Rodriguez in English. Roman is a young cinephile obsessed with documenting the truth, which already sounds like an interesting perspective through which to explore Night City.
Then we have Talia Yang, voiced by Akari Kitō and Kimoy Lee. Talia is an independent, no-nonsense young woman who was initially raised in a corporate environment before somehow ending up with Maelstrom.
Yes.
Maelstrom. The cyberware-obsessed gang filled with some of the most genuinely psychotic people wandering the streets of Night City. I’m guessing there is quite a story behind that career move.
Then there’s Weak Kingsley, voiced by Kentarō Tone and the legendary Clancy Brown.
Yes, that Clancy Brown — Lex Luthor, Mr. Krabs and the Kurgan. Kingsley is a veteran edgerunner now living in the shadow of his former glory, which sounds absolutely perfect for this universe. Night City is filled with people desperately trying to become legends, so following someone who has already experienced that glory — and then lived long enough to see it fade — could give us something very different.
Finally, we have Kok, voiced in English by Nazeeh Tarsha, a nomadic netrunner seeking revenge by hunting down the person responsible for killing his clan. And as someone whose V became an almost terrifying hacking god in Cyberpunk 2077, you better believe this is the character I’m particularly pumped for.
A Different Kind of Crew
What immediately interests me about this new cast of rogues is that they feel firmly rooted in the Cyberpunk universe without simply looking like replacements for David and his crew.
That is a surprisingly difficult line to walk.
Make them too different and you risk losing what people loved about the original series. Make them too similar and Season 2 starts feeling like someone desperately trying to recreate lightning in a bottle.
From what we know so far, however, I think they have the potential to pull it off.
More importantly, these characters give the writers opportunities to explore Night City from completely different perspectives: corporate life, gang culture, fame, revenge, journalism and the strange relationship between humanity and technology.
The first season gave us a tragedy about ambition, love and a young man who believed he could somehow outrun Night City. Season 2 doesn’t need another David Martinez.
It needs another reason for us to care about the people Night City is inevitably going to chew up and spit out. So yeah, I’m excited for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2.
I know better than to expect a happy ending.
But maybe they’ll give us another little sliver of hope before they rip our hearts out again.
What about you? Are you excited to return to Night City?
