‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’ series review: Love and art in the time of technofascism

That ‘Edgerunners 2’ can wring such tenderness, such an unembarrassed belief in art and human connection, from a world so thoroughly committed to grinding both into dust is precisely what makes it one of the finest things television has given us this year

Updated - October 25, 2026 04:21 pm IST

A still from ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

Good morning, Night City! Four years since David Martinez and his chromed-out cohort gave Arasaka a run for its eddies, we’re back on the streets, where the body count remains awful and the cost of existing worse! Cyberpunk 2077 has undergone a miraculous rehabilitation, courtesy of enough patch updates and a sprawling Phantom Liberty expansion to make its launch-day catastrophe one of gaming’s great redemption stories! Meanwhile, Ghost in the Shell has returned through Science SARU, Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 is touching down next month, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer is finally getting its Apple TV moment in January. The future (daresay the present), ladies and gentlemen, is looking absolutely dystopian, and the entertainment industry has never been more bleak!

For the handful of cyberpunk devotees who were impressed by my thoroughly shoddy impression of Cyberpunk 2077’s iconic radio jockey intro, and the considerably larger contingent of uninitiated readers wondering whether I’ve suffered a stroke; the genre has been having something of a moment lately, thanks in no small part to the real world making steady attempts to outdo it. But the crown jewel that has had people like me practically mainlining copium in anticipation all year is Studio Trigger’s long-awaited follow-up to its Anime of the Year-winning Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Born in Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop RPG, immortalised in CD Projekt Red’s sprawling videogame, and subsequently given a spectacularly violent animated makeover by Studio Trigger, Night City has become one of sci-fi’s most recognisable monuments to humanity’s capacity for self-sabotage. It is a dystopian, hypercapitalist hellscape where corporations like Arasaka wield more power than governments and the human body is just another depreciating asset awaiting its next absurd upgrade. The first season followed a gang of rebellious mercenaries AKA ‘Edgerunners’ as they took increasingly suicidal gigs and eventually found themselves on a collision course with Arasaka that could only end in tragedy. After all, there are no happy endings in Night City… or so we were led to believe.

Set three years after the first season and a year after the events of the videogame, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 returns to Night City with an entirely new cast of walking liabilities. Roman Carax is a 12-year-old aspiring filmmaker who prefers his analogue camera to the brain-rotting convenience of Braindances; D is a vengeful netrunner whose Nomad clan was massacred; Talia is a young woman replacing her failing body with disturbing amounts of chrome; and Weak Kingsley, once the celebrated edgerunner King, is attempting to rebuild his life after surviving cyberpsychosis at the cost of the augmentations that made him formidable.

Despite the subtitle, Edgerunners 2 couldn’t care less about edgerunning, abandoning its predecessor’s fixer-economy ladder-climbing and doomed pursuit of mercenary immortality for a more incisive autopsy of the psychological inducements and hideously personal costs of chroming. This sequel throws together four protagonists who share neither a crew nor a coherent set of interests, through a bunch of narrative happenstance.

Weak Kingsley’s introduction establishes just how close he is to cyberpsychosis, forcing him to chrome down to prevent another episode. The prospect of becoming an obsolete relic without the hardware that furnished his reputation proves so intolerable that he attempts suicide, until a former flame Avida, interrupts his exit strategy by asking for his help. His ensuing arc keeps circling the question that David’s story could never quite afford to entertain: who the hell are you when the chrome comes off? Losing his augmentations does mean losing the very thing that made him somebody, but it eventually gives him the freedom to find his own meaning in life, untethered from the legend he once was.

Talia’s predicament is the inverse of Weak’s — while he has to figure out who he is without his chrome, she is unable to imagine herself without hers. She begins augmenting herself to treat her condition, but as more of her flesh gives way to machinery, the distinction between medical necessity and personal compulsion grows murkier by the episode. Chroming becomes her means of coping with trauma, a way of feeling powerful enough to finally be fully herself, even as that pursuit takes a brutal toll on the very body she is trying to reclaim. The season probes this vicious oscillation between chrome as an act of self-preservation and body dysmorphia as a licence for extraordinary acts of self-directed contempt.