Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 1 recap: Let You Down

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a 10-episode anime series co-produced by popular game studio CD Projekt Red and Japanese animation company Studio Trigger, an embattled street kid named David struggles to survive in a dark future where tech and cyberware are the rule of might and law. The first episode opens to a crime scene on a rainy evening in Night City with projected police signs cordoning off what looks to be like a shooting.

Two local uniformed cops are talking inside a police cruiser when a muscled and armored cyber psycho opens fire on them. With those two dead, the psycho wastes no time going full automatic, hosing down the rest of the police with bullets.

There’s only one man and dozens of the police. They try to overwhelm him but his speed, strength, and augmentations—including retractable scythes, knives, and swords—give him plenty of advantages.

When a police chopper arrives he activates his Sandevistan military grade cyberware to move faster than the human eye. Eventually he falls to the SWAT team.

As the cyber psycho dies, we cut to the young David Martinez. He is at home, on his couch, jacked into his virtual rig and writhing in enjoyment from the intensity of the cyber psycho’s death.

It’s been recorded and uploaded for sale to buyers of intense experiences called Braindance. David and his Ripperdoc have a conversation about where this Braindance footage originated from.

We later find out it’s just a couple of hours old, scrolled and edited by the Edgerunner Kurosaki.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 1 recap: Welcome to Night City, choom

After his Braindance session we see that David’s life in the real world is way less exciting as we find out he and his mother Gloria live in the inner city slum district of Santo Domingo. They are so dirt poor his washing machine can’t even finish a few minutes of its laundry cycle for David’s school uniform.

He wakes up his mom, exhausted on the couch, where we learn she’s burned out from her job as a paramedic. As footage of the cyber psycho’s rampage versus police plays on the TV, his mom bugs David about the software update for school he needs.

She doesn’t have the Eurodollars for it yet. When David exits their apartment Gloria calls someone named Maine as she looks down on her lap where she has the Sandevistan cyberware augmentation the cyber psycho used from the crime scene.

As David walks to school, the episode deadpans through the slums of Night City. We see the homeless sleeping right outside their doorstep, rubbish piled two people high, a mugging in broad daylight, folks with their virtual goggles and fleshlight groin peripherals on enjoying Braindance porn.

These are ordinary sights on David’s daily walk to the train station and he doesn’t even blink. On the train he gets off on a vastly wealthier part of the city. From his vantage point below, he spots the back of a white, short cropped hair of a girl in a bomber jacket and monokini.

Her back is to him on an overpass. He tries to catch her but she’s nowhere to be found when he catches up to where she was previously standing.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 1 recap: Crashing the school system

David runs through a park and arrives at a very high-class high school, the Arasaka Academy. After the virtual teacher berates him for being in violation of the school’s dress code, he gets a call on his HUD from class rich kid and his bully Katsuo.

They trade jabs about money David’s obviously outdated hardware. When the class logs on, David’s unlicensed and illegal modification update crashes the school program, frying his classmates’ hardware too.

Gloria is called in to see the principal for David’s violations. On the drive home through the freeway, mother and son argue.

Suddenly a heavily armed car containing Animals gang members opens fire on the limousine next to them, ripping up their dashboard in the crossfire. David and Gloria crash into the wrecked limo of the Animals’ target.

When David wakes up he’s upside down, trapped by the seatbelt in the car. He can see his mother on the highway, motionless with her back to him.

A medical air ambulance from Trauma Team arrives to tend to Gloria and David. But upon checking their database, neither of them are company clients.

The medical team secures the person with a policy from within the limousine and then retreats, leaving David and Gloria untreated. At the hospital, the surgeon tells David that his mom is stable but that they really should get better insurance.

He asks David to go home and secure money when his mom is released. But in meantime he hands him her clothes and possessions.

Returning to their apartment, David learns that their rent is past due. They’ve been locked out.

He gets inside by busting one of the windows and crawling in. As he pays for the medical bills David also finds the Sandevistan cyberware his mother kept hidden.

He calls the Ripperdoc and asks for its market price.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 1 recap: Time to chrome up

The next day at school, David is ambushed by Katsuo and his friends. He is bullied and beaten up from kung fu by the rich kid’s Strong Arms cyberware body augmentation with a very fast Bruce Lee chipset.

Later that day at the hospital David learns his mom has died. The doctor explains that she took a turn for the worse and that they couldn’t do much with the discount package insurance Gloria had bought.

David picks up his mother’s remains from the crematory service. An automated vendo-like machine pops out a metal canister containing Gloria’s ashes.

As David walks home with his mother’s urn he gets bombarded by voice emails. Utilities bills, the apartment rent, school fees.

In grief and anger, David visits his Ripperdoc and cajoles him to surgically implant the Sandevistan cyberware on him.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 1 recap: Review

What a great introduction to the joys and perils of Night City and a welcome expansion of the world of Cyberpunk 2077. I haven’t played the videogame by CD Projekt Red but I HAVE played the original tabletop version ages ago.

The quality aesthetics of this anime right off the bat hits all the right notes and allusions. For fans of this genre references to the likes of Ghost in the Shell and William Gibson’s Bridge novels abound like tasty nuggets in a multi-tier cake.

While the animation is beautiful, it’s also just great that it embraces all the adult content that makes the cyberpunk genre a dystopia. It’s really NSFW.

You can almost smell the uncollected rubbish rotting on the streets of the Santo Domingo slum district, hear the argument and brag of the tough guys haunting the corners and taste the barbecue and burnt microchips in the polluted air. There’s plenty of street jargon carried over from the game too, like “choom” and “gonk.”

What’s best is that the story of the poor underdog David and his struggling mother Gloria establishes an easily relatable, emotive arc right away. In a technology and body modification-obsessed world, a night of watching Braindance snuff porn is one of the only pleasures a gutter rat like David can get.

The stark reality of a rundown apartment, a broken washing machine, and soon to be dead mother are par for the course in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. David’s fate looks grim until he is motivated to play the cards he’s been dealt with, setting up his, ironically, forthcoming downward spiral and redemptive arc.

Series creator Rafal Jaki and series director Hiroyuki Imaishi have made sure that both fans of the game (videogame and tabletop) and those coming in cold without any idea of the world can enjoy the very adult delights of blood, sex, and politics of tech in the dark future. As an added bonus, the voice cast of both the Japanese and English versions (especially Zach Aguilar as David on the English one) breathe kick-ass aural life to this series.

They’ve got different flavors, but both equally satisfy. Please, choom, I want some more.

You can stream all episodes of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix.