Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 3 recap: Smooth Criminal

In the third episode of Netflix’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a collaboration between videogame maker CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger, we find our young hero David surrounded by a group of rowdy edgerunners. He wakes up upside down in Lucy’s apartment.

The big cyberpunk gang leader Maine is holding David by one of his legs like he was a weightless chicken. Maine reveals that the Sandevistan implant that David is wearing was supposed to belong to him.

This was the arrangement with Gloria, who sells the gang used implants from the dead, acquired from her job as a city medic. Lucy has clearly ratted David out to this gang and now he’s in deep trouble.

That is until he reveals that he is actually Gloria’s son. He cajoles Maine to let him keep the Sandevistan and pay off his debt by working jobs for them.

David demonstrates his worth by using the implant. He points out that he has so far managed to not get his brain fried from the military grade chrome.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 3 recap: Meet the gang

Maine relents and the next day calls up David for his first run. He formally meets the misfit group of cyberpunk edgerunners, getting mercenary jobs led by the veteran Maine.

The gang members are Kiwi, Dorio, and Pilar. Kiwi is a veteran female netrunner and hacker.

Her voice, under a constant mask in both the Japanese and English dubs, are cold and aloof. Dorio is a big and muscled woman who’s topless under a leather jacket.

She’s also a veteran cyberpunk and Maine’s second-in-command. Pilar is a constantly swearing techie with cyber arms and a wicked sense of sarcastic humor.

David’s first mission with Maine’s crew is a heist. They must steal the route data of Tanaka from one of Arasaka Corp’s drivers, Maxim Kuznetsov.

How? Maxim is a constant at betting on and watching underground fights.

It has been arranged that his favorite fighter will go down on a particular night. Then Maine’s crew will shadow him to Jacked and Coke, Maxim’s favorite bar.

When the driver is good and drunk, David will swoop in, use his speed to get his neck chip, then hand it to Dorio for download. Should be simple and easy.

But things don’t quite pan out on the night of the job. Maxim gets a call from his boss while Dorio is still downloading the nav data.

He starts walking out of the bar.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 3 recap: Murphy’s Law of edgerunning

To delay Maxim, one of Maine’s crewmembers Rebecca, spills her drink on him. Meanwhile, David and Lucy break into Maxim’s limousine.

But Maxim walks out the door before Lucy and David can get out and he spots them in his car. While Lucy has been able to override the internal locks and break into the compartments, the car’s security itself has been activated and has locked them in with the doors refusing to open.

Maine tells them to start the car and get it to their chop shop at Aldo’s. Unfortunately, David can’t really drive.

He has a shaky start, bumping into posts and damaging the limo. On the drive to the chop shop, he and Lucy are ambushed by two Tyger Claw bikers dispatched by Arasaka to reclaim the car.

David is forced to use his Sandevistan multiple times, driving on the wrong side of the freeway and dodging cars, until they escape. At the chop shop, one of the Tyger Claw bikers has survived.

It’s only through Maine’s intervention that David is saved from getting his head chopped off.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 3: Welcome to the crew, choom

Still, Maine is impressed by David’s performance and welcomes him into the crew. That night at the party, Maine rewards David with a month’s dose of immunoblockers and a nifty cut from the job.

As Pilar shows off the agility and precision of his cyberarm implants, their handler Faraday arrives. This suited man with three eyes on the right side of his face is the fixer, the boss who’s been commissioning Maine’s crew for missions—like the heist for the navigation route data.

Faraday dressed won Maine in front of his crew, claiming that their moment of improvisation and theft of the car have made Tanaka paranoid and set him on high alert. Which makes the nav data they just stole useless.

As the party gets louder David gets a call from his former principal. There’s an offer to return to Arasaka Academy if he so wants, only if he apologizes to Katsuo for beating him up.

David turns down the principal cold, closing the door to his former life.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 3 recap: Review

This is where the world of Edgerunners opens up. I think it’s one of the best in the series.

In David’s coming of age tale, it’s here that he meets his comrades and gets validation about his skill and being “built different.” A turning point episode, he loses his innocence and goes on his first job.

Most of all, viewers are introduced to the dramatis personae that further populates the world building of the milieu. Here are the branches of stories, in varying shades of grey, that David will later use to see his own journey by and judge himself.

We have the cool and stoically sexy Kiwi and Maine and Dorio; twin towers of physicality and classically augmented strength. Can’t forget the heckling and clownish Pilar and of course, the Lolita-ish Rebecca (Alex Cazares voices her with just enough restrained maniacal glee here that it foreshadows her killing psychopathy later).

A highlight for me is the introduction of Faraday, the crew’s middleman for jobs. In the English dub he is impeccably voiced with sinister undertones by the great Giancarlo Esposito—he’ll be familiar to viewers of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad as drug lord Gus Fring.

The events of Edgerunners take place about a year before the events of Cyberpunk 2077 and its already exactly what videogame icon Hideo Kojima called “a miracle of squeezing the trigger to the world.” He was referring to Trigger Studios when he declared that metaphor, who’ve truly made something beautiful here.

Even when we can clearly see how David’s arc of crime starts here, we are still hopeful that the impulsive kid can maybe, just maybe, make it out of the grind with enough of his soul intact. Perhaps turning down the principal for a return to school felt right, but he still has such a good head on his shoulders and could, as we are led to believe, just become an ordinary, decent cyber criminal.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 can be streamed in full on Netflix.