Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 6 recap: Girl On Fire

In the Netflix anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 6, crew leader Maine is showing red flags of cyber psychosis symptoms. This couldn’t have come at a worse time as the crew are on a deadline to acquire the data that Faraday hired them to extract from Tanaka, an Arasaka executive.

The episode opens with a flashback as a young and thin Maine runs through the desert in a wife beater shirt and jogging pants, listening to an AM radio DJ. As Maine’s hands shake, he begins to show symptoms of a slide into cyber psychosis.

Dorio and the rest of the team urge him to cut back on the chrome. They now have Tanaka and Kiwi is in a deep dive to find their data.

But Maine suddenly attacks her while she’s still in the cooling bath. He ruins their hack and injures Kiwi too, putting her out of commission.

He remembers none of it when he comes out of his aggressive fugue.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 6 recap: Lucy’s up to bat

To compensate and get the job done, they enlist Lucy to finish Kiwi’s assignment. She is initially reluctant but after some arguing and back and forth, Lucy relents but with the condition that Maine isn’t in the room and that David will be assisting her.

She makes her way into Arasaka’s servers, through Tanaka’s personal neural net access. But Tanaka wakes up during her deep dive and David unfortunately hesitates to put him back to sleep.

Tanaka reveals to David that he was the one who wanted him reinstated into the Academy, cajoling David to free him and end the madness of his abduction. Tanaka’s deep dive port short circuits before Lucy gets out.

Luckily Dorio and Maine arrive to mitigate the damage, revive Tanaka from being momentarily dead, and also retain their data after pulling out a writhing Lucy from the ice bath. Unfortunately, the Trauma Team has zeroed in on their location when Tanaka flatlined for a moment.

David preps the car for egress with an unconscious Lucy, as Maine and Dorio engage in a firefight with the Trauma Team.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 6 recap: Fall of Maine

When Lucy wakes up, she reveals that Tanaka was a bust. He didn’t have access to the data they needed.

David leaves Lucy in the car to help Dorio and Maine fight the intruders. As the firefight intensifies, Maine slides deeper into cyber psychosis.

He even opens fire on his girlfriend Dorio. She dies trying to shield Maine from a spray of bullets.

It’s at this point that he loses it and goes into full blown cyber psychosis, slaughtering the Trauma Team and their police backup. When Tanaka is beheaded, the police call in the Max Tac SWAT.

But Maine is still able to kill all the police and Trauma Team before they can get away. David follows the trail of dead bodies and finds Maine making a Viking funeral for Dorio as he lays her corpse to rest on a pile of fuel cells.

He knows that Max Tac is coming and urges David to run, to use the Sandevistan, even as David insists he will fight with his friend. But when the Max Tac team fires their first shot, Maine lights up the fuel cells.

David runs back to the car with Lucy, escaping the blast radius that kills Maine and the SWAT. As Lucy takes the wheel and they drive through Night City, David weeps as he cradles something precious he rescued on his lap: one of Maine’s big cyber arms.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 6 recap: Review

This is the most intense episode yet. What with the death of Maine and Dorio, plus half the crew like Becca, Falco, and Kiwi indisposed or out of commission, there was so much at stake that played out so badly.

The crew getting blindsided by Maine’s descent into cyber psychosis was the main culprit of the issues. So was David’s hesitation to act during these moments of crisis or completely freeze like a deer in headlights.

Despite the episode’s plot surprise left hook that arguably was handled in an inorganic way to usher out David’s mentor, it also ably demonstrates Murphy’s Law holding sway in Night City’s criminal enterprise. I could argue all day that the writers should have had one more episode to signal how far gone Maine was into his cyber psychosis.

We should have seen him building up the reluctance to do something about it or even acknowledge it to his girlfriend Dorio. But in the end, it all served its purpose.

One, it gave us insight into Maine’s history and character. Something I highly appreciate.

Two, it made David realize that there are very real side effects and sudden consequences to packing and stacking all that chrome augmentation. It’s a minor gripe.

Maine and Dorio going out in a tragic (ultimately idiotic) blaze of glory for nothing (since Lucy revealed that she’d come up with nothing in the Tanaka hack) was quite apt. And ironic, too.

David holding on to Maine’s chrome arm in the end, shedding tears for his lost mentor and friends, even as he became enlightened about the profession he’s chosen and its likely end, is a surprising moment of genuine pathos. Even if he sees his own death, he’s already too deep in the game that he can’t do anything to quell his momentum.

Having known nothing else since his mother died, he just can’t stop.

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