Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: Stay

In this episode of the Netflix anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, David’s crew’s actions have led the Arasaka intel operatives to suspect Faraday. Meanwhile, both Lucy and Rebecca have noticed the strange behavioral changes in David—symptoms looking much like the downward spiral to cyber psychosis.

This episode opens inside an Arasaka lab, where a female lab functionary is asking the Lab Director for an early night off. Her son has just gotten into Arasaka Academy, and she wants to surprise him.

Lab Director Evans is irritated at the request but urges her to fetch a lab sample and gives his blessing for her early exit. She grabs the sample from another part of the lab, but when she comes back, the office room lights are off.

David is curled up in front of the desk with a literal smoking gun. The director is dead, and his head is a bleeding pulp.

She screams in response. In his surprise, David points the gun at her.

We don’t see her get the bullet as we pull out of the office view but a shot does ring out.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: Arasaka strikes back

David exits and joins his crew in the getaway vehicle with Falco, Becca, and Kiwi. At the Arasaka Counterintel department, two operatives discuss the bloody trail that David and his crew have left behind.

They’re impressed by the clean work they’ve done but they are very concerned about the netrunner who’s been cutting off their trail. They don’t know it’s Lucy yet, but they do want to try if the angle of their fixers will bear fruit.

One of the profiles on their hit list is Faraday. The next scene is Faraday’s car getting ambushed by some city gangbangers.

He survives but he goes up to his contacts in Militech in a parking lot next and complains that he nearly died. His Militech contact, just a voice within an armored car’s half open window really, is lukewarm about this and dismissive.

The contact refuses to give more jobs to Faraday unless he cleans up his mess.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: Faraday’s dilemma

In their swank apartment, David and Lucy talk about the cost of a one-way trip to the moon. Lucy notices David’s shaking hand while he watches the news feeds.

Faraday meets with one of the Arasaka Counterintel agents at a diner. They offer him a sweet deal to identify and bring in the netrunner who’s been pushing back on their efforts to clean up the info trail of the Sandevistan (the mess that Tanaka left behind).

They also tell him that he’s back on the payroll as long as he eliminates everyone who knows about the existence of the Sandevistan chrome. After Lucy calls Kiwi, asking about David’s health and symptoms, Kiwi gets a visit from Faraday at her door.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: David’s confession

Becca and David are mowing down a bunch of rival gangbangers with their superior firepower. But David freezes when a young gangster pops up from behind a cover.

Luckily, Becca shoots him down. Afterwards, David ditches them to walk home but Becca follows him.

It’s obvious that she has a crush on him but disguises it by saying she is worried that he’s been freezing up a lot lately, even though he just dismisses it as nothing. Truth is David’s past has been haunting him.

He froze up with the lab woman because he saw his mother in her face. And he saw his younger self in the gangster that Becca eventually shot.

He’s also been having hallucinations of gun-headed monstrosities popping out of people he’s about to shoot. It happened to the Arasaka lab woman.

It happened when he shot the Lab Director Evans. Lucy witnesses him collapse in front of his mother’s urn and their photo together, after he flashes back to killing the lab woman and feeling guilty when he saw a photo of herself and her son on her desk.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: Nine times the standard dose

David wakes up at the ripperdoc’s. Lucy is napping in a corner wrapped in a blanket.

The doc tells him that his symptoms should subside if he stops using his chrome so much and halts any further augmentation surgeries. This sends David into a rage—the doc should just give him stronger meds and continue taking his money.

Lucy talks him down but the symptoms on the road to cyber psychosis are now undeniable. The ripperdoc sends him away with nine times the standard dose of meds and an ominous warning that he won’t be back anyway.

Not in his current state of decline. Lucy confronts David about what he did to the ripperdoc but their argument turns to the personal.

David breaks up with her. Lucy implores him to go home, and they’ll talk more about it.

She exits, saying she needs to take care of something urgent. In her emotional state, Lucy tracks down the netrunner signature that she’s been seeing in her deep dives.

She pins him down to a warehouse and is about to eliminate him. But the netrunner turns out to be a disguise for Faraday.

He knocks out Lucy. When she wakes up its revealed that Faraday was working with Kiwi to lure her into the warehouse, so they can imprison her and deliver her to Arasaka’s Counterintel.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 1 episode 8 recap: Review

Though there are a lot of moving pieces and narrative arcs going on here, the main thread really is about how David is now sliding into cyber psychosis. Pretty gleefully, too.

The story treatment by the writers that chrome addiction is just like any kind of drug addiction is a great handle. And David is now a full-blown addict without recourse to a cure and without the compunction to cut back because…reasons.

While I’m of the opinion that Kiwi’s betrayal could have been set up better, made more organic and foreshadowed with more than just a flippant “never trust a soul in Night City,” I can’t argue against it. Becca is just too head over heels enamored by David.

Falco is just in it for the Eurodollars. And Lucy is, well…David is the one addiction that she can’t shake either.

Faraday is just a creature of commerce. It was only a matter of time before he got his paws caught in either the Arisaka trap or the Militech cage.

The mess of needing to deal with both megacorps is just extra gravy. I love the scene where David tries to break up with Lucy.

A true sign of the addict is when he would give up those he loves in favor of his drug of choice. Chrome is the perfect drug to him and his reason for not stopping sound perfectly absurd: 1.) He has a mission to fulfill for his mom and Maine, 2.) Lucy and the others just don’t understand, and 3.) He’s just built different.

All are untrue. Though he regrets shooting the lab woman, he doesn’t have enough remorse to track down her kid and give him some compensation.

The ripperdoc’s words after David accosts him, are a grim foreshadowing that I can’t turn my eyes away from. “Just another turn for the next dreamer.”

Meaning the doc’s seen this before and he’ll see this again. David isn’t special.

None of them really are in the face of chrome addiction and cyber psychosis. The shame is in how David’s disease has now put Lucy in harm’s way and he’s all but blind to it.

Still, I’ll be there to watch his inevitable end in a blaze of glory. Ain’t love grand?

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