‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ Ending, Explained: Was David Able to Reach to the Top in Night City?
Welcome to the Ending Explained for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the new Netflix anime series produced by CD Projekt Red in collaboration with the legendary Studio Trigger. Trigger has been known to develop anime series full of flashy visuals and crazy action. On this occasion, they deliver, once again, a high-octane story that makes use of the fascinating lore of the Cyberpunk universe to put our characters into more tense and crazy situations. This is one of the best anime series of the year.
The story follows David, just another kid living in the glamorous and yet rotten metropolis of Night City, where gangs and megacorporations rule the streets. David dreams of making it big in the city and doing everything that his mother thought he could. When he meets the beautiful Lucy, a netrunner, David will begin his ascent into the underground criminal world that serves the corporations to fight their petty information wars. This is a great story with lots of humor, action, and even a lot of heart in a world where authenticity is the rarest of commodities.
The following paragraphs contain spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Read at your own risk.
Why Does Arasaka Want To Grab Both David And Lucy?
The series starts with an introduction to the world. There, on a fateful night, we see a big man covered in cyberwar going rampant. The man just starts to kill everything in sight. This man has gone cyberpsycho, a consequence of filling one’s body with too many cybermods. The man is taken down by a special elite team. The event appears on the news as he took with him dozens of people’s lives. It is here that we meet our protagonist, David. David is a 17-year-old kid living in Night City with his mom, Gloria.
Gloria is a hard-working mom, and she was able to put David into the Arasaka Academy, one of the most prestigious schools in the city. Gloria is only a first responder, so it makes you wonder how she is paying for the tuition of such an expensive school. Gloria has a gig on the side, where she sells cyberware she salvages from the dead bodies she picks up every day. Gloria dies when she and David get trapped in the middle of a shootout on the highway.
David finds a piece of military hardware in his house. He doesn’t know what it is or where it came from, but he goes to his local ripper doc and orders the doctor to install the mod. The mod gives David the ability to move as fast as The Flash. Each use wears down his body and mind, but it is revealed that he has a natural tolerance for cybermods. When he meets Lucy, she introduces him to her group of friends. Lucy is a netrunner, which means she is an expert hacker. Together with the team and Lucy, David starts doing gigs and making tons of money.
As David special tolerance for cyberware, Lucy is also special as well. When she was a kid, she was in a special Arasaka program for the breeding of netrunners. She managed to escape the secret facility where she was born, and she has been on the run since then. Arasaka is still looking for her. Her netrunner abilities are just that high. The same happens with David. When the company sees that he is using the mod with little to no secondary effects, the company begins to plan a way to get the boy to experiment on him.
Was David Able To Reach To The Top In Night City?
David, Lucy, and the team keep doing more gigs and their reputation keeps flourishing. However, there are some members who get lost along the way. The most important of all is Maine, the leader of the gang. Maine has gone beyond his limits for cybermods, and he is risking going psycho. When that happens, it is a sad event, and he ends up being put down. Maine serves as a cautionary tale for David, who will fall into that same trap sometime later. After Maine’s death, David picks up the pieces and becomes the new leader. He is also in a relationship with Lucy.
Faraday, a fixer working in Night City, also has his own ambitions. He wants to get on the Arasaka payroll and become a full corpo executive. To achieve this promotion, Arasaka hires him to not only capture and deliver Lucy, but also give them David, and a new prototype exoskeleton, developed by its rival corporation, Militech. Faraday gets in cahoots with Kiwi, a netrunner working with David, and she sells the team. Lucy gets captured by Faraday, and David gets into the exoskeleton, preparing to rescue Lucy. Using the exoskeleton might push him into going psycho.
David, Falco, and Rebecca all fight through tons of Militech soldiers who are trying to get their prototype back. However, they are no match for David. David kills countless humans, but inside his head, he has turned back in time to when his mother was still alive. He thinks he is fulfilling what his mother wanted for him. Faraday takes Lucy to Arasaka HQ and there he delivers her, but David soon appears. David is ready to kill everyone, but he is stopped by Adam Smasher, a legendary hero from the Corporate Wars. Smasher and David fight.
The battle is outlandish. Faraday dies, Rebecca dies too. Falco seizes the opportunity to escape with Lucy. Falco informs Lucy that this was always part of the plan. David and Lucy both knew he would die for her, as she was the only thing he cared about. Smasher kills David, who imagines being happy with Lucy. Meanwhile, Lucy travels to the moon, the place she has always wanted to visit. She remembers how she was supposed to come with David, but like with many things in Night City, happy endings are not meant to be.
