Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 Earned a Happy Ending

The award-winning anime promotes human connection in a technological dystopia

Oct. 26, 2026 at 3:13 p.m. PT

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Read at your own risk!]

Netflix's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 was a weirdly pleasant surprise. Not because it's good, since we expected that after the incredible first season, but because it ended up being extremely uplifting. After I finished watching all 10 episodes of the anime, I felt happy. That's not how it usually goes with stories in the cyberpunk genre, and especially with stories in the Cyberpunk franchise. The first Edgerunners had a brutally tragic ending, and the video game that spawned it, Cyberpunk 2077 — itself based on the 1988 tabletop RPG created by Matt Pondsmith — has many possible endings, and very few of them end in a way that's good for the player character.

And yet, here we are. Edgerunners 2 ends with all five protagonist characters — Kingsley, Talia, Roman, D, and Capri — coming out the other side alive, more or less intact, and actually happy. We shouldn't take this as the Cyberpunk franchise receiving a sudden injection of positivity and optimism, though. Rather, it's telling us that it's possible to find some level of peace with the people we love, even in an awful corporate dystopia that has no respect for human life — you know, like the one that we're seeing develop in the USA in our real world right now.

Edgerunners Season 1 was about two damaged people finding a romantic connection thanks to their common misery. Edgerunners 2 expands that theme to include other kinds of connections, like platonic friendship, and the relationship between a parent and their child. On a deeper level, though, it's about people finding solace with another person who's been traumatized and has suffered in the same way they have.

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It starts with Weak "King" Kingsley, an old mercenary who blows a mission and gets some of his friends killed while suffering from a bout of cyberpsychosis that caused him to hallucinate an old flame named Avida. Afterward, he was forced to downgrade his cyberware in order to survive, and he lost his home and all his possessions to pay for the surgery.

King's old love Avida is still alive, having been married to a corpo from Kang Tao for a couple decades. Avida's daughter, Talia, has some sort of terminal illness, and she runs away from home and joins up with the technology worshippers in the Maelstrom gang — the very definition of "running with the wrong crowd" — in hopes that their cyberware can save her life. But instead she starts to show signs of cyberpsychosis from adding so much cyberware so quickly, creating a whole new problem for Talia.

Avida asks King to keep track of Talia and try to save her, and sells him on the idea by claiming that Talia is secretly King's daughter. She's not really his daughter, of course, but it doesn't ultimately matter to King, who really just cares about saving this young person from having to deal with her cyberpsychosis alone — he just went through what she's experiencing now, and he wants to make it easier for her to deal with by being there for her, something her actual corpo father never did. While both of Talia's real parents end up dead by the end, King remains alive and adopts her. Talia is still terminally ill, and she has to downgrade her cyberware to avoid cyberpsychosis just like King did — they're two peas in a pod.

Then we have D, a nomad who is one of the only survivors of his clan, which was brutally massacred two years earlier by Maelstrom members at the behest of Arasaka Corporation. D has a vendetta against Maelstrom, naturally, and he saves a kid named Roman from being forcibly chromed up by Talia's friends. He's also unwittingly manipulated into using a shard that contains a consciousness on it, because he was on an Arasaka list of potential hosts for that consciousness, and it gets in his brain.

This consciousness, called Capricorn and shortened to Capri, is an amalgamation of many human minds that had been copied digitally using Arasaka's Soulkiller device. Capri doesn't initially play nice with D, and she even tries to abandon him when he meets Talia, another person on the list of potential hosts, and Capri ends up fragmented between the two of them. D spends the rest of Edgerunners 2 desperately trying to make Capri whole again so he can reunite with her.

It's not clear at all for most of the series why D wants Capri back so badly, since Capri made him do a lot of weird and crazy things in the early going. But by the time we get to the final episode, when they're finally back together, it makes an uncomfortable amount of sense. D has been suffering nonstop anguish since his clan was murdered, and he constantly hallucinates them because he feels like their deaths were his fault, since he wasn't there to help them fight back. He's been carrying an immense emotional burden ever since.

With Capri, he saw a kindred spirit, because she's made up of many minds that were taken from their bodies against their will — which is to say that every person in Capri is a murder victim who might enjoy getting some revenge for what was done to them. In emotional terms, Capri is like the living embodiment of his dead clan's pain, and so she is able to understand D's angst in a way that even his last surviving clanmate, Omi, does not. But when they find each other again at the end of the story, they work together to save Talia, King, and Roman, and end the Kang Tao threat against them. Then they peace out together, never to be seen again. Now that they have each other, D and Capri don't need to fight anymore.

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Then we have Roman, a 12-year-old boy with an old school video camera who seemingly has nobody looking out for him before D saves him from Maelstrom. Roman is the heart of this story, because these events are going to determine the sort of person he grows up to be. The fact that all his friends ended up surviving to the end of the story gives him a feeling of hope that he's definitely going to need as he grows up in the cesspit that is Night City. But for now, even after all the horrible stuff he's seen and filmed, he gets to hold on to a bit of his childish innocence for a little bit longer.

This cautiously optimistic finale is really refreshing, and not just in the context of the Cyberpunk franchise or TV in general. In our real world, we're seeing the beginnings of the sort of corporate hellscape that Cyberpunk has always depicted, where big companies can do literally anything they want because they're more powerful than the nations they inhabit. While we civilians look at this series and see a miserable dystopia, billionaire corporate leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison would see it as aspirational.

There is, unfortunately, nothing most of us can do about the trajectory of our world — we're just along for the ride, at the mercy of rich people who don't care about us even a little bit. While there's not much we can do, as individuals, to fix that status quo, Edgerunners 2 suggests we might be OK anyway, at least for a while, if we can make real, meaningful personal connections with each other.

In a normal show, that's a theme that might feel pretty trite. But with Edgerunners, after the immense heartbreak of the first season, it feels like a dang miracle.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.