I never really reviewed the first season of Edgerunners, even though I wrote about it several times and stuck the label on half a dozen posts. I wrote more about the soundtrack than I did about the show itself and the only reason I watched it at all was because Rosa Walton of Let's Eat Grandma did a song specifically for the show.
That song turned out to be the iconic I Really Want To Stay At Your House, which soundtracks the equally iconic ending of the final episode. You know you're not exploiting the overused "iconic" accolade, when you only have to think of the song and it all comes back. Well, not if you have a memory like mine, anyway. Not to mention the official video for the song on Netflix' YouTube channel has ninety-five million views...
The soundtrack to Season 2 isn't quite up to the standard of the first but it's pretty good all the same. I was very surprised and not a little delighted to see Petit Meller put in an appearance with two songs, including the closing theme. Using the Cure's 10.15 Saturday Night for the opening was a counterintuitive masterstroke. Fifty year old minimalism meets future maximalism and it's perfect.
Competing with all of that iconicism from series one was always going to be tough, though. At the time, I never thought they'd even try. At the end of the first season I wrote
"Without getting too spoilery, the series pretty much ran as a one-and-done, the ending leaving little room for a second season, the final episode being one of the more conclusive and downbeat resolutions I've seen for a while."
Yeah. True, that. And so there was a second season anyway. It just didn't have anyone from the first season in it. What them all being...
Hang on a moment. It's pretty much spoilers all the way down from here. I guess we'd better have a
S P O I L E R W A R N I N G !
...dead and all.
So, Season 2 has the same setting and some of the same themes but none of the same characters. It was also mostly made by the same people. Is it as good?
No, of course it's not. That would be too much to hope for.
Sidebar - I had a sarcastic paragraph here that I had to remove, where I was saying it's a bad idea to go iconic with your first season of anything because where are you going to go from there? But then I realized there are probably shows that managed to start out iconic and then top it second time out, so if I was going to say otherwise, I'd need to go do a whole lot of research to stand it up and I really didn't want to do that, so I just cut the whole thing. See that? That's the magic happening right there...
How do you write a second season of a show when not a single significant character from the first is left alive? Oh, wait... Lucy... (And Falco, according to Gemini, who I have doing my fact-checking for me, which is a bit like having Freewheeling Franklin monitoring your medication, but I can't off the top of my head remember who Falco was, so I'm not going to worry too much about forgetting him...)
Apparently you do it by setting the sequel in the future, albeit only by a couple of years and by having a brand new set of leads, not one of whom has any connection to the last lot. And it might work, too, given the star of the entire IP is arguably Night City itself.
Except you don't really get to see a lot of Night City in Season 2. I mean it's there but it's hardly a focus, more a backdrop. In the foreground there's just a bunch of people, none of whom seems to have all that much to do with any of the others to begin with but by the end of the ten episodes... they still don't.
Oh, they do if you go by the plot. They all get to meet and do things together or to each other and all their individual stories intertwine except they don't much have individual stories. They have vaguely sketched-in backstories but what they don't have is much of a sense of belonging together. They meet, they do stuff, they leave. That's it. The first Season had a Crew. The second has some people who happen to be going in the same direction for a while. It's hardly enough.
I think the best way to describe the show might be to record my feelings on each of the main characters. I can at least remember them, which is a tick in the positive column, although it has only been barely twelve hours since I watched the closing credits. I'll take them in the order they come to me, which ought to say something about how memorable I found them.
Roman - I liked Roman. That seems to be a minority position, based on some of the reviews and Reddit threads I skimmed after the final episode ended. A lot of the audience for this kind of show really doesn't like children, that's the vibe I'm getting.
Roman is a twelve year-old boy with an antique video camera and an obsessive desire to film everything that happens. Why he has it and why he became so driven to make home movies was either not explained or I missed it, although I do remember it was money that drove him to attempt to get footage of a crew of mercenaries called Maelstrom, which is what leads to his involvement with the whole escalating clusterfuck to begin with.
Roman doesn't really have much of a personality but he has more excuse for that than most of the cast, not having had as long to develop one. He's a weirdly innocent child, given the circumstances of his life, although even as I type that, I realize we know absolutely nothing of those circumstances. He comes across as bashful, modest, certain only of his great ability with the camera and apparently on loan from the 1950s. He also seems to have some kind of superpower (Metaphorically, I should make it clear.) that means he could probably walk through a collapsing building without even getting dust on his lens. Then again, everyone else seems to be able to get up and walk away from explosions or collisions that would crush a bus, so maybe invulnerability is a Night City thing.
If Roman has any traits on his character sheet other than Blank Slate they'd probably be Everyman and Moral Compass. He's an okay stand-in for the viewer but he's really not qualified to offer a moral center, even if he's probably the only member of the cast who doesn't kill anyone for the entire ten episodes. Still, he sure as hell hangs around with the ones who do and he does very little to stop any of it. I like him but he's hardly there a lot of the time. He's a cipher. The only time he shows any real emotional involvement is when someone tries to leave him, which suggests abandonment issues. Or he's just annoying, which is another popular viewpoint.
D - D stands for David. David is called David because the central character in Season One was called David. Not that he's related to him or even knew him. The writers thought it would be a way to link the two stories. They were wrong. It's just a bit confusing. The actual link is that both Davids were nominally included in some kind of corporate deviance concerning individuals with a greater than normal resistance to cyber-psychosis. Their names are in the same files and that's it.
D appears out of nowhere to save Roman from the Maelstrom crew, who have him hog-tied and are about cut him open to give him cybber implants he doesn't want. It's a disturbing scene, possibly the most unsettling in the whole run. D comes in, acting like a superhero. He pretty much looks like one, too. At this point he's cool and he seems admirable.
It's all downhill from there as reveals himself to be a borderline alcoholic, self-medicating for his extreme PTSD. It gets much worse as he succumbs to depression and mania and finally something that looks a lot like psychosis. He does have a tragic backstory but I found it pretty hard to sympathize him as he moved from specific revenge against the individuals he believed had slaughtered his tribe to pretty much killing anyone who looked at him funny then sitting around watching while a whole load of D-Wannabes played riot games. The scene where one of his acolytes casually shoots a cowering girl in the head was a highlight.
By the time we get to the last episode, where there's an attempt to recapture the magic of the first season's final moments, it's so obvious none of it has been earned it's embarrassing. We'd need to like D by then for that to come off. I sure didn't. Does anyone like him? Even Roman calls him an idiot.
Weak - Weak is apparently what David from Season One would have become if things had gone differently; if he'd lived out his life as an Edgerunner. He'd have gone full cyber-psychotic, murdered a bunch of people for no reason, then had all his cyberware stripped out for his, and everyone else's, safety, leaving him a powerless husk, unable to back up the threats he'd carry on making.
Weak (Real name Weak Kingsley, once known as King. Oh, the symbolism...) is quite an endearing character in his way. He's certainly loyal. And stubborn. And deluded if he thinks he can pull off any of the things he says he can. Mostly he gets beaten up - a lot - and all his attempts to do just about anything fail. Still, he's giving it his best shot and he's generally trying to do something that could just about be seen as the right thing, if you squinted really hard...
Weak also believes (Wrongly, as it turns out.) that he's the real father of
Talia - She's made to be everyone's favorite. A feisty teenage girl with a smart mouth and a terminal illness. How could she not be? Plus she has a horrible father and an overprotective mother and she's just Trying To Live Her Own Life, Her Way. Talk about stacking the pack...
So, yes, I liked Talia. It'd be bloody-minded not to. She doesn't actually kill people for one thing, well, not until right at the end, when she does make up for it but then there are mitigating factors. She's also genuinely nice to poor old Roman when she could quite justifiably tell him to get lost. Then again, she's very short with him at other times. Still, teenage mood swings... And she must be on a lot of drugs...
Kyoko - Kyoko is... hmm. What is Kyoko? About three feet tall for a start. For several episodes I thought I was watching another child, probably someone younger than Roman. I also thought I was looking at a boy.
Kyoko turns out to be an adult woman. Everyone in the cast immediately accepts this as if it's obvious. They are clearly seeing something I'm not. She's a Mad Scientist of the old school. She looks and acts like she's in a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, except for all the murdering. She was involved in a project that somehow condensed a whole lot of human consciousnesses into an AI. She did that for the same Corp that was the big villain in Season 1, Arasaka. Her project cost them a fortune, didn't show enough results and got shut down. Is she bitter? What do you think?
Her AI, which was on a chip, somehow got lost. I expect that got explained but I don't remember any of it. The chip somehow ends up in D's slot and Kyoko wants it back. She tries to catfish Roman for it, she sucks up to Talia's Bad Father, who's an Exec in another Corp. She promises him all the same things she promised Arasaka and he goes for it because he really is an idiot. Just because he's also a prick doesn't make him smart.
Kyoko starts out as an unmitigated villain but there seems to be some sort of half-assed attempt to engage our sympathies for her in the last couple of episodes. It's like wrapping a feather boa round a rattlesnake and asking people to cuddle it. I was not fooled. She's a fun character all the same. Just not in any way lovable. Or believable.
Capricorn - Aka Capri. Capri is an AI. Or something like that. A digital consciousness? She's a hoot, anyway. I bet everyone loves Capri. She's two-dimensional, as in she's a flat drawing in a medium that's all flat drawings and yet somehow she manages to look flatter than everything else. She's red but she's also green, when she gets split. She's in the chip and she's in whoever the chip's in, which is mostly D until it's also Talia. They each get some Capri. Then Talia gets it all and there's no more Talia, only Capri, until D gets the chip back and there's no more D or Capri because they went to space and now look! Talia's back.The few bits that are left of her after the EMP and the airstrike, anyway. Did you miss her? Yes, we missed her.
Capri is a lot of fun, visually and verbally. She probably kills more people than everyone else put together but she's an AI so it doesn't count. Talia's Last Dying Wish is for Capri to kill Bad Dad in the most gruesome way possible. She does her best but in the end a building falls on him.
Okay, I think that's all the ones I think of as Main Cast. Let me see if I missed anyone...
Nope, that's the lot, although where you draw the line between Main Cast and Supporting Cast is a judgment call. Gemini only gives Roman, D, Weak and Talia the honor. No Capri. No loyalty among AIs, apparently.
There are quite a few significant supporting characters, including Avida and Kiril (Talia's mom and dad, both dead now, so Talia's an orphan, I guess.), Omi (D's old friend from the tribal days. I liked her. She wasn't in it enough.), and Yupi (Harley Quinn to D's Joker. She was good value. The writers gave her more subtext than pretty much anyone. She could have made for an interesting spin-off if she hadn't gotten shot.) but my rule is that if I had to look up their names, they can't be Main Cast and I had to look up all of those.
That makes for a fairly chaotic overview which is fair because it's a fairly chaotic series. I think the writers might have been aiming for that Robert Altman gestalt, where you just keep introducing character after character and eventually some kind of shape to the story just coalesces around them. And it kinda does do that... it's just not a very good story.
Entertaining, though. I'll happily give it entertaining. I enjoyed every episode. The last couple are a real thrill-ride, even if I found it close to impossible to take any of it remotely seriously. Kyoko on her tricycle, racing to stop the bombs with the EMP in her backpack is like Elliot and his pals trying to save ET on their pushbikes, only played for laughs.
Apart from having absolutely none of the gravitas or emotional heft of the first season, Season 2 of Edgerunners is also more cartoony and feels much lighter, even with all the endless murdering and exploding heads. In part that's because most of the cast survive and there's something that's not a million miles from a happy ending. The final scenes of Season 1 are authentically harrowing. I can't say I'm sorry we didn't get a rerun.
I'll just throw in a word of praise for the voice acting, which is uniformly excellent. Every major character is a joy to listen to. The standard of voice acting is so high these days, though, it's all too easy to take excellence for granted. Same for the animation, really. We just expect it to be this good now. And it is.
Whether we needed a Season 2 at all is another question but since we got one, I'll take it. It was a good watch while it was on but I don't imagine I'll go back to it again. It just made me want to rewatch the first one.
There's no word on a Season 3. Clearly, if they're going to use this episodic "Tales of Night City" approach, they can keep going as long as the interest is there. I suspect they won't but I won't be annoyed if they do.
Either way is good with me.
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