Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Episode 6) – Girl on Fire

They’ve captured Tanaka and now they need to find out what information he’s hiding. However, Maine is having some issues keeping it together. Could this be the end of the road for Maine?

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Episode 6) – Girl on Fire

What happened?

Kiwi is deep diving into Tanaka’s memories in the hopes of uncovering the information he’s hiding. It’s not going well. However, Maine appears to be having some issues of his own. In a moment of blind fury, he punches Kiwi out but doesn’t realise what happened until he regains some clarity. He’s instantly on the receiving end of a big hit from Falco before Dorio gives him a talking-to. So, with Kiwi out of operation, they turn to Lucy. However, she’ll only go in if David is in the room with her.

He’s not convinced about the idea but agrees to help her. Meanwhile, Maine continues to struggle with his sanity. Dorio’s doing her best to calm him down, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Lucy connects to Tanaka and quickly gets past the security systems. Then, the unexpected happens – Tanaka starts to wake up. This could be disastrous for Lucy. David is about to knock him out again with a tranquillizer when Tanaka recognises him. He tells David that he’s special and that he wanted him to return to the school.

That’s when Lucy finds the information she was looking for and realises that Tanaka has plans for David. She erases the information and then causes Tanaka’s connection to blow, killing him. That automatically calls the emergency response team. Maine is furious that David didn’t instantly put Tanaka back under, but that can wait. First, he’ll have to deal with the emergency response team and no doubt MaxTech will show up too!

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Episode 6 David and Maine with Dorios body

What did you think?

I think this episode could have been incredible. The use of the rougher animation style worked well for the dreamlike sequences that showed Maine losing his mind, although the getting to the end of the road metaphor may have been a little heavy-handed. I didn’t like that style for the rest of the episode as I feel the point of cyberpunk is that it’s supposed to look clean and flash to juxtapose the horrendous conditions and body horror of everything that’s going on.

I also feel like we went from Maine being fine to cyber-psychosis at an alarming rate. There could have been some foreshadowing of the event in previous episodes. It didn’t have to be much to stop it from feeling so sudden. Of course, going forward, this is a big shift in the dynamic of the story as Maine and Dorio are both now dead and with Tanaka out of the picture it feels like David may end up lost once more.

This was still a great episode that really pushed David to the edge of his own sanity. Their bond was so great that he was willing to die fighting MaxTech alongside Maine which would have left Lucy behind. It would appear that David saw Maine very much as a father figure since he joined the crew. Luckily, Maine had enough of his mental faculties left to tell David to go on without him. This was quite the sucker punch of an episode.