Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Episode 8) – Stay

The bigwigs at Arasaka are getting frustrated with the way things are swinging Militech’s way so they’ve gone out and got themselves a fixer – Faraday. Now, they can finally put their plans into motion!

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Episode 8) – Stay

What happened?

Faraday’s test for David was to have him kill a senior member of Arasaka’s research department. He slipped inside the facility thanks to Kiwi’s hacking the security and found his target. However, David was starting to feel the burden of his implants and hesitated long enough to see the researcher’s body morph into something horrendous. He pulled the trigger and then turned to find another researcher. She screamed, but it was no use David pulled the trigger once more and then slipped away.

Arasaka was livid that one of their researchers had been killed in one of their facilities. They decided that they needed to up their game and sought to terrorise the known fixers until one of them came to them. The fixer that came was Faraday and he brought them something juicy – David and Lucy. Arasaka was pleased with this development and started to devise a plan to use them.

However, David continued to struggle with the strain on his body. Not only that, he felt guilty for killing the researcher as she had reminded him of his mother. What had he become? When things got too much for him to handle, he went to Ripperdoc who told him about how once you start down the path to cyber-psychosis there is no going back. David freaked out and attacked him, but soon regained his composure. Ripperdoc gave him some military-grade meds, knowing that he would never see him again. Lucy tried to convince David to lighten the load on his body, but that advice fell on deaf ears.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Episode 8 David seeing Ripperdoc

What did you think?

So, this is where the time skip has completely failed David. We get to see him losing his mind due to the implants, but we never got to see him coming to the decision to get them. There have been enough warnings for him to realise that putting too much in too quickly is definitely a bad idea so it would have been nice to see him weigh up his options. Now, we can’t understand what made him do it and we just have to watch him fall apart.

I also feel like a straight-up assassination job is a bit of a leap in terms of the jobs they are being given. It also feels out of character for David. We saw how hard it was for him to pull the trigger on the cyber-psychosis guy who killed Pilar and was shooting at Lucy so to make this leap feels decidedly out of character.

Part of me feels like they’ve tried to fit too much into ten episodes. We’ve now got some new baddies to deal with and the legend of Adam Smasher. If they had focused on a much tighter part of the story this could have been intense. That or give it a full run. Twenty-four episodes would have given them more than enough time to really play with the ideas and concepts of this world without forcing the characters to do things they wouldn’t normally do.