It has been over 24 hours and I’m still processing what has happened here. Upon the announcement over a year back that anime anarchist Hiroyuki Imaishi, Yoh Yoshinari and the rest of the visionaries at the one and only STUDIO TRIGGER would step beyond the bounds of their more in-house brand of brash and colorful works to take on the Gibson/Stephenson/Pondsmith nightmare mishmash tabletop and video game universe of Cyberpunk 2077, a part of me internally leapt with the kind of childish glee reserved for my younger self as few subgenres have flirted over the decades with sincere reverence in fusion as anime has over the years. And while many a creator in that realm have made references and nods to these works of post-PKD/Reagan-era nightmare fuel, few have gone whole hog into the more grit and grime of the original “high tech/low life” concerns of these visions. Where we have seen features and shows tinker with the “mind-body problem” (Ghost In The Shell) or the ramifications of the state going full pre-crime mad (Psycho Pass), this announcement to me felt like the long-awaited bolt from the blue expression of some of the nastier, more compelling aspects of what it means to be a true chromehead.

And good universe, has TRIGGER delivered.

In a mind-shattering 10 episodes, not only do we get a reverent slice of life in the game’s central overpopulated, hyper-transaction suffocated, morally broken Night City, but we also get one of the most viscerally powerful and perhaps even politically potent fables using decades of literacy of the cyber-fiction movement that somehow never loses sight of its humanity.

Edgerunners centers on the tale of teenager David Martinez, a half-attentive student of a pricey academy for ARASAKA, a tech giant who’s become one if not the only game left in society for a better life. Paid for by his mom, working nights as a trauma team worker, David’s life outside of school sees him dealing in porn and shady videos often bordering on snuff as sort of a junior delinquent. And it is in the latest incident out in town involving a bloody confrontation between a psychotic armed with wildly advanced body augmentation, local police, and a hard military strike force that David’s life takes on a series of horrific turns. Not that his life was faring much better prior. But now he finds himself possibly kicked out of school, out of home, and with no family to return to.

The only ember of light throughout this grand series of ruptures is his receiving of a mysterious military grade body implant. And as it turns out, David is surprisingly handy with it. So much so that it garners the attention of the enigmatic Lucy, a hyper-talented runner who’s thieving and hacking skills seem wildly at odds with the company she keeps. Even stranger, is her immediate kinship with the very wet behind the ears David who’s earnestness and lack of cynicism perhaps make for a refreshing voice in an otherwise unforgiving world. But who she runs jobs with, and their stock in trade as black market mercs for a shady fixer known only as Farady, hurls David into an odyssey of self-discovery, and a reckoning with the all-too-seductive nature of power through material means.

That’s right. What Edgerunners explores quite beautifully in its striking presentation and character work is a pulsating, meth-addled take on the Icarus tale where in this completely pulverized hellscape, it isn’t hard to find onesself addicted to the power of cybernetic upgrades, immunosuppressants, and the street cred that can often follow you once you cast away the shackles of already deeply rigged system. What ensues veers away from previous Imaishi works that often play like the most absurd creative arms races imaginable, often ending on a galactic scale. For once, based on a story by Bartosz Sztybor, Jan Bartkowicz, and Lukasz Ludkowski, the story centers on how this youthful drive has little value in practice in a world that thrives on citizens swallowing the fiction of assumed power hook, line, and sinker. This isn’t a story of console cowboys, and globally connected net experts with no hands on the goods, this is about the low end, hard luck, often collateral bodies merely scraping to survive..or obtain even more body mods along the way.

But there is a price to be paid. As the show establishes from the start, the melding of flesh and technology hasn’t evolved into a seamless process just yet, and an inevitable consequence to such dependence tends to be the same for all who buy in. It’s either insanity or death, often both for those who choose this life. Even the best underground cybernetic surgeons will deem this life a sucker’s bargain. And yet, David and his unusual second nature with the Sandievistan makes him feel unusually invulnerable. And therein lies the large central question of the series; is he?

Without going into further detail, I will share here again that the entire spirit and aesthetic of CP77 is beautifully and wildly expressed throughout the entire ten episode run, often with truly spectacular visual poetry and texture that informs far more than the dialogue does which is a thrill since the scripts by Yoshiki Usa and Masahiko Otsuka retain a great love for the game/genre’s worldbuilding and lingo. Even dialogue expressed in net comms are beautifully integrated into each shot making the viewing experience just disorienting enough to bring viewers into this often overwhelming universe of information and bulk that threatens to permeate beyond the borders of the screen. Virtually every image of the series is dense with visual information to the point I wish this were a theatrical experience. The show truly takes full advantage of the Netflix backing, making it into something that at once feels aggressively arthouse, yet somehow palatable on the pop art side.

The music and soundscape of the series is a unique mix of songs established in the video game, along with new music by Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill) that offers a bit of rock to counter the often overabundant techno infused claustrophobia of the visual presentation. Songs in several languages sneak into the soundscape again informing us of the world beyond the characters, creating an emotional landscape that both surprises and creates sneaky emotional hints of what is to come. Needless to say I will be listening to this stuff for a good few weeks. Hell, any show that makes me wild about Franz Ferdinand again is certainly doing something amazing.

Aside from David and Lucy, I remain fascinated by the cast of supporting characters. All with just enough backstory, or hints of depth in spite of all the crazy around them is potent. My favorites being small bodies, but endlessly energetic Rebekka who is all heart, merc daddy Maine who himself has sacrificed much of his life for almost full body prosthesis, the imposing and loyal Dorio who serves as Maine’s conscience, and the ambiguous as hell Kiwi who spends the series masked and tends to know far more than anyone else. It could be argued that at ten episodes, we could have easily gone for another several to flesh these characters out. And come episode five, it’s clear this is where the bulk of the compression takes place, and yet its this choice that allows Edgerunners to be a model of peerless efficiency. We get more than enough to feel this cast as a rabble of outsiders doing these often desperate jobs in order to seek out what lies beyond the city limits. Its a series that could have gone a full 26 episodes a few decades ago, but would we be able to experience this stunning animation had we done that?

As such, Edgerunners is unusually pretty complete by the finale with little to no dangling threads to annoy, or incomplete thoughts. Just a straightforward tale of life in a universe that’s gotta play louder than ever that it’s a warning of things to come, not an advertisement. The best dystopian fiction should never be aspirational. And with David’s story, it’s again made quite clear to the youth of today that no matter how badly we wish otherwise, there is no buying a way out of the clutches of capitalism run amok. There’s no special ones outside or corpo legacies, or those lured by them into service to keep the machine running.

The only true escape is to unplug.

Because when you bet against the city, the city will always win.

Always.