Cyberpunk: Edgerunners fans beg daily for David's return — its showrunner says they don't really want it
For once, the fandom is backing the writer against its loudest fans. Netflix's real test comes on 20 October: four new leads nobody has met yet.
Bartosz Sztybor, showrunner and writer of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, still gets "dozens" of messages a day asking him to bring David Martinez back. In an interview with GamesRadar+ published on 15 October 2026, five days before Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 arrives on Netflix, his answer is a polite no. Even if the whole audience asked for David, he says, he's sure "you don't really want that", and anyone who got their wish would probably end up disappointed.
Four years on, the spoiler is fair game. Edgerunners premiered on 13 September 2022: ten episodes from Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red about a street kid who chromes himself into cyberpsychosis so Lucy can reach the Moon. She gets there. He doesn't. The show was such a hit that Cyberpunk 2077, a game half the internet had written off in 2020, was back above a million daily players within days of the premiere.
The fans on the writer's side
The surprise isn't that Sztybor said no. It's who's cheering him on. The r/anime thread on the interview went up today and reads like a support group for the showrunner. The most upvoted reply is a one-line eulogy: "David's legend is over, he's already made his mark on Night City."
Further down, someone spells it out: "Let characters die so the story actually means something. David coming back would completely ruin his arc and sacrifice in the first season." Another put it more bluntly: "You want Boruto? that's how you get Boruto." Fair enough. Nobody wants Night City run like a Shonen Jump franchise on its third generation.
The loudest fans want David back. The rest of the fandom is guarding his grave.
So the DM crowd is not the real threat. They're a vocal minority, and the people who actually watched that finale with a box of tissues are on the writer's side.
Four strangers instead of David's crew
The real risk is the bit Netflix can't fix with a polite no. Edgerunners 2 is a standalone ten-episode story, and the first teaser said it out loud: "David is dead. But Night City lives on." Instead of David, Lucy and Rebecca, the season hands viewers four new leads:
- Weak Kingsley: a veteran edgerunner living in the shadow of his old "King" reputation, voiced in English by Clancy Brown.
- D: a Snake Nation netrunner hunting his clan's killer.
- Roman Carax: a young cinephile filming real stories in a city hooked on braindance.
- Talia Yang: raised in the corporate towers, hardened in the Maelstrom gang.
The director's chair has changed too. Hiroyuki Imaishi hands over to Kai Ikarashi, who directed episode six of the first season. That's a lot of new faces for an audience that fell for the old ones in ten episodes and has spent four years writing fan fiction about them.
Sztybor seems to know it. He told GamesRadar+ that the call to start over still costs him sleep:
"Even now, I have nightmares."
— Bartosz Sztybor, showrunner, to GamesRadar+
He also says he's proud of making something completely different. To be fair, that's exactly what the first season did: nobody had heard of David Martinez before September 2022 either.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 lands on Netflix worldwide on 20 October. Nobody is getting David back. The real question is whether anyone stays for Kingsley.
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