We Didn’t Like: The Abrupt Villains
Edgerunners largely plays in a space where its antagonists are more systemic ideas than actually individuals for the most part—David and his crew are caught up in the power struggles of dominant megacorporations, shady economic war aging, haves-and-have-nots. Even their smaller criminal enterprise is infected by this, as their job-acquiring fixer, a man named Farady, emerges as a turncoat threat later on in the series by playing a part in an inter-corporation rivalry over secret cybernetic tech.
This makes the last-minute introduction of two largely under-explored villains—intelligence agents manipulating Faraday on behalf of the Arasaka Corporations, and a character from the games, a mostly cybernetic legendary soldier called Adam Smasher—a weirdly rushed and under-explored way of raising the stakes for David, Lucy, and the rest of their crew in the last few episodes. There’s never really any time to care for either threat, although Smasher’s presence in particular largely undercuts the narrative if you know he’s from the game and therefore cannot be bested by Edgerunner’s heroes.
