David's death in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — is he really gone, or could he have survived?

Edgerunners premiered on Netflix on September 13, 2022: ten episodes from Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red, set in the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077 and directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi. David is a Night City teenager who loses his mother, installs a military-grade implant he has no business using and becomes an edgerunner, a mercenary for hire. Over ten episodes he goes from scrawny kid to a body made mostly of chrome.

How David dies

It happens in episode 10, "My Moon My Man." The fixer Faraday has kidnapped Lucy, the netrunner David loves, and used her to force him into an experimental Arasaka cyberskeleton. The suit is pushing him into cyberpsychosis. When he reaches Lucy, her kiss brings him back.

Then Arasaka sends Adam Smasher to take the suit back. David stays behind to hold Smasher off so Lucy and Falco can escape. Smasher tears the cyberskeleton apart and executes David with a shot to the head.

Lucy makes it to the Moon, the place she always wanted to go. She goes alone.

Could he have survived?

Not in the version that aired. But there was another one. In an interview with Anime Corner at DoKomi in May 2026, writer Bartosz Sztybor said: "There was never a happy ending. There were even worse endings."

"There was one ending in which David doesn't die entirely," Sztybor said.

In that draft, Arasaka gets hold of him, and he ends up fighting corporate wars "as a robot." Sztybor has no plans to undo the one that aired. Asked about fans who want David back, he said: "But no, it won't happen. It's a legacy." He also explained why, with a scenario he clearly doesn't want to write: if David "finds Lucy and has seven babies, people would be like 'you destroyed those feelings.'"

What Edgerunners 2 does with him

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premiered on Netflix on October 20, with a new story and a new cast. David isn't in it. But he's behind one of its main characters.

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Weak Kingsley, voiced in English by Clancy Brown, is a veteran edgerunner who now lives in the shadow of his former glory. Sztybor said he came out of a question he kept asking while writing season 1: "What if David made it? What if he didn't die?"

The closest David gets to surviving is a different character, played by Clancy Brown.

Where he still turns up

Cyberpunk 2077 has kept him around in small ways:

• His jacket — a September 2022 update added David's yellow jacket. In the game, Falco left it with a man named Muamar Reyes, who passes it on to V.
• His drink — the Afterlife sells a cocktail named after him, topped with NiCola, a soda. David didn't like carbonated drinks.
• His grave — update 2.0 in September 2023 added niches for David, his mother, Gloria, and his crew at the North Oak Columbarium in Westbrook.

David's epitaph reads: "you didn't take me to the Moon, but you were there with me."

Previously we wrote: Yaga: who is Logan, the roommate who looks exactly like the heir who vanished?