Who is Talia’s Father: Kiril or King?

The second season of Netflix’s ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners‘ brings a new story from the depths of Night City, with the lives of three new characters overlapping in unexpected ways. One of them is Talia, whose significant body parts have been replaced with implants. As the details of her tragic situation come to light, questions about her parentage are also raised repeatedly. What makes it more interesting is that this doubt is sown by none other than her mother, Avida. By the end of the season, the reality about her biological father’s identity comes to light, but it turns out to be a different answer from the man who acts as her father figure. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Avida Deliberately Raises Doubts About Talia’s Parentage

Talia is raised by Avida and Kiril Yang, the latter being a top executive in a megacorp called Kang Tao. At a young age, she is diagnosed with a terminal illness that slowly starts to chip away at her body. To ensure her survival, her parents get her cybernetic implants. While they act as replacements for her body parts that had slowly lost their functionality, the implants do nothing to cure her illness. This means getting more and more implants to the point that there is barely any organic material left in her body. It ensures her survival for the time being, but it also makes her vulnerable to cyberpsychosis.

The fact that she has been able to get these many implants without already having lost her mind proves she has a high tolerance for implants compared to others. But that still doesn’t change her eventual fate. Ironically, the only way to save her from cyberpsychosis is to downgrade her implants, but that brings her back to square one because her illness is still ravaging her body. The choice of death or insanity is a heavy one, and it makes Talia feel dissociated from the people around her. So, she runs away and joins a gang called Maelstrom. Her mother, Avida, desperately tries to bring her back home, especially since she knows that Talia intends to get even more implants, refusing to consider the possibility of cyberpsychosis.

In all of this, her father, Kiril, seems to have no involvement. He uses the resources at his disposal to locate his daughter and even sends men to bring her back home by force, but we never see him have a proper conversation with her. While Avida seems constantly worried about her daughter’s welfare, Kiril seems to have detached himself considerably. Yes, he does visit the doctor and get updates about Talia’s health, but he doesn’t seem particularly invested in ensuring she has the love and support she needs so she doesn’t run away again. What paints him as an even worse father is when he discovers that Talia not only has a high tolerance for powerful tech but has also shown remarkable compatibility with Capri, an AI construct known to have killed its host within 48 hours.

Talia not only survives Capri but also seems to have formed a bond with it. Instead of finding ways to use Capri to save his daughter, he is more concerned about keeping her body intact so that Capri can be properly installed in Talia, giving Kang Tao the weapon that Arasaka had created and later tried to bury because they hadn’t been able to make it work. In this quest, Kiril even has Avida killed and has no reservations about putting Talia on the chopping block. All of this makes one wonder if he really is her father, and the tragic truth is that he is, at least, biologically.

King Takes Avida’s Lies to Heart

When Avida isn’t able to bring Talia back home herself, she reaches out to her old flame, King, who she knows has a soft spot for her. He had been madly in love with her, but for some reason, they did not end up together. While Avida moved on and married Kiril, King remained so hung up on her that when he was ready to kill himself, she was the one he thought about. When she reaches out to him for help with Talia, he hesitates because he is at his lowest point. Having recently survived a bout of cyberpsychosis, he has lost his crew, his money, and even his will to live.

He wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d asked this of him before the cyberpsychosis incident. But now, he feels he might not be up to the task. To push him into agreeing, Avida lies and says Talia is his daughter. Had King given it more thought, he would’ve noted that the timeline of his and Avida’s breakup and Talia’s birth is so far apart that there is no way that girl could be his. However, the thought of having a daughter gave him a reason to live, so he clung to it, refusing to accept any other explanation. Not only does King accept himself as Talia’s father, but he also acts like it.

He is genuinely concerned about her well-being and is ready to do whatever it takes to bring her back home safe and sound. Later, even when Kiril confronts him with the truth and mocks him for being so easily manipulated by Avida, King doesn’t change his mind. For him, Talia is his daughter, and he intends to be the father that she deserves. Sure enough, when the dust settles and both Avida and Kiril die, King is the one who takes in Talia and vows to take care of her. At one point, he even promises her that they will flatline together if that’s what it takes for her not to get more implants and risk cyberpsychosis, and for all intents and purposes, he seems ready to honor that vow. Thus, it is fair to say that while Kiril may have been Talia’s biological father, King was the father figure she had and deserved.

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