‘Cobra Kai’s Sixth Season Needs 60 Percent More Johnny

The series premiere of Cobra Kai finds Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) at a low point in his life. Over the course of a few days, Johnny loses his job; his stepfather buys his way out of the promises he’d made Johnny’s late mother to look after him; and when some reckless teens crash into Johnny’s beloved Firebird, the tow company brings it to the LaRusso Auto Group, forcing Johnny back into proximity with its owner, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), Johnny’s childhood nemesis. 

Through the many seasons that followed, Johnny has learned about the legal requirements for opening a karate dojo, and as his companies have come in and out of his ownership, he’s learned some basics of graphic design and branding, too. Most importantly, though, Johnny’s learned how to be a good father both to his biological son, Robby (Tanner Buchanan), and to his quasi-stepson Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), and the values and virtues that underpin martial arts mastery, making him a better sensei. Season Six kicks off on Netflix today, with the first five episodes of what will be the show’s final season, which means we only have a few more hours left for Cobra Kai to deliver its most critical plotline: giving Johnny the happy ending he deserves.

For the uninitiated, Cobra Kai is a TV series sequel to the Karate Kid movie franchise — specifically, the first three movies starring Macchio as the titular Kid. The first film finds Daniel moving from New Jersey to the Los Angeles suburb of Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley. When he meets and flirts with Ali (Elisabeth Shue) at a party, her ex — Zabka’s Johnny — enlists his cronies to join him in bullying Daniel. Their conflict ends up involving John Kreese (Martin Kove), sensei at Johnny’s dojo, Cobra Kai; and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), now primarily a handyman but formerly a karate master who agrees to train Daniel. The two senseis’ very different karate philosophies play out through their students at the climactic All-Valley Karate Tournament, where (40-year-old spoiler ahead!) Daniel defeats two-time defending champion Johnny. 

The genius of Cobra Kai, which begins around 35 years after the original movie, is how it flip-flops the original hero and villain: Now Daniel is the king of the Valley, and Johnny is the scrappy underdog.

Through the seasons that followed, various important figures from the movies returned to Reseda — or, as it’s known to some fans, Karate Town — and their various perspectives affected the sine wave that is Johnny and Daniel’s relationship in the present day: dojos are founded, revived, usurped, rebranded, usurped again, and merged. Season Five closed with the arrest of Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), one of the show’s (and franchise’s) many sociopathic senseis and the latest to keep the Cobra Kai name synonymous with pure karate evil. Season Six’s opening montage takes us into the title card on Daniel beaming smugly as Cobra Kai signage gets loaded into a dumpster. 

The upstanding dojos — Daniel’s Miyagi-Do and Johnny’s Eagle Fang Karate — stand united; with the support of Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), a former Daniel rival turned ally in the fight against Silver, students at the merged dojo are preparing to compete at the international tournament known as the Sekai Taikai. But it doesn’t take long for a new shadow to fall on everyone: Kreese, arrested at the end of Season Four for the attempted murder of former Cobra Kai student Stingray (Paul Walter Hauser), has faked his death and escaped from prison. Obviously, there are plenty of routes this sociopathic sensei could take to get revenge for those who trumped up the charges against him if he lived somewhere else. However, he’s from Karate Town, so there’s really just one. (Karate.)

Various characters get new challenges to deal with alongside Sekai Taikai training. Daniel’s wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) — who got sick enough of Karate Town’s karate politics that she briefly left Daniel in Season Five — is now barely tolerating Chozen’s extended stay Stateside, ineffectively dropping hints that he should move. An effort to relocate him into Mr. Miyagi’s old studio uncovers some of Miyagi’s personal history, which tarnishes Daniel’s view of him as practically a secular saint, unsettling his vision of the world. Tory (Peyton List), formerly Silver’s Queen Cobra, has to decide whether it’s worth it to make peace with the kids who were, until recently, her sworn enemies; since she and Robby, having done time in juvie, aren’t looking forward to college applications like their peers, they have more riding on the tournament than anyone else. Kreese’s pursuit of vengeance introduces a whole new evil sensei into the mix — and, with him, karate students who are learning karate the wrong way. 

I appreciate the effort that has gone into making the world of Cobra Kai feel real and well-populated. When Daniel and Johnny try to narrow down the field of candidates to the six-person team they’ll bring to the Sekai Taikai, for example, we’re familiar with each of the TWELVE finalists, and those aren’t even all the students we know. (They are, unfortunately, mostly still white, something the show’s been criticized for through its run.) But whenever we’re watching a character learn about his mentor’s possibly shameful secrets, or another deal with a parent’s death, or two scrapping over who did and didn’t apply to M.I.T. like they’d planned to do since they were kids, we’re not watching Johnny. 

When Cobra Kai premiered, reframing the story to make Johnny its unlikely hero was part of reimagining it as more of a comedy. Initially, Johnny lives down to every stereotype of the kind of guy who peaked in high school and has found himself, in his 50s, beleaguered by a world he hasn’t kept up with. Based on what we’ve seen during the run of Cobra Kai — hell, going all the way back to the first two movies — Johnny is only able to learn lessons the hard way, from how to start his own business, to what the internet is for, to which people in his life he can actually trust. In the new season, awaiting the arrival of a new baby with Carmen (Vanessa Rubio), Miguel’s mom, Johnny very belatedly learns why a credit score is important and that gig work isn’t moving him toward stable adulthood. (We also see he’s still not 100 on the internet when a tertiary character asks him about Bluetooth functionality and Johnny waves him off: “This puppy’s got all the teeth you’ll ever need.”) 

Ostensibly, this show about teenagers is probably primarily intended to entertain teenagers. But for those of us who are much closer to the parents’ age than the kids’, Zabka’s quietly poignant performance as Johnny in his flop era gives Cobra Kai emotional heft — something it really needs to ground it as the karate battles constantly breaking out all over the Valley get increasingly improbable.

As a revival of a beloved media property from yesteryear, Cobra Kai is far better than average. Its creators have actually thought through what its pre-existing characters would be like decades after the production that first introduced them. As a comedy, it understands that the story it’s telling is extremely goofy, and that each successive season has made it harder and harder for the viewer to suspend disbelief about how much a whole region of a major U.S. city can possibly care about extracurricular youth martial arts. As a portrait of middle-aged disappointment — specifically Johnny’s — gradually transforming into hope for the future, it’s surprisingly effective and… occasionally moving?!?! 

I never would have thought the Johnny Lawrence of the mid-1980s was among the great characters of his time. The Johnny Lawrence of the 21st century is an underrated treasure, and I will be anxiously watching to make sure the end of Cobra Kai doesn’t disappoint either him or me.