The Middle Batch of ‘Cobra Kai’ Season Six Episodes Are, Unfortunately, Very Mid
When Netflix launched as a streaming platform, one of the most thrilling innovations was making whole TV seasons available at once. At first, these were older shows that had already aired in the traditional fashion, and had been licensed from the studios that produced them. But when Netflix started making its own original series, those would also premiere every episode of a new season simultaneously — waiting a week for your story to continue was a relic of the 20th century!
Soon, however, the downside of having super-users marathon six or 10 or 13 episodes in a weekend became clear: Publicity and social media buzz around a new title quickly burned itself out, and both high- and low-quality shows turned into an undifferentiated mass of content, constantly achurn. In more recent years, Netflix tried to put the content toothpaste back in the tube, slowing down the episode drops for select titles — a few at a time for shows like Love Is Blind, or dividing seasons into parts for shows like Stranger Things and Emily in Paris and releasing them months apart. Starting with its current sixth and final season, Cobra Kai has been in the latter category. The first five episodes dropped back in July, with five more landing today.
But this isn’t the end: The last five episodes of the series are yet to come (reportedly next February). This latest batch is just the middle of the season’s story, and you sure can tell.
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When we left the Miyagi-Do Karate dojo, its senseis had wrapped up a multi-episode tryout period, and brought their six successful students to the Sekai Taikai tournament in Barcelona. This group didn’t include Tory (Peyton List), who had a meltdown in her qualifying fight, since it took place hours after her mother’s shocking death by pulmonary embolism. Daniel (Ralph Macchio), the original Karate Kid and current Miyagi-Do co-sensei, stops the fight as soon as he finds out about Tory’s bereavement, and is prepared to bring her to the tournament regardless, but Tory ghosts her dojo — only to appear at the Sekai Taikai with her evil former sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove), captaining a newly reconstituted Cobra Kai team that has (evilly) trained according to the brutal teachings of Master Kim Sun-Yung (C.S. Lee), Kreese’s own (evil) sensei.
How Kreese, who escaped jail in the Season Five finale, is globe-trotting through Season Six is unclear — I guess someone who’s capable of attempted murder might also know where to get a fake passport? — but he’s just as focused as ever on getting revenge on Miyagi-Do, and using Tory as his instrument. Cue Miyagi-Do’s shock, horror, and in the case of Tory’s boyfriend Robby (Tanner Buchanan), potentially disastrous distraction from the task at hand.
As one could probably guess, this set of episodes is aimed at the viewer who comes to Cobra Kai primarily for the fights, and hits that viewer squarely in the solar plexus, repeatedly. The tournament involves multiple rounds of fights with comparatively tiny variations: one where you have to knock an opponent off a mat, one where you knock them off a platform, one with a tag team component and so on. The show is still skillfully edited and performed to give even the least knowledgeable in its audience (me) a clear sense not only of a fight’s geography but also its emotional effect on its combatants. Other than the co-captains of the Iron Dragon dojo, each of whom ends up forming a relationship with a Miyagi-Do contestant, we don’t really waste much time getting to know any of the other international karate students. The writers also don’t waste effort applying attributes to whole teams’ characters — for instance, the Dublin Thunder, who we’re told love to fight even more than the other contestants, presumably because they’re Irish, and whose matches are scored with a knockoff Dropkick Murphys track.
Of course it’s clichéd, but it’s also evidence that the show knows what it’s for: these teens advance and retreat too fast for us to even register what their faces look like; it’s fine if they’re basically cartoons.
Part 2 does occasionally aim for more resonance, as when Daniel tries to research Mr. Miyagi’s history with the tournament. Having found a blood-stained Sekai Taikai headband in a box of Mr. Miyagi’s things in the first part of the season, Daniel appeals to tournament organizers to help him track down any still-extant participants who may have crossed Mr. Miyagi’s path. Without spoiling details, this storyline includes what may be the least exciting return of a character from the first three Karate Kid movies in the Cobra Kai series so far. It does take some unexpected turns beyond that “fan service,” such as it is, but this part of the story barely advances, and might not even pay off in Part 3 of the season given that another Karate Kid feature film, starring Macchio, is coming after that.
Johnny (William Zabka) — Daniel’s movie antagonist, who’s become his co-sensei and frenemy — has been the show’s most consistently comic character, thanks in part to his determined refusal to change his behavior or overall ethos with the times. Unsurprisingly, Johnny isn’t at his best in a foreign environment. Despite dating a native Spanish speaker, his knowledge of the language is scant, and his complaint to the front desk about the shower in his room is a setup for him to bark at the clerk, “Did you just call me a douche?!” (Daniel’s wife Amanda, played by Courtney Henggeler, watching via FaceTime: “This is my new favorite show.”)
When a crisis forces Johnny to head back home in the middle of the tournament, it seems clear that the main purpose of the trip contrivance is to give him a chance to be Maximum Johnny on the plane: struggling to control his temper with a belligerent jerk in first class; calling a flight attendant over because the flight map makes it look like the plane’s flying in a curve instead of a straight line; accepting his seatmate’s offer of her emotional support dog. Gags aside, Johnny’s shown the most growth not only over the course of the series, but starting all the way back with his characterization in the original movie. It’s satisfying to see him, now, being the sensei his students need and not just the one who started a dojo to spite Daniel.
The problem with getting caught up in the fandom of a multimedia franchise is that you never know which parts are essential watching to set up the next installment, and which you can safely skip. You could probably try just to watch the first and last episodes in this drop and proceed to Part 3, but you do kind of have to know where certain mid-midseason character reveals actually came from — and, crucially, what flimsy plot devices they’re resting on. Netflix is really pulling the Cobra Kai taffy with Season Six Part 2, but with episodes still just a half-hour long or so, it’s not too big an imposition on your time.
Just don’t expect as many plot threads as obis to be tied by the time you finish Episode 10.
