‘Cobra Kai’ Never Dies… But It Does Have to End

For a whole generation, Johnny Lawrence, played by Billy Zabka in The Karate Kid, was the zenith of teen villainy. He was rich! He had an entourage of bully minions! The fact that he was tall and blond and preyed on a small, olive-skinned immigrant didn’t look great! (Fine, Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso has immigrated to the San Fernando Valley from New Jersey. But still!) Now we can say Johnny was essentially brainwashed into violence by Kreese (Martin Kove), the sociopathic sensei who used his dojo, Cobra Kai, to train Johnny in his extremely aggressive style of karate. But back in the mid-‘80s, Johnny was the jerk against whom all other pop-culture jerks were measured. Even though today’s teen villains have more platforms on which to attack their targets and more bad role models to inculcate them with more bad ideas, there is hope: Cobra Kai shows us that even the most toxic man can be redeemed.

When we left off in December with the middle third of the show’s sixth and final season, the world’s best dojos — two of which boasted students from the Valley, which seems statistically unlikely — were participating in a storied karate competition called the Sekai Taikai. Our Miyagi-Do heroes have been trained by Sensei LaRusso in the defensive style of Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), Daniel’s teacher in the original film and its first two sequels, with Sensei Lawrence folding in his own lessons on offense. But at the Sekai Taikai, they’ve got not one but two sworn-enemy dojos trying to take them down. There’s Cobra Kai, of course, reconstituted and now under the control of Kreese and Kim Da-Eun (Alicia Hannah-Kim), granddaughter to Kreese’s sensei. But there’s also the Iron Dragons, which Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) is using as his instrument of vengeance against Johnny and Daniel.

Everyone has had a lot to fight for — honor, revenge, career and academic advancement — but that all seems trivial once a student from the latest version of Cobra Kai is accidentally killed in the last episode of Part Two. Terry, who has a reason not to want to wait until next year for another Sekai Taikai, convinces director Gunther (Carsten Norgaard) to see if the other senseis will continue the tournament; Gunther will only consider it if the senseis unanimously agree to resume. Very little effort goes into creating suspense about this, and rightly so. We’re not here to watch Daniel’s stress over his precious daughter’s departure for college or Johnny’s attempts to be worthy of his girlfriend while she gestates their baby daughter. This is Karate Town; make with the karate!

Cobra Kai has been a victim of its own success: As Netflix, which picked it up from YouTube Red after that platform was shuttered, has continued renewing the show, the story has gotten very soapy. It’s meandered through multiple rounds of hookups and feuds for its four main kids, which at one point led to Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) — the neighbor whose victimization by bullies spurred Johnny to revive Cobra Kai in the first place — getting temporarily paralyzed from a bad fall in a karate fight. Daniel and Johnny have gone through more cycles of friendship and rivalry, making this relationship between middle-aged men far more platonically intimate than the norm. No two guys in their 50s ever (literally) fought so hard to be in each other’s lives. 

But the most glaring proof that the writers have had to unspool a story thread far past its tensile strength is everything that’s gone on with Kreese and Silver, who’ve both been arrested for multiple serious crimes but seem to have plenty of time, freedom and resources to pursue their karate vendettas. Maybe you actually forgot that Kreese was actually incarcerated and broke out of jail, and why wouldn’t you when he proceeded to cross multiple international borders and show up on camera in a karate tournament being broadcast around the world?

Despite the self-seriousness the show has indulged in, particularly in the baggy final season, this last bunch of episodes returns the show to its roots by being mostly funny, and mostly about Johnny. There’s no bigger proof that the show’s back to cheeky self-awareness than that the Sekai Taikai resumes not in Barcelona but in Encino, where all our characters live — all the better for them to be present for every face kick and chest punch! Even Daniel’s wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler), historically a karate skeptic, gets in the spirit with Miyagi-Do face paint, and scenes shot on the streets of the real Encino, as opposed to whatever Atlanta suburb has been standing in for it almost this entire time, is a treat. The final fight in the tournament is a matchup I could have never predicted, but that delighted me when it was revealed.

This show has made me fall in love with middle-aged Johnny, and I don’t think I’m spoiling much to say his story is the most satisfying aspect of the last five episodes. We’ve watched Johnny progress in so many areas: rekindling his relationship with Robby (Tanner Buchanan), the son he’s neglected; getting over his grudge against Daniel for cutting short his streak of All-Valley Karate Championships at just two; learning to be a better sensei to his students than Kreese was to him; figuring out how the internet works… sort of. As dismissive as Johnny has been about Daniel’s insistence on the value of balance, these final episodes show how much he has absorbed those lessons, building himself a happy, balanced life. Johnny can still be a clown — applying the internet’s advice on putting together a romantic date involves typical Johnny improvisations like stealing roses from a neighbor’s bush — but it’s important for the show to portray its recovering toxic man that way. In life, as in karate, perfection is elusive; what matters is that Johnny’s made his very best effort, as a well-meaning idiot, and that the next one will be just a little better.

The show hasn’t quite closed all its plot holes. Retconning some continuity errors about Mr. Miyagi ahead of Karate Kid: Legends, the feature film sequel coming in May, happens so intermittently that it gets confusing, particularly with the season broken into three chunks released pretty far apart. (Maybe that will get smoothed out in the movie, but an attempt to MCU-ify this franchise might annoy me more than if some stories just remain unresolved.) But the LaRussos, and the adopted patriarch whose spirit still hovers over them, probably aren’t what hooked most viewers anyway, so any Miyagi business is easy to forget. I’ve been here for Johnny, and the show’s producers clearly wanted to give him the right ending just as much as I wanted to see it. 

Did it need to take this long to get here? Probably not. But it feels good to have arrived.