Two years ago, I wrote that Season 6 of Cobra Kai should be its farewell. I also noted that the show “hasn’t worn out its welcome — yet” while conceding that Season 5 was the weakest chapter of The Karate Kid TV saga to date.
Now that Cobra Kai Season 6 is streaming on Netflix — or at least, the first of three five-episode chunks of Season 6 is available — I’m pretty much ready to remove the yet from that previous sentence. It’s time for Cobra Kai to hang up its blue-and-white headband once and for all.
To be clear, this show still had an improbably successful run. A Karate Kid television sequel sounded like a shameless catch grab, an excuse to prop up a moribund but potentially lucrative franchise for a new generation. Instead, it turned into a real unicorn of a series, a genuinely compelling resurrection and update of a nostalgic hit. In fact, I’d hold up that first season of Cobra Kai, by series creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, as maybe the single best legacyquel ever made.
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The show’s secret in those days was the way it reconsidered nearly every Karate Kid character, rather than simply trot them out to rehash their old conflicts. Cobra Kai’s hero wasn’t the Karate Kid, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio); it was Daniel’s mortal enemy, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), the cocky jerk who tortured and bullied Daniel in high school. Daniel’s defeat of Johnny in The Karate Kid’s climactic tournament sent the latter into a tailspin; decades later, he still hasn’t gotten his life together — while Daniel grew up to become Southern California’s most successful car salesman. But without his wise sensei Mr. Miyagi around to advise him (like actor Pat Morita, Miyagi passed away in the period between the Karate Kid film franchise and Cobra Kai), Daniel has become a bit of a cocky jerk himself.
Cobra Kai Season 1 was essentially the inverse of The Karate Kid, with Johnny as the down-on-his luck underdog, and Daniel as the big shot in the Valley. Then Johnny met a high school kid named Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) who needed help with his own high school bullies — putting Johnny in a position to become his Mr. Miyagi. (Johnny, like Miyagi, even worked as an apartment building handyman.)
The first Karate Kid hewed to a simple sports movie formula, and the sequels got increasingly cartoonish from there, with Daniel and Miyagi traveling to Okinawa to settle old family scores and then returning to Reseda to battle a new batch of sadistic karate fighters from the Cobra Kai dojo. The early years of Cobra Kai were uncanny in the ways they took even the most ludicrous pieces of those Karate Kid movies and refashioned them in thoughtful ways. It gave tragic backstories and relatable motivations to former villains like Johnny and Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove). In a world created in black and white, it filled in shades of gray, and told a story about how the sorts of grudges that Karate Kid trafficked in don’t end when the tournament is over. They fester in a cycle that goes on and on.
That cycle continues in Season 6, but the shades of gray are long gone; Cobra Kai has become as absurd and unrealistic as the later Karate Kid sequels. Where early seasons of the show were a drama with comic elements, Season 6 is practically a sitcom. The formerly tortured Johnny Lawrence is now largely relegated to the role of comic buffoon; in one episode he even hosts a wacky slumber party for three of his dojo’s female students set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
But practically every character is comic relief now, including Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), the reformed villain of Karate Kid Part II, who now cracks jokes about Property Brothers, and Hawk, one of the next-gen bullies (but really tortured outsiders) who cleaned up his act and now sports a American flag themed mohawk. One episode hinges on a character pooping their pants on camera. (No really.)
To some extent, Cobra Kai has become a victim of its own success. Early episodes were small with a clear-cut conflict: Daniel vs. Johnny, Miyagi-Do vs Cobra Kai. Over the years, the cast kept growing larger and larger. Cobra Kai’s Wikipedia page currently lists a whopping 65 supporting players, and that’s in addition to the 13 members of the main cast. Season 6 is filled with scenes where characters stand around in big groups, possibly because there is no other way to give everyone screen time. Even then, formerly crucial members of the ensemble have almost nothing to do this year, particularly Daniel and Johnny’s significant others, Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) and Carmen (Vanessa Rubio).
The show simply has too many characters and too little conflict now. In Season 6 almost everyone is now part of the combined Miyagi-Do dojo. Former rivals like Daniel and Johnny, Miguel and Robby, and Sam and Tory are all friends. (Johnny’s baffling slumber party is his way of trying to inject tension into Sam and Tory’s now contended relationship, in the hopes that it will make them better fighters.) But Cobra Kai is also a show built around karate, and if there’s isn’t an official quota that demands every episode include at least one big fight scene, it sure feels like it — no matter what is going on in the overarching storyline, two characters invariably start punching and kicking each other, sometimes just for the hell of it. (The one this season involving 78-year-old Martin Kove really raised my eyebrows.)
The overarching plot of this season, at least in its first third, involves Daniel and Johnny’s students preparing for an international karate tournament that could potentially change the fortunes of all the characters for the better. Only the best students can enter the competition, renewing the aforementioned rivalries between the central stars. And meanwhile, that dastardly John Kreese is lurking in the shadows, preparing a new group of students to challenge Miyagi-Do.
But these are all battles we’ve seen play out before. The show we loved because it wasn’t an empty rehash of The Karate Kid has now become a rehash of itself. Season 6’s first five episodes are so rough I’m starting to wonder if Season 5 should have been the series’ last.
It doesn’t matter. No matter how good or bad Cobra Kai gets through its final ten episodes on Netflix, it won’t be the end of The Karate Kid franchise. A new movie starring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan is already in production.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
