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WARNING: This review of Cobra Kai season 6 contains MAJOR SPOILERS.
“Balance good, karate good, everything good. Balance bad, better pack up and go home.”
If only the gatekeepers of the six-season smash hit Cobra Kai had taken the above words from Nariyoshi Miyagi – also known as Mr. Miyagi – to heart for their final season, their otherwise superlative efforts in resurrecting Lazarus-like from the cinematic graveyard the Karate Kid franchise may very well have gone over with the bang it so richly deserved. Instead, it gave in to its weakest and most commercial impulses and left the dojo mat bowed in a barely discernible whimper, forgetting that the ‘Karate’ in this long-running franchise was never the main player on the stage but, rather, a metaphor for something more than an end-product which bears more of a resemblance to a slickly packed video game than a heartfelt coming of age and redemption story which Netflix vainly attempted to pass off the final season as. Or maybe that’s just us?
For the benefit of readers who may not have been keeping up, Cobra Kai was a television series that served as a direct sequel to the four film Karate Kid series. Originally seeing life on YouTube back in 2018 (Netflix only entered the picture with the third season), this series from Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg posited what would happen if you made the bully of the original 1984 film – Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) – into the central focus of the new show, rather than the bullied hero, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio)? Suddenly, the dynamic shifted from a coming-of-age story (though those elements obviously introduced themselves as the series went along) to a full-on redemption story about a man whose entire life went into mothballs when he lost the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament in ‘84. Years later, a down and out Johnny Lawrence is given a chance to revive his old dojo Cobra Kai and teach a whole new generation of students the right way to do karate. But will the decades-long animosity between Lawrence and LaRusso sink the newly returned dojo before it can even begin, or can the two men find a way to work together and reconcile the teachings of their Sensei’s, John Kreese (Martin Kove) and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita)?
That was the crux of Cobra Kai for most of its 65-episode run and, to give credit where it’s due, the creators of the series kept the train going for a majority of that time with fresh spins on old rivalries as well as something quite meaningful to say about the grace of forgiveness while keeping an eye on the future as you acknowledge and respect the past, messy though it can sometimes be. Unfortunately, that secret recipe was mostly discarded in the final season of the show, replaced by an interminable karate tournament which put action and plot over character development.
About that never-ending karate tournament called the Sekai Taikai: On a basic storytelling level, we get why this super tournament was added to the proceedings. After all, you want to challenge your principal characters. What good is a triumph if the challenge was wan and uninspired to begin with, right? Alas, the writer’s room for Cobra Kai elected to turn the entire season over to this tournament, at the expense of character development and believability. Worst of all, the great and beating heart which has long been lock, stock, and barrel of The Karate Kid and, in turn, Cobra Kai, was exchanged for cartoon-like violence and a choreography which felt straight out of a video game. In deciding to grab for the glittery bobbles and low-hanging fruit of the Sekai Taikai, the wordsmiths for the show opted to trade in substance for flash; it feels like no one is minding the store.
Perhaps the most difficult part of watching Cobra Kai’s underwhelming final season was the almost total hand-off of the writer’s room to lesser lights who feel apparently as if they’ve been instructed to write more for The Fast and the Furious crowd rather than the folks who jumped aboard at the start of the series and signed up for something fun with real depth of character. By this sixth season, Johnny, Daniel, Kreese, Silver, Amanda, Carmen, Miguel, Robby, Samantha, Dimitri, Hawk, Kenny and Tori have had their carefully structured character arcs traded in for what feels like an alternate take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These are not the same characters we first met and fell for at the start of the journey, and not because they’ve grown and changed as people; as written now, they’ve regressed. They’re now reduced to glorified cardboard cutouts, with tin-eared dialogue and catch-phrases, to boot. For their parts, the incredible cast of actors in Cobra Kai do the best with that they’re given. The character of Chozen (The Karate Kid Part II’s bully), wonderfully brought to life by veteran actor Yuji Okumoto, is one of the greater casualties of this last hurrah, reduced to waxing rhapsodic about Storage Wars and dropping gems of dialogue such as “The binary bros are back!” (Ouch.) We know these bits are intended by writers to ‘humanize’ a character, but the above borders on abuse of a once dignified character and feels off and untrue to much of what has been established about Chozen in the second film and in his early appearances on the series.
The captains of the Cobra Kai ship seem mostly absent from both the writing and directing side of things this last go-around, and that’s clear almost from the start. The fifteen-episode grand total for this season feels bloated and meandering, and the bad writing doesn’t help matters. One thinks of more hands-on creators such as Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner who always had direct skin in that show’s game. It showed, too, in the best possible ways. Though truly a case of apples and oranges, Weiner’s writing and directing until the final episode of that evergreen series is a great example of a creative never taking his eye off the ball. For that due diligence, Mad Men will be a part of our pop culture and social conversation for decades to come. I’m not so sure the same can be said for Cobra Kai.
We could go on about what didn’t work for the sixth and final season of Cobra Kai. But after a certain point, it feels too much like a pile-on or sour grapes. One word of personal note: I first saw The Karate Kid in late 1985 (I was late to the party) and instantly fell in love with the film. Ditto the sequels, although in an increasingly diminished scale, as is the case with most continuations of a film story. However, I count the first three seasons of Cobra Kai as some of the very best ever committed to the small or big screens. If this review reads as slightly bitter, it’s only because there is so much love for these characters and the desire to see them be handled with love and care. Unfortunately for anyone looking for satisfactory closure to Cobra Kai, this regretfully is not it.
