Even in a landscape littered with reboots and sequels, Cobra Kai is still one of the most unlikely hit shows of the past decade. A spin-off from the Karate Kid franchise inspired by a gag on How I Met Your Mother and launched in 2018 on the short-lived YouTube Red, Cobra Kai survived to become a cult hit on Netflix and is now closing out a six-season run. Even many of us who enjoy it have a hard time explaining its appeal. It sports a D-list cast, ridiculous premise, and a weird tone — somewhere between a Nickelodeon sitcom, a CW superhero drama and Eastbound and Down. Cobra Kai has arguably lasted one season too many, with 2022’s Season Five really testing the drama threshold of a series about rival karate schools in Southern California, but showrunner Josh Heald and company have picked themselves off the mat back for the final round. Part One of Season Six has all the hyperbolic teen drama, tightly choreographed action and cringe-inducing comedy that fans have come to expect. Like Johnny Lawrence, it’s dumb as a rock, but you gotta respect the confidence.
Season Six begins with the Valley’s various fighters and factions living in harmony. Eagle Fang Karate, overseen byJohnny (William Zabka), has merged with Miyagi-Do, run by his former rival Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), and all their students are getting along for a change, even Daniel’s goody-two-shoes daughter Sam (Mary Mouser) and his hardcase student Tory (Peyton List). Johnny’s family is whole and growing bigger than ever, with his biological son Robby (Tanner Buchanan) back under his roof and a baby on the way with Carmen (Vanessa Rubio), the mother of his adored mentee Miguel (Xolo Maridueña). Their in-fighting seemingly behind them, the gang can focus on the future, like applying for college and preparing for the Sekai Taikai, the global karate competition for which the dojo qualified last season. But the peace can’t last long, as there aren’t enough tournament slots for the whole gang to participate. Meanwhile, evil Sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) has escaped from prison and still has glorious ambitions for his own dojo.
Wait, what was that last part?
Over the past few seasons, Cobra Kai has veered out of its very narrow lane as an over-the-top, self-aware sports dramedy about characters who take junior karate championships way too seriously, and escalated to the stakes of a crime drama. This is a series in which 12-person martial arts melees break out in mall food courts; once a character gets thrown in the slammer for assault, you’ve basically broken the show. Likewise, the idea that last year’s villain Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith, reprising his role from The Karate Kid: Part III) represented a global threat to the very soul of karate was too goofy even for this series. Though Kreese’s jailbreak at the end of last season was also a silly comic book moment, it’s an instance of two wrongs making a right, as it allows the stakes of the final season to hinge once again on the results of a karate tournament, with nothing on the line but pride and prestige. If Cobra Kai is going to be a cartoon, it should be a tournament animé, not Codename: Kids Next Door.
Though its cast is sprawling and its mythology is dense, this final run of Cobra Kai benefits from a tighter scope and simpler conflicts. Winning the Sekai Takai would be a life-changing opportunity for any of the Miyagi-Do kids, either as a boost to their college application or a launchpad for a career in the martial arts. They’ve reached the point in their lives in which their obsession might actually make a difference in their lives, and for once, the intense pressure that these kids put on themselves to succeed in regional karate tournaments actually seems justified. The final five episodes of the season, which arrive this November, will be dedicated to the Sekai Takai, and are set up to be a worthy finale to the series.
The young cast’s years of training also continues to pay dividends. The principals do so much of their own fighting that it’s actually jarring when the show cuts to one of their characters doing a flip or some other advanced maneuver obviously performed by a stunt performer, their face carefully obscured by a hair flip. Cobra Kai’s fight sequences remain exciting and imaginative, and these five episodes offer plenty of good GIFable moments of bloodless violence.
There are times during this batch of episodes where it feels as if Cobra Kai could keep running even as the original batch of teenage fighters age out, transforming the show into a sort of karate Degrassi. The younger students are growing up and developing their own feuds and internal conflicts. But as rewarding as that growth has been to watch, there’s no such commitment to the growth of Cobra Kai’s middle aged characters. From the beginning, one of the show’s central gags is that Johnny is a toddler’s imagining of a cool grown-up alpha male, who is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Each season has seen Johnny mature into a more functional adult, but now more than ever, that growth gets thrown out the window whenever the plot demands it. Johnny has long outlived the jokes that the writers are trying to squeeze out of him, and that’s become the biggest strain on the show’s suspension of disbelief. (Let that sink in for a moment.)
It’s probably for the best that Cobra Kai is closing up shop this fall. But who knows—maybe the last five episodes will leave us all with a craving for another follow-up, which finds step-brothers Miguel and Robby opening up rival karate schools and starting this whole rigmarole over again.
