The first five episodes of the final season of the Karate Kid spin-off deliver more martial arts melodrama in the Valley.
PLOT: With Cobra Kai eliminated from the Valley, our senseis and students must decide if and how they will compete in the Sekai Taikai — the world championships of karate.
REVIEW: Debuting in 2018, Cobra Kai started out on the now-defunct YouTube Red before shifting to Netflix for its third season. Each new season of Cobra Kai has built on a blend of nostalgia for The Karate Kid saga along with a new generation of wholesome teen melodrama. Bringing back recognizable faces from the big screen franchise, including Martin Kove, Thomas Ian Griffith, Elizabeth Shue, and Tamlyn Tomita, has helped make the series popular with multiple generations. Still, a sense of repetitiveness has crept into the last few seasons. With the sixth season split over three parts comprising five episodes each, the first batch of episodes is supposed to build up towards the dramatic conclusion of the series but ends up treading water and padding out the final season to maximize profits rather than narrative quality. With minimal tension and familiar plotting, Part One of Cobra Kai‘s sixth season starts out underwhelmingly.
Picking up shortly after the conclusion of the fifth season, Cobra Kai was disbanded after Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) paid off a referee to garner a win for Tory Nichols (Peyton List). John Kreese (Martin Kove) also escaped from jail and is on the lam, leaving the students and senseis of Miyago-Do and Eagle Fang unified as they prepare for the international Sekai Taikai competition. With all their squabbling behind them, the combined dojo is led by Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) as a fully unified partnership for the first time. This also means that five seasons of rivalry are gone, and Cobra Kai needs something to stoke the fire between the friends and frenemies. That means a lot of scheming to try and keep rifts between Dimitri (Gianni DeCenzo) and Hawk (Jacob Bertrand), Toory and Sam (Mary Mouser), Miguel (Xolo Mariduena) and Robby (Tanner Buchanan), and Kenny (Dallas Dupree Young) and Anthony (Griffin Santopietro). Some of this falls apart quickly, especially a subplot involving Devon (Oona O’Brien) towards the end of the first batch of episodes.
To try to increase the mystery, the trailers have teased a mystery about Mr. Miyagi that Daniel discovers in a box buried at the dojo. While this is partially explored during Part 1, the true revelation of how it impacts the season remains in Part Two. Much of this first run is designed to weed out all of Johnny and Daniel’s background students as they train for the tournament, where they will have a final showdown with John Kreese. Kreese’s arc involves his return to Korea, where he first learned martial arts and builds a team to defeat his rivals back in the Valley. Martin Kove has always been the best villain in this franchise, and his return to being the main bad guy is welcome. The problem is that keeping the former Cobra Kai sensei on a different continent from the protagonists for all five episodes of Part 1 ends up diminishing what happens over these chapters to not having any true goal or momentum for the final season of a series that has been mining the same plot structure for half a decade.
Because Cobra Kai episodes clock in at right around the half-hour mark, the series has regularly kept the plot of each chapter concise as it centered on one or two characters learning a lesson that helped them hew closer to Mr. Miyagi’s message of balance before dropping a cliffhanger ending leading into the next episode. Part 1 incorporates the message of balance and callbacks to the feature films but struggles with the cliffhangers. Last season’s ending was a nice place to have left the series, and now the characters are left to think about life after high school and life after karate. It is a natural progression for the teenage characters, but the adult arcs feel more forced than ever. A significant twist that wraps up the first part of the season is the most artificial that this story has been thus far in a series that relies heavily on the lightweight conceits of teen melodrama. How these characters have not learned a single lesson that does not involve martial arts is beyond me, and it feels very stale.
Series creators Josh Heald, Hon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg do not have a writing credit until the fifteenth and final episode of the season, their first since the third season’s premiere episode. Joel Novoa directed the first two episodes of Part 1, with Ralph Macchio helming the third chapter and Sherwin Shilati directing the final two. Macchio’s episode is solid, but none delivers much in the way of original action or interesting plot developments. There have tended to be one or two episodes too many in each season of Cobra Kai to date, but this first section of the final season feels bloated and devoid of anything all that exciting. The franchise cameos and connections used to be interesting, but now they feel as telegraphed as the overly choreographed fights. The cleanliness and superficiality of Cobra Kai have always been my least favorite part of the series, and it is overwhelming in these episodes.
Because Cobra Kai VI is being released in three batches of five episodes each, we have to wait until November 28th to see how the middle chapter of the season builds on the setup of these first episodes before waiting until a currently unannounced air date in 2025 for the concluding section of the season. It is difficult to judge the overall season without having seen two-thirds of it, but the five previous seasons of Cobra Kai hit a speed bump in the middle after starting out strong. The concluding episodes of Cobra Kai have historically been the strongest, but this is the first season where the opening chapters completely underwhelmed me. With too many red herrings and retreads of previous conflicts, Cobra Kai VI opens with a disappointing start to what should have been a slam-dunk wrap for this popular franchise. Maybe because a feature film is on the way, there is still hope for this story, but it feels more than ever before like Cobra Kai has run out of steam.
Part 1 of Cobra Kai VI will premiere with five episodes on July 18th on Netflix.
