Cobra Kai, the Final Chapter
There’s probably a Rocky V joke in here somewhere, too
Cobra Kai (2022), Netflix
Through season four, this show was weaving a pretty solid tapestry out of some surprisingly complex material. I was very curious to see how the showrunners brought it to a close. As it happens, it brings the curtain down in high spirits and has a great brawling good time, though it necessarily has to ease back from the complicated place it was going in order to get all the threads tied up neat.
The buttkicking and training montages don’t stop, which is nice. Johnny’s shtick doesn’t tire (this time he swerves his tech-ignorant Gen-X grumpiness into gig driving for a minute), and he gets a neat little growth moment here as he finally embraces maturity and fatherhood. The show uses that to tie his story off as quickly as possible so the narrative can pivot away from him, and people who were here for Johnny from the start may feel a little robbed by that. But ramping into a final showdown between LaRusso and Silver is the only plausible way to end this story, so it’s what we get. While Johnny and Daniel are the adversaries from the original film that come to learn respect for one another, Terry Silver was always more ferocious, and here proves irredeemable. The end of season four offered a tantalizing whiff of a psychotic break in Silver, grounded in his old ‘Nam traumas and relationship with Kreese. However, it doesn’t take long for season five to direct Silver into a straightforward corporate greed/malignant narcissism lane. While this definitely represents a back-off from where the show seemed to want to go, the scripts take some pains to establish that Daniel and Terry have legitimate beef springing from the mostly-forgotten Karate Kid III all those years ago, so Silver becomes the clear villain the show decided it needed. Their confrontation is inevitable. I think you know how that will end.
Even on the way out, it’s worth noting that this whole show never stops being primarily about guys trying to be good men. Each is trying to do what he believes must be done, and impart his wisdom to the teen boys asking him for direction into adulthood. The show tries really hard to keep female characters in the mix, notably the girls of the assorted dojos (and Daniel’s wife, Amanda, even gets a little side plot this season that facilitates the super-deep-cut reappearance of Robyn Lively). They’re strong but cute, independent but yearning, tough but fragile, and all the stuff showrunners think girls want to see, but in the end they still have to step back and let the guys take center stage for the real finale. Different viewers will feel differently about that, but it’s the nature of this story with these characters to unfold this way. By the time we get to the grand melee of the final episode, the whole thing is wrapping up exactly the way the films did: the bad guys (and gals) are exposed and defeated, and the good guys (and gals) win by discovering new maturity and perspective. Daniel gets to deliver one last crane kick to wave goodbye, and the whole thing goes out on a warm and pleasant high note of nostalgia. Well done, says I.
Ultimately 3.5 stars of 5: It’s a great time once, and highlights are worth sharing, but overall it leans heavily enough on nostalgia that it’s not something casually rewatchable.