I just finished the season and all of this. Not to mention, another brawl in the season finale? S1 ended perfectly in an All Valley tournament. These constant all out brawls just completely suspend disbelief to me (though the Johnny vs Kreese fight with LaRusso joining in was). I’m glad we are getting back to tournament next season.
Started watching it because a friend who is obsessed wouldn’t stop bugging me about it.
It’s incredibly cheesy. Over the top, so.
My main gripe is that almost every encounter between people ends in one of two ways: a fight or someone walking away in a huff before explaining everything or listening to someone explain everything.
This series has more easily-cleared-up misunderstandings than 10 seasons-worth of “Three’s Company.”
Christ, I"m always yelling at the screen “JUST EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED!” Or “JUST LISTEN FOR TEN MORE SECONDS!”
No he isn’t. He bullies children.
I do like the series, cheesiness and all, but they do need to finish it as S4. I am honestly surprised the topic could carry us so far, and I agree that the constant assault and B&E does get over the top.
Awesome interaction with Ali, even though it took them a long-ass time to get there. Also th trip to Japan was more fun than I imagined and well played.
The Kreese flashbacks did nothing for me. I still don’t get the point, the neither made him more relatable nor more badass or anything. They have a hard time pretending for Mr. Kove to be an actual fighter, so I would really prefer they stepped away from that.
Yeah. I think one of the things the show has done the best is step back a bit from “daniel is the pure hero, Johnny is the evil villain” into some shades of gray, without trying to both-sides-ism it so that they’re equal people. Daniel is a better person in nearly every way than Johnny, but Johnny does have some genuinely good qualities, and he’s a much better person than he was in high school (as are many people).
Johnny is also entertaining as heck to watch, while Daniel can be a tad boring, but they’re always fun together.
Season 4 dropped this weekend. I’ll try to avoid any specific spoilers, but there will be some general spoilers.
SPOILER BREAK
I was pleasantly surprised by the first season. I thought the second season wasn’t as strong, but it was still really good. Part of the reason I thought it wasn’t as strong was that they had to soften Johnny up a bit - the balance between clueless has-been jock and flawed middle-aged man trying to be better was just perfect in Season 1, but unsustainable. He had to have some character growth, but that cost them their best humor. I thought Season 3 was about on par with Season 2, but their were starting to stretch the limits of their premise. Season 4…
I still liked Season 4. But at this point, I think the strains in their premise are really starting to show. Just how many characters are we going to see going from victim to bully? How many characters are we going to see go through redemption arcs? Are we going to get a new villain every time the old one gets towards the end of their redemption arc? I actually think the show does a remarkably good job overall showing complex characters, but it’s gotten pretty formulaic at this point.
And, at this point, I’m kind of thinking karate is actually a bad influence. Even the “good guy” characters have a habit of using it to pick fights. Also, the show keeps approaching the idea that both Johnny and Daniel are trapped by their past, and their children are the way forward, and they need to break the cycle. But then bouncing off of that, so the series can continue.
And, without specific spoilers, the last episode ends on multiple cliffhangers, for Season 5. I’m just hoping that actually gets made. Netflix has a distressing habit of cancelling shows after only a couple of seasons. I think the first two seasons were actually YouTube Premium, though, so hopefully we’ll actually get a Season 5. They really need to wrap up the show in that season, though. For one thing, I think they’ve mined all of the villains from movies at this point. Although I don’t think they’ve referenced any material from The Next Karate Kid yet…
Season 5 was ordered back in August.
And I see that it has actually finished filming.
I just started watching it today for no particular reason. I don’t even know if I saw the original karate kid. I probably did see it, but I probably saw it 30 years ago and forgot almost everything.
But cobra kai is pretty funny and entertaining. I’ll probably binge the whole series in a month.
Well, that is genuinely reassuring. I was worried about all the new plotlines and characters and cliffhangers, but apparently they did that knowing they were guaranteed a Season 5.
Now, they really need to wrap everything up in the next season…
I kind of look at it as a guilty pleasure. It’s silly and it’s more than a little unrealistic, but it’s fun. And it’s good at showing that things are not always what they seem for anyone, including the rich/privileged characters. And there are few really good or bad guys; honestly I can only think of one who’s sort of irredeemable, and we’ve got his backstory showing why he’s the way he is, which mitigates even his villainy somewhat.
I think the show’s main “lesson” is to show how support/mentorship growing up affects young people for good or ill. I mean, we see that Johnny could have had a worse outcome in many ways had he stuck with Kreese, and we know that Daniel could have ended up like that, or like present-day Johnny had Miyagi not stepped in as a mentor and friend. And we’re seeing something similar with Miguel, Robby, Tory and other characters as well.
Over the past month I binge-watched all of Cobra Kai to date.
It reminded me of the Netflix series Sex Education in the sense that Season 1 was already pretty silly but with reasonable stakes (the karate championship, in the case of Cobra Kai) but each subsequent season gets sillier, introducing more and more secondary characters, adding more gratuitous scenes and raising the stakes to less plausible levels.
I was starting to lose interest with Season 4 (I fast-forwarded through most of the storyline with Daniel’s son, for instance), but I thought the last couple of episodes were interesting and surprising.
On a side note, I have never seen Karate Kid III and I forgot that it even existed. I figured it went from Karate Kid II to the one with Hilary Swank.
On the issue of “balance”, I felt like that was kind of the whole theme of Season 4. I felt like they were just about to say, “So-and-so will bring balance to The Force Karate” several times, about several of the kids. I mean, we now have most of the main kid characters having trained extensively in both Cobra Kai/Eagle Fang, and Miyagi Do, and being able to switch between them was crucial to the ending of the tournament.
I realized it was Silver before the actual reveal, largely because he was the last major character left from the original movies we haven’t seen. I initially liked how he had grown past the events of the movie (“I did a lot of cocaine back then…”), but I think his Heel Turn is what will ultimately set up a redemption arc for Kreese. I think how this season ended is the only way forward for Kreese to finally realize how badly he’s screwed things up.
What I’m not sure about is how Silver will be redeemed. Everyone riding off into the sunset together has to be the end game of all this, right?
Mike Barnes from Part III has still yet to be featured, and it seemed they were teasing him at the end of this season (when Silver said to Kreese as he was being arrested that he would bring in a couple of friends to help him run Cobra Kai). It would also be interesting if they somehow got Hilary Swank to guest as her character Julie from The Next Karate Kid. It might be a little awkward though, as that character was only connected to Mr. Miyagi (who obviously isn’t around).
I had forgotten that part of the movie. Googling it, I found this:
It is confirmed that Mike Barnes will return in this season.
I was reading an article where the showrunners said that is definitely a possibility. The Next Karate Kid is in canon so Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside, Walton Goggins, and whoever else was in that film could reprise their characters. And Swank’s already making films and shows on Netflix.
I was totally expecting to see Hilary Swank in the audience watching the girls fight. That would’ve been enough for a way to bring her in next season, or just acknowledge her as a cameo.
I was pleasantly surprised by Season 4, but also let down some. The Karate gets sillier and sillier, culminating in the Tournament where they let Kenny fight against Robbie - that was so out there I couldn’t wrap my head around it anymore 
But I let go and embraced this parallel universe now where Karate is magic.
Even though I can’t stand the actress, Larussos Daughter and Tory were really interesting, as well as Robbie up and leaving.
But I do fully agree that this has to end - it really should have ended this season.
Oh, and +1 to Hogarth - I had completely forgotten there ever was a Karate Kid III. That already confused me in season 3 where Danny references having been Cobra Kai for some time. My wife commented that she was unhappy with Silver falling off the wagon after very clearly stating that he is over this nonsense and has a much better life now. TBH, they should have gone full tilt with the addiciton parallel and have him snorting coke again, that would have made more sense.
I did love the callback that Danny blew his college fund on that crazy ass Japan trip in Part 2 - those callbacks are what makes the series so fun to me.
I just finished this season, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Thankfully we didn’t have teens rampaging in an all out brawl in the high school this season - I can handle quite a bit of ridiculous cheesiness, but that was really over the top. It is kind of interesting how they do the victim becomes the bully due to karate thing - it started with Hawk (and I can’t believe I was rooting for Eli in a fight knowing how much I despised Hawk!) and continues with Kenny. And it looks like Daniel has learned some lessons from Jonny as Chozen did a far more aggressive version of Miyago-do - which should make Sam happier. Probably will see Robbie switch sides… once again.
Well that made sense as Cobra Kai had so many individuals qualify for QFs that two of their fighters were going to have to go up against each other. Though how Kenny got so good so fast is another question - then again so did the female Eagle Fan (who acknowledges how silly that was).
I have no idea how real world karate tournaments work, but in Cobra Kai’s world, there apparently are no weight classes, or age categories beyond “Under 18”, and it was apparently a major reform to have separate Boys and Girls divisions, and before that it wasn’t that girls were ineligible, it was that they competed with the boys in a unisex tournament.
Well, that goes all the way back to Daniel in the original movie, who in a few months (maybe, or maybe just a few weeks) of waxing cars and painting fences goes from absolutely no experience to All Valley Champion.
I think Demetri may be the one character who has actually had something approaching a realistic learning curve - it’s only in Season 4 that he’s finally gotten competitive, but still isn’t one of the top fighters.