"Cobra Kai," Season 3: review

Daniel and Chozen meet again

Aside from watching certain Netflix-only movies, another reason I chose to sign up with Netflix was so I could continue to watch "Cobra Kai," which started out on YouTube Premium but moved to the now-dying platform after Season 2. Despite the transition to a new online host, the show retains its balance of comedy and drama, with arguably more focus on Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) than on Daniel (Ralph Macchio). Both characters continue in their struggle to better themselves while also being self-undermining dickheads, although Season 3 does show Daniel in a slightly more sympathetic light this time.

Season 3 picks up after the huge high-school brawl that ended Season 2 and saw Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) crippled by Robby (Tanner Buchanan) after Robby kicked Miguel over a second-floor banister. We follow several subplots about the grownups and the teens. In one subplot, Daniel's car dealership suffers a PR disaster because Daniel had linked his marketing to his karate skills. With Miyagi-do students having been involved in the school brawl, karate has become associated with violence, bullying, and the gang mentality. Daniel's wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) is doing what she can to dissociate the dealership from karate. In another subplot, Johnny, having half-mastered Facebook, reconnects with his—and Daniel's—old flame Ali (Elisabeth Shue) even as his relationship with Miguel's mother Carmen (Vanessa Rubio) is heating up. We also follow Miguel's rehabilitation thanks to certain New Age-y health "professionals" and Johnny's tough-love encouragement. In the background looms the specter of evil sensei Kreese (Martin Kove, quietly malicious), who gets something of a back story this season as we see, through flashbacks, what he and Terry Silver went through in Vietnam as part of the Special Forces. This back story allows us to see Kreese as a complicated individual who, at least in the past, had a conscience—a conscience that got him and his men captured by the Viet Cong. Daniel, in a bid to rescue his dealership, flies to Japan to meet with the executives of Doyona Automotive: the Doyona brand doesn't want to be associated with Daniel's current bad PR, and Daniel does what he can to change the executives' minds. While he's in that part of the world, Daniel takes a sentimental side trip to Tomi Village in Okinawa where, in a pair of Dickensian coincidences, he reunites with his second ex-girlfriend Kumiko (Tamlin Tomita) and with his old rival Chozen (Yuji Okumoto). Kumiko is older but still radiant; Chozen is older and sterner, and he has lessons to teach Daniel-san—lessons that will be applicable once Daniel is back in the States, just in time to deal with Kreese.

This season has its quirks and highlights. As part of Miguel's rehab, Johnny takes Miguel to a Dee Snyder concert, and we get to see the Dee Snyder on stage (although I couldn't help noticing it was a really small stage, like for a black-box theater). The series gives us a glimpse of Daniel's son Anthony, who has lost all of his weight but is still an annoying dick. Anthony is the rebellious opposite to his goody-two-shoes sister Samantha (Mary Mauser), who is herself something of a young-adult-novel drama queen bouncing from one boy to another, her loyalties constantly shifting. Sam is also trying to get over her fear of Tory, the nasty karate bitch with her own back story as she works several jobs to care for her brother and her sick mom. Amanda LaRusso, Daniel's wife and normally the voice of reason in the first two seasons, becomes something of a loose cannon this season, slapping Kreese and ranting about him at a school-board meeting, unmindful of how her behavior makes her look. Johnny, having split completely from Cobra Kai, creates his own dojo, which he hilariously names Eagle Fang despite the fact that eagles don't have fangs. And, of course, we have the reintroduction of Ali, Kumiko, and Chozen. Ali proves to be a bit of a puzzle: she and Johnny come perilously close to kissing after Johnny finds out that Ali is a separated mom of two, but she serves more as an expository device when she lays out what she thinks is the problem with Johnny and Daniel, telling both of them that they're more alike than they care to admit. It felt a little awkward, the way Ali was written for Season 3: she plays the role of both quasi-temptress and wisdom figure, and I'm not sure the two roles mesh all that well. Also of note is that Tamlin Tomita and Yuji Okumoto both speak standard American English, but they had to affect Japanese accents for their roles (as they did in "The Karate Kid Part II").

Although the series deals with a whole complicated tapestry of themes, one of the major ones has to be bullying. In fact, I'd say that, if you took all the bullying out of the series, you'd have very little left. When I think back to my childhood, I recall being bullied in taekwondo class when I was a fifth-grader, but beyond that, I really don't recall junior high and high school being the Darwinian jungle we see in "Cobra Kai," which shares a certain amount of DNA with "Better Call Saul," a show that makes clear the world is divided into wolves and sheep. Maybe I didn't see much bullying because I got large when puberty hit; I don't know. But while I did see a fight or two while I was a student, I don't remember my secondary education as some smoking battlefield where weaker students constantly hunkered down in fear as stronger, more predatory students circled them with slavering jaws.

Except perhaps for Kreese, the series continues to do a good job of presenting us with complex characters. There's still that soap-operatic feel as different groups of people unite and split, rearranging themselves in different permutations. It can be hard to keep track of who's dating whom, for example. And Daniel and Johnny are still on that roller coaster: sometimes, they're tentative friends; sometimes, they're bitter rivals. Daniel sees Miyagi-do karate as coming from an ancient tradition (it supposedly harks back to China) so he can't bring himself to respect Johnny's Eagle Fang karate which, in Daniel's view, comes from no tradition at all. Johnny, who has a rich, self-righteous stepfather (Ed Asner in his final performance), is sensitive to supercilious attitudes, so he can't take Daniel's poorly hidden arrogance.

One interesting point is that, during a Vietnam flashback, we learn that Kreese was specifically taught the Korean martial art of dangsudo (often written as Tang Soo Do) by his captain. Dangsudo was officially founded in the 1940s (it has a strong resemblance to taekwondo), but you could arguably trace its roots back to ancient martial ways in both China and Japan. Johnny, who learned from Kreese, apparently doesn't know any of this about his fighting style, which is strange because people who become advanced in their chosen martial art usually learn a lot about their art's history and philosophy as part of their training.

This brings me to the issue of the martial arts on display in the series. In terms of fight choreography, well, frankly, I've seen better. Most of the actors are obviously not martial artists; the fight scenes tend to be stiff and slow (not to mention heavily edited), and maybe with a TV-scale budget, it's impossible to expect the actors to train as hard as, say, Keanu Reeves does for the John Wick films. This isn't the same as watching a pro like Scott Adkins, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Chuck Norris, Jason Statham, Michael Jai White, or Jean-Claude Van Damme. But my pet theory is that, ultimately, "Cobra Kai" is less about the martial arts than it is about the human relationships blossoming (and sometimes withering) before us. The fights are there to spice things up and to remind you of the series's Karate Kid roots, but the real meat of the series is the interpersonal interaction. As a show about karate, "Cobra Kai" isn't very good, but as a dramedy about several generations of people who are all trying to work their shit out, "Cobra Kai" is not half bad.

I should take a moment to talk about the plausibility of some of the scenes throughout the series. Maybe it's because we live in the age of Defund the Police, but you'd think there'd be way more police involvement with all these karate brawls happening in the San Fernando Valley, and with people stealing various items from each other (Johnny steals an expensive sculpture from his stepdad; Robby, taking after his dad, steals a minivan). One character, Demetri, gets his arm broken by an ex-friend, but there are no repercussions. The season ends with another massive brawl inside a home... and that somehow failed to alarm the neighbors? While the series has always been on the silly side, there were times, this season, when it was hard to suspend disbelief.

Despite those complaints, Season 3 of "Cobra Kai" gets a thumbs-up from me. I do wish they toned down the teen drama and stopped resorting to bullying to move the plot forward (if you're going to keep focusing on bullying, then bring in issues like substance abuse and suicide!), but I'm generally happy with the complexity that the writers have given the main (and minor) characters, who are not obviously good or bad. As I said above, Ali remains a bit of a cipher (Elisabeth Shue basically grins her way through her performance), but the weird feud-friendship between Daniel and Johnny continues to be interesting.