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| Top: Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) |
I've reviewed each season of "Cobra Kai" faithfully.
And here we are at last.
Season 6 of "Cobra Kai" is the final season of the show, which started on YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) and ended up on Netflix (thus finally forcing me to subscribe to Netflix). Given the show's tendency to bring back characters from the movies (which got all the way up to "The Next Karate Kid"—i.e., Part 4—before the bizarre kung-fu reboot with Jackie Chan and the upcoming "sequel" starring Chan and Ralph Macchio titled "Karate Kid Legends"), I would have thought that Season 6 might bring back Julie Pierce (Hilary Swank) from "The Next Karate Kid," but that didn't happen. But the show did bring back, from the movies, grandma Lucille LaRusso (Randee Heller), evil sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove), arguably more evil sensei Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), ex-flame Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue), minor-flunky-turned-pastor Bobby (Ron Thomas), nemesis-turned-businessman Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan), ex-rival/nemesis Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), second ex-flame Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita), and others. Ralph Macchio continues to star as Daniel LaRusso, a successful car-dealership owner, husband, and father, but the show, per its name, really belongs to William Zabka as Daniel's old nemesis Johnny Lawrence, who over the course of several seasons becomes Daniel's friend and even partner, but not without continued friction as they run up against each other's wildly differing philosophies of and approaches to karate.
The three-part, fifteen-episode Season 6 (the previous five seasons were each ten episodes) picks up where Season 5 left off: with the students preparing for the Sekai Taikai, a worldwide karate tournament. I had guessed the Korean pronunciation for this event would be 세계대회/segye daehoe ("sehgyeh daehweh"), but as it turns out, the characters for Sekai Takai (a fictional tournament invented for the show) are 世界大赛, which in Korean would be rendered as 세계대새/segye daesae. It still means "world tournament," though. Daniel and Johnny's students are training together now, trying to absorb two very different, yet sometimes weirdly complementary, training styles, with Johnny focusing on the Cobra Kai way of aggression and offense while Daniel focuses on the Miyagi-do way of inner balance and defense. Meanwhile, John Kreese, who has escaped from prison after being convicted of a crime he hadn't committed, finds himself in Korea, where he meets old acquaintances Kim Da-eun (Alicia Hannah-Kim) and her grandfather Master Kim Sun-yung (CS Lee), the exponents of a dishonorable, aggressive form of the martial art dangsudo (often written as Tang Soo Do) that became the foundation of Kreese and Silver's training philosophy: strike first, strike hard, no mercy. Disgraced, Kreese confers with the Korean masters in an attempt to bring Cobra Kai back on the world stage as a competing team in the Sekai Taikai.
The teens, meanwhile, go through their usual waves of drama as the end of high school looms, bringing with it an uncertain future. Many of the kids will go on to separate colleges, but some, like Johnny's biological son Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan) and his bad-girl girlfriend Tory Nichols (Peyton List), have no college prospects and might be facing a blue-collar future. Friends Demetri (Gianni DeCenzo) and Eli (Jacob Bertrand) think they're both heading to MIT, but Eli hasn't told Demetri that he never applied. Young Kenny Payne (Dallas Dupree Young), meanwhile, has little desire to join the now-unified Miyagi-do (Johnny conceded to having his karate under the Miyagi-do umbrella); it takes some persuasion to bring him in. The news comes in that this year's Sekai Taikai will take place in Barcelona, Spain; Terry Silver manages to get his own charges dropped and is on the loose again, but he discovers he's contending with a terminal illness, which makes him all the more desperate to make a name for himself by forming a team for the Sekai Takai.
Much of Season 6 is devoted to the question of which group of people will ultimately bear the name of Cobra Kai. Ostensibly, the name was given by a Korean branch of dangsudo (which makes no sense to those familiar with East Asian culture; kai is a Japanese particle). Also in question is what the latest incarnation of Cobra Kai will represent. The show resolves this and other issues in a fairly neat, if rough-edged, fashion (no spoilers), and the final few episodes are devoted to moments of triumph, loss, closure, and future horizons. Do Daniel and Johnny remain friends, or does Kreese seduce Johnny back to his old ways? Do Kreese and Silver make up, or do they stay bitter enemies to the end? Will Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) make it into Stanford? Will his girlfriend, Daniel's daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser), go to a local university or overseas? These and other questions get asked and answered by the end through a series of codas reminiscent of Peter Jackson's "The Return of the King."
The show manages its usual balance of comedy and seriousness (hat tip to Courtney Henggeler as Daniel's often-hilarious wife Amanda); it also does its best to balance Johnny's style of Cobra Kai with Daniel's style of Miyagi-do. The script still manages to pull a few surprises on us, but it's the final season, and since some plot lines have been converging for a while, those points of convergence become somewhat predictable. As always, the series has its heart in the right place; it wants to show that people (well, most people) can change; that karate can bring out the best in you; that martial virtues aren't always the same from school to school; and that life can often be a tangled mess. Although Season 6's first two episodes were disappointingly corny, the overall story ended up being funny, bittersweet, and satisfying. The show's final few moments came to a conclusion that was, I think, consistent with the show's overall tone since 2017.
While I'm still praising the show's good points, I should make a special note of William Zabka's performance as Johnny. Zabka's not going to win any Oscars with his acting (not that the Oscars are worth anything anymore), but Season 6 provides him with several opportunities to show he has more than a narrow emotional range. (For what it's worth, he's also got a great sense of comic timing and delivery.) In one sentimental scene, Johnny proposes to and marries his lady love Carmen (Vanessa Rubio) while she's in the hospital, and he has a final father-son moment with a deeply altered Kreese that ends in manly tears. Johnny spends time talking to his dead mom at her grave, too, a moment I couldn't help but be touched by. Zabka might not win any Oscars, but he's a very decent actor who held his own opposite Martin Kove's Kreese and Ralph Macchio's Daniel.
And now, we turn to my complaints. Season 6 continues the trend of Korea-bashing, with the focus being relentlessly on dangsudo and not the more popular taekwondo. Despite that focus, we learn little about what dangsudo is really like, and how it contrasts with the Okinawan karate that Daniel was taught. One of the younger antagonists in Season 6 is Kwon Jae-seong (Brandon H. Lee), who is essentially channeling the sneering vibe of the young Chozen Toguchi (older Chozen is much wiser and is now Daniel's friend). Kwon's character isn't given any real depth, and his ultimate fate is, at least for me, inadvertently funny (some will think I'm mean for saying that). Korea in general gets a bad rap in this show; I began to think it would have been nice for Chuck Norris to guest star as a good practitioner of dangsudo (since that's Norris's background). It would also have been nice, with so much of Season 6 being set in a mythical, timeless, and rather caricatured version of Korea, for the show to reveal more of what modern Korean society is like. Australian actress Alicia Hannah-Kim, as Kim Da-eun, doesn't seem too comfortable speaking Korean; aside from the younger Korean cast, the only actor who seemed to have a halfway decent, authentic Korean accent was CS Lee as the evil grandfather Kim Sun-yung (or in official romanization, Kim Seon-yeong). But old master Kim's problem was the way he looked: like a villain straight out of a bad Hong Kong action flick—covered in old-man latex and a fake wig, with a fake mustache and beard. Kim Da-eun, the granddaughter, ends up doing two things that are hard to believe: (1) she falls for the charms of Chozen Toguchi, and (2) she ends up murdering her grandfather in a Darth-Vader-kills-Palpatine moment, possibly as a result of her exposure to Chozen and the philosophy of Miyagi-do. Both of these plot points ought to have repercussions, but they occur too late in Season 6 to be explored. While Japanese/Korean romances do occasionally happen, they're fairly rare (especially among older folks) given the countries' bitter history with each other. And murdering a relative in modern South Korea isn't an act that one can just sweep under the rug. People will ask questions, and the police will find out.
The fight choreography is still a sore point for me. While some of it looked like real karate, a lot of it was overly stylized, lacking grit and brutality. There was also way too much gymnastic helicopter kicking (this kind, not this kind) during the Sekai Taikai bouts as a way to move around the mat, and way too many jumping somersaults (which were obviously done by stunt doubles). Some of the less major characters that we meet at the Sekai Taikai tournament are legitimate martial artists in real life. Before I watched Season 6, I happened to stumble upon some videos of taekwondo practitioner Rayna Vallandingham, a talent who has been doing martial arts since she was five or six. By all rights, Vallandingham's character, the vain social-media whore Zara Malik, should have been the ultimate winner, but as the kids say these days when someone's abilities or powers are reduced so that someone else can shine, Rayna/Zara got nerfed. (Comics nerds say, for example, that Dr. Fate got nerfed in the "Black Adam" movie. Fate is apparently a cosmically powerful character in the comics.) And some of the actors have, over the years (I won't say who), swelled up a bit as they've become fat-assed adults, making a lot of their gymnastic moves look laughably implausible.
Overall, I thought that Season 6 started off on the wrong foot, and there were annoying problems along the way, but the way the show wrapped up was satisfactory. If you've followed "Cobra Kai" this far, you'll see the same blend of comic and serious, realistic and unrealistic, philosophical and pretentiously dramatic, that has propelled the series forward to this, its crowning moment. There were plot elements that I would have liked to explore more deeply, and some I would have done differently; I could also have done without the CGI Miyagi who appears a couple times toward the end in Daniel's dreams, but all in all, Season 6 was a better finale than what I've seen with other series. It helps, I think that the showrunners are on record saying they're fans of the original movies, so they wanted to respect the characters and the world as much as possible. They did, I think, an imperfect job of it, but there are definitely worse ways to spend your time than to watch Season 6 of "Cobra Kai."
Nice review. I watched some of the earlier seasons (can't recall now how far I got) and then lost interest for some reason. My memory is rapidly deteriorating, and I'd probably have to start over to understand the conflicts and motivations. So, I'm unlikely to live to see the end of the series.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate the review. I kind of lost interest in CK after the second season, and our decision to drop Netflix sealed the deal. I think it was the surfeit of teen drama that didn't appeal to me--I would have much rather seen the show focus solely on Johnny and Daniel's relationship. But I realize that is an unrealistic hope. The kids have to have something to latch on to.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteThe series is done now, so feel free to binge it.
Charles,
One thing I should have talked about in my review was the way in which Johnny and Daniel's relationship didn't evolve. Right up until the final episode, the nature of their conflict barely changed. This relationship could have been its own character arc, but somehow it wasn't. That was a major disappointment.
Ah, well that solidifies my conviction that I did the right thing in dropping the show. Their relationship was really the only draw for me, and already by the end of season two it seemed stuck in a familiar rut. The conflict between them was entertaining at first, but at a certain point you need things to grow and develop.
ReplyDelete