Cobra Kai Series Review

Three years ago, I took a week and tried out Cobra Kai. I had no stake in the show or the movies. What I did have was some downtime and a Netflix subscription. So, I marathoned every episode available and enjoyed the karate-fueled thrill ride.

In that first review, I jotted down this line:

So wouldn’t it be great to escape to a world where all of your problems can be solved with karate?

Broke? Karate. Low self-esteem? Karate. Difficulty trusting others? Ka-ra-te.

It’s funny how the problems kept escalating over the series: life-changing injuries, international business, arson, kidnapping, MURDER…

And there ended up being two solutions: Karate… and Friendship.

That may be reductive, but it isn’t cynical. Cobra Kai is a great show about punching and friendship. I can’t really pretend it’s much deeper than that. But Cobra Kai never promised more. And though I worried once or twice that the show might be outliving its premise, the final season broken into three parts, succeeded where a lot of shows fail. It successfully closed out the arcs of all the main characters and several of the secondary ones.

People who needed a shot got a shot. People who needed to step back stepped back. And though the extended finale had to twist itself into knots to deliver on those character arcs, there was enough going on that contrivances still had some surprises mixed in. And all of it was in keeping with a karate-centric universe.