Cobra Kai Season Three (Spoiler Review) by Josh Davis : Pop Culture Leftovers

Cobra Kai Season Three (Spoiler Review) by Josh Davis

January 24, 2021 9:01 pm |

Growing up, my two biggest heroes were Luke Skywalker and Daniel LaRusso. I watched “The Karate Kid” and it’s sequel on VHS over and over … and over again, practicing the infamous crane kick from the first film, and later the drum technique from the second.

Daniel was a kid a little bit like me — an only child, being raised by a single working mother. I could relate to moving to a new and unfamiliar place, and I also knew what it was like to be bullied now and again. But Daniel always found a way to overcome the odds and win the day, not to mention get the girl. Sure, he had a fiery temper and could be a little impatient, a little rough around the edges. But that just made him more relatable.

So, it was with skepticism in 2018 that I watched the first episode of “Cobra Kai,” a new YouTube series that recast original “Karate Kid” villain Johnny Lawrence as the hero of the story. How in the hell, I wondered, could they pull that off?

Johnny was the lead bully in the original movie. He snarled and sabotaged Daniel at every turn. He was a spoiled, stuck up, ungrateful rich kid who was used to getting his way, and it took Daniel’s bravery to stand up to him and put him in his place. Right?

The magic of “Cobra Kai” is that it re-examines the events of the original movies and, in season one, made a pretty convincing argument that Johnny was actually a victim of circumstance. He had a terrible home life and a manipulative and abusive teacher. And then Daniel showed up and, wouldn’t you know it, he always threw the first punch. He even landed an illegal crane kick to Johnny’s face and won the big All-Valley

karate tournament, even though he should have been disqualified for it!

Cobra Kai’s first season won me over — like a lot of fans — because series creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg put a lot of love and a lot of fantastic detail into the story. They were big fans of the original property and treated it with respect and admiration, while also taking the story in exciting new directions.

It further succeeded based on William Zabka’s surprisingly nuanced performance as Johnny, now washed up and middle aged, a failure and a drunk who never quite got over what happened after that little shit Daniel LaRusso — now, of all things, the successful owner of a car dealership — came to town.

In “Cobra Kai” the pair remain rivals, although their lives have gone in entirely different and opposite directions: Daniel is now successful and maybe a little sleazy, while Johnny has emerged as a down-on-his-luck antihero.

The show also managed to build a strong and likable gang of new characters, casting largely unknown actors to flesh out the next generation of karate kids.

To subvert the expectations of a generation of fans of the original film was a neat trick, and the series became such a phenomenon that, even after it was canceled by one network, it was a no-brainer for Netflix to pick it up and continue the story.

Season three picks up right after the cliffhanger of the last season, with Johnny’s protégé Miguel Dias (Xolo Maridueña) still in a coma after an epic school-wide brawl that bordered on the ridiculous.

Johnny’s son, Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan), is on the run after landing a near-fatal blow that landed Miguel in the hospital.

Johnny, meanwhile, has started drinking heavily. On top of his son being once again estranged and his star pupil comatose and potentially paralyzed for life, his beloved Cobra Kai dojo that he resurrected is now controlled by his old teacher, John Kreese (a returning Martin Kove). While Johnny sought to teach his students how to stand up for themselves and be “badass,” Kreese teaches one thing — brutality.

Meanwhile, the LaRusso family is in disarray as Daniel and Amanda’s (the great Ralph Macchio and Courtney Henggeler, respectively) teenage daughter has been suspended for her part in the big school brawl. Samantha LaRusso (Mary Mouser) also is suffering from PTSD after a brutal fight with her rival, Tory Nichols (Peyton List).

Johnny lands in jail after a drunken bar fight in the opening scenes. After being released he wanders, tattered and bruised, into the hospital to see Miguel.

Of course Miguel eventually wakes up, and Johnny spends much of the season trying to reconnect with him and help him regain his confidence and learn to walk again. In a way, it’s a throwback to the first season when Johnny found the boy, not unlike Daniel in the original film, being bullied and beaten up, and then took him on a student.

Their chemistry has always been one of the show’s strengths, and it’s a nice to see Johnny continue to show character growth in caring for the boy, while also keeping up the comedy and his relentless pursuit of that word again, being “badass.” That, of course, involves wacky new training techniques and several montages, as well as a Dee Snider concert thrown in for good measure. Johnny, always at least partially stuck in the 1980s, can’t succeed as a karate teacher without also sharing his love of cheesy 1980s hard rock and heavy metal.

Johnny is less successful at reconnecting with his son, Robby, who eventually lands himself in juvenile detention for his part in the fight. Buchanan has always been a little wooden, so it’s not too much of a disappointment to see him being sidelined for much of season three.

There’s also the looming threat of Kreese, who has become a sort of boogeyman both for Johnny and Daniel, as he continues to instill the “strike first, strike hard” mentality on his young students, essentially turning them into a small army of violent thugs.

Halfway through the season, there’s a welcome diversion as Daniel, in an attempt to save his failing dealership, returns to the Okinawa setting of “The Karate Kid Part II” and reconnects with Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita, reprising her role). She’s still as charming and graceful as ever, even three decades later, and of course she teaches Daniel a valuable lesson just as his life is falling apart.

Okinawa also marks the surprising return of “The Karate Kid Part II” antagonist Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), who guides Daniel by teaching him a lost bit of knowledge from Mr. Miyagi. Again, it’s an example of the show runners subverting expectations in a fun and satisfying way.

Back in the California valley, Johnny also gets a visit from a returning leading lady, as Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue briefly returns as Ali. She and Johnny reconnect and hit it off, and relive some of their youth in fun montage set to, of course, cheesy 1980s music.

They later run into Daniel and Amanda at the country club — a returning setting from the first movie — and the combination of strong writing, chemistry and performances from all four actors is undeniably fun. Ali’s return was teased all the way back in the first season, and the payoff was absolutely worth the wait.

Overall, the season moves the story along in two important ways:

1. It further splinters the resurrected Cobra Kai dojo into fanatics loyal to Kreese and ultra-violence, and those kids from the first season who were mostly just sick of being picked on and wanted to learn how to toughen up and stand up for themselves. Most of the original gang gets back together and bonds in a way that’s both entertaining and satisfying.

2. It finally brings Johnny and Daniel together as allies (thanks in no small part to cameos by Ali and Komiko), and sets up perhaps a final, epic showdown against Kreese in season four, already green lit by Netflix.

It’s a bit of a disappointment that we’ll have to wait for that, as the season had a lot of cleaning up to do after season two went slightly off the rails, and it seemed like there was room for a big Kreese showdown this season.

Still, ‘Cobra Kai” continues to be a well done — and welcome — nostalgia bomb that keeps depending the original storylines, while also doing enough interesting things with the new characters.

All that said, there’s nothing better than seeing Zabka and Macchio together again on screen, and they remain the real heart — and highlight — of the show.

There is currently no release date for season four, but it’s likely to hit Netflix some time in early 2022. Hurwitz tweeted in November 2020 that “I … would imagine Season 4 will come out roughly a year after Season 3.”

For fans of “Cobra Kai” — including this one — that date can’t come soon enough.

PCL Rating: High Taste It

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: FRESH