Cobra Kai: Season 6 - Part 1

There's something so effortlessly fun yet silly about Cobra Kai. This is effectively a teen soap opera where a bunch of youngsters get caught up in tribal warfare between karate dojos head-up by rivals and feuding former adversaries. It's daft and frankly has no right to be as good as it is, but time and time again this series proves it's potential and brilliance and lends for great and thoroughly engaging television.

However, the era of Cobra Kai is coming to an end. The final season is here, and while in the past that would mean a one-and-done bulk drop of 10 or so episodes, for this last outing we're getting a staggered release where approximately every four months five new episodes will make their debut on Netflix. The first five, Part 1 as we're calling it, are now here and boy are they arriving with a bang.

Terry Silver is behind bars, John Kreese is a fugitive on the run, Miyagi-Do won the battle for the valley and extinguished the Cobra Kai threat, and Daniel LaRusso, Johnny Lawrence, and Chozen Toguchi are working hand-in-hand to train the talented youngsters for their appearance at the Sekai Taikai world karate championship. While the overall theme of these five episodes is this major upcoming event, creators Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz have still made time for the petty inconveniences and silly feuds that Cobra Kai's foundations are built on. The icy relationship between William Zabka's Lawrence and Ralph Macchio's LaRusso remains as real as it ever has, the core four main characters of Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña), Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan), Samantha LaRusso (Mary Mouser), and Tory Nichols (Peyton List) are much closer but still have bubbling tensions between them, and there's always a snake in the grass raring to strike and throw further spanners into the well-oiled works.

If you look at Season 6 as a whole as a three-act story, this first part serves as the setup and narrative builder for what comes next. There's well-choreographed action to look forward to, there are a few plot twists to stomach, important moments that will have sweeping repercussions as we barrel towards the conclusive end, but at the same time, this first slate of episodes are more rooted and basic than what we became used to in the last couple of crazy and hectic seasons. If anything, Part 1 more closely reminds of Season 1 of Cobra Kai, as it's more about those petty jabs and snide remarks than it is about intent to commit violence and pain as was becoming the norm when Silver was at his peak. That's not a bad thing at all, if anything it's a welcome change to go back to what made Cobra Kai so compelling to begin with, all while setting the stage for an increasingly wild and busy second and third act.

I do think that there are a few narrative hiccups in this part. Some of the arcs feel a bit more forced than they should, especially surrounding the character Tory. This character has always been a bit of a challenging one for the creators in my opinion, as while they frequently try to vilify her, you can't help but feel compassion and empathy towards her situation, and once again we're seeing this problem take centre stage. Thankfully, there are some actual new characters that appear too, some of which you can treat as pure villains, alongside Kreese getting back to his old and ruthless antics.

The narrative does also face a lot of predictability. There are storylines that develop and unravel as these episodes roll on, and more often than not if you've been following Cobra Kai for the past six years and are familiar with how Heald and Hurwitz convey narrative, you'll have very clear ideas of how the situation will conclude. It's not a foreshadowing problem, it's just that after 50 episodes there are fewer tricks to pull out of the hat, and that leads to some moments that don't land with as much gravity. For example, very early on it's revealed that only a select number of the students will be able to compete at the Sekai Taikai tournament, and without watching any episodes you can probably already make a very informed guess about who they will likely be...

But just because it's a bit predictable and lacks some of the narrative oomph that the last couple of seasons have delivered doesn't mean that these first slate of episodes don't entertain. Cobra Kai is still such an effortlessly fun series that the biggest offending factor this time around is that we have to wait until November for more.