I admit, over the past few seasons a few things have started to get under my skin. Cobra Kai has always been at its best when Johnny Lawrence was just being himself: Ridiculous, out-of-touch, boneheaded but ultimately a pretty adorable guy. The rest of the cast has a lot of great characters and actors but Johnny has always been the show’s lynchpin.
Conflict between Johnny and LaRusso has always been pretty fun and funny but it’s one of those things that can only go on for so long before it becomes a little repetitive. That’s why new villains were introduced. Unfortunately, I also think that the villains have fallen a little flat. Kreese is so ridiculous. They started giving him a bit of an arc which I thought might even lead to some kind of redemption, but here in Season 6 he’s back to being the mustache-twirling villain he was in earlier seasons.
Silver was like Kreese on steroids—a violent psychopath who took things even further than Kreese was willing to go. This was a startling change of pace for the show, but it mostly worked (though I’m glad that storyline is over). Still, even with villains the core of the story remained the long-held grudge and ongoing feud and occasional grudging partnership between LaRusso and Johnny. And in Season 6, we begin with the two men trying to make their combined karate studio work.
It seems like a bad idea because it is a bad idea. There’s no way you can make these two men work together without friction. Their personalities, teaching styles and values are so fundamentally different that by all rights they should just be leading their own studios. It would make more sense for Eagle Fang and Miyagi-Do to both enter and compete in the Sekai Taikai—the fictional world karate tournament this season is centered around—than to try to work together.
Working together, it turns out, is really hard. Not just for Lawrence and LaRusso, but for Miguel and Robby as well, despite now being friends and very nearly stepbrothers. It’s even harder for Samantha LaRusso (Mary Mouser) and Tory Nichols (Peyton List) who had an even more bitter rivalry, though this is patched up and then un-patched in Season 6, Part 1.
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