How ‘Cobra Kai’ Part 2 Paves the Way for Profound Resolutions When Final Season Returns
[This story contains major spoilers from Part 2 of Cobra Kai‘s final season.]
When Cobra Kai released the first part of its sixth and final season in July, viewers of Netflix’s hit karate series were left with their favorite new team, Miyagi-Do, getting ready to face off with one of their greatest foes at the international Sekai Taikai Tournament in Barcelona, Spain: the revamped Cobra Kai, led by their nemesis and former brutal sensei John Kreese (played by Martin Kove). And to add insult to injury, one of Miyagi-Do’s star teammates, Tory Nichols (Peyton List), defected from the Danny LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence (Ralph Macchio and William Zabka) joint martial arts school to join Kreese’s no-mercy team of fighters.
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But if these two rival karate schools thought they could take their aggressions out on each other in an international tournament, surely they don’t know this series. A bigger and more sinister martial arts team would prove to be even more challenging and lethal for both Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do during the tournament with the show’s return (now streaming amid the final season’s split-release). And thus is Cobra Kai Part 2’s biggest reveal with the return of a villain who has disdain for Kreese, LaRusso and Lawrence: the infamous Terry Silver (played by Thomas Griffith) and his ruthless Iron Dragons.
In a flashback scene in episode nine, “Blood In Blood Out,” Silver has somehow escaped prison and is in Bangkok, Thailand, recruiting a deadly martial arts fighter at an underground fight to lead his financially backed team in Sekai Taikai (co-show creator Hayden Schlossberg makes his acting debut as Silver’s lawyer trying to advise against taking his revenge at the tournament).
The Hollywood Reporter recently caught up with Schlossberg and his Cobra Kai co-creators Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz to discuss the challenges and complexities of old and new rivals; filming the biggest melee ever in the history of the series during a pivotal scene in the international tournament; that death scene; what to expect in the last chapter, Part 3, of this final season; and what we might see in the Cobra Kai universe after the chapters in this Karate Kid story close.
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I believe author-novelist Thomas Dreier once wrote, “Hatred is a low and degrading emotion and is so poisonous that no man is strong enough to use it safely.” Is that the lesson viewers are supposed to learn from Kwon’s (Brandon H. Lee) death during the tournament in this Part 2 ending?
JON HURWITZ That’s actually a great quote. It’s hard for me to give a firm answer as to what we’re to learn as a result of Kwon’s death, because that’s something the characters are all unpacking in the final five episodes. But certainly, Kreese has been under the teachings of Master Kim for all these years and he was reupped in the first five episodes to have hate driving him. And Kreese is certainly passing down those lessons to his students and directly to Kwon, which is driving Kwon’s actions that led up to his death. So, the back five [episodes] will be exploring everyone’s reaction to what happened, and Kreese is a big part of that.
How long did it take to coordinate that incredible fight scene in the finale with all those moving parts of the teams battling each other, and of course, the epic battle of Terry Silver (Thomas Griffith) and John Kreese (Martin Kove)?
JOSH HEALD That was in motion before the script was even written. We were breaking that episode in the writers room, but even before we were breaking the episode, we knew the general beats that would happen of the important things that were going to evolve over the course of that fight. So, we got on the same page with the director Sherwin Shilati and our incredible stunt team, led by Ken Barefield and Don Lee, very early on, just when we had a raw idea of how big we wanted to go with that, even before we had the location locked down. And then once there was a script and once there was a location, they were working in the background, bringing us to the table with a buffet of ideas: “What if we did this?” “How about this?” And for us, it was important that it doesn’t just become chaos and a melee that was just following chaos. It has to be a story that’s evolving over the course of that fight.
So, we were able to look at the array of options in front of us in terms of how to present that brawl and then pare it down to something that is chaotic and wild, but you see all the individual rivalries and beats, from minor to really really serious. Rivalries that are decades old to rivalries that started five minutes ago. And you piece it together and then look at how much time you have to shoot it, which on this show is not much, it was about three or four days of shooting for everything that happens from the moment Robbie gets pushed off the mat until the end of that episode. And that’s a lot of material. It’s a lot of background performers, stunt performers, doubles. It’s a lot of actors doing things that need to be carefully choreographed to remove the risk of injury. And we could not have been happier with how it came together and how much material we had to put together in post-production to make sure that we’re presenting the biggest fight we’ve ever put on screen.
So, it was Silver who kidnapped Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and made it look like Kreese did it? Is he trying to get back at Kreese, LaRusso — or both of them?
HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG I think that it’s mainly directed at Miyagi-Do in general. Silver has a lot of plans, a lot of schemes you hear right from the outset. When you meet him in the bar in Bangkok, he just wants the whole world to burn at this point after what happened to him. He bought the best team to screw with everybody, but the kidnapping plot is really to get into Daniel and Johnny’s heads, to screw up their team. And it also has a potentially unintended consequence of getting Miyagi-Do to hate Cobra Kai, because they don’t know that Silver exists in Barcelona. So for a period of time, Miyagi-Do — Daniel and Johnny — are aggressive toward Cobra Kai in a way that’s throwing them off balance. And Silver is just lurking behind the shadows hoping that everyone fails.
The backstory of Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi gets more interesting and intriguing after we learn he actually killed someone during one of the Sekai Taikai tournaments in the late ‘40s or early ‘50s. How does the death of Kwon — although, one can argue that was of his own doing — play into what we know of Miyagi’s history with the tournament? Are we in the realm of “a curse” element?
HURWITZ It’s very possible. In in the first five episodes, Mike Barnes when talking about the Sekai Taikai to the class, he basically says people have died; so, it’s something that has happened. And I think part of what we’re trying to emphasize is that this has been an underground tournament for years that has not been on the world stage. And there’s a brutality that’s been there in the past that adds a level of danger beyond the All Valley [Tournament] that we’ve seen. In terms of Miyagi, we learned that match ended in death in the past and a thing that we may find out more about is, what exactly happened in that match? All we know are the results, and that’s what Daniel is wrestling with there. When he’s seeing what happens with Kwon, it’s this element of history repeating itself right in front of Daniel LaRusso. And it continues his soul searching — not just about Mr. Miyagi, but about karate and tournaments in general.
It was interesting how you resolved the conflict between Anthony LaRusso (Griffin Santopietro) and Kenny Payne (Dallas Dupree Young) along with Devon (Oona O’Brien) in one swoop. Did you always know Devon’s conscience would get the best of her, while teaching Kenny and Anthony about forgiveness and maturing?
HEALD Early on we were looking for any little screw to turn that can take a character and push them into a place they haven’t been before. Devon has always been a character who is pushing herself to be the best and better than the best. If you give her a piece of homework, she’s going to do all of it and the extra credit; she’s going to come in early for work and stay late. And despite all of that, in episode four [of Part 1], she is feeling like she’s not getting the best look from Barnes as he’s putting together the team. She’s feeling backed into a corner by the amount of spots that exist and her own expectations of herself. And when she’s looking for guidance, she’s only met with, “You gotta do whatever it takes, you gotta be ruthless, you gotta go for it.”
And she makes this decision to dose Kenny, which has unintended consequences of pouring gasoline on the Kenny/Anthony relationship and becomes this kind of private regret and embarrassment that she takes with her to the Sekai Taikai. It gives her a little bit of inner turmoil, as we’re dealing with some major turmoil between Robbie and Tori, and Miguel and Robbie, and everything else that’s beginning to pull apart this team, which is just another ingredient in the mix of conflicts that the Miyagi-Dos are going through as they’re on the world stage.
Well, can we say that Devon didn’t belong there? She wasn’t a better competitor than Kenny?
HEALD We’ll never know. That’s the gray area. If she didn’t dose Kenny, would she still have had a shot at coming out of the woods with the flag and earned her spot in Sekai Taikai? That’s something where she took the possibility of ever knowing that away from herself and from Kenny when she unbalanced the scales. So, it’s something she suffered with. Basically, she cheated, and she’s not a character who cheats. She’s a character who takes advantage of every advantage you can get; so, it’s it was out of character for her and, at the same time, it was the gray area where her character got pushed into, from doing the morally right thing to something that’s not as ethically sound.
Will seeing the death of Kwon internationally via streaming end the Sekai Taikai Tournament?
SCHLOSSBERG We intentionally ended this middle block with a lot of questions to be answered in the final block, and definitely one of those is: What’s going to happen with this tournament and the people’s opinion on karate in general? A lot of times we take things from real life and put it into the show, like things that happen in sports. You’ll have moments in the NFL where a player looks like he’s very seriously injured and it becomes a national conversation. And that’s the type of thing we could play with our show in karate terms. And in the final block, you’ll see how we ended things. The second block does lead to a lot of questioning from every side, everybody involved. Obviously, for the kids that we’ve been following and Miyagi-Do, it’s like, “Well what is this going to mean for all their goals that were tied to this tournament?” And for Cobra Kai, it was their student who died and for Kreese, he bears responsibility for that. And in some ways, everyone does. So, we’ll see how that all gets resolved in the final block.
Why did Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai join forces in the end to battle Silver’s Iron Dragons team? Well, some (or at least one) did.
HURWITZ One of the things that we always play with on this show is, you’re on different teams but you’re all humans. And just because someone is across the mat from you doesn’t necessarily make them your enemy. They could be your friend and it could be healthy competition, as opposed to everything being like a karate gang war. So we have these moments, like during the melee where it’s no longer competition on the mat, it’s real life. And real people are getting injured, real people that you care about and that you have relationships with. And once it’s not a sport anymore, and it’s real life there, it’s the human emotion and the human relationships that take precedence. For all the bad that happened in that melee, the silver lining at times are the allegiances showing their true colors; relationships showing their true colors. There are conflicts that have been there and fall away when pushed to the limit when tested.
With Part 3 we are coming to the end of this Cobra Kai story that has fascinated millions of Netflix viewers for six seasons. What can you tell me about the final five episodes?
HEALD Well, it’s going to be the end. There’s five episodes left. All of the balls that are in the air need to come down, and some of them will have soft landings and some of them will have harder landings. But we are looking forward to resolving stories — and not every resolution is a happy ending, but it’s still a resolution. So, given the cliffhanger, given where things are at with martial arts and the world now, having a death on the international stage, what does that do to all of our characters? How does that affect what they want for their lives, how do they move on from that? How do they take from that something good for the rest of their lives when there is seemingly nothing good in that moment? So, there’s a lot of conflict, there’s a lot of relationships and a lot of story left to be told. Some of it 40 years old, some of it has just happened. But it’s going to be a wild five episodes, and we can’t wait for everybody to see the conclusion.
A second part to that question — does that lay the groundwork for the spinoffs?
SCHLOSSBERG When we watched the final episode of Cobra Kai we see so many potential spinoffs, some intentionally and other unintentionally laid throughout the course of this six-season story. So, the show will end our love for The Karate Kid, but our desire to play in The Karate Kid sandbox doesn’t end. It’s just that this is a story that really followed the redemption of Johnny Lawrence [played by William Zabka], and that story is going to come to a close. But along that journey, we’ve had so many other characters and we’ve delved into the past and the backstories. And I think you’re going to, hopefully, finish the series and feel like you want more. And whether that’s delving into some of the characters and their pasts or where their future lies ahead, there will definitely be a lot of potential that you’ll see in those last episodes.
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Cobra Kai Parts 1 and 2 are now streaming on Netflix; Part 3 of the final season returns Feb. 13, 2025.
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