Note: The following story contains spoilers from “Cobra Kai” Season 6, Part 3.
The “Cobra Kai” showrunners wanted to put Johnny’s (William Zabka) “bloodier, sweatier” fight in the series finale to mimic the underdog energy Daniel (Ralph Macchio) had in “The Karate Kid.”
The YouTube-turned-Netflix series wrapped up its six-season, 65-episode story with Johnny squaring off against Wolf (Lewis Tan) in a tiebreaker match to decide whether Cobra Kai or Iron Dragon would win the Sekai Taikai tournament. The showrunners told TheWrap that the goal of the final episode was to return to the karate tournament mats in a more brutal fashion then fans had seen before.
“It’s ‘Rocky IV,’ you know,” Josh Heald said. “It’s bloodier, it’s sweatier, it’s more brutal in certain ways.”
For Johnny, his finale bout with Wolf sends him back to his 1984 fight against Daniel. It’s something that showrunner Hayden Schlossberg said never really left his mind throughout the series and served as a redemptive moment for the underdog.
“I think that fight is really within the shadow of the 1984 fight,” Schlossberg said. “You’re on that mat. It’s Johnny back there. So this is his second chance … we wanted to put him in the underdog position – put him in the Daniel position – where there’s all this weight on his shoulders of expectation. Now he got what he what he wished for but there’s more cameras, more attention to this thing than ever and the person that he’s competing against is in the prime of his career, ready to embarrass him in on the world stage.”
Despite some bone-crunching ups and downs, Johnny overcomes the adversity and wins the tournament for Cobra Kai and earns a redemption almost 40 years in the making. That arc does not just happen on the mat though. He is also able to bury the hatchet in a tear-filled moment with his old sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) – which came at the perfect moment because Kreese died not long after in a boat explosion while fighting Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith).
“It was the culmination of the series,” Hurwitz said. “In the very first episode, we see flashbacks to Johnny’s childhood trauma — which was not just the kick to the face — but more importantly being abandoned and abused by his sensei. Over the course of the series, Johnny’s been trying to work through those issues.”
He added, “So this scene was the culmination where Johnny was finally able to say in his heart and bear his soul and express how he truly felt: that you did teach me some amazing things, but you broke me in these ways. And Billy’s performance – he became a teenager again. You watch him in that scene, and he looks like a teen. He’s that vulnerable. And for Martin playing Kreese you know it was a genuine apology.”
For Daniel, the final episodes of “Cobra Kai” were all about coming to terms with all he learned about Mr. Miyagi. In Season 6 Part 2, Daniel learned his childhood sensei also fought in the Sekai Taikai tournament and ended up killing one of his opponents during the match. The news rattled the Miyagi-Do leader but these closing episodes – capped by a season standout “Skeletons” — had him embracing Mr. Miyagi the person and losing the mythologized sensei he had held for years.
“We wanted it to be honest that he came to an evolved and comfortable resting place with ‘I’m never going to know everything but I’m surrounded by reminders of the man I knew who was a good man,’” Josh Heald said. “He’s not going to have full context about what happened with Mr. Miyagi at the Sekai Taikai when Miyagi was there. He’s not going to have full context on a lot of aspects of Mr. Miyagi is life that he didn’t know about.”
He finished with, “everybody’s human. [Mr. Miyagi] wasn’t a saint, and nobody should be held to a standard of living their life at every single moment perfectly. I think that’s where we want to leave him – in that kind of honest, comfortable, warm place.”
All episodes of “Cobra Kai” are now streaming on Netflix.
