Cobra Kai Season 3 Is a Mess

If you haven't seen Cobra Kai or at the very least up to Season 3 of Cobra Kai, here is your spoiler warning. Read further at your own peril.

I didn't do reviews of the first two seasons of Cobra Kai mostly because I came to the party pretty late on both. I have an innate resistance to new streaming service things and didn't really want to start in with Youtube's. Moreover, the idea of going back to the Karate Kid universe seemed just incredibly sad to me. The Karate Kid didn't really need a sequel, much less three, and especially not the dumpster-fire reboot it got. "Now they want to do a TV series to launch Youtube's streaming service? Yeah hard pass on that nostalgia bait," I thought. 

Ended up watching it anyway though, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised by Season 1 of Cobra Kai. It was rough around the edges, but they took a really novel approach by making the show all about Johnny and his redemption and executed it quite well overall. Fans had long had debated whether Johnny or Daniel was actually the villain of The Karate Kid, though admittedly it was usually tongue-in-cheek, and Cobra Kai was smart enough to walk that line with its story by neither needlessly tearing down Daniel nor whitewashing Johnny's misdeeds. It also knew how much to wink at the audience without becoming an outright parody, and it handled the callbacks with a similar level of balance. Having it be one of the few shows out there to take shots at SJWs didn't hurt either. Bottom line, it felt like a show made by people who really loved The Karate Kid and had a great idea as to how to revisit it.

Season 2 was a little less pleasant. Cobra Kai was always a concept that couldn't have very long legs by its very nature, and Season 2 demonstrated they were already running out of reasons for the show to continue to exist. It had more characters we didn't need, more silly teenage drama, and especially more contrivances to put Johnny and Daniel at odds again since obviously their inevitable team-up can't happen until the climax of the series.

Then we get to Season 3, and Season 3 is a mess. This season feels like a textbook example of something being a victim of its own success. With Netflix's deeper pockets and the popularity they earned from the first two seasons, they can afford the cameos and the big fight sequences and all that stuff that at best doesn't matter and at worst actively interferes with what does matter, and even if the people who made the show in the first place know better, the suits funding it do not and are going to demand it regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do.

The heart of the show has always been Johnny and Miguel. Everything not connected to them was a waste of time. Daniel's stuff invariably turns into a rehash of the old movies and inevitably gets loaded up with nostalgia bait, which is fine in small doses to remind us where we came from, but the less it relates to Johnny, the more intrusive it becomes. Cobra Kai is interesting explicitly because it isn't the "Daniel has a mid-life crisis that Miyagi has to help him through" show we all expected it would be.

That means the more the show leans into stuff like Daniel's trouble with his kids, one of whom they constantly seem to forget even exists, or his issues with the dealership the less interesting it gets.

This is why characters like Robbie and Sam suck (other than the fact that I just don't find the actors likable in the least.) The only thing interesting about Robby was his relationship to Johnny, but Johnny already has a surrogate son in the form of Miguel thereby making all the Robby stuff redundant. The saving grace of Robby's existence was the notion that Johnny's arch-enemy was raising his kid better than he was and even then that part was basically the bad rehash of The Karate Kid story that nobody wanted.

In fact, Robby is so irrelevant to anything else that he disappears for most of this season and even the characters don't care he's gone. Every once in a while somebody goes "oh right, Johnny had a son and he was the star pupil of the Miyagi dojo until we brought Sam in to replace him, what ever happened to that guy?"

It's even worse because for a minute there it looked like he would finally settle the will they/won't they between Johnny and Daniel that had already gotten pretty tired by the end of Season 2. It's not like these two guys spent their whole lives in a bitter rivalry after all. They hadn't seen each other in decades until the first season of Cobra Kai. Hell they all but bury the hatchet at the end of the first Karate Kid! So it makes the constant excuses to full-on hate each other increasingly tedious and contrived.

That's why it was really nice to see the season open up with them working together to find Robby, since that seemed like the perfect way to segue into the part we've all been waiting for where they have to team up to fight someone else. But nope! We got a Season 4 and we're saving it for that, so Daniel has to get all pissy for no reason so they can split up again, and then everyone promptly forgets about Robby because he serves no purpose otherwise.

Much the same can be said about Sam. Sam was initially poised to be a direct point of conflict between Daniel and Johnny, and then they just switched her over to her being Miguel's 'Ali'. That was fine, but now she's everywhere in the show despite having nothing to do but act as one fourth of the love quadrangle and perpetuate the "Daniel doesn't know how to relate to his kids" thing that was played out by the end of Season 1.

Then they decide they want Sam to be the Miyagi-do leader only to give her PTSD so she can't actually do it, which itself feels completely out of place in a show that routinely allows the kids to throw down without any real consequences. The kid who gets his arm violently broken by his former best friend is completely unaffected by this, but Sam can't be in the same room with Tory without having a panic attack? (Tory is also completely superfluous this season given the existence of Hawk, the previous bully's return, and ultimately what they do with Robby.)

So I don't care about Sam, or Robby, or Hawk, or all the stunt kids we need to involve so we can have massive karate fights. I care about Johnny, Miguel, and to a lesser extent Daniel, and every minute we spend with these dumbass kids is time away from the actual story worth telling.

Speaking of wasting time, let's talk about Kreese. Bringing Kreese back to be the combined villain both of them have to deal with is good. Trying to humanize and explain why Kreese is who he is while at the same time making him ever more cartoonishly evil is not.

First of all, the "villain's not really a villain" thing is Johnny's bit. It's why the show is Cobra Kai and not Middle-Aged Karate Kid. Doing this for another character just cheapens what they've done for Johnny and like a lot of things in this show, feels redundant to boot.

Second of all, it doesn't work if you wait until after Kreese steals Cobra Kai from Johnny to do it. Johnny is our main character, so once he's betrayed by Kreese, nobody cares what Kreese's thought process is. He is now the bad guy and all we care about is taking him down. It'd be like Thanos trying to explain why he snapped after he already did it. Nobody's gonna listen to your sob story after you wiped out half the known universe.

Third of all, it is already a huge stretch to think Kreese is so dangerous that neither Daniel nor Johnny can beat him alone considering Miyagi laid him out in his prime. When Kreese was just a thing Johnny had to get past, it worked, but once you try to make him seem unbeatable to both men, you gotta do some rehab. So every minute you spend with him should be trying to show what changed there.

We need to know how exactly he transformed from just kind of an asshole who slunk off into the night after his team lost an underage karate tournament into a complete sociopath that's ten steps ahead of the entire main cast to the point we need both sides to team up just to defeat him, especially since you already have an established potential threat from outside the Valley that serves that purpose better...which brings us to Okinawa.

Look it's great to see Kumiko and Chozen. Those are cool cameos, but they are utterly wasted here. That entire side trip has almost no bearing on anything, it's built on a plot point that's raised explicitly for the purposes of the cameos then immediately dropped, and everything about it is so stupidly convenient it's painful. Worse, they raise all kinds of questions that are just hand-waved away because "shut up, it's a funny cameo and we don't have time for that."

This is where Chozen comes in. If you wanted to get to the Johnny/Daniel team-up, Chozen is the ideal villain for it. He's an outsider. He's Daniel's problem so Johnny gets to be a little more heroic by helping, he's the same age so there's no questions about why an 80-year old man is any physical threat to them, and he's from outside the entire ecosystem so he can show up out of nowhere and be anything you want.

If not that, at least do something more fun with him. When I realized he wasn't going to be the new Big Bad, I thought it would be really funny if he showed up as a completely reformed and super nice guy, putting Daniel constantly on edge because he's waiting for the next shoe to drop. Instead they try to have it both ways where he both seems like a scary rival and yet is in fact a nice guy who doesn't even seem to carry a grudge against the guy who repeatedly humiliated him in his youth even though the rest of the people on this show still can't get over what happened to them one summer in high school. Basically they didn't take it far enough.

That's where the questions come in. Sato said to him "now to you, I am dead," and that was before he tried to murder Daniel at the festival. How does that turn into Sato taking him back and teaching him everything he knows including stuff Miyagi never taught Daniel? Shouldn't Chozen have spent a few decades in prison for attempted homicide? Did they just decide the humiliation of getting his nose honked in front of the whole community was enough punishment? I want the flashbacks to explain that stuff, not how Kreese got a girlfriend who ultimately died off-screen.

But you know what? I was still willing to go with it as long as we got to the team-up, which we kind of did.

The thing that ultimately had me say 'sayonara' to this season was Ali. When Ali first shows up it seems like they're about to do something even more interesting than making Johnny the good guy and Daniel the bad guy, which would've been to say that neither Daniel nor Johnny were the bad guy in The Karate Kid and that it was actually Ali all along.

She lays it on so thick with Johnny you'd think she came just to screw up his thing with Miguel's mom. She invites him to the party that Daniel happens to be at with his wife as if to create a beef, and all the while it almost seems like she's plotting something or other.

But, nah. Ali's actually just the hero of the season. She's the one that finally makes Johnny and Daniel see eye-to-eye by trashing them both equally in front of one another, and making Daniel look like more of a dick than he was before. Because why have the cameo be anything other than just rehashing The Karate Kid, again.

I thought at the bare minimum she'd be essential to Miguel's recovery since they had noted she was a doctor in the earlier seasons, but nope. It's boring, it's lame, and it's another wasted cameo in a season of wasted cameos.

Hopefully next season will stop stalling and get to the payoff already, but considering they're bringing in Terry Silver I doubt it. The only thing left to do after that is have Hillary Swank show up to train them all in yet another secret move Miyagi never taught Daniel for reasons.

Anyway, that's my rant. Hope you enjoyed it more than I enjoyed this season.