REVIEW: ‘Cobra Kai’ Season 6 Part 1 Brings The Series Back To Form

Cobra Kai is the little show that could. Having started on YouTube Red, the series found new life on Netflix after its first season and new audiences. I was among the Season 2 converts. The series started as fairly grounded, with Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence competing against each other while mentoring their pupils. The breakout star was Xolo Maridueña as Miguel, and ultimately, over time, the series began to expand its cast and shed more light on more characters.

Last season, Cobra Kai buckled under that weight. With Cobra Kai Season 6, the series has mostly returned to the grounded relationships and interpersonal tension that made it great—even if it still throws in the extravagant melodramatic twist.

John Kreese (Martin Kove) is on the run, Johnny and Daniel have formed a new dojo, and with Cobra Kai eliminated from the Valley, they have to decide if they will compete in the Sekai Taikai, the Karate World Championships. Without a true big bad this season, the tension is driven by the characters themselves—how they’ve grown, regressed, and seen their futures. This isn’t just at the student level; it’s also with our teachers.

While Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1 is less about action this season, it uses its karate moments well. In line with the action of other seasons, there is a larger force on what each fight means to each participant. Yes, even the big dumb ones. It’s a change of pace that connects the action to the characters like we did last season. Sure, they still aren’t all necessary, but they do each have weight. They offer more to connect students, confront assumptions, or work through personal issues.

That said, the truth of the series is that the LaRussos really suck. Daniel sucks, his kid Samantha sucks, and in Cobra Kai Season 6, it hits the audience in the face in such a different way. Johnny may be rough around the edges, but he is honest. LaRusso is a people pleaser looking to force people into his Pollyanna sense of resiliency, and it’s to the detriment of those around him. This is especially true when it comes to Tory (Peyton List).

Made up to be the villain of multiple seasons, Tory has emerged as the girl at school who is consistently misunderstood because she doesn’t fit into the mold of those around her. In Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1, she suffers an even bigger loss than she could have imagined: her mother. Despite the series trying its hardest to make you root for the LaRusso kids, I have found myself repeatedly pulled to Miguel and Tory, like Johnny ultimately is.

Johnny and Miguel come back into the spotlight in Cobra Kai Season 6.

But for Tory, it’s all the more salient. Miguel has Johnny and his mom. Even Robby (Tanner Buchanan) has been taken under LaRusso’s wing. But Tory is constantly shuffled around like someone else’s problem and forced into a role she is not made to play. This doesn’t mean that Tory’s excessively aggressive style isn’t wrong-persay. But it is who she is. In the season’s final episode of the first half, we see Tory show up to the match against Samantha. The match is to crown one of them the female champion and give them a standing ovation as they walk into the Sekai Taikai.

Having just lost her mom, Karate is all that Tory has left. It’s not only the only outlet she can see for her future, but it’s also the only way that she can work through her grief. Instead of acknowledging or even listening to Tory, who is begging to keep fighting, the LaRussos force her to stop. All that Daniel sees is anger, and because he’s a father before he’s a sensei, all he sees is a threat to his daughter. I have never hated Danny more than at that moment—and each subsequent season has shown that he is the real villain of the series.

But Danny, who has never been without support from those around him, can’t empathize with Tory. Do you know who can? Johnny. He tries to push Daniel to let the fight continue, and when Tory storms off, he explains just how important fighting can be to get through your pain. Where LaRusso sees anger, Johnny sees pain.

Throughout the series, Johnny has maintained his Johnny-isms for sure. But he’s also grown to be the empathetic core of the series. As we shift focus from time to time to different students, Johnny’s ability to connect with them and his determination to understand his own flaws and fix himself in the process has made him the character that resonates well beyond expectation.

Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1 brings the melodrama-and heart.

Outside of the character development and relationships in Cobra Kai Season 6, the series basks in its own melodrama. The twists and turns around the Sekai Takai are absolutely unhinged, and Kreese fleeing to South Korea to recruit his own team and train them only to be confronted with PTSD ghosts in a cave with a cobra is a level of chaos that I’m surprised got through editing. That said, those quirky moments, for all the destruction they offer, balance out more depressing elements of this season. They also exist to give the season something larger and make it seem grander than it is.

You can talk about any number of absurdities, from the fight in the college to the cave to Mr. Miyagi’s secret box and Johnny abandoning his job to find LaRusso in a forest. But ultimately, the melodrama doesn’t lose sight of what made the series special in the first place.

In fact, for the first time in a couple of seasons, Cobra Kai Season 6 feels like it’s honed back in on the small moments of emotion and growth that we initially came to the series for as the characters use Karate to teach them more about themselves. Without a big bad in these first episodes of Cobra Kai Season 6, we just watch high school students preparing for their futures and where Karate does or doesn’t fit into it all.

While Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1 doesn’t reach the height of Season 2, it does come back to what made it special: the characters. The characters outside the melodrama, in doing so, make the series well worth watching again, even if its success hinges on sticking the landing when Part 2 releases in November.

Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1 is streaming now on Netflix.