“Cobra Kai” may never die, but at long last, the show is bowing out by honoring its better days

Imagine an ‘80s action movie villain growling the following line to a battered hero right before she stomps their fingers: You know, in some ways, I respect “Cobra Kai” for lasting this long.

Better series had shorter lives, some by their creators’ design. Not this one. “Cobra Kai” refused to die not out of fealty to the namesake dojo’s motto, but as a business matter. The show started on YouTube in 2018  and ended on a globally dominant streaming service. Netflix acquired “Cobra Kai” around the same time our mania for “Stranger Things” confirmed how lucrative selling reminiscence will always be. That, and the plot’s simplicity, assured its longevity.

All in all, that’s not a bad run for the spinoff of long-dormant intellectual property. Before “Cobra Kai,” Daniel LaRusso’s tormentor Johnny Lawrence starred in an Internet fantasy pitching him as the real hero of “The Karate Kid.” Creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg took that seriously, restoring his humanity and showcasing William Zabka’s dramatic versatility. It remains one of Netflix’s most popular titles although, creatively speaking, it lost momentum ages ago.

To be more precise, it was sometime between the third season and its fourth that “Cobra Kai” morphed from a respectable action comedy into a nostalgia farm informed by the philosophy of “Itchy and Scratchy”: “They fight, and fight! And fight and fight, and fight! Fight-fight-fight, fight-fight-fight…”  Before all that, it spun a compelling tale about fathers and sons, classist assumptions and confronting old wounds. Even as it stumbled, its spirit remained true to the intergenerational appeal it launched with.

If Zabka weren’t so charming, we couldn’t have bought the proposition that an ignorant wretch like Johnny could be redeemable. But the scripts tapped into the first Trump administration media fantasy of the dejected working-class white guy angst without pandering to either side of the partisan divide. Johnny would spew a few vaguely racist one-liners and get drunk on Coors Banquet, but instead of digging in, the years changed him. He wanted to be a better person and a sensei worthy of the kids he instructed. Hence, the rivalry between Ralph Macchio’s Daniel and Johnny that began 41 years ago with 1984’s “The Karate Kid” caramelized into something more than friendship.

Like another ridiculously farfetched movie franchise, “Cobra Kai” is about family – a blended brood standing against interlopers on their territory, walking a balance between the pacifist lessons and legacy of Mr. Miyagi (the late Pat Morita) and the sensible strategy of striking first and hard.

By flipping the dynamic between a wealthy, respected and formerly judgmental Daniel and Johnny, a down-on-his-luck absent father, Heald, Hurwitz and Schlossberg used their children and their friends as proxies for their rivalry before realizing how senseless their conflict became.  

Gianni DeCenzo as Demetri and Jacob Bertrand as Eli ‘Hawk’ Moskowitz in “Cobra Kai” (Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix)

Now Johnny’s son Robby (Tanner Buchanan) and his first student Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña) are both champions and soon-to-be stepbrothers. Daniel’s daughter Sam (Mary Mouser) dated both, ending up with Miguel. Robby connected with Tory Nichols (Peyton List), who joined Cobra Kai just in time for it to slide to the dark side.

From the show’s return to Mr. Miyagi’s birthplace in Japan to pick up Daniel’s “Karate Kid II” rival Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) to the escalating stakes of the Under-18 All-Valley Karate Tournament forced by the returns of John Kreese (Martin Kove) and his Vietnam buddy Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), there was always a reason to boomerang back to the original (and progressively more disappointing) movies.

Also to Mexico, and a Korean martial arts school pulled straight out of some old Shaw Brothers kung fu movie, which doesn’t make sense culturally, but consider what we’re discussing.

All roads lead to Sekai Taikai, an international karate tournament held in Barcelona and broadcast worldwide (presumably on ESPN8: The Ocho!, although I can’t be certain). The fictional Sekai Taikai is a slightly less lethal version of the kumite from “Bloodsport,” albeit with martial arts star Lewis Tam as Sensei Wolf, an entirely new and evil dojo master, instead of Jean-Claude Van Damme, who’s probably less affordable.

We could go into all the ways these simplistic storylines play into MAGA concepts of foreign relations, but that’s a rant for another day. That said, it was adorably quaint to see the recent midseason cliffhanger brawl be kicked off by a surly Russian sensei that resembles Zangief from “Street Fighter.”  

William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence and Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso in “Cobra Kai” (Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix)

I know we’re piling on the random pop culture references here, but those are the bricks holding up this house. No vintage needle drop or edge cameo is too small, as proven by Darryl Vidal, a.k.a. the fearsome kid who somehow lost to Johnny in 1984, turning up for the show’s final round.

But even those bright lights could only sustain the narrative integrity to a point. Hence, a leap from the San Fernando Valley to the Sekai Taikai in Spain and, following an inconvenient karate riot and accompanying fatality, back to the Valley one more time.

Yet for all of its meanderings, “Cobra Kai” found its way again in the end. Its overall bloat still makes it a mascot for the TV industry’s prevailing ills of franchise excess and stretching out a few splendid hours of storytelling (and a handful that weren’t so great) into 65 parts, but that doesn’t make loving “Cobra Kai” less defensible. Think of how many shows you’ve dedicated yourself to following whose narrative arcs blow through your system like a White Castle slider and are twice as flushable, and you’ll realize that describes the majority of streaming content.

And it doesn’t excuse stretching this show’s last sprint into a 15-part marathon that began last summer, although it could have concluded more honorably before that.

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But at the end of this seven-year Gathering of the Sluggalos, “Cobra Kai” lands the audience in a place of relative contentment, returning to its underdog origins. Zabka made sure we always liked Johnny, but the very last episodes ensure that we leave the series loving him. More than this, it redeems Daniel too, highlighting his transformation from a self-righteous know-it-all into a man who makes peace with some mysteries and finds balance with the man he once tolerated.

This show doesn’t score a flawless victory, mind you. Plenty of the twists leading up to the last episode are idiotic, including a few scenes relying on CGI distractingly inelegant enough to border on repulsive. (Except for one, a climactic explosion rivaling the special effects of an Abrahams and Zucker movie, that incapacitated me with laughter.)

Somehow that doesn’t take away from a wrap-up that promises nothing we want is too late to be worth fighting for, as long as you have the strength to get up from the mat, change up your old stances and embrace new ideas of what winning looks like.

Would its legacy be brighter if “Cobra Kai” had ended before, say, a major character used melted Jell-O to escape from prison? Absolutely. At least it’s bowing out with a measure of grace for the good guys before we all get too old to appreciate it.

All episodes of “Cobra Kai” are streaming on Netflix.