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SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot details from the Season 6 Part 2 finale of “Cobra Kai,” now streaming on Netflix.
Cobra Kai never dies. Until its students do.
The final season of Netflix’s hit dramedy “Cobra Kai,” itself a spinoff of the “Karate Kid” franchise from the 1980s, is split into three installments. Part 1 was released on July 18, with Part 2 now streaming. Part 3 will arrive in early 2025.
This second chapter of the final season brings the Miyagi-Do dojo to Barcelona for an elite international karate tournament known as the Sekai Taikai. The finale to Season 6 Part 2, an episode aptly titled “Eunjangdo” — and you’ll see why — features a title match between Miyagi-Do’s Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan) and the Iron Dragons dojo’s Axel Kovacevic (Patrick Luwis).
Axel, brooding and muscular in his 6’3″ frame, towers over Robby as the fight begins. Miyagi-Do’s captain quickly tires himself out through a series of attempted hits that prove futile to Axel’s formidable defense. At that point, it takes one subtle look from the latter’s abusive sensei (Lewis Tan) to send Axel on offense. The fighter repeatedly strikes Robby, drawing blood by a punch to the mouth. When Axel tosses him outside the competition mat, Robby comes face to face with Cobra Kai rival Kwon Jae-Sung (Brandon H. Lee). Kwon hits him with a quick jab and Robby’s Miyagi-Do teammate Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña) quickly takes exception. Miguel crosses the mat to confront Kwon, when Axel knocks him to the ground. Within seconds, Robby and Miguel square up with their competitors.
Before the Sekai Taikai host can put an end to this confrontation, he is knocked unconscious by a disgruntled sensei whose team was banned for drug use. From there, the momentum of the karate match coalesces into the kind of drawn-out, adrenalized fight sequence that has become a “Cobra Kai” staple.
Because the tournament qualifies as an international sporting event, this subsequent brawl is being live streamed for fans globally, including Miyagi-Do’s loved ones back in the San Fernando Valley. The fight comes to a climax when Kwon and Axel are thrust into a physical altercation. The “Iron Dragons” fighter kicks Kwon into the tournament’s cameraman and the show shifts into a vertical vantage point of Kwon’s bleeding face to reflect the camera’s drop to the floor. Kwon lets out a frustrated scream. Then, he laughs. He’s spotted what he believes to be his key to victory: an Eunjangdo knife lost by his Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) amid the chaos.
Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) can see the scene unfold before it happens. He rushes over to stop Kwon and the camera cuts to a karate battle between Kreese, Johnny Lawerence (William Zabka) and Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith). As the three antagonists of the original “Karate Kid” franchise prepare to face off, a harrowing scream is heard. And everyone stops fighting.
The texture of sound design molds from a dramatic, foreshadowing crescendo to something somber and ethereal, a few seconds of layered music composition punctured by the dialogue “That’s a lot of blood,” and then, the reveal of an eunjangdo knife lodged into Kwon’s torso.
“We set Kwon up to be the new big, bad antagonist going into this second block,” series co-creator Hayden Schlossberg tells Variety in a conversation alongside co-creators and showrunners Jon Hurwitz and Josh Heald. “For him to get killed by another opponent is a surprise we were looking forward to.”
Hurwitz contextualized Kwon’s death as a particularly groundbreaking moment, because audiences have not previously seen a visceral on-screen death in the series or in any of the “Karate Kid” movies. He added that the “Cobra Kai” writers crafted a narrative set-up for Kwon’s death in Part 1 through the storyline of Daniel discovering Mr. Miyagi killed his opponent at the Sekai Taikai decades earlier.
“Kwon became this powder keg of a character that really got us excited in the writers’ room,” Heald said.
Hurwitz added that the “Strike Hard, Strike Fast, No Mercy” philosophy imbued into Cobra Kai by Kreese injected a kind of emotional venom into Kwon’s psyche.
Kwon, Hurwitz explained, is a broken person who so desperately wants to prove himself as the best. After losing to Robby during the tournament, he struggles to cope with his internal anger. His sensei and mentor, in turn, give him the wrong message: to show no mercy.
“Kreese is more vengeful than ever, and using Kwon as this ultimate weapon,” Schlossberg says. “It ends with this Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla fight all the students are involved in. It created an opportunity for us to have Kreese see the results of some of his actions. … Watching one of his students get killed with the knife he brought there.”
Season 6 Part 1 chronicled the backstory of the eunjangdo knife, which a younger Kreese acquired years earlier during a perilous journey to prove himself to his former sensei, Master Kim (C.S. Lee). The weapon, Heald says, is about a lot more than a knife.
The co-creator detailed how the eunjangdo takes on the last remnants of love for Johnny that Kreese still possesses. It’s this empathy, Heald explains, which stands in the way of his becoming the ruthless creation he was once capable of molding into under the tutelage of Master Kim.
“The knife represents Kreese’s last vestige of humanity,” Heald says. “It’s an inflection point — does it send him further down the spiral or does it create an opportunity for change? That’s a big question we want people to be chewing on at the end of these five episodes.”
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