Cobra Kai Season 6: Part 1 Review - The Valley's Karate Warriors Begin Their Endgame

The final battle begins! (...with two more sections to follow)

The five episodes comprising Cobra Kai Season 6: Part 1 are now streaming on Netflix. No major spoilers are included in this review.

Cobra Kai makes me happy so I’m very happy to have Cobra Kai back.

Granted, now in its sixth season, the show is feeling a bit long in the tooth — at least one of the “kids” in the cast is pushing 30 in real life and they all clearly have aged much more than the characters, who still haven’t graduated high school — and the stakes have escalated to an amusingly over the top degrees at times. But there is still a very specific and appreciated alchemy to Cobra Kai that stands strong as we enter the sixth season, allowing it to mix comedy, drama, campiness and so very many karate fights into one magical blend that somehow works. Creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are clearly still loving the world of The Karate Kid and their opportunity to expand upon it and that love shines through. There’s a wonderful earnestness to Cobra Kai that makes it hard to resist, even when things get decidedly goofy.

Season 5 ended with the downfall of Terry Silver and nearly every single character all finally united under one dojo’s roof. Longtime rivals Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) are now working together under the same roof and almost all of their former students have joined them. But with 15 episodes left for this story (Part 2 of the season debuts in November, Part 3 in early 2025), there are still some issues to work out — even just starting with what exactly this combined dojo will even be called — so no, things aren’t going perfectly.