Cobra Kai season 4 review: A better bad guy makes it a bigger winner

Cobra Kai The fourth season reminds me of a pay-perview pro wrestling show. It’s a good show. SummerSlam, the Survivor Series, whatever you’re watching, the best part comes from guessing who the writers have matched to win and whether that will be believable or pleasing to the fans. And in the best ones, well, you get endings you legitimately didn’t see coming. I don’t know who you had in your betting pool for the 51st Annual All-Valley Under-18 Karate Championship, but I didn’t come close to guessing these winners, right up to the last strike.

Cobra Kai season 4’s outcome lingered with me for a good two days after viewing it, much like WrestleMania when it really delivers. However, PPVs are plagued by a problem. Cobra Kai Season 4 shares are they often sag at the middle with less conflicts and expository dialog, dithering in between the events. It is easy to forgive the experience. The seventh episode ends with a head-snapping moment. Thank you It is very serious and it is decisive.

Cobra Kai Season 4 begins with Johnny (William Zabka), and Daniel (Ralph Macchio), who merge their dojos in order to win the tournament. They also drive John Kreese out of Valley under terms of a loser leaves-town side bet, which no one expects anyone to respect. Kreese is in charge of not only Cobra Kai but also Johnny’s estranged son, Robbie (Tanner Buchanan), whose time in juvenile detention transformed him into a scowling Karate Anakin.

Robbie did worse than go to the dark side. He’s now teaching the Cobras the Miyagi-do secrets he learned from Daniel in season 1. Johnny and Daniel are wasting time disagreeing over which method should be used. It is a funny series of montages that goes beyond the boundaries of type. Johnny’s “Eagle Fang” style expects kids to leap across rooftops and kick each other in the gonads inside a dimly lit warehouse. Daniel shows the children chasing carp in a koi-pond to further train them.

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But even as it introduces new conflicts worth exploring, like Samantha LaRusso (Mary Mouser) embracing Johnny’s strike-first ethic, Cobra Kai season 4 can’t wait to bring more characters to an already harried ensemble narrative. It’s a confounding place to be as a viewer, because this year’s callback to the 1980s films is the strongest and most dynamic of them all: Thomas Ian Griffith as Terry Silver is the psychopath the Cobra Kai dojo has desperately demanded, and which the 75-year-old Kove has only subtly provided in the two seasons preceding.

Silver, in the Karate Kid canon, was Kreese’s rich buddy who bankrolled a convoluted scheme to defeat and discredit Daniel in Part III: The Karate Kid. Showrunners Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz chose Silver’s character arc to redeem the 1989 movie, which was critically acclaimed. Kreese teases Silver out of the New Age lifestyle in Malibu by showing him how he needs money to help Cobra Kai succeed. Kreese gets way more than he bargained for, and it’s fascinating to watch Griffith out-Svengali Kove in every scene they share. Silver’s cliffhanger knife-twist caught me well off-guard and has me genuinely optimistic for season 5, which has already been greenlit.

As if Silver wasn’t enough of a presence, we also get Kenny Payne (Dallas Dupree Young) as the all-new prism through which Cobra Kai It is able to refract its cycle of bullying and revenge as well the dehumanization that both are responsible for each year. The established characters travel less and have to spend more time with new characters. But it’s not like the writers, or Young, waste the space that Kenny has been given. The characters and circumstances of his character are well written and sympathic, including the break-point prank which drives him to Robbie or Cobra Kai. His bully is Daniel’s heretofore-unused son, Anthony (Griffin Santopietro), a great choice as an antagonist as it gives some depth to Daniel’s conflict management and lays a solid foundation for future seasons.

It is still possible. Lots 7 episodes covering the territory. It doesn’t matter how interesting or difficult the new characters are. The show is still a good two-thirds. Cobra Kai Season 4 isn’t held together by anything stronger than a lingering comparison of Daniel and Johnny’s conflicting methods. So the damaged-goods coupling of Robbie and Tory (Peyton List) gets a few quick plate-spins before the story dashes to the other end of the stage to perform maintenance on whatever’s going on with Hawk (Jacob Bertrand) and Demetri (Gianni DeCenzo). It’s a shame because List’s breakout performance over the past two seasons has me wanting more out of Tory than anyone else.

Photo: Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix

Out of all the antiheroes, Cobra Kai, List does the best job at selling the chip on Tory’s shoulder, seething with earned resentment and underprivileged insecurity. Don Lee’s fight choreography, overall, is more visceral and visually entertaining in season 4 than in the previous three seasons combined. It elevates Robbie’s character to the status of Cobra Kai’s undisputed best fighter. But when it’s applied to Tory, we see the kind of barely controlled fury that distinguished the original Cobras in their scenes of the first film.

As expressive and satisfying as List’s and Buchanan’s fight scenes are, Mary Mouser steals that particular show with the bespoke fighting style Lee created for her. Visually, it marries Cobra Kai’s Meta-meta-meta conflict, between Daniel and Johnny’s training and traditions, in a kind of interpretive dance. It was impossible to sell this point with expository dialogue. The result is a climactic duel in which the viewer is rooting for both combatants — just like the Robbie-vs.-Miguel finale of season 1 — and thus we get a genuinely suspenseful outcome, a rarity for a sports flick.

After the salvage effort — successful nonetheless — of season 3, I was skeptical that Cobra Kai’s story-spinners really had a universe and characters that could extend beyond a trilogy. I was flat wrong about Season 4. Even though it slowed down a little on the way to its finale, the 10th episode left me feeling that the show was reborn. That’s largely thanks to Terry Silver, as well as story-resetting scenes and chemistry involving Johnny, Daniel, and Robbie. And there’s not just a visual cliffhanger to be quickly resolved, like the end of season 2. There’s real ground, new ground to break, especially with Kenny and Anthony, next year.

The fourth season of Cobra Kai is now streaming on Netflix.