COBRA KAI Showrunners Break Down That Explosive Finale: "We Thought That Was the Most Dramatic Way to Go Out"
After six seasons of dojo rivalries, redemption arcs, and karate battles, Cobra Kai has come to any end, and it was a fun ride!
The show delivers an intense, emotional climax one that perefectly wraps up Johnny and Daniel’s long-running story, and also brings an explosive end to the franchise’s two biggest villains, John Kreese and Terry Silver.
Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t watch the final episodes.
It was always the plan for showrunners Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg to see Johnny and Daniel end up friends. Speaking with GamesRadar+, Hurwitz explained:
"It was always the idea, speaking specifically for the very end with Johnny and Daniel, we wanted them to be together and finally have a friendship.
“It's so funny 'cause I remember in season one when we were making the show, the early notes we got from the studio were, 'Can Johnny and Daniel be running a dojo together?' and we're like, no, that's the whole [thing], that's where we're getting, we're headed, give us like 65 episodes and we'll get there by the end.
“And we wanted to, you know, build a friendship over these seasons [and for] Johnny Lawrence to finally have that redemption, to get him back on that red mat where he's able to exercise the demons from the past."
I love that Johnny Lawrence does get his redemption. His journey from the washed-up, beer-guzzling sensei we met in Season 1 to the man who finally lets go of the past is one of the show’s strongest throughlines.
His emotional confrontation with Kreese, reconciling the pain from The Karate Kid Part II, is a great moment. The two finally make peace, but what Johnny doesn’t realize is that it’s the last time they’ll ever see each other.
In the series Kreese and Silver end up in a fight on Silver’s yacht and it ended with the two villain being killed when the yacht explodes. It was a wild an unexpected ending for these characters, and after they blow up, they aren’t really ever addressed again in the finale.
While Kreese finds redemption, Terry Silver is a man that is too far gone. Hurwitz went on to talk about the conclusion for these characters saying:
"You know, the boat explosion. We knew that with Terry and Kreese that we were headed to an explosive conflict between them. And we thought that was the most dramatic way to go out: with Sensei Kreese finally stepping up in the ways that he hadn't in the past for Johnny in the most dramatic way possible."
It was a fitting sendoff for two of The Karate Kid franchise’s most notorious villains, one finding a sense of redemption, the other clinging to his villainy until the bitter end. It was just a little weird that they weren’t really acknowledged after that.
Regardless, I loved the ending of the show and seeing Johnny and Daniel finally standing together as friends.
Source: GamesRadar+