What do I know about this series going into it?
It is a sequel to the Karate Kid movies, taking place decades later.
Through pop-cultural osmosis, I know the basics of the plot of the first movie. But the only film in the series that I actually saw was “The Next Karate Kid”. I was ten years old at the time. I remember nothing whatsoever about it.
Recap
August 10, 2017. A drunk blond guy is walking through a graveyard. He stops at the grave of one Laura Lawrence Weinberg – his mother. He apologizes: he wanted to have his life together before he visited her again, but he might not be able to for a while. Not after he got arrested for doing something awful in an Applebee’s.
He reminisces about her attending his karate tournaments. So I think this is the villain of the first movie, whose name I can’t remember. He also admits that he’s a loser and needs to come to terms with it.
It’s later; based on changes to his appearance, I’m guessing years later, not days later. He’s home with his wife and child. He’s got a “big fight coming up”, a “second chance”.
The blond guy is sparring at a dojo, during which I finally learn his name: Johnny. His opponent, Daniel, is the protagonist from the first movie. Johnny keeps urging Daniel to attack him harder; he’s angry and won’t back down. Daniel gives him advice about the upcoming fight against “Wolf”: don’t leave yourself vulnerable, don’t get angry, don’t try to win with a single flashy kick. Johnny isn’t listening and leaves.
The dojo instructor tells Daniel that Johnny needs to find “balance”, so Daniel goes out after him. Johnny thinks it’s to spar more, but Daniel says, “I’m your sensei and I know when my student is off”.
So if I understand this correctly, the dojo instructor is only Daniel’s sensei, and is only Johnny’s meta-sensei.
Johnny confesses that he’s worried: this is the first fight he’s entered without being sure that he was going to win. Yes, he’s lost before, but he always felt sure he could win. Now he’s sure he can’t, and that he’s a loser.
Daniel assures him that he’s not a loser, and reminds him that in the original Rocky, Rocky loses.
So let’s go to the training montage! The tune is “You’re the best around”, complete with imitations of Rocky’s run through Philadelphia.
Later, at home, Daniel and his family are seated around the dinner table while Johnny is passed out on the couch. “Miguel” announces that he got into Stanford; I think this is Daniel’s son.
Ah, I got that wrong. Daniel’s mother gives Miguel’s girlfriend a graduation present that had belonged to Mr. Miyagi’s wife, and she calls her “grandma”. So Miguel is the boyfriend of Daniel’s daughter, identified later in the conversation as Samantha. The grandmother describes how the necklace was stolen from the Japanese internment camp by a guard, who Mr. Miyagi later tracked down and beat the crap out of.
It’s the final match of the Sekai Taikai, the All Valley tournament. Outside the arena, “Julia from Icon Branding” approaches two teenagers, a blonde girl named Tory and a guy on crutches. She wants to endorse them for an enormous amount of money. In the stands, a suit-wearing guy approaches another suit-wearing guy, gives him the announcer’s microphone, and apologizes for kicking him in the face. Again outside the arena, another blonde teenager1 grabs “Dmitri’s” ass and says she forgives him for whatever it was he did. She takes him somewhere private; skip the match, let’s have sex.
In the locker room before the match, Wolf (I assume) approaches Johnny and trash-talks him. Johnny starts out confident but it takes only a minute or two before Wolf wears him down and Johnny takes a swing at him. Wolf easily dodges, grabs his arm, and twists it into a hold, then throws Johnny into the lockers. “We’ll do this in front of the cameras,” he says.
Cut to the announcer, introducing the main event.
The students of the two dojos line up as the sensei combatants representing each school enter the square. The judge asks for a “good clean fight”. Johnny gives a perfunctory bow; Wolf gives a mocking one.
The moment the fight begins, Johnny goes straight for a furious, whirlwind attack. Wolf effortlessly blocks every single attempt, then easily kicks Johnny in the stomach. 1 point.
Daniel and his sensei recognize that Johnny is afraid.
The fight resumes, and Wolf quickly hits Johnny in the back of the head. Tinnitus, and an illegal hit. No point. Again it resumes, and Wolf elbows Johnny in the mouth. Also no point, and this time an official warning from the judge that next time he’ll lose a point for it. Wolf reacts with smarm; he knows what he’s doing, humiliating Johnny and riling him up.
Johnny goes back to the corner, where his meta-sensei gives him particularly unhelpful advice: “You must control the fight.” Daniel, however, goes for something a little bit better, telling Johnny to “let go of the pressure, just do your best”. But Johnny isn’t in the right mood for that kind of platitude.
The fight resumes, and Wolf quickly gives Johnny a round-house kick to the head. Johnny goes down. 2-0. Three points wins the match…
Just as the fight is about to resume, Daniel has a realization: “Miyagi-Do” isn’t going to help! He calls a timeout, and calls Johnny over. “What dojo are you fighting for?” he asks. “Cobra Kai,” says Johnny. Daniel responds: “Is there defeat, fear, pain in this dojo?”
I’m guessing that Daniel is echoing the kind of speech that Johnny’s sensei from the movies used to give him; Daniel is recognizing that the “it’s all going to be okay” approach is wrong for this student in this situation.
So Johnny gets back into the fray and scores his first point with a kick to the chest. The local crowd goes wild2 and, seeing their reaction, Wolf looks for the first time unsure of himself.
The fight resumes, with Johnny on the attack again, seeming more controlled than before. This bout is broken up when both fighters grab each other’s clothes, and when it resumes Wolf gets Johnny with a knee to the side. This is also apparently an invalid hit; I wish I knew the rules3.
The next point is pretty quick: both fighters go for a roundhouse kick but only Johnny connects. 2-2. Next point wins.
Daniel’s sensei, finally identified in captions as “Chozen”, advises Johnny to remember what he learned at Miyagi-Do, and to be careful because Wolf is pissed off. I don’t understand; didn’t Daniel say a few moments ago that Miyagi-Do won’t help? What is Miyago-Do?
The fight resumes, and Wolf spends about half an hour making elaborate arm and hand movements, just asking for Indiana Jones to shoot him. Johnny glances back at Daniel and Chozen.
There’s a flashback to the first movie, and how Daniel defeated Johnny back then. Is Johnny going to use the exact same move? No, but a similar concept: he lets Wolf approach, and kicks out Wolf’s foot from under him. This doesn’t score a point, it seems, and Wolf also manages to take down Johnny, but Johnny recovers and kicks him in the head for the victory.
I really wish I knew the rules.
There is jubilation all around, and Johnny’s wife approaches and kisses him. “My husband, the world champion,” she says with pride and tears in her eyes. He is awarded with the trophy.
Closing montage:
Johnny surprises his wife with a new house.
Samantha gets a sai as a present from her boyfriend, whose name I’ve forgotten.
A guy with a multicolored mohawk, who we’ve seen a couple of times, is going to Caltech.
The teenagers who got sponsored are being filmed breaking wooden blocks for a commercial.
Chozen, presumably returning to Japan, surprises some relative of his (wife? daughter? niece?) who is also a karate teacher.
Johnny and Daniel are on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Johnny leaves flowers and a picture of his child at his mother’s grave.
Daniel and his wife are at the airport, seeing off his daughter Amanda, who is flying to France. Actually, that sentence seems to be completely wrong; Miguel, Sam’s boyfriend, surprises her by buying a ticket to fly with her, so this is probably Sam, and they’re going to Okinawa, not France4.
At the Cobra Kai dojo, Johnny stands at the front of a room full of new students. He is still carrying on the tradition of the Cobra Kai method of “Strike first, strike hard, no mercy”, but warns the students that taking that route and that route alone will turn them into assholes. They therefore need to learn more than one discipline, so they will also learn Miyagi-Do. So I finally know what that was about.
Aggression isn’t only the answer, he tells them. My specialty is offense, but I can’t teach you patience and defense, and sometimes that is what you need to win.
During this speech he is needlessly cruel to two kids with glasses.
In a restaurant, two guys plan a follow-up movie to Back to the Future 2. We pan away from them to see Daniel and Johnny sitting for lunch together. Daniel teaches Johnny what taxes are. He then tries to catch a fly with his chopsticks, but Johnny crushes it first with his bare hands.
Unresolved questions
Just how much in unpaid taxes does Johnny owe?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 5/10. A simple, straightforward, and fairly classic story. There were a few subplots but none of them occupied more than two minutes of screentime.
Writing: 4/10. The episode felt like a throwback to the 80s and 90s, which I’m sure was intentional. But rather than evoking all the best parts of the culture of that era, it evoked the silliest.
Perhaps it’s deliberate. A major theme of the episode, and I presume of the series, is that Johnny never recovered from his loss to Daniel and thus never grew up. If he’s trapped in an 80s movie, maybe the rest of the world is trapped there too. That would explain the announcers behaving like the villains of a Nickelodeon show about a superpowered kid5; the absurd endorsement contracts given to teenage karate champions; and the crowd of people chasing after Johnny in the streets.
Unfortunately, if it is deliberate, they missed the mark; it doesn’t quite come off as tongue-in-cheek as it should. It felt like they were earnestly trying to make an 80s kids movie starring adults, forty years too late. Maybe it works better if you watched the rest of the series.
And finally, the theme of the episode may have betrayed itself a little bit; see under Closure below.
Production: 9/10. While I’m docking a point for the silliness (some of which is due to questionable directorial choices), everything else here was top-notch. The montages were well put together; the sets were well designed; and with the exception of one of the kicks, the fight choreography was excellent.
But what really shines here is the acting, especially Johnny and Wolf. It’s one thing to have an expression on your face that says “I’m resigned to losing” or “I’m furious” or “I’m controlled” or “I’m taunting”. It’s another thing to do so with your entire body language while also pulling off complex sparring sequences. The difference between the punch Johnny throws when he’s lost control; the punch Johnny throws when he’s in control; the punch Johnny throws out of despair; the punch Johnny throws with confidence – each one had a distinct character that you could read, instantly. The actor did some incredible work there. And though we had less of a window into Wolf’s head, you could see the differences in his body language too.
The other actors weren’t slouches either; the goodbye scene in the airport, as confused as I was, was particularly effective.
Characterization: 5/10. The characters were fairly typical for television. Stellar acting notwithstanding, I didn’t see more depth to them than the average television show. But maybe that’s just because so much of the runtime was taken up by the fight.
The only exception is the announcer. His character was ridiculous, and if he were more prominent I would’ve docked a point just for him. I don’t know why he grated on me so much; it’s a combination of his childish behavior and the way his voice was both high-pitched and low-pitched at the same time.
Accessibility: 8/10. Mostly easy to understand from a cold start, with a little bit of confusion surrounding some of the side characters and a lot of confusion surrounding the rules of the match. I think I would have understood a lot less if I didn’t already know who Mr. Miyagi was.
Closure: 7/10. Johnny becomes world champion and his journey to adulthood is complete.
Is it, though? Is this really all Johnny needed to grow up? Is it smooth sailing from here on out?
Consider: Johnny is obsessed with winning, craves winning, fears and flees from and reacts violently to being called a loser. The answer that Daniel offers, ten minutes in, is, “Let go of that drive, remember the first Rocky.” But the answer the episode offers, viewed in its totality, is, “The only way to avoid being a loser is to be the literal world champion.”
Really? Second place on the planet is worth nothing? There are billions of people on the planet.
If that’s the message that Johnny took away from his championship match, then he hasn’t actually grown up. He believes he’s not a loser only because he won. What happens next year, when he has to defend his title? (I don’t know if it actually works that way.) What happens five years from now, ten years from now, twenty, when he sits and tells himself, “I haven’t won any world championships lately”?
The tournament ended, but I doubt Johnny’s journey came to quite the satisfying end that the episode believes.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Nah. This isn’t actually a show for adults; it’s three kids’ shows in a trenchcoat.
identified in captions as “Yasmine”
Why does Johnny get home field advantage?
I don’t mean that as a criticism. I used to fence foil, I know that the rules of valid target and priority can be esoteric.
I know why I got the France part wrong: The scene was set with a PA announcement about a flight to Charles de Gaulle, and in 99% of cases a show will only do that if it’s the flight the character is taking. But where did I get “Amanda” from? Did the caption writer screw up? Did I misread or mishear it? Did I have a stroke?
The Secret World of Alex Mack in particular, but any of its siblings will do