I was pretty sure I’d seen every fight in Cobra Kai that I could have imagined, but the Netflix show’s final season completely caught me by surprise with its shocking face-off between two characters I would never have expected to meet on the mat. Cobra Kai season 6, part 2’s cast gained a new member that genuinely made me gasp when they showed up, and for more reasons than one. While it ticked a box for me that I didn’t even know existed, I still have mixed feelings about the scene in question.
Karate Kid sequel show hasn’t restricted itself to fights between its original characters. For every fight between Robbie and Miguel in Cobra Kai, there’s also the coming together of two or more franchise legends trying to settle old scores with their fists. Although almost every key actor from the Karate Kid movies has shown up in Cobra Kai, there has long been one glaring absence. While this has been understandable, the show finally found a way to include them, and it pitted them against a very unexpected opponent.
The death of Pat Morita in 2005 meant he was never able to reprise the role of Mr. Miyagi when Cobra Kai debuted in 2018. Instead, the show respectfully killed off Morita’s character, but not before providing an offscreen extension of his story and revealing he lived with the LaRussos for a long while. Although Miyagi’s legacy has loomed large over the narrative of Cobra Kai, the show has understandably never shown him. Cobra Kai season 6, episode 10, “Eunjangdo,” changes all that, allowing Daniel to fight his late sensei in a trippy dream sequence.
With Cobra Kai season 6 set to end the show for good, it makes sense why the writers would make the decision to include Miyagi now. The show’s obvious lack of supernatural elements means a dream sequence is one of the only ways Miyagi’s franchise comeback can be achieved. So, it’s not really a massive surprise that this is the avenue Cobra Kai would take when exploring the possibility. However, having him fight Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso is certainly the most unexpected facet of the scene.
Although Daniel’s relationship with Mr. Miyagi wasn’t always perfect in the Karate Kid movies, it never degraded to the point of them exchanging blows. Instead, Miyagi was also portrayed as a tranquil man who only resorted to violence in scenarios that called for self-defense or the protection of another – and the person he was usually saving was Daniel. Seeing a younger, more ferocious version of the character is very interesting. The character is simply a figment of Daniel’s unconscious mind, but it’s informed by the upsetting knowledge that Miyagi killed a man at the Sekai Taikai.
