With the newest season of “Cobra Kai” now out on Netflix, we get to return to this spin off series which follows the original characters of the 1984, “The Karate Kid” films in their old ages and their children. The show had run for three seasons on Youtube before the platform decided to move on from scripted shows and content, leaving Netflix to acquire the series in June of 2020.

Season five of the series picks up shortly after the All Valley karate tournament of the previous season. This tournament left the evil Cobra Kai dojo as champions of the valley and the members of the Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang dojos without senseis after they were forced to shut down.

This series is consistently able to pack a ton of character development and storyline into its 10-episode seasons, and this newest season is no exception. In season five, we follow along multiple different storylines including Miguel’s journey to Mexico to meet his biological father, Johnny’s struggle to become a better father, Tory’s inner conflict surrounding the Cobra Kai dojo’s cheating scandal and the penultimate fight to take down Terry Silver’s growing empire.

One thing I really appreciate about this series is their effort to reintroduce characters from the original 1980’s movie trilogy as seen with the reintroduction of Mike Barnes this season. It brings a great sense of nostalgia for movie fanatics that have seen the original movie versions. This also provides new characters for fans to latch onto without making them seem too out of place.

This show never fails to bring the action and excitement that keeps me enthralled in each and every episode. While the actual fight scenes do seem cheesy and maybe overabundant at some points, something about a bunch of random people beating each other up keeps me engaged.

This season in particular though, one thing I seem to take issue with is how disconnected each story line is from one another. I don’t know whether it was how they tried to include so many locations compared to staying in the California valley that we had been familiar with or the scattering of various different topics that had nothing to do with karate — it just made the season seem somewhat disorganized and hard to follow.

All in all, the series proved to be a huge success for the majority of Netflix watchers. The series stays true to its roots in the 1980 movies, revisits characters that encourage a sense of nostalgia and keeps viewers entertained. This season gets an overall 9/10 from me, taking away a point for how jumbled it felt to follow the storylines of it all.

All five seasons of Cobra Kai can be found on the Netflix streaming service now. While season six for the hit series has not yet been confirmed, fans can be positive as the creators have teased future plans for their creative direction. It has also been speculated that a possible delay for the proposed season six could happen as the show’s creators pursue other projects on the platform.

Cobra Kai Season Five: Flop or “Chopping” Success?