Cobra Kai recap, season 3, episode 6: ‘King Cobra’

We need to talk about how John Kreese is making money by running the Cobra Kai dojo. We learned from his landlord, the greasy Armand, that he always pays the rent on time and apparently both have a lease, but where does this money come from? How, exactly, is he getting students to train at Cobra Kai when he treats her more as an “elite squad” or squad than an academy?

He travels the Valley in search of the toughest boys in wrestling, basketball and weightlifting, a montage that coincides with young John Kreese being recruited to an elite training team in Vietnam in 1968. “You need strength, you need determination, it needs brutality, ”said Kreese at the time, and now he tells others. “All you have to do is say yes and I will shape you to be the ultimate weapon.” When these new recruits show up at the dojo, they have to fight current students to see if they are worthy to be Cobra Kais.

Okay, let me see this business model right: it goes to the kids, tells them it’s going to turn them into killing machines, but they have to pay for it, and then, when they show up, he says he just wants to your money if they are good enough? It’s like entering Curves, but the first time you get there, they say they will only accept your money if you can bench press with your body weight.

He then has a wrestler fight with “Ass Face”, who loses his fight. Kreese then expels him from the dojo. Okay, okay, okay. Hold on. So, after making potential students prove their worth, does he get rid of paying customers if they are not good enough for him? How does this guy make money to pay the rent? Is it because he also lives there and never changes clothes, so his expenses are low?

Hawk hates new recruits because they are the guys who bullied him (although, in the classic Snake Kai none of these people are given real names). Kreese makes Hawk fight the weightlifter I will call Pepperoni Combos. You can tell that Hawk is serious because he takes off his shirt to reveal not only his Affleck-style back tattoo, but a new reaper tattoo on his chest. He mops the floor with Pepperoni Combos and Kreese and he doesn’t even have to tell Hawk to “finish him off” as a geriatric version of the announcer in Mortal combat. Hawk starts punching him until his hands are covered in blood.

Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. So now Pep Combos is going to come home and say what to his parents? “This old man approached me at the gym about joining his club and I had to pay, but when I got there it was like a kind of test. I failed and he broke my nose and now I can’t afford to be at his club. ”What would your parents do in this situation? Just say, “Oh, that makes sense. Should you be a better fighter? “No, they would call the police and say” There is a Cape Fear–psychotic level running a dojo ”, which is exactly what Amanda calls it.

When Daniel returns from Japan, or from the sound stage in Tarzana who was doubling to Japan, the boss scolds Amanda and tells him that the children are with their grandmother because she is worried about Kreese. She’ll get a restraining order, but he already applied one against her because she showed up at his store and slapped him for no reason. Yes, it makes perfect sense. She then invites Armand, fills him with chicken cacciatore and convinces him to dump Kreese. The only problem is that Kreese kicks the snot out of Armand’s henchmen and stays in his dojo.

Amanda is back in a new LaRusso Motors (not kicking the competition since 2021), rejoicing about how she defeated Cobra Kai one afternoon, while Daniel has been trying to do so for 35 years. That’s when Kreese picks up the phone and tells her it’s hunting season for Miyagi-Do’s students – although Miyagi-Do is technically closed, but whatever – but also for the LaRussos. That’s when we found out what that snake Kreese is for in the studio: he released it at the dealership and chaos ensued. I’m just pissed off because no one at that dealership yelled, “I’m sick of these M-er F-er snakes on this M-er F-er plane.”

While all of this is diminishing, we are also gaining some empathy for Kreese and understanding what did. We also found out that Kreese from Vietnam was a hot guy who could do things with the sleeve of a T-shirt that weren’t seen outside Warrant’s video for “Cherry Pie”, except for a man. We found your captain who, because this is CK, he has no other name than Captain, who taught Kreese not to have mercy. When they are on a mission, their countryman Ponytail (finally, a name!) Places a bomb, but is caught by the enemy. Kreese can’t blow it up, so instead, the entire squad is caught and the ponytail runs in front of his face.

This obviously had to be traumatic, but what Kreese needs to understand is that what worked on ‘Nam will not work at home, especially in the modern day. When Captain No Name tells him, “It’s either to kill or to die. No mercy ”, he is right because it is literally a war. No matter what you think about the conflict in Vietnam, you can understand this battlefield mentality. But can’t Kreese see that it has only damaged his life since he returned? Perhaps the PTSD fog and the smell of Napalm in the morning are too much for him.

The best story of the episode, however, is what is happening to Johnny and Miguel. Johnny attached him to a harness and hung it on the ceiling of his apartment so that he could teach Miguel how to walk. “I look like a baby, is there a tougher way to do this?” Miguel regrets.

It turns out that the badass way has to do with Facebook. Miguel finds out that Ali, Johnny’s famous ex-girlfriend, wrote him a message on Facebook (they are almost 60, after all, in the FB demo) asking him what he was doing. Johnny not only has an almost empty profile, he also went back and liked all of her pictures in his story, because one of his most captivating qualities is having no idea how the internet works. Miguel decides to help Johnny to draw a beautiful message for Ali that is not 85 pages and capitalized and also take some pictures, because the only ones he has are of him shirtless, with feathered hair and a gold chain as if they had been pulled on one Bop central hinge in 1984.

They go all over town and Johnny pretends to read, pretends to like art, and even pretends to like sushi, which is a little strange that he never ate sushi considering that he dedicated most of his life to Japanese cultural appropriation, but anyway. (Also, there is definitely a Sugarfish in the Valley, so he should get into it.) While they are eating sushi, Miguel meets Tory, who apologizes for not seeing him at the hospital and everything is strange and strange between them and Miguel hates that all of his friends he fought so hard for have basically abandoned him.

Back at Johnny’s, Miguel is so upset that he can’t walk that he yells at Johnny for basically giving up. He’s mad, Johnny let Kreese take Cobra Kai and did nothing. “You helped a lot of people and then you left like a sissy,” Miguel yells at him. “You are a sensei. If you can’t see, you are blind. ”Miguel is so furious that he doesn’t even realize he’s standing up alone. It is another miracle of karate.

You might think Johnny would go over to that Reseda strip and get his dojo back, but first he has to deal with Facebook. It does not upload any of the fake photos. Instead, he uploads all of his pictures helping the children. He responds to Ali with a great note about how his life was meaningless until he met someone who needed his help and it brought him back to karate. Since then, he has become a teacher trying to help prepare children for the difficult world out there. It is so honest, sweet and true without being sentimental that it brought a small tear to my eyes. So I got mad because Snake Kai it made me cry and then I could hear my dad saying, “There is no crying in daddy’s shows”, although my dad definitely cries weekly Yellowstone for no discernible reason.

In a classic move by Johnny, he decides his message is too long and erases everything. Finally, he comes up with the perfect answer for Ali, something that has worked for bad boys trying to get laid by text message for decades: “Not really. YOU?”