By now, hopefully, you’d had the chance to sit down and watch the final five episodes of Cobra Kai. Maybe you’ve even watched them two times or three times. Whatever the case, if you’ve seen them you certainly have a lot of questions. Questions centered on how much the ending of the show was on the minds of the creators from the very beginning. Why the decisions were made for some characters to go, some to stay, and some to be the best around. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Since 2018, io9 has been lucky enough to talk to Cobra Kai creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald for almost every single season. They’re some of the biggest Karate Kid fans in the world, and they’d have to be to make a show as satisfying as Cobra Kai. And so, a few weeks back, io9 sat down with Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and Heald one last time to discuss their magnum opus. Their six-season love letter to The Karate Kid, Cobra Kai. We got deep into spoilers so, if you’ve not seen the final episodes yet… you’ve been warned.
Germain Lussier, io9: Before I get into my nerdy specifics, I want to go big picture. Can you guys even grasp what you’ve done? You made a six-season sequel to your favorite movie franchise. Can you fathom that you were able to pull that off and have you let it sink in yet?
Hayden Schlossberg: It’s sunk in. We’ve hung out with Marty Cove enough where we’re like, “Yeah, this is not a dream.” [All laugh] At the same time, I think now that we’re doing press for it, it’s just like you really appreciate the fact that we were able to get six seasons in this day and age. When we started this – we pitched it back in 2016-2017, when we started getting the rights to it and everything – the concept of having a six-season TV show was still a possibility, but it was a long shot back then. Nowadays, it’s really tough to get to season six. And so, you know, I think that the stars aligned in a lot of ways going from YouTube to Netflix and we’re just really appreciative and thankful that things worked out in the best possible way.
io9: And it did. Okay, so I’ve been waiting since season one and we finally got there. “You’re the Best.” You finally played the song. I know you always said it had to be the right moment so when did you know that this was the moment and was it always a moment that you had in mind?
Jon Hurwitz: It was a moment that we had in mind for a very long time. We love the idea of it being in the final episode. We loved it being during a training montage with Johnny and Daniel. So yeah, it kind of landed exactly where we wanted it to. We thought it had to be a really special, iconic sequence going on if we were going to use a song that is that meaningful to the fans of this franchise.
io9: The show wraps up in the way that it starts. It’s about Johnny Lawrence and the rebirth of Cobra Kai. So how conscious were you guys of redeeming Johnny and Cobra Kai and was that always like the day one pitch when you talked to Ralph and William? Like did you work towards it specifically or did it just become obvious later?
Josh Heald: We shared that more with each other than with them. We dribbled out a little bit to them as it became real-real. We didn’t want to lead with something that then we changed our minds about in a mid-season way and they got very attached to or precious about. So whenever we sat down with them to tell them a full season, it was usually at the top of a new season, we would unveil a little bit more of the surprise awaiting them. But it was always our intent to see Johnny gain control of his own dojo again. And we knew right from the beginning, it was probably almost definitely going to be Cobra Kai again, because that seemed like the best story. If we could figure out a way of getting Johnny out of a corner that he was painted into with Cobra Kai, where he gained control of it again for the wrong reasons, Kreese then got it for worse reasons and Silver just made it toxic. If we could somehow make that be powerful again in the right hands – and the only hands that it can flourish in – without losing its edge, but also having a knowledge of what came before it. That was our charge in front of us. So when it became time to do that we unveiled the plan to them.
io9: But if you look at the episode titles for the first episode and last episode they’re both from that one brief but crucial moment in the first movie. Was that an intentional setup to match the titles of the bookend episodes?
Schlossberg: Right. Yeah, we talked about the last episode being that title “Ex-Degenerate” for a long period of time. And yeah, it was just the bookend. I mean, in the very first episode, you see Johnny is driving and he’s thinking about the tournament. And you just get the sense that he would kill to be back there and get a second chance at that. And we wanted it where, in the final episode, he gets that second chance. But now with that comes a lot of pressure. Like if he screws it up, then he’s just going to feel like he’s a loser. That was the big thing in the last episode was figuring out like, well, what are the stakes in a world where you’re not worried about a Terry Silver anymore or a Kreese. And really what you’re worried about is Johnny getting what he wanted at the very beginning and having that fulfilling moment,
io9: Yeah and it is wonderful. What about the specifics of the Seikai-Teikai in these last episodes? When did you know the of twist that Miguel and Johnny would jump back in this Cobra Kai with that loophole and that Tori and Miguel were going to win?
Hurwitz: Before each season, the three of us kind of have our general game plan for the season that we explain to the writer’s room and then we all work on it together from there. We knew that we were going to have Johnny at the end. We knew that they were going to be Cobra Kai in the end. We wanted specifically, Miguel and Johnny as Cobra Kai to have these final victories. And the big key – and this is something that we’ve also been talking about since the very beginning of making the series – was eventually Johnny Lawrence not necessarily forgiving Sensei Kreese, but having a resolution with Sensei Kreese where he expresses the appreciation for what he learned for him, but expresses the pain that that Kreese gave him and for Kreese to give a proper genuine heartfelt sorry. And when we were looking at the machinations, we made little choices in the middle five episodes about like you can play around with the rosters and things like that going on. The Terry Silver references. Devon stepping down and Kenny coming in. All those kinds of things were purposeful so that it can be believable that these guys as former Cobra Kais could step in at a time when Kwon is no longer a part of the equation.
io9: Oh man, and that scene at the end of 14 with Kreese and Johnny in the hallways. Oh my God, guys, So good. Okay – Killing Kreese in Silver in a boat explosion. Tell me about that decision. Was there any specific reason and why doesn’t it really get to get brought up again in the finale? I know Wolf mentions it real quick, but tell me a little bit about both parts of that.
Heald: From the earliest days of talking about Kreese stepping back into this world, we knew that his final moment on the show would be something self-sacrificial to protect Johnny. And then once Silver entered the equation, it became clear that was going to be the clash. We could not have predicted – I can’t sit here with a straight face and tell you, “Oh, yeah, it’s 2016 and we said it’s going to be on a yacht.” But prior to season six, we decided it was going to be on a yacht. We pitched the season to Sony and to Netflix and they said, “OK, well, you can say ‘yacht’ in pencil right now. But really, what’s it going to be?” And we’re like, “It’s going to be on a yacht.” And we were pitched by the studio, by our line producer, by just about everybody, “What if it’s this house over here? What if it’s this mountaintop over here?” And we’re like, “Guys, it’s a yacht. It’s on the ocean. We’re going to do this.” [Laughs] And that was probably the most stubborn we’ve ever been because we’ve seen such spectacle with fights to this point.
Season six really is a martial arts spectacle in so many ways, especially part two and then the premiere fights at the end of part three. We’ve seen house fights, we’ve seen school fights, we’ve already seen the biggest house fights between Silver’s House and the LaRusso House. Having another fight in the house just didn’t make sense. But having a fight on a boat and having that boat explode into a million pieces, if we could pull that off, we were just so happy. That was the last thing we shot of anything in season six was we were on that boat – when you see that drone shot and people are fighting, we’re in there on a monitor watching this thing – as the sun is setting and we can’t believe we’re getting this. And it just became this bombastic relationship had to go out as explosively as possible and that it felt very apropos.
Schlossberg: I just wanted to add that, you know, there have been numerous times in the past where John Kreese is supposedly dead and yet he’s come back. And we never actually see any bodies. It’s fair to assume that he died based on the explosion, but it was a very far-back shot. You know, if you watch the show Landman, you see that explosions can sometimes blow the body away so that they’re actually shielded from the fire.
Heald: Hayden is pitching an animated series called A Very Badly Burned Kreese.
Schlossberg: So I say Kreese and Silver, I like to think, are still alive.
Hurwitz: But to answer your other question, in the finale, we wanted to be clean of that. We want the feelings of the finale to be grounded and back in the world where we started. We did… this is something that we did cut. We filmed it. And while filming it, we knew we probably weren’t going to use it, but we wanted the option. You know how in that there’s the montage towards the end where you see where that lands on the magazine stand with Sports Illustrated?
Io9: Yes.
Hurwitz: We filmed beyond that where the camera drifted over and you saw another magazine with Terry Silver on the cover and it being like, “Where is this missing billionaire?” And we even had Marty Kove there with his hand, pick up the magazine just in case. We knew it would be too ridiculous.
Schlossberg: We didn’t want to make it clear that he’s alive. So we felt it’s better to keep it vague and let the audience interpret it.
Heald: But also we wanted to give the events of [the finale] their own, like Jon said, like when he says free and clear, like this happened. That boat exploded so much that nothing remained. And they’re not going to really find anything that washes ashore from that boat for a few days. So give them their day to not even know that there was a self-sacrifice, to not even know just to carry forth in a world without sabotage.
Schlossberg: But then one day they’re going to open the door and see a third-degree burn Terry Silver pissed off beyond belief. [All Laugh.]
io9: I love that. Freddy Krueger Terry Silver. Next, you brought back basically everybody you could and would want. The one that everybody always asks about is Hilary Swank, who doesn’t show up. How close were we, if at all, to ever having her on the show?
Schlossberg: It’s one of those situations where we always explore. We try to find out what the options are because we don’t control all these actors’ lives. It was no guarantee that we were going to get Yuji [Okumoto] or Thomas Ian Griffith back. So we explored it. But we learned pretty quickly that that wasn’t going to happen in the final season. And we always construct things in a way where it’s not everything reliant on one uncontrollable piece of talent. So that like, oh my God, the whole house of cards falls apart.
Hurwitz: Well, Elizabeth Shue. Everything would have fallen apart had she not shown up. That was the one exception. That was the thing where we painted ourselves into a corner.
Heald: Only she could un-paint ourselves.
Hurwitz: I will say, yeah, with Julie Pierce, it was something that we would have loved to have done. But one of the things we always say is, things happen for a reason. And creatively, it actually worked out totally fine. And we’re thrilled with how the season ended up.
Heald: And I’ll say there’s no lost episode out there. We didn’t get deep enough where we’re like, “Here it is” and now we have to totally shift. We explored very early to just make that relationship and see if it was possible. And the timing was such that it just couldn’t work out. And we wrote knowing that. So we didn’t have any kind of remorse.
io9: I rewatched The Next Karate Kid before these episodes just in case and I’ll say, I’m kind of glad you guys couldn’t bring her back – Because oof – it’s so bad. Okay, tell me a little about the final scene. Why is that there kind of as a little button? I’m guessing where I was obsessed with “You’re the Best” but other people were obsessed with the fly and chopsticks and you just wanted to give them that? Is that it?
Heald: I think we just wanted to have a palate cleanser. You have that last scene of Johnny in the dojo and you’re seeing Daniel and you’re realizing what the new normal and the new balance of the Valley is going to be. And there was a degree of not wanting to say goodbye as we were writing and just kind of wanting to drop in on their lives on a later date and just to show the audience that it’s going to be okay. These two are friends. They’re having lunch. Johnny doesn’t know how to pay his taxes. And then the fly was really the cherry on top. It was something nice to just kind of tie a nice little bow around Daniel’s relationship with Miyagi this season that he had had quite a tumultuous affair with. It was just one more moment. It was literally like us saying like “It’s going to be okay.” And us just wanting one more bite at a scene with these two guys together.
io9: And to pitch your Back to the Future show, which is definitely happening.
Heald: Of course. A backdoor pilot.
io9: Speaking of Miyagi we get the pearl explanation in the finale for why he fled, but we never really find out more about his time with the Seikai Taikai. I know you’ve said maybe you’d eventually do a Miyagi thing so is it on purpose that we don’t learn more about that at this point?
Schlossberg: Well, you know, we talked about things. I’ll say that we had a game plan. We’ve talked about what happened. And then we realized you don’t need to know all the details. A lot of times you don’t know every single thing. What’s more important is that Daniel has come to terms with the fact that Mr. Miyagi was a human being just like him. Probably not everything was great. But the story of the necklace kind of gives him that added sense of confidence that there’s always a different side to the story that you don’t know. So, yeah, we’ve found out this thing about Mr. Miyagi fighting in the Seikai Taikai and killing somebody but maybe there’s another side of that that makes it seem not as bad. And we don’t know it. But Daniel will probably just assume the best when it comes to Mr. Miyagi. And if it was something, well, then you know what? He’s a human being just like all of us. And then, yes. Selfishly for us, if we’re doing a Miyagi spin-off, now you’ll get to see what actually happened there.
io9: One of the things that first brought me in with the show is that you used alternate footage in that first episode of the big final fight. And at the time you said you had access to more of that. Were there any other moments that I maybe missed or am not remembering where you used alternate footage from the movies in the flashbacks?
Schlossberg – I think maybe in [season 6, episode 13] in one of the Johnny/Kreese scenes. Johnny’s flashing back to when Kreese got him in a chokehold.
Heald: That might be a new angle that we didn’t use in episode one of the series.
Hurwitz: Yeah, I think there’s that. But I think throughout the series, there’s a number of moments like that. Where our editors had access to all the dailies and threw things in there. But that was definitely one where we did it.
Heald: In season three, we obviously did the whole Karate Kid Part II moment with Daniel and Chozen right before we flashback to Chozen. We used a lot of new angles there between Daniel and Miyagi. Whenever we go to the flashbacks, we try to show the dailies footage when we can get it. It was never fully digitized. Like we keep sending people back to the salt mines to look for it.
io9: Yeah, of course. Now you guys have said you want to do more in this world and hopefully we’ll find out at some point when or if that happens. But with the new movie coming out, do you think the success of that movie will have any bearing on your ability to continue in the Cobra Kai world?
Hurwitz: I don’t think so.
Heald: I think, look, a high tide raises all ships. So we’re rooting for that movie. This is a big ecosystem, the Karate Kid universe. We’ve been most invested in the Daniel LaRusso, Johnny Lawrence, and John Kreese story for six seasons. That’s a different branch of the tree. That’s Mr. Han’s universe that Daniel is stepping into. And we wish it well. And we hope that everything in this universe can have their moment to shine.
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