TC wrote: 01/01/22, 08:59:46Cobra Kai - Season 4 - as we covered back on page 58, s3 ended in kind of insane land where many teens should now be living at juvi. S4 picks up immediately after the events of s3. I don’t really understand how much time passes during a season - two weeks? Five days? A school year? - and that creates some issues with this season especially. A kid that has been in your class for what i assumed was maybe a week is doing the skills demonstration? He’s also able to strike your best guy? Anyway, was a good season. Brought back the guy who i guess was the villain in Karate Kid 3? I don’t know, didn’t watch that one, but there were enough flashback scenes for me to grasp i guess this guy has existed in the canon of this franchise. He was fine, definitely more enjoyable than Krese. Thankfully, we didn’t get Krese fight scenes this year - those were so painful to watch last year. Guys biggest opponent is clearly arthritis. But, these two guys - ‘nam vets? How old are they supposed to be again? They’d have to be in their 70s at minimum, but in the flashback scenes they looked older than 20, so… Anyway, forgetting about all that, this season was enjoyable. Had some laughable moments. But there’s just no way to recapture why s1 was so great. Watching this, i feel the same way i do watching the CW superhero shows - there is so much teen drama that is both annoying and ridiculous, just in this show, all their issues somehow end up getting solved by and with karate. And i’m still watching because i’m invested. But if all those kids tried the roof jump and fell to their death like lemmings, i’d be fine with that too.
ok, so season 5 fixed everything i hated about s4. s5 was pretty goddamn funny, and entirely self-aware, leaning into the ridiculousness of their internal timelines, among other things. it was definitely better than s4. my only real gripe was that ending, because it means
we have to deal with more fucking kreese, who is the worst character in the show, and incapable of acting in any meaningful way, let alone trying to fight and be a badass. leave the poor old man alone. i cheered when they killed him. but then, of course he's not dead. shrug.
I guess i entirely missed posting about the first...third?...of s6, but here i am talking about the second third. don't know why they broke up this final season into three parts/drops, but they did, milking this dehydrated cow for everything it has. present are the usual entirely insane plot beats, the pastiche of WB-level high school drama, mixed in with a ridiculous amount of karate. at least there is the context of the tournament here, which is a valid reason for so much karate, but the shtick of every problem being solved/caused by karate is beyond old. it gets less amusing with each iteration. i kind of hope every character here dies in the final few episodes, whenever they air. no coincidence that as the show started to take itself seriously and became way less aware, it became way less enjoyable. anyway, if you're still in at this point, might as well finish it. that's my take anyway.
