Cobra Kai Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: ‘King Cobra’

We have to talk about how John Kreese makes money by operating the Cobra Kai dojo. We learn from his landlord, the greasy Armand, that he always pays the rent on time and apparently the two have a lease, but where does this money come from? How, exactly, does he get the students to train Cobra Kai when he treats him more like an elite “team” or squad than an academy?

He travels the valley in search of the toughest kids in wrestling, basketball and weightlifting, a montage that coincides with the recruiting of young John Kreese to an elite training team in Vietnam in 1968. “You need it. for strength, you need determination, you need brutality, ”he had said to Kreese then, and now says it to the others. “All you have to do is say yes and I will turn you into the ultimate weapon.” When these new recruits show up at the dojo, they have to fight against the current students to see if they deserve to be Cobra Kais.

Okay, let me clarify this business model: he goes to the kids, tells them he’s going to turn them into killing machines, but they have to pay for it, and then when they show up, he tells them that he only wants their money if they are good enough? It’s like joining Curves, but the first time you get there they tell you that they will only take your money if you can press your body weight.

He then went on to wrestler bout with “Ass Face”, which lost his match. Kreese then throws him out of the dojo. Alright, alright, alright. Wait. So after proving himself to potential students, he then gets rid of paying customers if they aren’t good enough for him? How does this guy make the money to pay this rent? Is it because he also lives there and never changes his clothes and his expenses are low?

Hawk hates new recruits because they are the ones who bullied him (however, in classic Cobra Kai mode, none of those people get real names). Kreese asks Hawk to fight the weightlifter I’ll call Pepperoni Combos. You can tell Hawk is serious because he takes off his shirt to reveal not only his Affleck-esque gnarled back tattoo, but a new one of the Grim Reaper on his chest. He wipes the floor with Pepperoni Combos and Kreese doesn’t even have to tell Hawk to “finish” him like a geriatric version of the announcer in. Mortal combat. Hawk starts hitting him until his hands are covered in blood.

Wait wait. Wait. So now Pep Combos is going to go home and say what to his parents? “This old man approached me at the gym to join his club and I had to pay, but when I got there it was like sort of an audition. I failed and he broke my nose and now I can’t pay to be in his club. What would his parents do in this situation? Just be like, “Oh, that makes sense. Should you be a better fighter? No, they would call the cops and say, “There is a Cape Fear–level psycho leading a dojo, ”that’s exactly what Amanda calls him.

When Daniel returns from Japan, or Tarzana’s soundstage doubling for Japan, the conductor scolds Amanda tells him that the children are at their grandmother’s because she is worried about Kreese. She goes to get a restraining order, but he’s already taken one against her because she showed up at his business and slapped him for no reason. Yes, that makes perfect sense. She then invites Armand, gives him chicken cacciatore and convinces him to expel Kreese. The only problem is that Kreese clears the snot from Armand’s morons and stays in his dojo.

Amanda is back in a new LaRusso Motors (which hasn’t kicked off the competition since 2021), rejoicing in how she defeated Cobra Kai in one afternoon as Daniel tried to take him down. have been doing for 35 years. That’s when Kreese picks up the phone and tells her it’s open season for Miyagi-Do students – even though Miyagi-Do is technically closed, but whatever – but also the LaRussos. That’s when we learn what this snake Kreese kept in the studio is for: he let it go at the dealership and chaos ensues. I’m just pissed off that no one in this concession shouted, “I got it with those M-er F-er snakes on that M-er F-er plane.”

While all of this is happening, we also gain some empathy for Kreese and understand what made him. We also learn that Vietnam Kreese was a hottie who could do things to a t-shirt sleeve that wasn’t seen outside of Mandate’s video for “Cherry Pie” except on a man. We meet his captain who, because it is CK, has no other name than Captain, who taught Kreese not to have mercy. When they are on a mission, his compatriot Queue de Cheval (well, a name!) Drops a bomb but is caught by the enemy. Kreese can’t detonate him, so instead the entire team gets caught and Ponytail is executed in front of his face.

This obviously had to be traumatic, but what Kreese needs to understand is that what worked for Nam won’t work for him, especially nowadays. When Captain No Name tells him, “It’s kill or be killed.” No mercy, ”he’s right because it’s literally a war. No matter what you think of the conflict in Vietnam, you can understand this battlefield mentality. But can’t Kreese see that it has only caused him harm in his life since his return? Maybe the fog of PTSD and the smell of Napalm in the morning are too much for him.

The best story of the episode, however, is what happens with Johnny and Miguel. Johnny has him hooked to a harness and hung from the ceiling of his apartment so he can teach Miguel to walk. “I look like a baby, is there a harder way to do this?” Miguel moans.

It turns out that the hardest way has to do with Facebook. Miguel finds out that Ali, Johnny’s famous ex-girlfriend, wrote him a Facebook message (they’re almost 60 after all, so squarely in the FB demo) asking him what he was doing. Johnny not only has a mostly nude profile, but he’s also come back and loved all of his photos in his story, because one of his most endearing qualities is not knowing how the internet works. Miguel decides to help Johnny write a nice message to Ali that is not 85 pages long and in all caps and also take some pictures, as the only ones he has are of him shirtless with feathered hair and a chain in or as if they had been taken from a Bop in the center in 1984.

They go all over town and Johnny pretends to read, pretends to love art, and even pretends to like sushi, which, it’s kinda weird that he’s never eaten sushi. given that he devoted most of his life to Japanese cultural appropriation, but whatever. (Plus, there’s definitely a Sugarfish in the valley, so he should go.) While they’re at sushi, Miguel meets Tory, who apologizes for not seeing him in the hospital and all. is weird and awkward between them and Miguel hates that all his friends he fought so hard for abandoned him.

Back at Johnny’s, Miguel is so pissed off that he can’t walk that he yells at Johnny for giving up. He’s crazy Johnny let Kreese take Cobra Kai and didn’t do anything. “You helped a bunch of people and then you left like a cat,” Miguel yells at him. “You are a sensei. If you can’t see you’re blind. Miguel is so angry that he doesn’t even realize he’s standing on his own. This is another miracle of karate.

You might think Johnny would go into that Reseda gang and take over his dojo, but he has to deal with Facebook first. It does not download any of the bogus images. Instead, he uploads all the pictures of him helping the kids. He responds to Ali with a high note that 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 children prepare for the difficult world. It’s so honest and sweet and true without being harsh that it brought a little tear to my eyes. Then I went crazy because Cobra Kai made me cry and I could hear my dad say, “There is no crying on dad’s shows”, even though my dad definitely cries every week at Yellowstone for no discernible reason.

In a classic Johnny move, he decides his post is way too long and removes it all. Finally, he finds the perfect answer for Ali, something that has worked for bad boys trying to text each other for decades: “Not much. U? “