Cobra Kai karate chops its way back to broad, dumb fun with an improved season 3

A series of flashbacks run throughout season three of Cobra Kai. Only, they don’t belong to Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), adrift after his dojo was stolen from him and his best student Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) trapped in a coma following the brawl that ended season two. And they also don’t belong to Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), struggling to keep his family and business together in the wake of his daughter’s suspension and the negative fallout from being the public face of a dojo whose students were deemed responsible for a school-wide riot. No, these flashbacks follow John Kreese (Martin Kove), Johnny’s former sensei and the show’s cigar-chomping villain, following him as an idealistic young man going to Vietnam in 1968, presumably so the audience can get a deep insight into his character and learn why he turned out so cruel and monomaniacal. But is there really anything to learn that would make us change our minds about such a sneering sociopath? As Daniel’s daughter Sam (Mary Mouser) says early on, voicing the show’s overarching theme: “Everybody’s got a sob story. Doesn’t give you the right to be a bully.”
But that’s the Cobra Kai way: a long walk to confirm what you already knew. Luckily, there’s a lot of humor and good-natured theatrics accompanying the story this time around. After season two got bogged down in straight-laced melodrama and lost much of the series’ initial acidic insight, it looked as though Cobra Kai might have fallen victim to the very macho posturing it used to lampoon. And while that tension is very much still present this year—episodes can turn from comic to portentously cartoonish faster than a crane kick—the creative team seems to have remembered that what makes all the teenage chop-socky-infused drama palatable is a healthy sense of sardonic perspective on the proceedings. Taking all the soapy emoting at face value quickly gets tiresome, as last season demonstrated; now, the show is once more aware that something like a news announcer grimly reporting on the aftereffects of a high school’s “all-out karate riot” is pretty ridiculous.