‘Cobra Kai’ Episode 1 Recap: Get Him a Body Bag  

Through some combination of time, Twitter, and pop culture osmosis the original Karate Kid has been whittled down to an easy punchline 34 years after its premiere. It’s easy to forget that John G. Avildsen’s film is actually a pretty masterfully told coming of age story—Pat Morita’s performance as Miyagi got an Oscar nom, for goodness sake—when you’re surrounded by drunk dudes screaming “sweep the leg, Johnny” at NBA games and using “wax on, wax off” as a way to describe jerking off. But that’s the way time works, man. Things change. Hard corners get softened by easy jokes. The inspirational quotes that seemed supremely important underneath your high school yearbook photo suddenly don’t mean half a powder room shit when you’re past 50 and waking up next to a Coors bottle.

That, in a very depressing nutshell, is the premise of Cobra Kai, YouTube Red’s surprisingly great Karate Kid follow-up that acts as a meditation on the low crane kick to the dick that is getting older.

What keeps things fresh—at least in Episode 1, “Ace Degenerate”—is the way creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg follow not New Jersey outcast turned LA karate master Danny LaRusso but Johnny Lawrence, the quintessential 1980’s blonde-haired asshole of “sweep the leg, Johnny” fame.

Surprise! Three decades after losing the All-Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament, Johnny’s life kind of sucks. He wakes up with bags under his eyes to work as a handyman in the hills, photos of a son he never sees taped to the fridge and karate trophies—symbols of a time he was king of high school—buried in his closet. Johnny Lawrence no longer strikes hard or first, he just eats his dinner alone on the curb outside a mini-mart, a situation practically engineered in a lab to be the most depressing thing a human being could possibly do.

William Zabka is fantastically beaten down in his reprisal of Johnny Lawrence. I might be making this show sound a bit sadder than it actually is—aging is just rough, fam—but Zabka largely saves it from veering into straight up melodrama by adding tinges of over-the-topness to his sad-guy character. This is exactly what an ’80s high school villain would look and sound like after life beat the cocaine and synth music out of him.

Johnny gets his chance at some sort of redemption after meeting Miguel (spectacularly named young actor Xolo Maridueña), a LaRusso-esque new kid in town. Eating his very sad meal outside the convenience store, Johnny gets a glimpse of a few bullies—who 100% would have been Cobra Kai regulars back in the day—giving Miguel a tough time.

Johnny Lawrence proceeds to beat the shit out of a few high school kids.

The moment a 52-year-old spin kicks a high school senior into unconsciousness is probably where Cobra Kai either grabs or loses you. Besides the fact that it’s just an objectively funny image on every level, it also acts as a pretty effective character beat that builds on writing from 36 years ago in Karate Kid. Johnny has lived his entire life based on ideals that made a ton of sense as a 1980’s villain but—and I really hope Cobra Kai builds on this going forward—might not be so great for a middle-aged man in 2018. He struck first, struck hard, showed no mercy, and got very rightfully arrested.

Orbiting all this in the background is Danny LaRusso himself. Surprise! Danny LaRusso is also kind of a dick now. Not in an insidious way, but in the artificially cheerful conman way of the auto dealer. Danny owns LaRusso Auto Group, an overtly karate-themed car lot where every customer gets a bonsai tree and the prices “kick the competition.” The lessons Miyagi taught Danny as a kid—all those tutorials on self-control, discipline, inner peace—are being used in low-budget local commercials to sell cars.

For the record, Ralph Macchio is committed to making this as ridiculous as possible.

These two men are reunited after a group of teen girls—one of them Danny’s daughter—crashes into Johnny’s car. Their intensely passive-aggressive confrontation at Danny’s business is by far the best scene of the episode, mostly because of Zabka and Macchio’s dual performances of two grown men barely containing a decades-old grudge. It’s like every awkward time you randomly bumped into an old acquaintance at the Target checkout line rolled into one perfectly acted two-minute scene.

Danny: “When I first moved here from Jersey he and I got into it a little bit. This guy really had it in for me.”

Johnny: “Well you did move in on my girl.”

Danny: “Well she wasn’t really your girl anymore, was she?”

This all happened in high school! Special shout-out to the script by Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and Josh Heald for having Johnny mention the fact Danny’s tournament-winning kick was illegal, a very true statement that has been debated since the invention of the internet.

Either way, Johnny sees the light at the end of his current dark tunnel not by looking forward but by opening up the past. Literally. He re-opens the Cobra Kai dojo, enlists Miguel as his first student, and names himself sensei. The last shot we get is Johnny donning a headband in the style of his old, abusive teacher Kreese, and he looks…ridiculous.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion going back and forth over whether this last shot is the show taking itself way too seriously or underestimating how low-key sad it is to see Johnny desperately trying to regain his past. But the fact that the Cobra Kai mindset—the self-seriousness, the faux-toughness, the talk of this “pussy generation”—seems absurd in the light of 2018 is exactly the point.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

Watch Cobra Kai Episode 1 ("Ace Degenerate") on YouTube Red