‘Cobra Kai’ Episode 2 Recap: Skinny Dips and Bong Rips

The most important moment of Cobra Kai‘s second episode, “Strike First”—which sets up a lot of interesting, interweaving storytelling into its 26 minutes—is Johnny Lawrence’s advice on washing a window. Miguel, who is learning the ropes as the sole member of the newly reopened Cobra Kai dojo, asks his new self-proclaimed sensei if there’s any particular way he should be scrubbing.

“I don’t give a shit,” answers Johnny.

It’s an inverted echo of Miyagi’s famous “wax on, wax off” mantra, the seemingly endless series of chores—car washing, fence painting, pretty much anything but actual martial arts—the teacher told Danny LaRusso to complete in The Karate Kid. The word was tedious, yes, but in the end it had meaning. In its boring repetition there was a lesson to be learned about discipline, about self-control.

Johnny Lawrence doesn’t give a shit about that. Any of it. His words. More than anything, Cobra Kai is becoming a show about the person you were and the person you are right now, and how hard it can be to reconcile the two. Johnny is kind of a terrible teacher because he had a terrible teacher, whose terrible ideals he’s trying to drag with him into adulthood. The look on William Zabka’s face when Miguel accuses him of “doing a lot of genderizing” should be this show’s poster, the look of a dude realizing “STRIKE HARD STRIKE FIRST NO MERCY” is not really a sustainable life motto in the year of our lord 2018.

But that struggle is just as real for Danny LaRusso, whose current day personal life we learn a lot more about outside his hilariously karate-themed car business. Danny is trying to instill the lessons bestowed on him in his own children, something we see in an overly sappy flashback to an in-house karate lesson. But as an actual real-life zen philosopher once said, parents just don’t understand.

Danny’s son, Anthony (Griffin Santopietro), keeps his ass glued to a chair and eyes to a gaming console because you can’t wax off a Nintendo Switch. His daughter, Samantha (Mary Mouser), is running with a crowd who almost surely would have stuffed Danny LaRusso into a locker back in 1984 and throwing pool parties while her parents are away (complete with a guy who belts out a “skinny dips and bong rips,” a nonsense phrase I would very much like engraved on my tombstone).

Samantha just also happens to infatuated with a classmate named Kyler—huge props to show creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg for choosing such a pitch-perfect high school asshole name—an under-the-radar bully who helped beat up Miguel and has the audacity to ask his semi-girlfriend’s parents to make him fish sticks in the comfort of their own damn home. Kyler does serve a purpose, though. His spot-on description of a crazed and possibly homeless man with a penchant for roundhouse kicks leads Danny right to the Cobra Kai dojo to confront his old nemesis, Johnny Lawrence.

This middle-aged stand-off is a fantastic example of what makes Cobra Kai a better show than maybe it had any right to be. Hurwitz and Schlossberg are using the original Karate Kid not as an endless source of empty callbacks, but a building block to tell an interesting story about who these people are now. On one side, you have Johnny Lawrence—still a dick, still kind of a racist—defending and attempting to mentor a lonely outcast, while Danny LaRusso—the actual damn Karate Kid—backing up a group of asshats who certainly would have been wearing black at the All-Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament.

And yet both men are still trying to play their roles. Johnny is still trying so hard to be the teen-Zabka-shaped villain of this story. “Get your house in order, LaRusso,” Johnny says, hours after his own son called him a pathetic loser over the telephone. (Watch Zabka’s face in moments like Miguel angrily going off on the punching dummy, when Johnny is slowly but surely he doesn’t want to play the villain as bad as he thinks.)

“You and I, this? We aren’t done,” Danny responds, exactly what the hero might say, despite the fact that a beef between two 50-year-old dudes that started over a karate tournament three decades ago should very, very much so be done. By the time these two are eyeing each other up like opponents it’s hard to tell whether Danny LaRusso forgot how to wash a window or has simply stopped giving a shit.

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 2 ("Strike First") on YouTube Red