‘Cobra Kai’ Episode 4 Recap: Boba Foot

In only four episodes, Cobra Kai has morphed from a silly-but-fun idea for a pop culture sequel into a surprisingly moving study of how people grow older and the reasons humans largely can’t help but stay the same. Of what drives us at 15 versus what motivates us at 50, of the ways time eventually batters the prom kings and queens into submission. A meditation on the well-worn ’80s tropes of misfits and bullies and how they’ve been inverted to fit into a 2018-shaped hole. It’s a beautiful thing, really, and truly does deserve serious consideration.

So with that said, I regret to inform you that the only thing I want to talk about is Danny LaRusso dramatically kicking a boba tea out of another man’s hand.

Danny’s absolute thrashing of a rival car dealer’s chilled drink via heel kick was one of two times I fully expected a scene in this show would be revealed as a wish-fulfilling, imagined daydream and was not (the first being the time Johnny Lawrence beat the shit out of three teenagers outside a mini mall). Nope. This really happened. This 56-year-old former karate tournament champion really did damn near tear his fitted suit settling his adult problems with martial arts in front of an assembled group of shocked auto lot employees.

Now, I’m a simple critic who loves any unnecessary karate or escalating conflicts with roundhouse kicking. But I do part of what makes Cobra Kai work so well is that it does exist in this strange, adjacent reality where really weird shit happens every so often and the answer to most problems is karate. It’s not nearly as crushingly surreal as, say, Atlanta. But it is using the over-top-ness of every single thing created in the 1980s to tell personal, subtle stories.

You see this in Johnny’s strained relationship with his son, Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan). Dear, sweet ghost of John Hughes, does Buchanan look and sound exactly what the son of the villain from Karate Kid, Just One of the Guys, and Back to School should look and sound like. If this dude was born in a different era he’d be shoving dweebs into lockers in two movies every summer. Wouldn’t even need a character name. He’d just be “Jock-Ish Asshole, Tanner Buchanan.”

Again, though, this is Cobra Kai drawing you in with some silliness just to sweep the leg out from under you. It’s a little absurd that Robby is such a delinquent that he steals laptops from incredibly poorly-monitored tech stores. It’s just kind of funny that Robby and his fellow hoodlums watch porn and listen to death metal together, as the teens do. But everything is a lot less funny when Johnny actually tries to intercede, and you realize that the evil high school jocks from decades past probably would grow up to be inattentive, absentee fathers. “I had no idea what a real father-son trip looked like so I had to use my imagination,” Robby says to Johnny about a made-up canoe trip he fed to his school.

Johnny’s ex Shannon (Diora Baird)—Robby’s mother—has a much more biting way of putting it. “You gave up on day one.”

Meanwhile, the LaRusso family proves that they are at least capable of scrubbing dicks from their lives. Samathana, until now painfully unobservant, drops Kyler with a bit of movie theater martial arts. For Danny, things are more literal, thanks to the actual giant penis Johnny drunkenly spray-painted over the LaRusso Auto Group billboard.

Instead of devolving into an American Vandal-style who-drew-the-dicks mystery box, Johnny’s cockturnal work of art just ends up adding more fuel to the once-again burning LaRusso v. Lawrence feud. “Cobra Kai Never Dies” ends with Danny’s cousins asking a very loaded question: “What are we going to do about this?”

But Danny doesn’t know he’s about to come in hot at the moment Johnny has decided to turn over some kind of new leaf, in his own sloppy way. Cobra Kai’s self-prescribed sensei is leaving his tattered relationship with his actual son where it lies, but he is putting a bit of uncharacteristically warm effort into teaching Miguel, who had been barred from returning to the dojo until Johnny personally pleaded his case.

“That kid, he’s the only person in the world who hasn’t given up on me,” he tells Miguel’s mother. “If you let him come back, I won’t fail him again.”

Which is interesting, especially paired with Johnny’s first piece of advice on Miguel’s return. “The best defense…is more offense,” he says, already on some level failing him again already.

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 4 ("Cobra Kai Never Dies") on YouTube Red