‘Cobra Kai’ Season 1 Finale Recap: You Got What You Wanted, Johnny

“There’s nothing dirty about winning, Sensei. You taught me that.” The entirety of Cobra Kai’s Season 1 finale, “Mercy”—the longest, densest, karate-iest episode of the entire season—boils down to the look on Johnny Lawrence’s at these words from Miguel. Because woo boy, there is something dirty about winning, providing you do so like Miguel, taking him the All-Valley trophy for Cobra Kai by mercilessly targeting Robby Keene’s injured shoulder. Just like Johnny taught him, like he learned from weeks of lessons preaching strength over everything and looking at the three Cobra Kai laws written in black on the dojo wall: “Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy.”

Man, Johnny’s face. He’s looking into the past and seeing himself glaring back at him, an angry kid that Johnny accidentally turned into a monster.

The tournament that takes us to that final match—which, not to sound dramatic, takes place for the fate of several peoples’ immortal souls (not literally [but kind of literally])—takes up the bulk of one hell of an entertaining finale. I really do love that Cobra Kai takes place without explanation in this adjacent reality where California is just filled with kids who aren’t old enough to buy booze but are straight flipping around like the fight team from The Raid. The defending All-Valley champion is a yet-unintroduced 17-year old ninja with the early Jean Claude Van-Damme name of Xander Stone, who backflips his way into this show to deliver a speech about ending intolerance. It’d be unbearable if every person involved in this show wasn’t handily in on the joke. “Am I the only one who’s been out of the loop?” asks Demetri, sitting in the crowd of a heavily-attended karate tournament that’s apparently been happening in this town for 50 years. (Although wasn’t there a line in “All Valley” about attendance being down? That’s such an odd story beat to introduce and never mention again.)

That’s not to say the episode is a joke in and of itself. A huge part of what makes Cobra Kai work is how much it respects martial arts. The one thing this show has never mined for laughs is a fight. The tournament is no different, and a huge amount of kudos goes to stunt coordinator Hiro Koda for putting together fights that are not only, to use the technical term, badass as shit, but that tell a unique story about the character walking on to the mat.

Like Eli, for example—announced as “Hawk…well, I guess it’s just Hawk”—who has morphed from charmingly confident to the type of dude who rips his shirt off during an under-18 karate tournament and makes the eagle tattoo on his back fly. With all the major characters of this show annoyingly going through complex arcs that make us care for them, I haven’t had enough time to praise Jacob Bertrand as Eli; the character’s transformation into evil lackey is apparent just from the way Bertrand carries himself this episode, all upturned nose and puffed up shoulders. If Miguel is the modern day Johnny Lawrence, Eli is the kid who screams “get him a body bag.” Which is why it makes sense that all of Eli’s fights are so much sloppier than Miguel’s, even when he wins. Eli latched particularly hard on to the “strike first” idea, because it’s the mantra that turned his actual life around. So when that finally fails he opts for the “no mercy” route, cheap-shotting Robby and disqualifying himself from the tournament.

“What was I supposed to do, be a pussy?” Eli asks Johnny afterward. It’s another great face-fall from William Zabka. Because how many times has Johnny chided his students for acting, in his words, like pussies? Johnny got the exact dojo he was looking for, and that dojo attacked his own son while his back was turned.

That’s the theme of the episode; what very easily could have been a silly follow-up to The Karate Kid turned into a damn Greek tragedy, where everyone got what they wanted and it practically destroyed them. Because of course the final match-up would be Miguel representing Cobra Kai against Robby fighting for—in a last minute change-up that calls into question the rules of the entire tournament, to be honest—Miyagi-do karate. The fight itself is the stuff the best sports movie climaxes are made of, practically all Miguel’s offense against Robby’s defense, as it should be. Robby even breaks out the one-handed upside down Miyagi kick, which is exactly as impractical and ineffective as I dreamed it would be.

Miguel wins—exploiting Robby’s injured shoulder in front of his own mother and his high-as-balls grandmother—singularly focused on winning without remorse or compassion to impress a girl that left the gym an hour ago. Johnny, too, gets the win for Cobra Kai that, in a lot of ways, he’s been trying to achieve since 1984. And it’s as hollow as the trophy itself. Johnny Lawrence won the day and then watched his own son walk away with another father figure. “You got what you wanted, Johnny,” Daniel says, and for a third time Zabka’s face tells the entire story.

So where are we headed for Cobra Kai Season 2, which was confirmed a week after the series premiered on Youtube. For one, Samantha LaRusso—inspired by Aisha’s valiant tournament run—finds her love for martial arts again, which hopefully means Mary Mouser will have more to do than smile and react to the moods of her increasingly shitty boyfriends. (Cobra Kai was great, the role of every LaRusso family member not named Daniel was…not great.) Her father, along with Robby, are going to reopen Miyagi’s junkyard dojo, because Cobra Kai will take over karate in the valley over Danny’s dead body. His words.

An interesting choice of phrase, actually, because it also looks like John Kreese has risen from the dead.

“The real story’s only just begun,” Kreese tells Johnny, his words bouncing off the walls of the dojo he created. Considering Johnny mentioned his old Sensei was dead, it’s unclear whether the ex-Special Forces karate master faked his own demise or—and I actually think this is likely—is simply a manifestation of Johnny’s extremely damaged conscience, materializing at his most broken moment. I’m incredibly down for a season of William Zabka screaming at hallucinations, is what I’m saying here.

Either way, I can’t think of a better image to close out this wild, delightful, completely out-of-the-blue series of television: The ghost of your past mistakes emerging from the darkness like a boogeyman to tell you that the hard part isn’t over, not by a longshot.

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 10 ("Mercy") on YouTube Red