Germain Lussier
If you’re a fan of Cobra Kai, you probably spent a good chunk of your weekend binging the latest Netflix drop from its sixth and final season. The five episodes take us through the ups and downs of the Sekai Taikai, a worldwide karate tournament the show has been teasing for a while now. And, well, it’s more than a little eventful, not just for the students of Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai, but everyone else as well.
Recently, io9 sat down with Cobra Kai creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg to talk about all of the biggest spoilers of the season: that impossible cameo, the frightening cliffhanger, that shocking return, and, of course, that earth-shattering fart. Read our spoiler-filled discussion of Cobra Kai season six part two, below.
This interview was edited for length and clairty.
Germain Lussier, io9: So we’re just gonna dive right in. Tell me about the decision process to not just cast a new actor as Mr. Miyagi but bring back the character with CGI.
Jon Hurwitz: That was a big discussion that started with Ralph Macchio. From the beginning of making the series, it’s been our goal to honor the character of Mr. Miyagi and for him to bring added depth to Daniel’s story and Daniel’s experience. As we’re entering this final season, we had some early conversations with Ralph about the kinds of scenes that he’d really love to have in this final season and he talked to us about the idea of sharing screen time with Mr. Miyagi again in some in some capacity.
So, I’m not going to get into all the specifics because there’s more stuff to come in Daniel’s story, but in this middle-five journey to have Daniel learn that Miyagi was somehow involved with the Sekai Taikai and to potentially learn some things that would challenge his beliefs of Miyagi from his childhood, we wanted to continue down that road with him—and thought that the idea of having Daniel fighting against this version of Mr. Miyagi that he doesn’t entirely know, that he’s trying to make sense of, felt like it could be a really powerful scene.
Then doing the deepfake was something that… you know anytime you’re jumping into a deepfake you’re not sure how it’s going to turn out, and I think we were pretty pleased with the level that that we got that to. It’s always a challenge, that stuff.
io9: Do you have to talk to Pat Morita’s family or do they have any control over that?
Josh Heald: The family rights are complicated because Pat had more than one marriage and so the rights lie with his widow, and his biological children have a completely different relationship, obviously. But the rights were all handled appropriately. At the same time we have a really good relationship with with [Pat’s daughter] Aly Morita in particular and got to know her a little bit over the last couple of years, and consider her to be such an important person—to not only Pat, but obviously the legacy of Miyagi, who’s so important. That’s a relationship we in particular want to continue to cultivate. So there’s the business side and there’s the emotional side.
io9: Now as you add more backstory for Mr. Miyagi, such as the fact that he killed someone at the Sekai Taikai, do you go back into the movies and make sure it’s all motivated and fits in what we already know? Does that factor in at all?
Hayden Schlossberg: Well, we know Robert Mark Kamen really well, the writer of the original Karate Kid, and before delving into this final season we talked to him about Mr. Miyagi and his backstory. We know everything about Miyagi that’s been said from the movies. So we have a timeline of his life, but there’s a big gap after World War II and when we meet him in 1984. So there’s a lot of creative freedom there. But we know that when we meet him in 1984, he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t seemingly have a lot going on in his life. So we just piece together things that we thought would make sense and that would be interesting. We’re always thinking about potential spin-offs and if you wanted to delve deeper into a character, what’s something could be interesting to explore? But most importantly it’s the characters in Cobra Kai that we’re thinking of and what are the lessons that they need to learn and how can Miyagi, even if he’s not still alive, affect Daniel’s life present day?
Hurwitz: I also want to just chime in here. “Murder” is a very strong word
io9: [All laugh] You’re right, that’s true.
Heald: That intimates some kind of pre-meditation.
Hurwitz: And I would just add that none of us know exactly what happened [with Miyagi at the Sekai Taiki]. We’re getting bits and pieces from the past and from relics and stuff like that. Maybe he did murder the guy! Maybe you’re right! But we don’t know exactly what happened there as of right now. Well, the three of us might know.
Heald: I know what happened.
Hurwitz: But that doesn’t mean that the audience knows.
Schlossberg: It’s out of Game of Thrones. He crushed his head. [All laugh.]
io9: Well, we know that he can kill people, right? He’s joked about it in the movies. Moving on though, I literally cheered when Terry Silver came back, especially in the very Karate Kid Part III fashion with the hot tub and everything, Did you guys always know he’d return, and were there any challenges to bringing him back?
Hurwitz: Yeah, we were going to bring Terry Silver back this whole time. I will say that when we finished shooting season five we had great conversations with Thomas [Ian Griffin, who plays Silver] where he’s just like “This was an amazing season for me.” He’s like, “I don’t know what to do. How am I going to come back?” We’re like, “Your story’s not finished.” There’s more to explore with Terry Silver and we thought it would be a lot of fun for him to show up in an unexpected way. Just when you think that Terry Silver may be gone forever, suddenly he’s there and in a way that you may not have expected.
io9: And Hayden, I know you’re the biggest Terry Silver fan so I was happy to see you show up as his lawyer. How’d that happen?
Schlossberg: That was in season five when we were writing and realized he would be going to jail. I just felt like there’s no way he stays. He’s gotta have a team of lawyers, and because I am always defending him online and his actions I felt the urge to be his defense attorney. And I’m the guy who’s trying to help him not make the same mistakes that he’s made like [in] Karate Kid 3, getting caught up in all this teenage drama. It’s like “Dude. You got lots of money, why are you doing this?”
Heald: Hayden would have made a great defense attorney just in general. Just to troll us, Hayden will sometimes take a very unenviable position to defend somebody and you just see it in him that if he applied himself he could be you know, the Mark Geragos of a new generation [laugh].
io9: I love the action of the Sekai Taiki but you really give us a gut punch in the end by killing Kwon, who is just awesome. The character is great, the actor is great, did you always know that was the way to end this block? Talk about the decision to take that big step and actually kill someone, especially Kwon.
Heald: Yeah, I mean it’s not born completely out of a “Well, how do we continue to top ourselves? Okay, we’ve already thrown a kid off a balcony, maybe this one actually dies!” But it is born out of the desire to completely and continuously surprise the audience, and introduce and continue to develop the idea that anything can happen at the Sekai Taiki. I mean Barnes comes in in episode four and says “Yeah, people have died.” And Dimitri kind of makes light of that and then obviously we start hearing that people have died and now we see that these five episodes present the type of fighting and an aggression that is a little bit beyond what we’ve seen before In a traditional tournament setting. So we knew we wanted to get it to that point, and we had a lot of reasons for why at that moment that character would suffer that fate. And it goes to a lot of relationships that are tied to Kwon and that are tied to the fighting of the Sekai Taiki and giving us that Empire Strikes Back down moment as we begin to lead up to the end game.
It was amazing to be able to pull that off—but at the same time, it was bittersweet because we love working with Brandon Lee and his performance as Kwon was second to none. It was just unbelievable. So automatically you take a character off the table for any possibility of continuing that story down the line in a future sense. But wow, it was something that was just really satisfying from a story perspective to be able to do.
Hurwitz: I want to quickly add that Brandon, from the moment we started working with Brandon, everybody working on the show, the executives, everybody, they were like “Do we really have to kill Kwon?” That kept coming up. But as people will see as the series sunsets eventually, this is an unfortunate sacrifice that needed to happen the rest of the story to play out as it does. But he was phenomenal.
io9: Okay, finally, the biggest question: who farted in the hotel room?
[All laugh]
Heald: If you were in the writer’s room, this is like a seven-hour discussion.
Hurwitz: We all feel differently, I think.
Schlossberg: Yeah, there was one thing that almost split the three of us up and it was this discussion. I actually don’t want to talk about it because it’s a subject we’re in a happy place with right now.
The first two-thirds of Cobra Kai’s sixth and final season are now on Netflix. The mythical final five episodes of the show will debut in 2025.
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