Cobra Kai Season 3 – Still Pretty Overrated!

About four months ago I wrote a review about why I thought the first two seasons of Cobra Kai are quite overrated. That review sort of blew up! I didn’t expect that but it was much appreciated anyway. Moving over to what I think of this third season, and its mostly the same, except this season might be a bit worse.

One of the few praises I gave the last season was on the cliffhanger, so it was nice to see that the consequences took more than one episode to resolve. There was no way Miguel was going to die, but being possibly paralysed from the waist down was an interesting development. The school rightfully banned karate and I like that no one swayed the teachers with some cheesy speech that karate is some majestic gift or something. They saved that for a whole different situation, but that’s far from my point. The show impressed me that these new storylines actually take most of the season to even come close to a resolution. That being said, this also ties into my biggest fault with season 3, which we will come back to.

Let’s quickly get what I liked out of the way. No debate, Johnny is still the best character. His storyline with helping Miguel walk again was the best part of this season and the silver medal would go to him trying to reunite with his High School ex, Ali. I liked Daniel’s completely pointless side quest to Japan, only because of the nostalgic memory of seeing characters I have forgotten about from the movies. Lastly, the other thing I like is the karate fight scenes, which are pretty much a guilty pleasure at this point.

Now onto what I don’t like and her name is Sam! I never really considered who my least favourite character on Cobra Kai would be, but if I had to nail it down it would be Sam, as every season she never fails to make me roll my eyes. Sam’s character is completely defined by her ongoing romances with the two main protégés and the fact she can also kick ass. She’s also one of the main players in the worst storyline of the season. With her two boyfriends indisposed, Sam’s storyline this season is to prepare her fellow defense first Miyagi-do peers to take on the aggression first Cobra Kai. A recurring trend with this storyline is that Cobra Kai are constantly getting away with dirty deeds in front of our heroes, who understandably want to give these smug jerks their comeuppance. Unfortunately I couldn’t help but think that Miyagi-do were asking for it!

Sam wanting to ambush Cobra Kai didn’t make much sense to me as Miyagi-do was all about self defense and plus they were clearly being baited by Cobra Kai to give it their best shot. So it felt like another frown at Sam moment when Miyagi-do got their asses kicked. This leads to Sam’s mum coming into the fray to challenge Kreese. Her plan of action appears to be to force Kreese to quit his job or, failing that, to tell people with any power over Kreese that he’s insane and is a bad influence on the children, with no evidence of his atrocities to back her claims, other than that they messed with her daughter. This was so frustrating as for one I really like Mrs Daniel LaRusso. The other being that if she worked with Daniel and Sam they could probably  build a strong enough case to bring down Kreese and have a police investigation search into the criminal antics of the students of Cobra Kai. The fact that the school hallway fight 2 is inside the LaRusso home should easily be enough proof to put some of these kids into police custody, hell maybe even Kreese too, and I don’t get why they didn’t take that golden opportunity.

This leads me to what ultimately annoyed me most about season 3 and that its a season all about biding its time so they can tease what’s to come in season 4. While I guess that’s not a bad thing per se, but the show feels pretty satisfied with the conclusion that Johnny and Daniel need to unite and take on Kreese in the karate tournament by the time the next season finale rolls around. I was underwhelmed by this ending which feels very predictable and boring to me.

Season 3 of Cobra Kai is once again enjoyable easy TV viewing, but the repetition is getting stale. Season 4 better be the last one because, unless its a real banger, I don’t have enough interest to continue after that. That’s it from me Blog Complainer, signing out.