‘Cobra Kai’ Season 4 Continues to Vie for Best Martial Arts Drama

While it’s been exactly a year since the last time we witnessed the battle for the karate soul of the Valley, all of maybe two seconds have passed between Cobra Kai season 3 and season 4. Our very first scene features the vague profile of an aged Terry Silver getting the call to action from John Kreese, and the second scene picks up from Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang’s joint practice with a simple “Ready / Let’s begin” (appropriately, the title of the first episode).

Cobra Kai. (L to R) Gianni DeCenzo as Demetri, Nathaniel Oh as Nate, Aedin Mincks as Mitch, Mary Mouser as Samantha LaRusso, Xolo Maridueña as Miguel Diaz, Khalil Everage as Chris in Cobra Kai. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2021

The premise of the fourth season of Cobra Kai is the much-anticipated team up between Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso as they recognize that their feud means nothing in the grand scheme of John Kreese resurrecting his brutal pedagogy and cultivating a cult of personality with a bunch of teenagers…again. After the absolutely brutal home invasion that capstoned last season, the dojos have agreed to a super tentative truce with the agreement to hash everything out at the All-Valley. To the victor, goes the spoils. To the loser, their dojo must shut down. And thus sets the stage for what I will continue to argue is the best high school martial arts drama series that has absolutely no right being as entertaining as it is. I’ve been advocating for this series since the YouTubeRed era in 2018 and on…