The first part of the sixth and final season of Cobra Kai debuted on Netflix this week and, yes, you are going to have to wait four months to see what’s next. In the meantime though, io9 concludes our series of interviews with show creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg with some spoiler talk.
Specifically, we asked about what’s in store for parts two and three of the final season, and what went into part one’s crucial choice of which six characters would travel across the world to the Saikai Taikai. Read those answers and more below.
Germain Lussier, io9: So for the Saikai Taikai, you decided six people from Miyagi-Do would go. It could have been any number but you picked six. And obviously the show leans into the fact that four of them are kind of locked in. So tell me a little bit about why the number is six and the debate about who those last two were going to be.
Jon Hurwitz: We made it six because we figured, we wanted to have a decent number of the members of our team actually there at the Saikai Taikai. And when we started thinking of the kinds of events we wanted to have, we thought that it’d be fun to have different characters there—not just [for] the things that are on the mat, but also the drama we wanted to be having off the mat with our characters. You know, there were the core four who you would expect to go, which is Miguel, Robbie, Tori, and Sam. And we wanted to play around with the captain roles and that kind of element to create some added drama there. There were moments in the writer’s room where we talked about scenarios where one of those four doesn’t go initially and then maybe ends up there or whatever it is. We were debating a wide array of things.
But part of the fun of, say, episode four in this first five is getting to focus on the Devons and the Kennys and Anthonys—Demetri, Hawk, those characters of the world, because all of them, there’s some element that may make them viable to show up at the Saikai Taikai for whatever reason, for character reasons, for karate reasons. And it was fun to be able to create a different kind of competition than what you’ve seen before with them. And then when it came down to it, we liked the idea of Hawk briefly not being a part of it, but then an opportunity opening up for him. And we liked the idea of Devon making a mistake and doing something that isn’t exactly right for her and and seeing where that takes us. And then, Anthony and Kenny are left back in the Valley, holding the bag and we’ll see what happens with those guys.
But it was really, it’s all about taking all the characters, the storylines that you want to take them on over the course of the season and figuring out, “Okay, who do we want here? Who do we want there? And what’s the juicy story for the characters?”
io9: What can you tease about what’s in store for parts two and three of season six?
Hurwitz: Part two—we’re finally at that world tournament. We’re at the Saikai Taikai and you’re going to see a tournament unlike any other tournament that you’ve ever seen in the Karate Kid movies or on Cobra Kai, which is a lot of fun. You have your six fighters from [Miyagi-Do] and you’ll get to know fighters from all over the world. And that’s really exciting to us. Everyone’s been so focused on the internal conflict of who’s going to actually go to this tournament and we know that Cobra Kai is going to be there, but they’re not the only dojos in this competition. So it’s going to be really exciting for people to see the level of karate that we have in that tournament and the kinds of events that there are. And you know, there’s a lot of fighting on the mat, but there’s a lot of drama off the mat as well, as there always is on the show. So we’re excited about that.
And then, you know, for the final five it’s not only closing out Cobra Kai as a series, but it’s digging all the way back to the Karate Kid movies. It’s a resolution for a lot of these characters and new beginnings for them as well in different ways. And it’s going to be a really fun, fulfilling final five episodes, I think, for fans of this franchise. If you’ve been a fan for just a few years now, or if you’ve been a fan for 40 years, you’re in for a real treat in the final five.
Cobra Kai season six, part one is now on Netflix.
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