Summary
The students learn that actions have consequences in “All In”, as the rivalry between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do reaches boiling point.
This Cobra Kai Season 2 Episode 5 recap for the episode titled “All In” contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
The funny irony about Hawk embracing his inner awesomeness is that deep down he’s still just a nerd. The haircut and tattoo are ridiculous. His newfound confidence is dopey macho posturing. “All In” begins with a flashback to him pre-Cobra Kai, crying to his mother about being bullied, and by the end, he’s still virtually the same person, just trying harder to cover it up.
His relationship with Demetri is central to the episode. Now that the latter is a student at Miyagi-Do and has left a negative review of Cobra Kai on Yelp, they’re on a collision course; they meet in a mall, where Demetri is buying a comic book and Hawk is dragging his cronies (including the reluctant Chris) around looking for him. The ridiculousness of a Yelp review escalating into a physical fight isn’t lost on Cobra Kai, or on several of the characters, including Hawk’s girlfriend, who leaves him as a result of the attack. Luckily, since Demetri is a useless student with, as he puts it, no balance and disproportionate limbs, Robbie and Sam are on-hand to defend him with their perfectly-choreographed double-team assault.
Back at the LaRusso house, Demetri opens up about how alone and weak he feels having lost his friends to Cobra Kai; to him, he sees learning Miyagi-Do as a means to fight back, but obviously, that isn’t what the system is about. He resorts to Game of Thrones analogies, which Daniel, surprisingly, understands. If Robbie and Sam are Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, that doesn’t necessarily mean he has to be Samwell Tarly. Despite the fact he sees through the whole “paint the fence” routine, he starts to see the value in it.
The episode’s “All In” mantra comes from a Cobra Kai session conducted by Johnny and Kreese. They bond over the idea. Kreese believes that Johnny should apply the same logic to building a relationship with Robbie, who should be training with his father rather than Daniel. Seeing that Robbie and his mother have been evicted from their apartment, Johnny goes looking for him at the dealerships, and after assaulting a member of staff learns that Robbie has moved in with the LaRussos. Drunk, he staggers back home, where Carmen takes him inside and gives him some sage advice about being the bigger man.
Tory is full of advice too, but for Miguel, who has constructed a supremely dorky romantic video in the hopes of winning Sam back. She rightly tells him it’s ridiculous, but you can tell she was slightly moved by the gesture until the realized that the object of his affection was Sam. Her advice is for him to go all in too, but with her; by the end of the episode they have shared a romantic smooch in the park, and while it looks like Robbie and Sam are moving in the same direction, they don’t make it there just yet.
So, going all in is working for some people, but not for others — especially Hawk. His girlfriend leaving him tips him over the edge, and inspired by some of Kreese’s questionable wisdom, he goes and vandalizes Miyagi-Do, graffitiing Miyagi’s classic car and stealing his Medal of Honor. This, in turn, sends Daniel nuts, and he races to Cobra Kai to confront Johnny directly. After giving Johnny’s students the low-down about who their sensei really is, and what he’s teaching them, half the class leaves, led by Chris. With the ranks of Cobra Kai thinned, it seems like Miyagi-Do finally has the upper hand.
