Summary
Cobra Kai Season 6 has the closest thing to a perfect ending as you can imagine. Episode 15 is a masterclass in how to tie up a long-running, beloved show.
Ending a show is no easy feat, and ending a beloved, long-running show is harder still. It brings me enormous pleasure to report, then, that Cobra Kai Season 6 not only sticks the landing in Episode 15 but delivers perhaps the most perfect conclusion we could have possibly hoped for. It pays off all of the movies, and all the seasons of the show, pays homage to at least three Rocky movies, and then ultimately subverts the first one, instead delivering its own, meaningful conclusion that feels just right for these characters.
William Zabka excels once again, but Ralph Macchio really rises to the occasion here without the need for any karate whatsoever, and the finale even pays off that subplot about Mr. Miyagi’s chequered past — which I’d honestly forgotten about — just for good measure.
Johnny’s Redemption
A flashback to 2017 opens the finale to lay out the thematic stakes. We see a washed-up Johnny visiting his mother’s grave, apologizing profusely to the headstone for the direction his life has taken. This is a guy who peaked early and has never been able to recapture the glory of his youth. It really is quite remarkable what this show has managed to do with a one-note cartoon jock villain in a silly ’80s movie.
But this scene makes it clear that the finale is really about Johnny’s redemption. He’s returning to the scene of his greatest failure — losing to Daniel in the All-Valley Tournament — to rewrite history, but he’s haunted by the idea of the redo proving he’s still a loser after all. He’s also haunted by his previous confrontation with Wolf, where he got whooped pretty easily.
This is where the Rocky stuff kicks in. Daniel brings it up because the point of that original movie — naturally, Johnny prefers the sequels — is that Rocky is a winner despite losing the fight to Apollo Creed in the end. He’s trying to reiterate to Johnny that he doesn’t need to win to have rewritten history. He’s a winner either way.
But the obligatory training montages — set, brilliantly, to Joe Esposito’s “You’re The Best” — riff explicitly on Rocky II with the running and Rocky III with the slightly homoerotic beach training. It’s deliberately impossible to tell which one the show is planning to evoke in the final fight. Will Johnny be a moral winner, despite coming second? Or can he defy the odds and emerge victorious?
Tying Up Loose Ends
Before that fight, the Cobra Kai Season 6 finale has some other matters to address. Some of them involve the kids, but we also get the payoff to that Mr. Miyagi subplot which has been threaded throughout the season.
Miguel gets into Stanford, at least, while Tory and Robby both get a brand deal that will fund them traveling the world and competing together as a karate power couple. Demetri even gets Yasmine back.
But let’s talk about Miyagi briefly. Before the finals, Lucille, Daniel’s mother, gives Sam a string of pearls as a graduation present. She reveals that they were given to her by Mr. Miyagi. They had belonged to his mother, and when he left Okinawa, his father passed them on to him so that he could sell them if he needed the money. But he never did. Instead, when he married, he gave the pearls to his wife, who died in the war. The pearls were stolen by a work camp guard. Eventually, Miyagi tracked them down and recovered them. This was the robbery that he committed.
Miyagi had asked Lucille to give the pearls to Sam when the time was right. This certainly seems like the moment. Daniel is rocked to discover that what he thought was a violation of Mr Miyagi’s teachings was really a determined embrace of his core principles.
(L to R) Khalil Everage as Chris, Griffin Santopeitro as Anthony Larusso, Oona O’Brien as Devon in Cobra Kai. Cr. Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix © 2025
The Final Fight
The odds are stacked against Johnny. He’s older than Wolf, slower and weaker, and more importantly, he doesn’t believe in himself. Before the fight, Wolf taunts him about how history will repeat itself, and this loss, like the last one, will haunt Johnny for the rest of his life. Johnny takes the bait and swings at Wolf, and Wolf deliberately injures his arm.
For the sake of maximum drama — and evoking the original movie — the final match has the classic All-Valley ruleset. It’s the first to three points. Daniel and Chozen come out as Johnny’s senseis in the black Cobra Kai gis, as do all the other students, all dressed in the very original designs from the movie. It’s a brilliant moment, but Johnny is immediately outmatched. Wolf is toying with him, using dirty tactics and preying on his fear. And Miyagi-do isn’t going to cut it in these circumstances.
Daniel, at Chozen’s urging, takes a new approach, showing how much he now understands Johnny by giving him a Kreese-style pep talk, asking him if fear and failure exist in his dojo. Johnny gets his mojo back and brings things back level, but for the final point, Johnny returns the favor by embracing Daniel’s lessons about patience, balance, and defense. Johnny recognizes himself in Wolf, taking him back to 1984. He waits and baits Wolf in, like Daniel did to him back in the day, and is able to win the deciding point with a counter.
Cobra Kai wasn’t doing to the Rocky I ending after all. It was redoing the ending of The Karate Kid. Johnny beats Wolf in the same way Daniel beat him, having finally learned that there’s more than one way of doing things, and life is about embracing those differences. Johnny summons Daniel to lift the trophy with him, and in a beautiful callback to that original movie, Daniel says, “You’re all right, Lawrence.”
Tying Things Up
Cobra Kai Season 6, Episode 15 ends by giving everyone the send-offs they deserve. Johnny gets his house with Carmen. Hawk and Demetri are going to Caltech together. Robby and Tory are traveling the world as brand ambassadors. And Da-eun is running the family dojo her own way — with help from Chozen, who has gone to Korea to be with her. Johnny even makes the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Sam, of course, is going to Okinawa. But her tearful goodbye to Amanda and Daniel is lightened a bit by the arrival of Miguel, who has decided to defer Stanford for a couple of weeks so they can explore Okinawa together, making up for the fact they never got to do so in Barcelona.
People are queuing out of the door to join Cobra Kai. But as Johnny explains to them, they’ll also be learning Miyagi-do under Daniel, since there isn’t just one way of doing things, and karate is all about balance. The final scene emphasizes the point. Johnny and Daniel are having dinner, exchanging students — Anthony needs to learn some aggression with Cobra Kai, Devon needs to work on her defense with Miyagi-do — ahead of the upcoming All-Valley tournament. Daniel picks up some chopsticks to catch a nearby fly in true Miyagi style, but Johnny catches it between his hands. It’s all about teamwork, after all.
