‘Cobra Kai’ Season 6 Part 2: Kwon’s Death Explained

SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot details of the Season 6 Part 2 finale of “Cobra Kai,” now streaming on Netflix.

Cobra Kai never dies. Until the students do.

The final season of Netflix’s hit drama “Cobra Kai,” itself a spinoff of the 1980s “Karate Kid” franchise, has been split into three episodes. Part 1 was released on July 18 and Part 2 is now streaming. Part 3 will be released in early 2025.

This second chapter of the final season brings the Miyagi-Do dojo to Barcelona for an elite international karate tournament known as the Sekai Taikai. The Season 6 Part 2 finale, an episode appropriately titled “Eunjangdo” – and you’ll see why – features a title match between Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan) of Miyagi-Do and Axel Kovacevic (Patrick Luwis) of the Iron Dragons dojo .

Axel, brooding and muscular in his 6-foot frame, towers over Robby as the fight begins. Miyagi-Do’s captain is quickly exhausted by a series of hit attempts that prove futile against Axel’s formidable defense. At that moment, it takes one subtle look from his abusive sensei (Lewis Tan) to send Axel on the attack. The hunter punches Robby repeatedly and draws blood from a blow to the mouth. When Axel throws him outside the competition mat, Robby comes face to face with Cobra Kai rival Kwon Jae-Sung (Brandon H. Lee). Kwon hits him with a quick jab and Robby’s Miyagi-Do teammate Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña) quickly takes exception. Miguel crosses the mat to confront Kwon, when Axel knocks him to the ground. Within seconds, Robby and Miguel face their competitors.

Before the host of Sekai Taikai can put an end to this confrontation, he is knocked unconscious by a disgruntled sensei whose team was banned for drug use. From there, the karate match’s momentum coalesces into the kind of drawn-out, adrenaline-fueled fight sequence that has become a “Cobra Kai” staple.

Because the tournament qualifies as an international sporting event, this ensuing brawl will be streamed live to fans around the world, including Miyagi-Do’s loved ones in the San Fernando Valley. The fight comes to a head when Kwon and Axel get into a physical altercation. The ‘Iron Dragons’ fighter kicks Kwon into the tournament cameraman and the show shifts to a vertical vantage point of Kwon’s bleeding face to reflect the camera’s fall to the ground. Kwon lets out a frustrated scream. Then he laughs. He has discovered what he believes is the key to victory: an Eunjangdo knife that his Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) has lost amid the chaos.

Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) can see the scene unfold before it happens. He rushes to stop Kwon and the camera cuts to a karate fight between Kreese, Johnny Lawerence (William Zabka) and Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith). As the three antagonists of the original ‘Karate Kid’ franchise prepare to face off, a harrowing scream is heard. And everyone stops fighting.

The texture of the sound design shifts from a dramatic, foreshadowing crescendo to something somber and ethereal, a few seconds of layered musical composition punctuated by the dialogue “That’s a lot of blood,” and then the reveal of a eunjangdo knife lodged in Kwon’s torso. .

“We set up Kwon as the new big, bad antagonist going into this second block,” says series co-creator Hayden Schlossberg. Variety in a conversation with co-creators and showrunners Jon Hurwitz and Josh Heald. “Him being killed by another opponent is a surprise we were looking forward to.”

Hurwitz contextualizes Kwon’s death as a particularly groundbreaking moment, as audiences have not previously seen a visceral death on screen in the series or in any of the “Karate Kid” films. He adds that the writers of “Cobra Kai” created a narrative setup for Kwon’s death in Part 1 through the storyline of Daniel discovering that Mr. Miyagi killed his opponent decades earlier at the Sekai Taikai.

“Kwon became a powder keg of a character that really excited us in the writers room,” says Heald.

Hurwitz adds that the “Strike Hard, Strike Fast, No Mercy” philosophy Kreese embedded in Cobra Kai injected a kind of emotional poison into Kwon’s psyche.

Kwon, Hurwitz explains, is a broken person who desperately wants to prove that he is the best. After losing to Robby at the tournament, he struggles to deal with his internal anger. His sensei and mentor in turn give him the wrong message: show no mercy.

“Kreese is more vengeful than ever and uses Kwon as this ultimate weapon,” says Schlossberg. “It ends with this fight between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla involving all the students. It created an opportunity for us to show Kreese the results of some of his actions. … Watching one of his students get murdered with the knife he brought there.”

Season 6, Part 1, details the backstory of the eunjangdo blade, which a younger Kreese acquired years earlier during a perilous journey to prove himself to his former sensei, Master Kim (CS Lee). The gun, Heald says, is about much more than a knife.

The co-creator describes how the eunjangdo takes over the last vestiges of love for Johnny that Kreese still possesses. It is this empathy, Heald explains, that stands in his way of becoming the ruthless creation he was once able to mold into under Master Kim’s tutelage.

“The blade represents Kreese’s last vestige of humanity,” Heald says. “It’s a turning point: does it send him further down the spiral or does it create an opportunity for change? That’s a big question that we want people to chew on at the end of these five episodes.