On February 13, 2025, Cobra Kai came to an end. That’s the neat response, the one you can put away with ease. That morning, Netflix released the last five episodes of Season 6, bringing an end to a series that had run for almost seven years across two streaming services and six seasons totaling sixty-five episodes. In May 2018, when YouTube was still attempting to produce premium scripted content, it started out as a YouTube Red experiment and ended up becoming one of Netflix’s more dependable drama properties. Many did not anticipate that trajectory.
But it’s not just the date that makes the conclusion worthwhile. It’s how the show arrived and what state it was in at the time. Over the course of roughly seven months, Season 6 was released in three installments. July 2024 saw the release of Part 1. November saw the release of Part 2.
The third and final part, Part 3, debuted in February 2025, just ahead of schedule. Fans’ patience was repeatedly put to the test by the unusual decision to divide the final season that way. One could legitimately argue that dividing a 15-episode season into three parts over the course of seven months lessened the show’s momentum as it neared its end.
Eight months before the final segment aired, in June 2024, filming was completed. The 2023 labor disputes in Hollywood contributed to the delays, which caused the season to be released later than originally scheduled. Fans had been anticipating Part 3 of the show for more than a year by the time it debuted on Netflix. Because expectations had been discussed and debated for so long that practically any resolution felt like a release, it’s possible that this gap worked to the finale’s advantage.
Compared to the first two sections, the last one was well received. Part 3 provided a satisfying resolution to the main character arcs, which was generally acknowledged by critics who had found Parts 1 and 2 uneven, as some did. The series concluded with a tournament trophy shared by Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso, the two men whose rivalry had served as the foundation for the entire Karate Kid franchise since 1984. Forty-one years after their first altercation in a high school gymnasium in the first movie, the image was purposefully circular.
Watching the finale gives the impression that Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, the show’s creators, always wanted those two men to be on the same side. The idea that the hero and the antagonist of the first movie weren’t so dissimilar after all had been the focus of the entire series. It’s debatable if the arc’s six-season resolution was justified. However, it landed without embarrassing itself in terms of endpoints, which is noteworthy for a show that occasionally stretched the bounds of suspension of disbelief.
It’s important to note that all six seasons of Cobra Kai take place in about three years of in-universe time, with the last season taking place in 2020. Even though the logic occasionally faltered, the amount of karate, trauma, rivalry, redemption, and international tournament competition it managed to pack in is truly remarkable for a show covering that compressed period. The final venue for the series was the Sekai Taikai world championship, which relocated from Barcelona to the San Fernando Valley prior to the final matches.
It’s important to consider what Cobra Kai leaves behind. It demonstrated how nostalgia could develop into something more than a gimmick if it was handled carefully and with a willingness to reconsider presumptions about the hero’s true identity. It gave William Zabka, who was best known for decades as the antagonist in a teen film from the 1980s, a truly captivating second act as a leading man. For that reason alone, February 13, 2025 seems like a memorable date.
