The romantic plot of Samantha LaRusso’s Cobra Kai is one of those that seems straightforward on paper but becomes much more intricate when you sit with it. Miguel Diaz is the short answer to the question of who she ends up with. A period of PTSD, a brief but intense flirtation with a new character, two breakups, a school fight that left someone in a coma, and a finale moment that caused the fandom to split fairly evenly are all included in the longer answer.
Beginning in Season 1, when Miguel, having recently experienced his first real taste of karate training under Johnny Lawrence, becomes the one who truly shows up for Sam when her social world is collapsing, Sam and Miguel’s relationship serves as the emotional backbone of the show’s younger cast. They meet, split up after the school fight in Season 2, reconcile in Seasons 4 and 5, declare their love, and then face yet another challenge in Season 6 when Sam is accepted into a year-long exchange program in Okinawa.
For a brief moment, it appears that geography could permanently separate them, something that Cobra Kai politics was unable to do. It doesn’t. Miguel gets on the plane with her and postpones his start date at Stanford. They travel to Okinawa together at the end of the show, which is a neat enough ending for the couple the writers were constantly pushing for.
Of course, Robby Keene was between Miguel and Sam. Most discussions of the finale focus less on that relationship than it merits, most likely because the show didn’t give it much room in the last moments. In Season 2, Sam and Robby started dating. Their relationship developed subtly as a result of their shared training at Miyagi-Do.
The fallout between them was so bad after the school fight, which was partially caused by Sam kissing Miguel, that it affected almost all of their subsequent interactions. For a while, reconciliation seemed unattainable after Robby left Miyagi-Do for Cobra Kai. They were friendly but not close by the time Season 6 arrived, and the show never found a way to appropriately wrap up that chapter. That made some fans feel defrauded. It is a legitimate complaint.
Watching the last season gives the impression that Sam’s story was subtly subordinated to the larger narrative apparatus surrounding her. She put in a lot of training, made it to the Sekai Taikai as a female captain, and then resigned, in part because the show had other priorities in its last hours and in part so that Tory’s plot would land where the writers needed it to.
In Season 6, a brief relationship with Axl Kovašević suggested a different path, but it ended in failure. The weight of six seasons is evident in Mary Mouser’s portrayal of Sam’s heartfelt farewell with her father Daniel before departing for Okinawa. It’s another matter entirely whether the entire arc felt appropriate for Sam’s intended centrality.
In the end, she chooses Miguel and a new chapter overseas, which reads as hopeful even though some viewers wish she had more autonomy in the last episodes. Going to Okinawa on her own terms, even with Miguel by her side, has a subtle significance for a character who spent so much of the series entangled in other people’s disputes. The show’s conclusion isn’t the most dramatic. However, a character’s decision to move forward has merit.
