Cobra Kai didn’t feel like a show that killed people for the majority of its run. It was like a show about teenagers hurling spinning kicks at each other’s faces and making poor choices in parking lots. Even though the rivalries grew more intense and the fights intensified, nearly everyone managed to escape. Thus, it’s reasonable to assume that the death toll remained low. It didn’t, precisely. However, the deaths this show actually caused feel more significant than their numerical value when viewed over the course of all six seasons.
The show ran as a follow-up to the first Karate Kid movies and ended on February 13, 2025, after 65 episodes. A few characters did not live long enough to witness the conclusion, even though the tone remained primarily in the realm of drama and redemption rather than tragedy. A portion of those fatalities were justified. Some felt sudden. A couple of them really struck hard.
The majority of fans most likely first thought the show had potential after Tommy. In Season 2, Johnny Lawrence’s old friend from the first Karate Kid gang reappears, dying of cancer in the hospital. Jimmy, Bobby, and Johnny, his friends, take him out for one final visit to Big Bear Lake. That nite, he quietly passes away in his sleep, far from any competition or rivalry. It’s not dramatic at all. That’s precisely what makes it function. Cobra Kai demonstrated for the first time that it could slow down long enough to make something feel depressed.
The death toll increased more sharply in Season 6. Kwon Jae-sung, the top student from the resurrected South Korean Cobra Kai dojo, passed away at the end of Part 2. In an almost accidental moment during the Sekai Taikai tournament, he grabbed a knife during a fight with Axl Kovacevic, things went awry, and he fell on the blade. There was silence in the arena. The cameras stopped. It set the tone for everything that transpired in the last episodes and was blunt and ugly in a way that the show seldom permitted itself to be.
Tory’s mother, Grace Nichols, isn’t even a fighter, but she may have the most emotional impact of any death in the series. While Tory was out competing and attempting to create something better, she had been fighting cancer throughout the season, mostly off-screen. It lands differently than the tournament deaths when Tory returns home and discovers her unconscious; a pulmonary embolism is later identified as the cause. There is no karate, no dramatic confrontation. Just a daughter who returned too late. It’s more difficult to overcome that.
What would really happen to Terry Silver and John Kreese, a topic that many fans had been debating for a long time, was settled in the last segment of Season 6. Both passed away prior to the conclusion of the series. For a man who had always enjoyed spectacle, Silver’s death aboard a yacht explosion was fitting in a theatrical villain sort of way. It could be argued that the explosion simply accelerated his death, as he was reportedly only a few months away from passing away. The question of who started it is more difficult to ignore.
Kreese gave his life to defeat Silver. Kreese spent the last few seasons of the show attempting to repair some of the harm he had caused over decades as the show’s first villain and then its most complex antihero. He told Johnny he was sorry. Silver was turned on by him. He gave his life to defend those he had previously attempted to destroy. It’s possible that the authors always had this plot point in mind for him, but it still feels a little hurried, which makes it both gratifying and subtly depressing.
In addition to Kreese and Silver, the last season concluded with Master Kim Sun-yung, who is recognized as the original source of Cobra Kai’s “No Mercy” philosophy. His own granddaughter killed him. One of Silver’s longtime allies, Dennis de Guzman, perished in the same yacht explosion, but his death was hardly noticed in the midst of everything else. Something about that seems almost appropriate. Not all deaths are marked with a ceremony.
Then there’s the issue of actual losses. Tommy’s Season 2 sendoff feels even more nuanced in hindsight because Rob Garrison, who played Tommy, passed away in 2019. In 2005, Pat Morita, who portrayed Mr. Miyagi in the first movies, passed away. The actor who portrayed Sid Weinberg, Ed Asner, passed away in 2021. Dutch player Chad McQueen passed away in 2023. Although they weren’t storyline deaths, they had a significant impact on the show that is difficult to distinguish from the fiction.
For six seasons, the number isn’t particularly high when only the deaths that occurred within the story are taken into account. However, Cobra Kai never intended to be a show with a large body count. At its best, the deaths it did choose to feature served the purpose of being a show about the price of pride and the potential for change.
