Cobra Kai creators answer spoiler questions, preview 'rocky road' ahead for Miyagi-Do

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Cobra Kai season 6, part 1.

Miyagi-Do just got hit with a double whammy.

The final episode of Cobra Kai season 6, part 1, "Best of the Best," ends with a feuding Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) arriving at the Sekai Taikai tournament. Though their tentative friendship has been shattered by a huge disagreement over Tory Nichols (Peyton List), Daniel and Johnny are forcing themselves to work together one last time and coach their Miyagi-Do students during the prestigious tournament.

But in the final moments of the episode, their job gets exponentially harder. Not only do they discover that Miyagi-Do will be competing against a revamped Cobra Kai dojo led by Kim Dae-un (Alicia Hannah-Kim) and their old nemesis, John Kreese (Martin Kove), Johnny and Daniel are also horrified to discover that Tory herself has defected to Cobra Kai once again.

Kreese's latest dojo "is just firing on all cylinders and comes in with all the rizz that you could expect from a Cobra Kai unit with the embroidered jackets," Jon Hurwitz, who created Cobra Kai with Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg, tells Entertainment Weekly. "When you look at the Miyagi-Do side, you see a team that has had their confidence shaken."

Can Daniel and Johnny put aside their differences to lead Miyagi-Do to victory at the Sekai Taikai? What will happen when people find out that Devon (Oona O'Brien) sabotaged Kenny (Dallas Dupree Young) to earn a spot on Miyagi-Do's team for the tournament? Is it over for Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) and Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita)? And how did Kreese travel to Korea and back while being a fugitive from the law? EW pressed the Big 3 for answers to these and other burning questions about the first five episodes of Cobra Kai season 6.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Part one ends with Johnny and Daniel at a real breaking point in their relationship — only to discover that they’ll be going up against Kreese at the Sekai Taikai. Where do they go from here?

JOSH HEALD: They're at their lowest in terms of their ability to relate to one another and potentially to coach effectively. We've found Kreese at another power-ranking high point, as he has lured Tory away from Miyagi-Do to join his team. He's obviously instilled discipline in Kwon and has a formidable captain. The team itself is just firing on all cylinders and comes in with all the rizz that you could expect from a Cobra Kai unit with the embroidered jackets.

When you look at the Miyagi-Do side, you see a team that has had their confidence shaken. You see players who have done some untoward things to get onto that team. You have two senseis who have decided to stay together for the kids but break up for good once they get through this period. You have Miguel and Robby not on the same page and Miguel crushed that he didn't win the captainship. You have Sam totally rocked by the idea that this friendship with Tory that felt like it was finally reaching a point of stability has been taken out from under her. We can expect a rocky road ahead. And let's not forget that Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do are only two of the 16 teams that are going to be at this tournament — so it's not just team versus team, it's both of them versus the world.

You mentioned Miguel being crushed that he lost the fight against Robby for captain. How did you decide that Robby would win?

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: We just tracked the characters and where they're at in their journey. By episode five, they both were kind of a little messed up in their heads. For Robby, he his past that’s kind of screwing with him, the fact that he's never come in first place. He feels like this is his only chance to really do anything because he's not like Miguel, somebody that has all these college plans. He’s not thinking about his future, he’s thinking about the present — so he's putting a lot of pressure on himself. At the same time, Miguel's putting pressure on himself because he feels like this is good for his extracurricular activities, essentially. [Laughs]

They both have this stuff in their heads, and ultimately, it's Tory being there [during the fight] — that sets Robby in the right head space right as he's down zero points to two. On the show, we try to think about why somebody's winning, or why somebody's losing. Is it because they didn't put in the effort, or is it because something's going on inside? In that fight, it could have gone either way until Tory showed up — then he was fighting for the right reasons, and that sent him over the top.

The fight to earn a spot at the Sekai Taikai was equally brutal. Talk about the decision to have Devon sabotage Kenny.

JON HURWITZ: Episode four was a really fun episode for us, because there’s the core four that we knew were going to make their way to the Sekai Taikai. Although, we did debate some scenarios in which one of them doesn't [make it] at first and maybe ends up with the slot that Hawk ended up getting. But at the end of the day, we love the idea of having this episode where you're focused on some of these other characters that are really important to the show but don't always get as much of the spotlight — so, Devon and Kenny and Anthony [Griffin Santopietro] and Demetri [Gianni DeCenzo] and Hawk [Jacob Bertrand].

With Devon, she’s somebody who has been all-in with Johnny from the beginning. She jumped around to some other dojos, but this was in the absence of Johnny having a dojo. But the only sensei that she really connected with was Johnny. This was about her reconnecting with Johnny, her being an Eagle Fang representative there, her putting a lot of pressure on herself, her always sort of being the “other girl” in the dojo as opposed to one of the top two who've been there. She's super competitive and she doesn't want to let her sensei down and she doesn't want to let herself down. We saw her making a wrong decision, doing something that she wouldn't typically do, but she believes that she's following Eagle Fang sensibilities to do whatever it takes to win.

We liked the idea of her making it to the Sekai Taikai, having a character that maybe you didn't expect to see fighting on the world stage. And then there’s the trauma that it brings in the aftermath. Somebody like Kenny, who seemingly earned his own spot even in season five, for him to be sabotaged in the way that he is, to not have that opportunity, what does that bring? And leaving him and Anthony alone in the Valley where he believes that Anthony is responsible for sabotaging him — that could be explosive.

By the way, can poor Kenny and poor Tory get a break in part II or part III? Please?

SCHLOSSBERG: No. [Laughs]

HURWITZ: Maybe. You’ll have to keep watching to find out. [Laughs]

We must take a moment to acknowledge the brilliant Miyagi-Fang logo. Will you be selling merch?

HEALD: I hope we’ll be selling merch. That’s one we love just for the sheer novelty of it. It was fun in the writers’ room to discuss the potential names. That was really the only name that we [considered seriously]. It was never really an idea that enough legs that we wanted to stand behind it in perpetuity. I don’t think we would have felt great about landing the mothership with Miyagi-Fang. It’s just an obvious one that’s sitting right out there that feels ridiculous.

SCHLOSSBERG: In the writers’ room, we would refer to them as Miyagi Fang whenever it was Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang together, and the fans did it, too. We knew it had to be addressed in some way. [Laughs]

While I’m guessing we don’t know the full story yet, it is a risk to tinker with Mr. Miyagi's backstory — especially suggesting that he was the culprit of a robbery and assault. Why did you guys decide that was a risk worth taking?

HEALD: Well, it was time for us to dig deeper into Mr. Miyagi. We're fascinated by the past that we know about, that Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel and the Karate Kid and the additional past that we experienced in the Karate Kid Part II. We've had such a reverence for Miyagi in the series, kind of holding him at arm’s length, but also exalting him to almost a saintly presence over the show and over Daniel's experience. We decided that we wanted to dig more into his past, and one of the ways of doing that was to start looking at Mr. Miyagi as a man and not as just a figure. We wanted to explore the idea, particularly for Daniel, of discovering something new about a parent or a mentor that might challenge your opinion of what you thought about them.

The idea is that nobody ever gives 100 percent of themselves. There's always a story you hold back or a choice you made that you regret or just a part of your life that you feel doesn't paint you in the best light for somebody that you're trying to mentor and guide. We do that with our children. We're not necessarily bringing up our worst choices, although they do come up as a lesson from time to time. We wanted to explore that and see the effect that it would have on Daniel to start seeing his mentor as a fallible human being. You start having all these questions that knot away at your soul and begin to challenge your unflappable opinion. We felt it was a new and grounded approach to look at Mr. Miyagi.

HURWITZ: I was just going to add that we've become very good friends with Robert Mark Camen, who obviously created The Karate Kid franchise and created the character of Mr. Miyagi. We talk at length with him about Mr. Miyagi and all his life. Robert has had a long and successful career, and Mr. Miyagi is one of the most special characters he's ever created. We’re constantly looking to explore that character further and our hope is that this is the start of doing so.

So, he was aware of this storyline?

HURWITZ: Very much so.

On a lighter note, I loved seeing Chozen and Johnny house hunting together, and how it was tied to Chozen's love of reality TV. How did that storyline come about?

SCHLOSSBERG: With Johnny, we know that he can't ultimately be happy with the apartment that he has, because he's got such a growing family now. And at the same time, it's like getting a house in L.A., it’s just always a heartache. We felt at some point this season, we would want Johnny to at least start looking [for a new place]. This is about how are we going to leave things with the character — what would the dream be for Johnny? You’re seeing the kinds of houses that he would want, the kind of house that Carmen would want, and so we knew he'd have to go house hunting.

And it’s been this running thing with Chozen, that he's just acclimated to his time in the U.S. pretty quickly. There's just this couch potato, snack-eating, watching Netflix quality to him — partly because he came here to defeat Terry Silver and there's a lot of downtime with that. And now, Terry's gone. We also always try to think from a grounded, realistic place for Amanda — this guy who was brought in to take down Terry Silver is now living in their house. That's why he moves into Miyagi's room, which is how they end up finding the Miyagi box. It just all dovetails into each other. We talk in the writer's room about, “Wouldn't it be a funny pairing if Johnny and [Chozen] went house hunting together?”

Speaking of Chozen, we learned he never got a call back from Kumiko — so, is this love story over?

HURWITZ: One thing that we'll get to explore in season 6, [part 2] is Chozen’s love life. Just because he didn't get that call back doesn't mean that he's necessarily fully over it. We’ll see if he ends up reconnecting with Kumiko at some point this season or if his heart heads in a different direction.

Kwon seems like he’s going to be a formidable adversary for the Miyagi-Do team at the Sekai Taikai. What can you tease about his upcoming story?

HEALD: Brandon H. Lee is a world champion in martial arts and karate and has been in and around the world of acting — mainly in the stunt world — and has been wanting to cross over. This ended up being the absolute perfect opportunity. We saw his audition, fell in love with his personality, and then saw him take on the character on camera, and he took it to a whole new level. He just embodied the cocky strength and attitude and charisma that we had on the page. You’re going to see a lot of him in the middle five episodes. He was one of our favorite people to work with and one of our favorite characters to write to.

HURWITZ: The one thing I will add about him is when we first saw his audition, he did his slate first, where he introduced himself. And he was just the nicest guy in the world, and a giant Cobra Kai fan in the sweetest way possible — and we were like, how can he be this character?

SCHLOSSBERG: It was our one note to him, like, “You have to be the meanest person of all time.”

HURWITZ: It was hard to shake what a sweetheart he was. We were like, “Can he really play this guy?” But when we gave him a little bit of direction, he was off the charts.

I know this is a TV show and some suspension of disbelief is required, but still… I must ask a plausibility question. What is your working internal explanation for how Kreese — an escaped prisoner — made it from California to Korea and back again without being nabbed by the FBI, or at the very least, the TSA?

SCHLOSSBERG: We don't want to tell everyone all the secrets, because that may play into things later, but this is a character who has the ties to the military — let's just put it that way. That secret black ops military that we saw in Vietnam, he was doing things off the grid. It’s been established that this guy has interesting connections in the military world. Now, whether he used those, or whether there’s something with Master Kim and Kim Dae-un and their resources — I think it's probably the combination of some interesting players along with the fact that he escaped jail. But if you look at the number of people who escaped jail and how many people get away with it, and his particular situation, there may not be a nationwide hunt for him. There may also be boats involved.

HURWITZ: I'll just say he has a special set of skills. It's as simple as that.

SCHLOSSBERG: Let's talk about the boats! There's steamers and stuff like that.

HURWITZ: It'll be addressed at some point in the season as to what's going on.

It was great to see Mike Barnes again. You guys have talked about exploring Miyagi-verse spinoffs in the future, and Sean Kanan told us he’d very much be open to a Barnes series. Where do you all stand with the spinoff discussions, and is Barnes someone you might explore that with?

HURWITZ: With spinoffs, we’re definitely in active conversations about what's next. It was important to us to end this Cobra Kai story the way that we do. We always had the goal of ending the series purposefully. But as you'll see, where we end things with all the characters, our characters are all going off in interesting places and have interesting things going on in their lives. We'd certainly be interested in seeing more from any character in the show. It’s always possible that Barnes shows up in a future spinoff.

We can't speak to any of the potential spinoffs at this time, but what I will say when it comes to Barnes is we love what Sean Kanan brought to the character. We loved working with him, a hundred percent. He was game in every way. He was prepared. He was hilarious. He was collaborative. He's a badass fighter and he's just a great guy on set. So, working with Sean again would be amazing. Whether that's a Barnes spinoff show or Barnes appearing in anything going forward, or just working with Sean Kain in general, it's all appealing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cobra Kai season 6, part 1 is now streaming on Netflix.