Just shy of a year ago (on New Year’s Day), Pop Culture Junkie binged every episode of Cobra Kai season three and as you can read, it made us believe in a lot of things. But on this, the last day of the year 2021, the producers and powers that be at Netflix have given us the new season that while slightly more grounded in reality, still had us scratching our heads.

Overall this was a good season, of course. The dynamic between Johnny (William Zabka) and Daniel (Ralph Macchio) is still the highlight of the show, and the writing and acting is still sharp, and the jokes (whether intentional or not) are still on point. Still, nothing is perfect so here is a list of the things that had us saying “no way’ during today’s binge of Cobra Kai season four.

The idea that karate will make you a better person is a patent lie, as this sport straight up turns people into psychopaths. Winning the fight is more important than anything, and if you lose, it will haunt you forever. (Johnny’s loss to Daniel THIRTY-SIX years ago is still a major motivating factor for the character in the show.) Each student who joins the evil Cobra Kai dojo (the question of what a dojo has to gain by being evil is a real puzzler) turns into a mindless maiming machine. Even the kids who join the “good” dojos have to be strong-armed into behaving like decent human beings some of the time; their martial arts training seems to make them into monsters. You get the idea that some of these kids are going to take a life eventually, all in the name of a karate trophy. Still, the characters on the show like to pretend that the kids taking karate are learning some important life lessens and growing as people.

You always know your friends from your enemies – or do you? Amongst the high school crowd, the kids are friends until they join different dojos, then they have no common ground whatsoever. Girlfriends and boyfriends become enemy combatants all the time. And don’t even think about teaming up with your old buddy to run your dojo. You won’t see it coming, but that you will get stabbed in the back even as you act in all sincerity as partners. But as stated above, the intoxicating power of karate has turned many a child over to the dark side, so that is to be expected.

Two heads are better than one – except when one head belongs to Johnny and one to Daniel. At the end of season three, Johnny and Daniel decide to team up to teach the kids who aren’t in thrall to Cobra Kai’s dark lord sensei Kreese (Martin Kove). But Danny and Johnny are never really on the same page about their teaching methods. A major point of disagreement between the two is presented as a rather simplistic focus on offense vs. defense – as if any sport in existence ever makes players choose between the two. Over at the Cobra Kai dojo, the new sensei Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith – more on him later) seems to undermine Darth Kreese’s firm commitment to winning at all costs – at first.

There are good parents on this show. Obviously Johnny, the drunk absentee father with anger issues, is the poster boy for what not to do as a parent. But holy cow, Daniel and Amanda (Courtney Henggler) are terrible parents. Amanda goes to her daughter’s rival (in love and karate) Tori’s (Peyton List) place of work, threatens her and is instrumental in getting her fired. Daniel and Amanda’s neglect of their other kid Anthony (Griffin Santopietro, and I had to look his character’s name up), who heretofore has spent every episode of previous seasons playing video games in his room yields entirely predictable results: the kid is a full-on bully. New kid Kenny doesn’t even have a parent to speak of, which makes you wonder who’s paying his karate class fees. Only Miguel’s mom Carmen (Vanessa Rubio) seems to have a grasp on the idea of good parenting.

Everyone needs closure – it’s awesome to see Nichole Brown back on the show, briefly reprising her character Aisha and explaining her hasty departure after the season two finale. The show owed her that much. But did we really need Stingray (Paul Walter Hauser) to return after skipping season three? He’s back, playing the too-old-to-hang-with-high-school-kids buffoon, supplying beer to the underage and a way for Kreese to be taken down? Not really. And Terry Silver, who was Daniel’s main nemesis in The Karate Kid III, gets pulled back into the universe here by his Viet Nam buddy Kreese (though the actor was in fact only around nine years old – to Kove’s 25) when the war ended. Why Kreese needs Silver to advance his evil agenda is anyone’s guess, and that plan goes haywire in a big way, except that this show needs to be packed to the rafters with antagonists.

Karate tournaments are all about sparring. Any parent who has sat through a karate regional tournament knows that there is more to the day than watching kids kick the crap out of each other. Kids compete for medals in form (kata), forms with weapons (kobudo), and sparring (kumite), and there are usually several matches taking place on the floor at the same time, making it hard to focus on any one match or person. (There usually aren’t performances by A-list artists like Carrie Underwood, either.) And to Cobra Kai’s credit, the tournament directors decide to include those other aspects of the tournament this year. But why did that just happen this year?

Oh, right, girls do karate too! Yes, girls have always been part of Cobra Kai. Sam (Mary Mouser), Aisha and Tory have participated as parts of the dojo. But this year, the tournament directors decided to make a female participants fight in separate matches, after watching video from an earlier season that showed Aisha getting pummeled by a male sparring partner. It just seems a little odd that this was never an issue before. Either the tournament directors were blind to the “bad look” of boys beating up girls, or else there were never female participants before. The latter seems to be the case, though, as Johnny’s Eagle Fang dojo and Cobra Kai too have to scare up a few more female participants. (Miyagi-do is satisfied with just one girl on the roster.) In the finale, thanks the plot requires that the female championship match happen after the male champion is selected, which is awesome, but perhaps an unrealistic turn of events in a world where sporting events for women regularly get substandard venues and play times compared to what the men get.

None of these nit-picks should discourage anyone from bingeing the season; it’s a worthy continuation of the story so if you enjoyed the first three seasons, season four is worth the 5-6 hours it will take you to watch it all. Fans probably aren’t watching any show with a dojo called Eagle Fang with any expectation of cinema verité anyway, and you will want to be ready for the madness that season five will surely bring us next year.