The Cobra Kai Fight Scene That Could Have Been Much Different
Contains spoilers for Cobra Kai season 2
Through two seasons, Cobra Kai has rapidly become one of the most popular shows on Netflix. Its impressive fight scenes have earned the program two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Comedy Series or Variety Program. The wild brawl featured in "No Mercy," the finale of season two, earned the show even more mainstream attention because it combined the show's excellently choreographed fights with substantial plot and character development. In the climax, Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan) kicks Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña) off a school balcony. Miguel suffers serious injuries from the fall, a development that immediately changes the status quo of the show in several ways.
As significant as this scene is to Cobra Kai's story, many fans have wanted to know how directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg — as well as the rest of the cast and crew — pulled the complicated fight scene off. Now, thanks to a new episode of Netflix's Shot by Shot web series, fans can finally go behind the scenes and see what it was like to execute such an ambitious sequence.
The fight at school was supposed to be even bigger
The final cut, where Robby, Miguel, Sam LaRusso (Mary Mouser), and Tory Nichols (Peyton List) are the main players in the fight, is quite different than the creative team initially planned. In Shot by Shot, Mouser briefly describes what the fight was supposed to look like. "This was originally scripted to be a different fight piece involving other actors, and then we just got to like a crunch point," Mouser says. As a result, the scene was condensed so that it focused on the quartet of main characters. This revision led to a dramatic conclusion to the brawl between Sam and Tory, the culmination of their season-long rivalry. Sam kicks her enemy onto a flight of stairs, a strike that could have seriously injured Tory. Tory, for her part, gets her own licks in, slicing up Sam's arm with her makeshift spiked knuckles (pictured above).
The time crunch may have actually worked to the scene's benefit, since the tight focus on the coincident duels between the series' principals definitely worked as a dramatic capstone to the season's conflict.
A lot of work went into making Miguel's fall look real
In this episode of Shot By Shot, Maridueña recaps some of the memorable aspects of Miguel's fight with Robby. "So Caine, Tanner's stunt double, gets thrown on the ground right there, but Caine has two fake front teeth," Maridueña says. "So we throw him on the ground, and his face actually hits the ground, and his tooth like falls out. So everyone's looking all on the ground like, 'Uh where's the tooth?' They ended up finding it." Maridueña also describes how, when he kicked the railing during the fight, he actually dented it, and the directors wound up using that take.
Filming the fight's decisive conclusion, when Robby kicks Miguel off the balcony, was also an extensive process. Maridueña shares how he was hooked up to a harness, and along with his stunt double, Noah Bain Garret, they pulled off the comprehensive stunt so that it looked like Miguel actually fell.
Though fans are left wondering what the initial plan, which involved several more actors, could have produced, the violent brawl remains quite memorable, and certainly left Cobra Kai viewers excited to see what happens next season.