The following contains spoilers for Cobra Kai Season 6, part 2.

Amanda LaRusso was right: the karate drama went way too far. And now it’s officially become deadly.

In the season 6 finale, part 2 of Cobra KaiChaos strikes the Sekai Taikai, as tensions between warring dojos boil over and explode. After one of the tournament officials is punched in the face, a riot breaks out and the rivals start fighting dirty. Kreese and Silver face off, Johnny faces Sensei Wolf, and when Zara starts hitting Tory, Robby chooses his girlfriend decisively.

But when Kreese realizes his eunjangdo is missing, we see Kwon looking at the lost gun on the ground. He picks it up in a fit of madness, but before he can use it on one of the Iron Dragons, he is knocked to the ground, impaling himself on the blade and letting out a scream that is literally heard around the world. (“Cut the food!”) When Daniel turns the boy’s body over, blood pools on the floor and it’s clear: Kwon is no more.

Below, TVLine speaks with Cobra Kai co-creators and executive producers Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg talk about Kwon’s tragic fate, Terry Silver’s epic return and how this wild melee came to be projected.

TVLINE | Kwon dies tragically in this final battle where all hell breaks loose at the Sekai Taikai. Will his death have a ripple effect on the other dojos and how will it propel us into part three?
HEAL | His death is a great moment and it should reverberate throughout the karate community. It was a televised event that went around the world. The Sekai Taikai is finally coming out of the shadows and being broadcast as a major sporting event and it’s happening. It’s terrible and there are a lot of people who will most likely blame themselves. It calls into question the whole idea of ​​competitive karate and its safety, and whether someone’s intentions, good, bad or otherwise, are to blame for what happened. This will have as much impact as any possible cliffhanger on this series and will deeply inform the endgame of the series.

TVLINE | The fight scenes become more and more intense with each new batch of episodes. From a production standpoint, how did you go about training, planning, filming and everything else for a fight of this magnitude?
HURWITZ | It’s a miracle and it’s a team of passionate and determined people. We don’t have the resources of many other shows that would attempt to pull off this sort of thing, we’re technically a 22 minute comedy, although most of our episodes are close to double that and feature tons of stunts. It all started in the writer’s room when we decided, “We’re on our last season.” Let’s blow this up. Let’s have a melee that goes beyond anything we’ve done before, beyond fighting at school, beyond fighting at home in the season 2 and 3 finales.” And we’re in a environment where everyone knows karate, so it’s not just the students in the same place, the students and the senseis are all in the same place.

It took a lot of prep work. Making sure there’s juice in the fights we’re fighting, making sure everything that happens makes sense to the audience. So whether it’s something big like Kreese and Silver teaming up or Daniel and Johnny having this new Sensei Wolf that they’re dealing with, or with the kids, there’s all these conflicts of It’s been a long time until new conflicts with secondary dojos that we have a bit of a taste for. He plans it all. But from a production standpoint, we have the best stunt team in the business. They had to plan each fight, and each fighter needed their own specific style or something that was consistent with the training they had done. What’s amazing is that it’s not all stunt work at this point. Many of the kids on our show as well as the senseis have been practicing martial arts for many years. There is a fully functional dojo on our stages. When everyone is in Atlanta filming, the kids and adults are training non-stop and a lot of what you see on screen are performances from our actors practicing martial arts.

We had limited time for filming. I think we shot this whole melee in probably less than four days. Director Sherwin Shilati was phenomenal. He’s super prepared, he puts a lot of thought into making it dynamic and works with us, our stunt team and our incredible cinematographer Abe Martinez to achieve it spectacularly. Then in post-production we worked with our editors to keep it moving, keep it strong, and then we worked with our composers to make sure that each character, each dojo has its own musical themes that we play with and that we continue. , so that each individual fight has its own little flavor. So it was one of the biggest projects we’ve had for the show and we couldn’t be more proud of it.

TVLINE | Daniel is kidnapped in this second part and we learn that it is at the hands of Terry Silver. Can you tell me a little about the return of Thomas Ian Griffith and the role Terry Silver plays in parts 2 and 3?
HURWITZ | Thomas Ian Griffith is one of our favorite artists. Not just on this show, but just in general. Working with him is incredible and he is a very good actor. His withdrawal at the end of season 5 was a major turning point in Cobra Kaibut we liked the idea of ​​him disappearing for a while and forgetting about him. There’s enough conflict between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do, and now they have to face all these other teams from around the world. So just when you forgot about Terry Silver, we wanted him to raise his head up there and we felt like that’s where he would be. He’s the kind of rich billionaire who, no matter what crimes he commits, is going to get out of prison with the help of a lawyer who might be on this Zoom with us. (Schlossberg plays Silver’s lawyer.)

But we think he would be determined to make sure that if Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do are on that world stage with cameras in front of them, they are humiliated and he is part of the championship dojo. So he used his considerable wealth to purchase a team of ringers, the reigning champions who, as you know, Sensei Wolf had some financial problems. Luckily for Terry, he can go there and make him an offer he can’t refuse. And we love bringing Terry back into that hot tub. In Karate Kid IIIit is one of the most iconic images. It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while, so we thought its re-emergence in a hot tub seemed fitting.

TVLINE | Silver gives Daniel an old record indicating that Miyagi killed his opponent during a Sekai Taikai back in the day. What can you tell us about Miyagi’s story that we will learn in part three?
SCHLOSSBERG | We’ll learn more about Miyagi’s story in the final five episodes, but we’ll never know everything. We deliberately created this box and all the elements within it as an allusion to a life much more complex than Daniel remembered. He only knew him as a mentor, but (Miyagi) was a full human being, with ups and downs throughout his life.

I think you will come away with a better understanding in some ways, but there are also some unanswered questions. But knowing that there was a greater complexity there, Daniel is clearly destabilized by this information to the point that he this horrible nightmare. It kind of gets to the point where, “You know what? It makes no sense to dwell on the past. Just focus on the present. But that doesn’t really alleviate these deep-seated fears. They’re still in there. And I think we’ll face them in the final five, while leaving questions unanswered after the series ends.

TVLINE | Leaving questions open for a Miyagi prequel series, perhaps?
SCHLOSSBERG | Absolutely! We are shameless. (Laughter)

What did you think of part 2? Rate it and the finale below, then share your thoughts and theories in the comments!