Welcome to episode 2 of season 2 of the Over/Under of Lucha Underground, our gently reworded Best and Worst report about every episode of the best wrestling show on television. Maybe the best show on television. If you’d like to read about season 1, you can find all of our previous episode reports — we’ve been down with this show since season 1 episode 1 — on our Lucha Underground tag page. For season two (and last week’s recap), click here. If you’re new to the show and are jumping on with season 2 (or just want to know what the hell’s going on), we put together a season 1 primer that answers all your pertinent questions and fills in all the gaps. It also tells you where you can watch the show, if you’re thinking of asking that in the comments.
With Spandex is on Twitter, so follow it. Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Shares, likes, comments and other social media things are appreciated. This show doesn’t have the built-in WWE audience behind it, so it needs your word of mouth. Tell @LuchaElRey that you read and love this column as well, because they’re the best and it increases my Temple Footprint.
And now, the Over/Under of Lucha Underground season 2, episode 2. This one’s important.
Over: Finding New Things To Love
First of all, following the events of last week, Mil Muertes is now sitting in his throne IN A SLING, which honestly might be the most absurd image Lucha Underground has ever shared. Keep in mind this is the company that had Pentagon Jr. break peoples’ arms so hard it made candles blow out. This is the company who made the dragon and the astronaut friends and had them fly away at the end of season 1. But yo, the living embodiment of death rules over his supernatural lucha libre temple from a THRONE OF DEAD WRESTLER SKULLS and also he had to go to urgent care. I love it. It’s so unexpectedly weird.
Anyway, this week’s opener is Johnny Mundo, returning from his busy schedule of beach parkour sans Melina, vs. Kill Shot. It’s great to have Johnny back, as rudo Johnny is (without hyperbole) a billion times better than whitebread tecnico Johnny, and I’m glad we get an entire season of it. The story here is that Johnny’s sauntering back into The Temple having rid the world of Alberto El Patron and is expecting to be the top dog again, and he’s way too overconfident. That not only allows a guy like Kill Shot to get in a ton of offense and almost win, but motivates the crowd to support Kill Shot in those efforts.
If you don’t really have a big opinion about Kill Shot, that’s not weird. He’s good in the ring, but he didn’t get much character development in season 1 beyond, “he knows The Mack and Big Ryck, and he likes guns I guess?” He’s an AMAZING underdog here, and with those clips of him karate gun-murdering dude sin the desert from the season 2 trailer I’m expecting this year to be big for him. Or, you know, King Cuerno shows up and kills him with a bow and arrow in a metaphor for man vs. technology. Either/or.
Not sure whether to give an Over or an Under to Striker for his End Of The World call, which seems like it gets longer every time we hear it. I hope on like, season 4 there’s an episode where Striker’s just screaming about Lovecraftian lore from the open until like 55 minutes in when Johnny hits the move.
Over: Lucha Libre Vs. U.S. Wrestling
Sometimes I don’t know if the show’s doing this stuff on purpose, but I’m gonna project on it anyway.
The first quarter of the show features two big standoffs: Prince Puma vs. Pentagon Jr., and Johnny Mundo vs. Cage. It’s a beautiful illustration of Lucha Underground vs. WWE, and it shows how both approaches can work.
The first fight is Pentagon and Puma, and it’s one of the most Lucha Underground things you’ll ever see. Puma’s backstage in the Pulp Presentation Gym lifting weights, and Pentagon kinda creeps in behind him for a subtitled promo. He appreciates Puma’s help in getting the jump on Mil Muertes last week, but the job isn’t finished: Puma must continue helping him break bones in praise of Pentagon’s Dark Master, and when that’s over, Puma’s gotta get got too. He’s not even subtle about it. Puma calmly puts down his weights, and the two engage in a slowed down THEN FAST slowed down THEN FAST catch-as-catch-can martial arts battle involving a straight-up Colonel Guile flash kick. Pentagon ends up getting the worst of it, and makes hilariously wonderful shifty-eyes when Puma literally growls at him like a puma. It’s perfect, and that’s without mentioning Pentagon’s Perros Del Mal mask that makes him look like he just got slashed in the face by Freddy Krueger. Or an Aztec jungle cat.
Then, there’s Johnny and Cage. Johnny Cage.
This is the most WWE thing in the history of Lucha Underground. Johnny cheats to win his match with Kill Shot after a ref bump — see, it’s already the most WWE thing ever — and cuts an in-ring promo about how the earthquake that killed Mil Muertes’ family isn’t going to hurt nearly as badly as his SPRINGBOARD SPLASH FINISHER. He’s interrupted by Cage, who returns to the Temple as a babyface because he’s giant and muscular and weird. Cage drops some catchphrases, Mundo insults him about said catchphrases, and they tease a fight until Mundo bails. Cage then turns to taunt Mil Muertes, because taunting is extremely insulting, and Mundo jumps him from behind. Cage STILL gets the better of him, and Mundo lives to fight another day.
The first fight is movie ridiculous. It’s an Aztec cat warrior being confronted by a pissed-off ninja skeleton in a supernatural graffiti gym with lens flares and getting into a choreographed karate fight, built around an argument about whether or not they’ll team up to injure people to make an ill-defined vampire Jedi (or whatever) happy. The second is wrestling ridiculous. Beefy hairless white dudes are doing NUH UH, I’M THE BEST ONE promos and lobbing threatening catchphrases and trying to attack each other from behind. They’re two dramatically different types of presentation, and proof that the people at Lucha Underground are not only aware of how different they are from the pro wrestling status quo, they embrace it, and they can still do that status quo as well as anyone.
Over?: Marty The Moth Goes Full Silence Of The Lambs
I put a question mark here because wrestling kidnapping stories never really make sense. How long are they supposed to be kidnapped without anyone escalating the situation? Remember when Edge kidnapped Paul Bearer and teased killing him for like a month? Remember when Matt Striker got ether’d on NXT and they dragged him from arena to arena for weeks? You probably don’t remember that, but still. Here, Marty still has Sexy Star kidnapped even though it’s been long enough between seasons for Vampiro to get captured, wrangled, taken to a secret desert military base for mental rehabilitation, get well enough to manipulate himself to freedom and drive back to Boyle Heights for two weeks of wrestling shows. It’s fine because we don’t know if this is happening in real-time or if it even matters because of how on-point ridiculous everything on the show is, but it’s worth noting. It’s like the Black Lotus story, where she was creeping around the Temple looking for Matanza for like two months.
Anyway, yeah, Marty still has Sexy Star held captive, and he’s dressing up like he’s in the Mean Street Posse to smash moths in front of her. How you gonna do that to your own kind, Marty? At least now we’ve got confirmation that he’s seen a moth before, so his flap better be updated and accurate. I AM HOLDING YOU ACCOUNTABLE FOR ANIMAL ACCURACY, LUCHA LIBRE SHOW.
Over/Under: A World Of Luchadors
1. We get the LU debut of “The Darewolf” PJ Black, aka WWE’s Justin Gabriel, aka “a guy who was in The Nexus so Brandon has to be stupidly in favor of him forever.” The first time we see him, he’s on a motorcycle with a voiceover about how he snacks on danger and dines on death. I’m paraphrasing. He’s just like a wolf, you see, because wolves are fearless. Wolves are Nikki Bella, and so is Justin Gabriel. But yeah, he’s quickly flanked by two additional bikers, and they all meet up in a local motel parking lot to fight. Because DANGER. PJ summons totem spirit wolf to defeat them, and I think we have our answer for his Lucha character: he’s not an actual werewolf like we were hoping — okay, like I was hoping — but he can summon the POWER of wolves. He’s like a … reverse warg?
The best part is that when the bikers take off their helmets, they’re wearing luchador masks. At first I just though they were confrontational free-range lucha bikers, but in the debut vignette for Kobra Moon — a lady who is a snake, except she’s blue and also a cat burglar? — she fights randos who are ALSO luchadors. Did season 2 of Lucha Underground decide that everyone within a hundred mile radius of the Temple is a luchador now? Are we living in a world of luchadors? Is Dario Cueto feeding dudes to Matanza in Temple 2 to weed out the muggles?
2. In an interesting decision, they follow up Black’s introduction by having him lose a match to The Mack. I’m calling it “interesting” because I’m not totally sure where they’re going with it, but I like the idea that being cool and new and showing up doesn’t automatically mean you can beat everyone. PJ Black showed he has skills and can compete, but also gently confirmed that having been on WWE TV doesn’t make you greater than season 1 Temple fighters.
3. +1 to Matt Striker for this call:
Vampiro: “What’s a darewolf, anyway?”
Striker: “I guess it’s a daredevil and a werewolf.”
Vampiro: [dead silence]
Striker: [dead silence, because he nailed it in fewer words than Matt Striker has ever spoken in a single sentence]
Striker: anyways-
Over: Pentagon Eats Piece Of Death Like You For Breakfast
The main event is a handicap match: the Trios Champions the Disciples of Death vs. Prince Puma and Pentagon Jr.
Now, normally I’d give this a “worst” or whatever because I don’t f*ck with handicap matches, and because they’ve got their six-man tag champs losing to two randomly assembled stars. I wanted to get that out there before anyone calls me a hypocrite. I also want to note a little thing called “context,” because sometimes it turns a thing I don’t like into a thing I like, or in this case, a thing I’m okay with.
Why? Because the Disciples of Death aren’t really wrestlers. They’re henchmen. Putties. They’re the Trios Champions because of opportunistic manipulation. Ivelisse had a severe injury near the end of season 1 and valiantly hung on to the championships for as long as she could, but as scrappy as the team is, they couldn’t stay lucky forever. Now that they’re back up to 100%, Catrina’s preventing them from getting a rematch, making them wrestle each other and feeding the winner to Mil. Like I said, Putties. Catrina is Rita, Mil is Lord Zedd. King Cuerno is, I don’t know, Goldar?
Lucha is great at playing with existing pro wrestling tropes I hate and seeing if it can convince me to like them, and that experimentation is one of the things I like most about the show. Pentagon and Puma are the two most powerful singles stars on the show behind Mil, right? They’re polar opposites. One listens to authority and works hard and works out and never talks. The other is a kinda-pudgy hate-monger who gets in the camera’s face and does Cero Miedo hands at every opportunity. He’s selfish. Self-centered. His first Lucha promo was about how nobody respected him, and his season 1 arc was “I’m going to hurt everybody because DARK MASTERS and also because I hate you and don’t give a sh*t.” It’s the closest thing the show has to good vs. evil beyond the Mil/Fenix death/life symbolism, and it feels like we’ve been building to it for a while. In the match they’re a terrible team, but their individual power is dope. Two Power Rangers can beat three Putties, right? It helps when the characters aren’t real people, and you aren’t forced to think of them as “real” all the time.
I also really enjoyed Vampiro in this episode, because they aren’t giving up the full story of his relationship with Pentagon yet. When Pentagon shows up, Vamp gets real iffy and starts rambling about how he has nightmares and needs to take his medicine … but whenever Striker starts in about Pentagon being a rudo, Vamp corrects him and explains Pentagon’s motivations. I don’t know if Vamp is just nuts or if the Dark Master is a separate entity possessing him or what, but whatever it is, it’s got me hooked.
After Puma hits the 630 and Pentagon steals the pin, they get in each other’s faces. That ends with Pentagon trying to break Puma’s arm, because of course, and Puma managing to power out of it and counter. It’s the perfect bookend followup to the opening fight, and Puma looks a little like Pentagon’s superior without making him look inferior. Does that make sense? After a year of breaking dudes like Super Fly and Argenis (and retired color commentators, and Melissa Santos), Pentagon finally has a real, difficult challenge.
OVER: !!!
Finally, we get an explanation about the question mark on the billboard from the end of season 1.
In a beautifully shot scene — this show has better art direction than like 90% of movies — we formally meet the new El Dragon Azteca, El Dragon Azteca Jr., and learn that the mask is a gift of the bloodline. The guy who was supposed to be El Dragon Azteca Jr. didn’t put on the mask and explored his own path, but he ended up pretty happy with the mask he chose. Because he’s GODDAMN REY MYSTERIO.
If werewolf vs. luchador biker motel parking lot motorcycle fights didn’t sell you on the show enough, they effortlessly took a legendary, 20+ year veteran everybody knows and seamlessly, believably worked him into the history and mythology of their show. Mysterio is part of the Dragon Azteca bloodline, he’s here because his mentor was killed, and he’s serving as the mentor of the kid taking his place. The sound you hear is me making MWAH noises and gestures at a show that aired yesterday.
EPISODE THREE NOW, PLEASE.
