Welcome back!
Here’s the first edition of the Over/Under of Lucha Underground for season 3, wherein we analyze the best and worst things about every episode of the best wrestling show on television. If you need to catch up, you can read about season 1 here, and season 2 here. Season 3 episode recaps will be found here once we’re more than one episode in.
If you’re still wondering how to watch the show, it airs every Wednesday night on El Rey Network. If you don’t have El Rey on your cable system, you can get it on Sling. If you can’t do that, you can download the episodes on iTunes. They’re selling a “season pass” right now where you can get every new episode right after it airs. If you can’t do that, and you demand viewing information without just being a cheapskate and googling “watch lucha underground online free,” I don’t know what to tell you. Watch the show.
Deep breaths, everybody. Let’s talk about the very first episode of season 3 of Lucha Underground, originally aired on September 7, 2016.
Over: Jail Is Cool, Cocky, Bad
Longtime readers of the column know that any truly great episode of Lucha Underground is measured by its opening scene, and this one is special: Dario Cueto getting released from jail and collecting his belongings from THE HONKY TONK MAN, who delivers maybe the funniest line in LU history: “One giant key.”
I never considered the value of having wrestling legends cameo as NPCs in the Lucha universe, but now I’m all about it. I want Brutus Beefcake somehow cutting people’s hair in a barber shop full of dudes in masks before a fight breaks out. I want Jake the Snake Roberts as a zookeeper who gets progressively madder about King Cuerno sneaking into his zoo and killing alpaca with suicide dives or whatever. Give me Kevin Sullivan as the proprietor of a pawn shop who is weirdly interested in buying Dario’s big wheel because it’s “of Doom.”
More on that in a second.
So yeah, Dario is doing pull-ups in jail and finds out all the charges against him have been dropped, because he’s got “friends in high places.” I will give ANYTHING if the guy he’s talking to in the limo is Garth Brooks as a megalomaniacal Spanish super villain.
We get a brief scene where Cueto tells lucha libre Wolfram and Hart that The Temple is back in business, featuring a cameo from the limousine Big Bad who I’m pretty pretty pretty sure is Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. If Officer Joey Ryan starts communicating with his niece and her dog via Apple Watch, we know something’s up.
Over: DARIO’S DIAL OF DOOM
A few weeks ago, around the time the Lucha Underground season 3 trailer dropped, I was dealing with a very deep, seemingly insurmountable depression. It happens. Bill Hanstock is my co-worker but he’s also a longtime friend, so I called him to talk through it. He lives in Los Angeles and went to a bunch of season 3 tapings, so to cheer me up he said, “I won’t spoil anything for you, but I’ll give you four words that will cheer you up: Dario’s Dial of Doom.”
How are you supposed to be depressed when DARIO’S DIAL OF DOOM exists?
Not only did this guy decide his roster was so depleted and beaten that he could decide championship opponents for his brother on a whim, he went through the trouble of having a wheel with their names on it custom made, complete with an original logo, with which to do so. And he called it DARIO’S DIAL OF DOOM. How comically, wonderfully evil is this guy?
It turns out Son of Havoc is the first name selected on the wheel, which is perfect for a number of reasons. Firstly, it lets you start off the season with an exciting, competitive championship match featuring a guy who is among the most popular tecnicos on the show, but who can take a singles loss without looking bad. Secondly, it plays on Son of Havoc’s play at Ultima Lucha Dos, where he was willing to turn down a sh*t-ton of money for a shot at main-eventing Ultima Lucha Tres. He was willing to wait all year, and now he’s thrust into a championship match against an unbeatable monster within the first five minutes of episode 1. Thirdly, who better to get tossed around by Matanza than The Littlest Biker? It even plays on last season’s Ivelisse vs. Matanza challenge, and it continues to let Havoc and Ivelisse have constructive roles on the show while we wait for Angelico to heal.
Great stuff all around.
Over: Flashbacks. Flashbacks, Yeah!
Season 3 episode 1 takes a page out of the Game of Thrones playbook by suddenly incorporating flashbacks into the presentation, taking us back to the night of Ultima Lucha Dos and showing us Worldwide Underground beating up Angelico in the parking lot and Barry Windham’ing his leg in a car door. Mundo wants a championship match, but Cueto’s not giving it up, even after a very Tommy Wiseau response.
Cueto uses ACTUAL HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE OF HIS OWN SHOW to point out that Mundo, PJ Black and Jack Evans lost at Ultima Lucha Dos, but Taya didn’t. Therefore if anybody wants a shot at the championship — or, in this case, Sexy Star’s newly-won Gift of the Gods Championship, which would earn them a shot at the top prize — it should be Taya. Love it. It seems so easy to make wrestling shows make sense, doesn’t it?
I think the best part of the segment is the dynamic between the group itself, with PJ Black being Kearney to Mundo’s Jimbo and just enthusiastically restating the last word Mundo said. “I want a shot at the championship.” “CHAMPIONSHIP, YEAH!”
Taya vs. Sexy Star wasn’t great, but it was a means to an end. It continued the narrative of Sexy Star always fighting from underneath, having to hang in there 4-on-1 against Worldwide Underground to hang on to the Gift of the Gods Championship. That’s made her a bigger target than ever. Sexy manages to find an opening, cradle Taya and get the pin. I like that when she wins, she actually keeps holding the small package just to show that she could.
That leads to the obvious post-match beatdown, with the new Trios Champions — Aero Star, Drago and Fenix — making the save and their first appearance of the season. I’m expecting much bigger, much better things out of everyone involved as we move through the season.
Over: We Already Have A Match For Ultima Lucha Tres
To finish reestablishing where the members of Team Havoc are and where they’re going next, we get a shot in-ring promo from Ivelisse where she challenges Catrina to a one-on-one match at Ultima Lucha Tres. Catrina teleports to the top of Dario Cueto’s office dressed like some other universe’s infinitely hotter Sable and accepts. “Bitches” are exchanged, and we’ve got 39 more episodes before the payoff. How great is it that they’re getting Ultima Lucha Tres on our minds before the dust has even settled from Dos?
Also, I love Ivelisse threatening Catrina with, “at Ultima Lucha, you’re dead.” I see what you died there.
Did. What you did there.
Over: WMD
I missed how adept this show is at explaining everyone’s motivations, establishing everyone’s histories and tying everything together.
Marty the Moth Martinez shows up in Cueto’s office — in a color reversed SEASON 3 version of the Aztec Pride t-shirt I still need to buy and wear every day — and we learn that Marty’s family helped Cueto stay safe in prison. I also like the pre-scene phone conversation where Cueto is presumably telling someone that his time in jail was fine, and that everyone was really cool. Like they’re going to be aggro to the EVIL MYSTICAL SPANISH BUSINESSMAN. It’s like when Wilson Fisk goes to prison and everybody kisses his ass.
Anyway, Cueto and Marty end up talking about Kill Shot — Marty still has his dog tags around his neck — and Cueto books Marty vs. Kill Shot in a “weapons of mass destruction” match. All they mention is that anything goes, but don’t expound on the nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons at play. Here’s hoping Marty goes to the ring first and the match immediately ends when Kill Shot snipes him from the band platform. He was hiding in the drums.
I’m also not above the show hitting us with a little political satire by booking a “weapons of mass destruction” match, then having the competitors not be able to find any weapons to use.
Over/Under: Pentagon Balk
This is one of those times when I have to approach something as a fan, and as an objective analyst.
As a fan, this kinda pisses me off. The main event of the show is Rey Mysterio Jr. vs. Pentagon Dark, which is GREAT. The match is a lot of fun, and Pentagon spends most of the time mauling him, unable to get a pinfall. Eventually the frustration becomes too much and Pentagon wanders to the outside to get in the face of Vampiro, who has worked extremely hard the entire episode to ignore what happened at Ultima Lucha Dos and be a regular dude. Vampiro ends up leaving, Pentagon loses focus and Mysterio’s able to Little Big Man him to death with a 619 and a Canadian Destroyer to get the victory. I don’t have any real problems with this, but man, how are you gonna have Pentagon Jr., the coolest and most popular guy on the show, lose at Ultima Lucha Dos and become a stronger version of himself just to lose his first match as the new character? Why is that happening?
Objectively, I guess it works for the character. Pentagon’s entire arc is about him feeling constantly disrespected and underestimated, to the point that he can’t even resist turning on and injuring his friends and mentors. He jacked Chavo Guerrero in season 1, and ended season 2 by destroying Vampiro. So now he thinks he’s hot sh*t and his own master, and he immediately loses to Rey Mysterio.
I get that the point of Mysterio is that he’s the Best Luchador In The World — not gonna argue that, because he’s f*cking Rey Mysterio — and you don’t want to have HIM lose to someone after beating Prince Puma to establish that ranking. But if you have two guys that shouldn’t be taking pinfalls right after Ultima Lucha Dos, why book them in a one-on-one match against each other with a clean ending? Just trying to figure out the logic here.
Pentagon tries to break Mysterio’s arm after the match, but El Dragon Azteca Jr. (a previous Pentagon arm-break victim) makes the save for his mentor. Can Pentagon stay the coolest and most rudo guy on the show if he keeps losing, often in totally humiliating and easy ways, and just pretends like he didn’t? I’m down for an extended Dragon Azteca/Pentagon Dark beef, but did we need to start that with him losing a match AND failing at a post-match beatdown?
OVER: It’s All About You
And now, the best moment of the episode.
Vampiro heads backstage during the Pentagon/Mysterio match and finds Prince Puma on a locker room bench, lost in thought about his Ultima Lucha Dos loss to Rey. Vampiro — the guy who Prince Puma’s mentor hated more than anyone in the world, remember — notes that Puma has been sorta aimless since losing Konnan and losing to Mil Muertes, and offers him advice: if he wants to get himself back, he’s got to beat Mil. Puma rebuffs him — I mean, honestly, isn’t there a chance Konnan’s blood enemy and the former dark master of a pissed-off ninja skeleton that tries to break everybody’s arms would still want to send Puma to an early grave? — and Vampiro hits one of the best and most telling lines of the series.
“How about a few words of advice? You haven’t been the same since you lost to Mil Muertes. I mean, not only did he take your mentor from you, he took you from you. You wanna be Prince Puma again, you wanna be the man again, you gotta take out Mil Muertes.”
“I’m surprised you’re not asking me to take out Pentagon for you.”
“Hey brother, this ain’t about me. This is all about you.”
This is all about you.
That’s Lucha Underground. From the first episode, this has been the story of Prince Puma. He’s the first champion. He’s directly descended from one of the ancient Aztec tribes we keep hearing about. He’s suffered hardship and loss. He’s had his title belt ripped in half, lost his mentor to the living embodiment of death, been betrayed by the first guy he decided to go against his mentor to trust AND decided to team up with his mentor’s best friend only to be overshadowed and see himself replaced. Mysterio took his spot as the ace of the show, and Dragon Azteca took his spot as the star protégé. Where does he go? What does he do?
Knowing what we know about the landscape of professional wrestling and WWE’s growing obsession with signing not only the biggest stars from around the world but basically anyone who can do a backflip, season 3 might be the end of Prince Puma’s story. With it would come the end of Lucha Underground as we know it. Hell, there’s no guarantee we’ll even get a season 4. It could be the end of the show as we’ll ever be able to know it. But what we DO know is that there are 39 more episodes before we’re done, and that the story that we’re introduced to here will carry through until it’s done.
And in the end, it’s all about Prince Puma. It’s all about you.
