Previously on the Over/Under on Lucha Underground: The stars of Lucha Underground enjoyed the rich, refreshing taste of Modelo™. Also, Johnny Mundo hit Rey Mysterio’s child in the face with a title belt.
If you need to catch up on the rest of the episodes — if you aren’t caught up, you should need to catch up — you can read about season 1 here, and season 2 here. Season 3 episode recaps can be found here.
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And now, the Over/Under on Lucha Underground season 3, episode 30, originally aired on August 9, 2017.
Over: A Great Week For Mythology
We’re still waiting for the intense, complex, pulp mythology of Lucha Underground to come together into a cohesive narrative. Really all we know is that there are some Gods, and they’re descending or arriving or possessing people or something, and representatives from the seven ancient Aztec tribes who I guess are also pro wrestlers will have to come together to stop them. That’s the general undercurrent of story, and even that’s sort of vague and open to interpretation. We’ve got monsters, time travelers, shape shifters, kidnappers, murderers, guys with enchanted armor, evil businessmen, the works. So the best part of this week’s episode is that it’s especially “mythology” heavy, with (for the show lately) an unusual amount of information dropping.
For example, we meet Agent Winter — not to be confused with the Winter Soldier — who I’m pretty sure we saw driving the Evil Limo of Doom earlier this season. He’s the replacement for Delgado, aka evil lucha libre Lorenzo Lamas, and he’s Dario’s new contact in “The Order.” They’re the Stonecutter motherfuckers who run the universe’s world. Turns out he’s a big fan of the show, loves Pentagon Dark, and is kinda disappointed that Pentagon’s flesh will have to burn like everyone else’s when the reckoning comes. That’s a pretty great and extremely Joss Whedon point of view for the show’s Big Bad. “Hey, I love what you’re doing and the heroes are cool, but they have to die I guess, oh well. ANYWAY!”
Winter’s appearance also explains why like, Cage isn’t in jail for murdering a councilman. The people above Delgado in the Satanic Daisy Chain don’t care that he’s dead, because he’s easily replaced. The people like Dario, who really DO care and are suddenly face-to-face with their own mortality, didn’t know about it. There’s also a great bit where Dario puts his legendary Desk Bull to his forehead, which is pretty straightforward symbolism that the man’s gotta start thinking about his family. Last week we got a helpful reminder that he keeps his deformed, God-inhabited brother locked in a cage and symbolically tortures him into submission with trays of raw meat. Since they’re all gonna die, maybe he should like, take him out for ice cream?
The other big reveal is a lot to unpack.
As it turns out, Captain Vasquez, the police captain who sent Cortez Castro and Joey Ryan into The Temple as undercover cops, is Catrina’s mother (!!) and the reason Catrina is immortal or whatever — she describes it as “trapped between realms” and says it’s “like a ghost,” which I’m counting as a nod to us constantly calling her a ghost — is because her mom, who owns an immortality medallion that only works on women (which we’ve seen before), cut it in half so she could siphon off some of the power. DO WHAT NOW.
Vasquez wants Catrina to get the God gauntlet — Godlet? — from Cage, because “no man alive” is powerful enough to do so, but Catrina’s boyfriend familiar is a dead guy. If Catrina can get Mil Muertes to get the glove away from Cage, she can give it to her mom in exchange for the other half of the medallion, which will give Catrina an actual life but take immortality away from her mom.
Keep in mind that the most complex story we’ve seen on Raw this year is, “Big Cass says somebody attacked his friend, but it was actually him, and everyone was an asshole about it.”
Under: Not A Great Week For Women
Lucha Underground is a telenovela about a wrestling show, but it’s also sometimes a “wrestling show,” which means it can forget it’s a creative, progressive medium for storytelling in the professional wrestling genre and be corny and wanky as fuck. This week wasn’t the best for that.
Up first is The Rabbit Tribe vs. Worldwide Underground, which should be the biggest lay-up of the season for me. It’s my two favorite teams having a non-tournament trios match, and Taya’s arguably been the best single performer on the show in season three. Instead of just doing that match, we get Local Indie Intergender with the Rabbit Tribe treating Taya like she’s not a wrestler, getting horny when they touch her butt, and wanting her to do running knees to all three of them at the same time because it’s funny to have a lady’s crotch in your face. It’s not anything to get up in arms about, and it doesn’t threaten to derail any important show threads like that Angelico/Ivelisse match back in the day, it’s just classic shitty regressive wrestling. Plus, they’re rabbits, so I get that joke.
I did love the fact that the rabbits foot Mascarita Sagrada gave them as a gag gift turned out to be lucky. Maybe he IS their God. Go full The Maxx!
The other bad moment happens after Pentagon Dark vs. Texano. Not that the match was very good anyway, because Texano.
Famous B accidentally costs Texano the match, which brings his Cueto Cup Tournament story to a close, I guess. Afterward, Pentagon of course superkicks B in the face so hard it knocks off his cowboy hat and breaks his arm. It’s what he does. The iffy thing is that when that’s done, The Beautiful Brenda gets in the ring to check on B and gets her arm broken, too, even though she wasn’t doing anything. She was just there. It’s a helpful reminder that whether we cheer for him or not, Pentagon Dark is rudo as hell — this is important, and I like that, as the last thing you wanna do is have him be a goody two-shoes and lose his edge — but watching a crowd of wrestling dudes mark out for an incidental lady getting her arm broken for no reason seemed a little unsettling. Maybe that was the intention? It would seem weird to do a moral double-turn between an extremely popular evil ninja skeleton and some lower lower lower card jobber managers.
I do hope this pays off in the remainder of the season, though. I think Pentagon needs the Rock “Deadly Game” treatment, where you say, “you should cheer this guy!” and then do an absolutely dastardly thing to ensure nobody cheers for him for a long time.
Under: Paul Layman
Worldwide Underground’s fake Paul Heyman agent getting all the lines in segments involving Johnny Mundo, Taya and Jack Evans continues to be the weirdest creative decision on a show with kidnapped dragons and ghost cop families. I hope the remainder of season three explains why the hell this guy’s actually here, because if he doesn’t have an unexpected hook, it’s odd that he has a big segment in the middle of a mythologically heavy show. Maybe he’s a trickster God or something, trying to split up the group? Maybe he’s a sports agent Frankenstein? I don’t know how this show works.
Walk Into The Club Like
Over: Cuckolding Death
The best match of the night by far is Mil Muertes vs. Jeremiah Crane, which might be the best match of the entire round. Aside from Taya, Crane’s been the MVP of season three. The guy brings the right kind of intensity to the show, which is crazy, because he brought the exact wrong kind of everything to NXT. That was probably on NXT, but you get what I’m saying.
Aside from that hilarious door moment courtesy of DEATH KRAMER, the best moment of the match is probably Crane doing a big wide lap around the ring and getting absolutely trucked by Mil in response. I love me some Meal Mortence, but this is the first time he’s really looked like “Mil Muertes” in a long time. When Matanza showed up, Mil kinda got bumped down to mini-boss, so it’s nice to see him puff up and maul dudes again. If we’re building to Mil vs. a magical Brian Cage with crazy God powers and a glove that can punch people’s heads off, it’d be nice to let Mil be Full Powered Mil.
In addition to all that, we got the return of Catrina’s overkill move, the Lick of Death in the Mouth. If you remember when she did that to Fenix, it escalates the “you’re toast and I’m stealing your life force” to “MY ZOMBIE MANS IS GOING TO KILL YOU FOR REAL.”
What a way to die.
