The Over/Under On Lucha Underground Season 2 Episode 6: Get Fame

Welcome to episode six of season two of the Over/Under of Lucha Underground, our gently reworded Best and Worst report about every episode of the best wrestling show on television. If you’d like to read about season one, you can find all of our previous episode reports — we’ve been down with this show since season one episode one — on our Lucha Underground tag page. For season two, click here. If you’re new to the show and are jumping on with season two (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, so if you want to know, go read.

Also, Don’t Forget: Lucha Underground is coming to Austin, TX, for SXSW, and I’m hosting their panel. Yes, this is happening in real life. If you’re ANYWHERE near the center of the United States, be at this show.

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And now, the Over/Under of Lucha Underground season 2, episode 6.

Over/Under: Mil Muertes Is Talking!

Man, I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out Mil Muertes and Catrina. That “Under” is for myself.

As we know from his origin video way back in season 1 episode 3, Mil was trapped in the rubble of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake as a 7-year old and watched his family die. When death came for him, he realized that it wasn’t something to fear, it was comfort. He knew that being “on the brink of death” is where he belonged, and now he harnesses the power of death itself (or whatever) to be an unstoppable zombie luchador. We jokingly call him the “living embodiment of death itself,” but we’re wrong. Catrina is death. That’s her whole thing. How have I not put that together?

She’s not a teleporting ghost lady, she’s Death. The angel of death, God of death, whatever. That’s the reason she uses a piece of the earthquake rubble to command Mil. She’s not controlling him like with an urn or giving him extra super powers, she’s just reminding him of the deal he made for her way back when. He’s her instrument of destruction. She’s the reason why people who lose casket matches in Lucha Underground actually die. Death is right there to take them. I mean, f*ck, her team of summonable skeletons is called “The Disciples of Death.” How much more obvious could it be?

It adds a fun layer to her relationship with almost every other character. Pentagon can’t get his hands on her for very long, and she tells him that messing with her is the biggest mistake of his life. She’s obsessed with Fenix because he can’t die. Even Mil himself is “on the brink of death” every time he’s standing near her. Mil didn’t come back to life stronger because of Mil, Mil came back to life stronger because death decided it. We’ve been putting it on Mil the whole time, but dude is just a bigger, stronger skeleton.

Under: Wrestling Kidnappings

This week’s opener is Sexy Star vs. Kobra Moon, and while it’s cool that Lucha finally has more than two female competitors, I’m giving it an “Under” for two reasons:

1. Wrestling kidnappings don’t make sense. They never have. They’re a good idea sometimes, I guess, but logistically if you’re kidnapping someone for more than one show there are some bizarre storytelling consequences that even a show like Lucha Underground has trouble executing. Remember when Bray Wyatt kidnapped Kane and The Undertaker and said he’d “harvested their souls,” and it gave him spooky lightning powers? Remember how the payoff to that was Bray having no powers, and Kane and Undertaker returning like nothing’d happened to beat him up? Remember on NXT Redemption when Matt Striker got kidnapped for like two months and they had to carry him with them from arena to arena across the country? Okay, you remember one of those things.

Anyway, that’s where we are with Sexy Star. She was kidnapped at the end of last season by Marty The Moth and held captive between seasons, and a few weeks ago we saw her just kinda running down a hallway looking scared. Mack found her and they both (presumably) saw Marty’s sister, causing them to make awesome exaggerated kung-fu movie eyes. This week … Sexy Star appears to be totally fine, and only falters when Marty pops up in the crowd to distract her. So, like, what happened? What’s the consequence to half a year of kidnapping? Vampiro’s desert rehabilitation put a definite gap between seasons, so Sexy was captive for a while. Couldn’t Marty have skipped the kidnapping entirely and just shown up in the crowd making bird-arms if he just wanted to make her lose preliminary matches? There’s just not enough of a hook or a reason here for me to be interested, and it’s only as bad as it is because Lucha Underground is usually so good at the “how” and “why.”

2. Matt Striker namedropping Selena. You leave her out of this.

Over: Commercial-ception

We get another Famous B “Get Fame” commercial, and now I’m gonna spend the rest of the month doing his “point at the number on screen, turn and smile at the camera” motion. God, I love it. I also love that Lucha Underground explains why the quality of the commercial is so bad: we aren’t watching the commercial ourselves, we’re seeing it through the eyes of El Dragon Azteca Jr., who is watching it on TV. BOOM.

He and Rey Mysterio have another catch-as-catch-can slap fight in preparation for A Great War, and it continues to crack me up that in the world of Lucha Underground any fight that happens in the Temple arena is pro wrestling, but any fight outside of it is kung-fu. Glacier would KILL at The Temple. He’s a two-sport athlete!

Over: I Want A Poster Of This Hanging In My Home

I don’t have a lot to say about the King Cuerno vignette — other than “it’s great that Cuerno’s a killer who doesn’t enjoy killing, but understands it’s part of the job” and maybe “OH MY GOD LOOK AT KING CUERNO’S HOUSE” — but man, it’s beautiful. Cuerno slumped in a chair in the one street clothes outfit he owns because it matches his gear, hat down, Gift of the Gods on his shoulder is one of the most surprisingly badass images Lucha Underground has given us. I want a full series of Cribs episodes with Lucha guys. Like, where does Pentagon live? In that mystical dojo? In a bag?

Over: Lucha Underground, No Longer On Sling

get it

Pentagon Jr. gets a rematch against Prince Puma due to the weird double-pin epidemic happening in wrestling over the past few weeks. Sami Zayn and Samoa Joe, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks, Pentagon and Prince Puma … at least Puma bridged and got a shoulder up, and it wasn’t just a referee choosing to end a match.

Anyway, they wrestle, and again it doesn’t get a conclusive finish. Mil Muertes, sick of sitting around watching from a throne while Catrina manipulates his opponents into eliminating each other, rips off his sling and makes potted meat out of both dudes. His declaration is that he wants back in the game, and that he’ll be defending the Lucha Underground Championship against both men. A champion who wants to take on his top contenders because he’s sure he can beat them? What is this, Mars?

Over: LADDER MATTCHHHH

And now, on a night full of us talking about death, here are two people trying to kill each other.

This week’s main event is a ladder match for the Gift of the Gods Championship between the champion, King Cuerno, and the challenger (and former champion) Fenix. There’s a lot to this if you haven’t read the previous columns (or watched the show before now … good to have you on board finally, but damn dude, what was the holdup?), so I’ll try to keep it brief: there are seven medallions made out of ancient Aztec gold, and … actually, that’s going to take forever. Fenix is a bird, Cuerno is a hunter, and death is playing them against one another to keep her broken toy safe. There.

There ain’t a hell of a lot of psychology here, but if you’re looking to watch the best-ever video game match between two extremely talented luchadors that apparently don’t mind hurting themselves for real for your enjoyment, watch this match. It’s got rope-bounce hurricanranas through tables, it’s got people being thrown off balconies and into piles of chairs, it’s got awkward ladder bumps that make you worry about upper thigh bruising, the works. It also has this, which made an entire bar of people go “WHAT, WHATTT”

Fenix ends up winning and reclaiming the Gift of the Gods, and suddenly Mil is in a tight spot: on the same night he got confident enough to challenge his top two competitors, he found out that the one guy in the company who can beat him reclaimed the belt that gets him a title shot. So now Mil has to worry about Puma, Pentagon and Fenix. That’s what happens when you don’t listen to your teleporting ghost lady.

Over: AZTEC WARFARE 2

No spoilers, but you guys are gonna lose your minds.