Welcome to the Over/Under of Lucha Underground for season 3 episode 6, featuring our analysis of the best telenovela about a supernatural wrestling promotion ever made. If you need to catch up, you can read about season 1 here, and season 2 here. Season 3 episode recaps can be found here.
Re-post: 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.
And now, the Over/Under on Lucha Underground season 3 episode 6, originally aired on October 12, 2016.
Over: Rey Mysteri-No
This week’s show starts off with a truly iconic moment: Rey Mysterio Jr. joining the endless pantheon of movie and television characters screaming NOOOOOOOO to the heavens, only with “CHAV OOOOOOOO” replacing the “no.” It’s cornball and ironically brilliant at the same time, especially since all Chavo did was attack El Dragon Azteca Jr. with a chair. He didn’t like, find out Dragon Azteca had died during childbirth or whatever.
There’s also a great little nod to Lucha Underground’s connection to fictional lucha libre history, with an old event poster advertising Chavo’s father, Chavo Classic, against El Dragon Azteca (Sr.).
They should pull an American Horror Story and randomly do an episode set in the 1970s. Get Antonio Banderas to play Dario Cueto’s dad. Robert Rodriguez could make that happen in a second, don’t even front.
Anyway, this is all to set up a wonderful catch-as-karate-fight-can confrontation between Chavo and Rey in Dario’s office — featuring a blissfully high-on-violence Dario — and a change in the announced main event. Instead of Pentagon Dark versus the now hospitalized El Dragon Azteca Jr., it’s gonna be Pentagon vs. Rey vs. Chavito.
But up first, MOTORCYCLE BUDDIES.
Over: PIZZA PALS
The opening match features two wonderful, unique tag teams:
1. Famous B and Dr. Wagner Jr. Imagine if Hulk Hogan and Jimmy Hart had ever tagged, that’s what this is like. Wagner is this 51-year old, jacked-to-the-gills rudo lucha doctor who is barely hurt or affected by anything. He’s basically a stress-free, God-absent Matanza so far. He’s teamed up with his own valet, a local jobber with a series of infomercials who wrestles in his full suit, like you’re wrestling as a selectable manager in a video game. DocWag does all the work, and B runs in to be entertaining and/or try to pin people with a stethoscope. Also, they’re managed by a drugged-out prostitute dressed like a nurse. And that’s not me insulting her, I’m pretty sure she’s supposed to be a prostitute.
2. Son of Havoc and Mascarita Sagrada, who we recently saw bonding over couch hangs and pizza bagels at Son of Havoc’s mom’s house. They’re such good friends now that SOH has outfitted his motorcycle with a little personalized sidecar so Mascarita can ride to the ring WEARING GOGGLES OVER HIS MASK. You gotta be a cold-hearted motherf*cker to not pop for a mini luchador in a sidecar wearing driving gogs.
The match is a lot of fun and a very different kind of “good” for Lucha Underground, based almost solely on absurdist entertainment instead of wrestling excellent. That kind of thing is brilliant in small doses. It’s why the comedy on Raw is almost always so bad, but why Santino wrestling a mixed tag on NXT was fun as sh*t. Wrestling comedy is a sometimes food.
As you might’ve guessed from my team descriptions, Dr. Wagner takes Mascarita to church, planting him with a Doctor Driver (aka “an ambulance”) and letting B pin him (and win his first match) with the stethoscope.
Next week we need to see Mascarita Sagrada at Son of Havoc’s dad’s trailer, rehabbing with a bag of Gushers.
Over: Remember What The Door Mouse Said
Somewhere in the middle of the show we get a weird TICK TOCK, THEY’LL BE HERE SOON teaser featuring a voiceover about how forever is sometimes only one second, a magical white rabbit (?) and this logo:
If you watched the season 3 trailer, you’ll recognize this as the logo for DHARMA Initiative, that group from LOST that … wait, what did they do again?
Kidding. Eagle-eyed viewers who hopefully aren’t upset about spoilers LU gave away themselves in a heavily promoted trailer will notice that’s the same logo from the chest of the Super Calo chicken guy (?) seen hanging out with Mad Hatter Paul London and Party City Morph Suit Guy. See:
Are they supposed to be RABBITS? Because there’s an Aztec myth about a bunch of magical rabbits who get together to get blitzed — not a joke — and I am SO INTO a faction of Alice in Wonderland-themed drunk bunnies.
Over: Sexyvl
First of all, look at Sexy Star. She is straight-up dressed like Evil-Lyn from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I’m not gonna NOT notice that. She’s got the orb staff and everything. Five f*cking stars.
Put her with Pentagon like they did in Mexico and complete that imagery. Bring back Night Claw and let him be their Beast Man. I mean f*ck, you’ve already got He-Man on the roster.
Over: STAR DESTROYER
Second of all, Jack Evans cuts another great pre-match promo where he announces that he’s not only the Dragon Slayer, he’s the STAR DESTROYER. Too bad Oney Lorcan didn’t go back to his roots at The Temple. Jack Evans should feud with everyone on the roster until he’s got a Daenerys Targaryen-style chain of self-imposed nicknames.
I really enjoyed the Sexy/Evans match, too, for a lot of the same reasons I liked the tag. This week’s show puts the story development stuff on the back burner and refocuses on making the show fun again, which I really appreciate. This one’s just full of Worldwide Underground running interference and trying to give Jack the cheap win, including a great springboarding-in appearance from the Darewolf that’s just a misdirect so John Mundo can attack Sexy and disappear under the ring.
Look at this beautiful human:
It comes back to bite them in the ass, too, when Fenix runs in to distract the referee, allowing Sexy to use PJ Black’s very own introduced kendo stick to whack Evans in the balls — turnabout is fair play — and retain the Gift of the Gods Championship. It furthers the beef between Mundo and Star, extends the ongoing issues between Worldwide Underground and the Superfriends, and it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.
Over: Deja Vu
Finally we have the main event, which manages to be very good and the least interesting part of the show for me at the same time.
Pentagon Dark gets the win here, thank God, because he really needs to start stringing together some victories. He kicks Chavo in the face to knock him off the apron and drags Rey off the top into a package piledriver, becoming (I believe) the only person in Lucha Underground other than Matanza with a pinfall over Mysterio. Good for him.
The post-match has Chavo jumping Rey with a chair, hanging him upside down in the corner and bashing him in the legs with a chair. You might remember that finish from their ‘I Quit’ match on a 2006 episode of Smackdown, and from the followup on a 2007 Smackdown. I’ll be shocked if Rey doesn’t get that same comeuppance on Chavo on an upcoming episode of Lucha.
All in all, this is a really great, different, and ultimately positive episode for Lucha Underground following last week’s show, which felt like a bummer. We got motorcycle pizza pals, a man being pinned via medical equipment, the promise of a rabbit tribe, Jack Evans getting kendo sticked in the gonads, Pentagon getting a main event win, Dario Cueto marking out for up-close-and-personal violencia and an old rivalry callback. That’s how you do it!
