By John Moore
Lucha Underground Hits
Mil Muertes: The common thread throughout this episode was to make Mil Muertes look strong, and they sure did a good job at this. It’s an interesting dynamic with Mil preferring to take a dominating/powerful approach while his handler Catrina would prefer to take the cowardly/tactful approach. What’s cool about that dynamic is Catrina tried her best to bide Mil time for weeks, but when Mil finally decided to unleashed, he looked unstoppable showing that Catrina was trying to play everyone like an awesome poker hand. As I said in my review, it was the right move to have Mil dominate the top two wrestlers in the promotion, yet he shows fear and anxiety when confronted by Fenix (since Fenix was the only luchador to defeat him decisively).
Famous B Commercial: The problem with the first few weeks of vignettes was mostly due to every one being essentially the same. This one had the same formula yet it had a different twist. We got the generic luchadores again, but this time they were comedy slapstick to Famous B’s manager ad. I also got a nice laugh out of Dragon Azteca Jr. watching the actual ad. On a serious note, the fact that the commercial was in Rey Mysterio’s TV was actually a nice bit of world building for the Lucha Underground world by showing some connectivity in universe.
Prince Puma vs. Pentagon Jr: TNA is doing a similar thing with the EC3 vs. Matt Hardy feud and I had the same fears there that both companies have done a great job mitigating. Lucha Underground is essentially doing the same thing by not giving us a conclusive victory (in fact they gave Puma the fluke victory). They got out of this one by doing the rare DQ/No-Contest finish. The match started off in a high gear, but was stopped before anything really interesting would happen. Also, they managed to build up Mil Muertes by having him destroy Puma and Pentagon. As previously noted, Mil shows no fear towards Puma or Pentagon, yet when Fenix walks in the temple, Mil gets shaken up. Therefore, Fenix is being built up cleverly as a huge in-ring threat and I’m anticipating Fenix vs. Mil Muertes again to possibly recreate what these two have done in such classics as “Grave Consequences” and the “Death Match”.
King Cuerno Vignette: This was a cool looking vignette with King Cuerno sitting back like a badass bounty hunter. When King Cuerno debuted last year, he was really mysterious and the only true video package we got was him doing his amazing tope in slow motion, which is one hell of a tope. I like his western gunslinger look (and thank god he was the cowboy hat guy and not El Texano Jr from the season one end cinematic). Also, it’s cool to see followup character pieces done in a high quality way. Much better than hearing wrestlers do an “inset promo” saying “Hi! my name is _________, and I’m the __________. I’m here to show you why ________” which is the format of every WWE inset follow up piece.
Fenix vs. King Cuerno: This match was good, but not as good as their other two encounters. Luckily, Fenix managed to keep the pace up with high flying Lucha action like that awesome Tope Con Hilo off of the hard camera podium over a ladder. The methodical pace works well for King Cuerno since his character is that of a methodical and tactical hunter. Of course, the other two matches were a bit more exciting. Fenix recapturing the title also puts him in line for a match against Mil Muertes and I totally expect Mil to bulldoze Puma and Pentagon to set up another classic between Fenix and Mil Muertes (and here’s a note, I wasn’t at the next few tapings so my mind is almost spoiler-free).
Lucha Underground Misses
Sexy Star vs. Kobra Moon: Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t anything awful about this match. There just wasn’t really a match and we didn’t get any more progression than what the Marty/Sexy-Star video packages already did. Marty the Moth is a creepy bastard for what he did to Sexy Star and the Mack is angry, we knew that two weeks ago. At the same time, Kobra Moon was better in her intro video than she’s shown in the Temple. She reminds me of that one girl from NXT who likes to smell flowers. There was one positive though. We finally got a female vs. female match in the temple, it might be the second ever after Ivelisse faced Sexy Star that one time.
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