SirSmUgly

Season 3, Show 30: “Bloodlines” or Lucha Underground would be way better as a classic Telltale game than it is as a pro wrestling show We’ll be 75% of the way through this season after this show. That fact is more exciting than any of the recent wrestling matches on this show. Recap: It’s the Cueto Cup! Famous B. is trying to sign Texano! Texano is trying to bang Brenda! Mil Muertes and Jeremiah Crane love the same woman, but I’m not sure she loves either of them! Also, Johnny Mundo’s male mooks are still incompetent! Taya is pretty good at running interference, though! Tons of excitement! Expressed through punctuation marks! Matt Striker and Vampiro lay out the rest of the Elite Eight matchups - Pentagón Dark vs. Texano and Mil Muertes vs. Jeremiah Crane – and mention that the Aztec medallions will begin being re-circulated tonight… …and the first three will be up for grabs in a match between the Rabbit Tribe (Paul London, Mala Suerte, and Saltador) and the Worldwide Underground (Taya Valkyrie, Ricky Mandel, and P.J. Black, accompanied by a still-recuperating Jack Evans). Mala Suerte is wearing around his neck the lucky rabbit’s foot that Mascarita Sagrada gifted them last week, so I guess Sagrada’s gift didn’t scare them off as intended. They do their weirdo dance, circling around Melissa Santos, and she actually gets a kick out of it. Maybe she can enjoy herself because when she waves them off, they respect her boundaries and stop bothering her (hint fucking HINT, Marty Martinez). Wow, wrestlers having a positive interaction with Missy Santos in the Temple is so rare that I sort of enjoy it when it happens. Meanwhile, Evans is holding a white board with a rebus puzzle on it. It has a poorly-drawn bowling pin on it, so it’s a puzzle about someone or something getting pinned. Rebus puzzles rule. Striker mentions Classic Concentration, which funny enough I’ve recently been thinking about watching while I’m on my exercise bike that my wife got me for like fifteen bucks on Buy Nothing. That is the best fifteen bucks she has ever spent on me, possibly. It’s definitely the healthiest fifteen bucks. Anyway, I’ve been watching old Scrabble episodes with that slowpoke dolt Chuck Woolery trying to comprehend the clues to the word puzzles that he's presenting, and it’s been a great way to pass the time while cycling. The other thing that I’ve been watching while on the bike is these old Coliseum Video uploads that the WWE Vault has been slowly adding to YouTube. I realize, having watched these, that growing up watching WWF as a kid has made me sort of like these objectively mediocre matches between two beefy dudes that were so prevalent in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had fun watching Davey Boy Smith wrestle Warlord at WM VII, and while Warlord is not a good singles wrestler, the big moves that Warlord did hit came off nicely, specifically a counter-Hot Shot early in the match that established his heel control segment, and Bulldog breaking Warlord's previously unbreakable full nelson grasp and then winning the match was a nice finish. I also got to see the British Bulldog/Repo Man abrupt feud-ending match once Bulldog was shunted over to wrestling Bret Hart for the Intercontinental Championship at SummerSlam ’92, and having watched that feud progress a year or two ago, I was glad to finally cap it off. The match itself was maybe just north of mediocre, but I had fun with it. Anyway, this match on LU is an exactly mediocre trios match with some unfunny comedy on the part of the Rabbit Tribe. They win this unremarkable and dull bout when Paul London lands an SSP on Ricky Mandel for three. It was a snoozer. Seedy backstage interstitial: Benjamin Cooke and Johnny Mundo are displeased at the failure of these dopey mooks in the Worldwide Underground. Cooke threatens to fire them, but he says that Mundo is such a kind soul that he’s allowing them all to stay. I have no idea why Mundo is lecturing Taya. He should call her up to stand next to him and then tell the rest of these geeks that they suck. Cooke leads Mundo off to do photo ops – Mundo: “No more sick kids, please. I can’t afford to get sick right now” – and I feel like Mundo should watch himself, man, because Taya is obviously the brains behind this whole unit, and I think he's losing her patience. Mil Muertes (w/Catrina) jumps Jeremiah Crane when Crane steps to the top of the stairs and beats his ass right into a commercial break. We come back to Muertes tossing Crane through a closed door. This, of course, is revenge for Crane destroying Mil’s neck with a couple of chairs a few weeks back. They do your typical crowd brawl, tease a toss off the roof of the storage closet, and then go back to crowd brawling after that. Eventually, they make it onto the floor and then, finally, onto the apron, and then just before Crane can make it into the ring, he tries to leap from the apron and land a rana, but he is caught and powerbombed into the apron. Then, and only then, does the match reach the ring after Mil dumps Crane’s body in there and follows. Whoops, wait, Mil misses a corner spear and goes back outside. Crane loads up a suicide dive, but he does it through the middle and lower rope and, I mean, is he trying to do a dive that looks like a botch? He looks like he trips and barely hits Mil in the waist, but it seems like it’s meant to be a transition rather than Crane hitting a big move, but Mil no-selling it anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that move is supposed to be. He did it against Taya, and it looked just as bad. If I can’t tell whether or not you tripped or you meant to do the move the way that you did, maybe take it out of your arsenal. They trade moves back and forth and toss each other into chairs and across tables. Crane stinks IMO, so no, I am not enjoying this. Mil can be a fun crowd brawler, but this is just a very noisy brawl that does a bunch of spots that were done better or more emotionally impactfully in other matches of the weapon-based type that Mil wrestled on earlier episodes of this show. Basically, Crane just takes stupid-wild bumps to hype this thing up, which probably explains why he had to recently retire from the ring. All this legit pain and bodily damage that he’s eating, and for what? A forgettable garbage match that blends in with countless others on this show? Crane hits Mil with his Pillmanizer/Con-chair-to sort of dealie. I mean, it’s not really a Con-chair-to because there’s no chair on the other side of Mil’s face. The point is that Mil doesn’t really give a fuck about that move and soon ends up spearing Crane from inside the ring, knocking Crane off the apron and across a table, then powerbombs him through the table, then grabs a crate that he ordered from ACME and pulls out a huge mallet, then swings the mallet, then Crane’s eyes bug out of his head when he's hit, then tries a spear, then gets caught in a front choke by Crane while attempting the spear. OK, only some of that list of moves was true. The front choke struggle is easily the best thing about this match, though, especially Mil struggling to break it, getting to his feet, then slinging Crane away and landing a massive chokeslam to punctuate his escape. Alas, his follow-up pinfall only gets two. After that, we’re back to breaking furniture and then a finish that feels anti-climactic. After all these chair and table and high-impact death spots, Crane simply leaps off the second rope and right into Mil’s arms; Mil quickly hits a counter-flatliner for three. Catrina enters the ring and, rather than giving Crane the Lick, gives him a full-on open mouthed kiss. There’s a long string of slobber and everything. Gross. Mil is mad about that, obvs, and hits Crane with another Flatliner because he’s jealous. This was what it was, and if you like garbage matches that focus mostly on delivering high-impact weapon spots, then you’ll like this. I personally do not, however. Seedy backstage interstitial: The Fibbies are onto Dario Cueto! Wait, no they’re not; actually, Dario’s office visitor is just one Fibbie and he’s been named Councilman Delgado’s replacement by “The Order.” Dario is confused, so this Fibbie named Agent Winter (whose actor I knew I recognized - it's Godfrey), informs him that Councilman Delgado was killed by Brian Cage and Brian Cage’s Magic Aztec Gauntlet Powers. I mean, it is completely unbelievable that the news of an acting councilperson who got his fucking head exploded in his office would not have gotten back to Dario in some way, even if he doesn’t watch the local news. Come the fuck on. And I say this about a show that runs on mysticism and immortality and super-duper Aztec god powers. Dario gets over Delgado’s death very quickly on account of Delgado was a prick and even pricks like Dario don't like other pricks a lot of the time. Winter enthuses that he’s a huge Pentagón Dark fan and then goes into a kind of reverie and monotones that despite his fandom,“[Penta’s] flesh will fry like everyone else’s when the war comes.” Well, that was creepy. Even Dario is creeped out, and this dude has seen some shit. Agent Winter says that The Order’s got eyes and ears everywhere, and boy are they excited to unleash the Aztec gods to rule the earth and start killing people indiscriminately! This news stresses Dario out so much that he presses the horns of his trusty ceramic bull to his head and tries to keep himself from forming a massive migraine. This was a high-quality interstitial that was extremely well-acted and nailed the unsettling tone that it was trying to set. The main event determines who will reach the Cueto Cup’s Final Four: Pentagón Dark or Texano. Mostly, the good thing about this match is Vampiro trying to subtly deal with Penta’s post-Vampiro-as-his-master progress by intimating that he needs to bide his time under the guidance of a wise sage and that becoming a truly dangerous wrestler can’t be rushed. As for the match, well, obviously you can guess that I don’t think much of it, but it is what it is. There’s a shot of DVDVR dude Tromataker in the crowd looking desperate for a Penta victory, which I get a kick out of. This match is worth it just for that shot. Famous B. and Brenda wander out here to support Texano in his efforts. Texano’s heel control segment is broken up by blips of Penta’s signature offense, such as lungblowers and the like. It’s otherwise pretty nondescript except for an Indian Deathlock into a leg snap that I thought was creative and cool. B. and Brenda try to run a distraction, but B. tosses a golden horseshoe right to Penta. I mean, his aim was the opposite of true. It was extremely false. Penta grabs it, tees off on Texano’s jaw, and earns an easy pinfall victory. Underwhelming match, but then again, considering the low ceiling based on who was in it, it was honestly just about whelming. Obviously, Penta tries to snap Texano’s arm after the match, and obviously, B. jumps in to interrupt it, and obviously, B. ends up with a snapped arm instead. Equally as obviously, Penta grabs Brenda when she jumps in to check on B., and Penta snaps her arm to a pop. Texano couldn’t even come back and help her out? Forget scoring with her anymore, buddy. The final four matchups in the Cueto Cup: Prince Puma vs. Rey Fenix and Pentagón Dark vs. Mil Muertes. Seedy LAPD office interstitial: What the fuck, Catrina blit-blurts into Captain Vasquez’s office?! And what the actual fuck, Vasquez apparently called upon her even though they agreed to stay out of one another’s way? And HOLY SHIT, Vasquez says this: “I gave you life, Catrina. Twice.” WTF Vasquez is Catrina’s mom?!?!?! And also saved her from an early death by giving her half of the amulet willingly?!?!?!?!?!?!?! AGEWGTAMAGAHBOWHN>!?!?!!,1? Well, this explains a ton in the batshittiest way possible! Catrina is aggrieved; she says that needing to possess the half of the amulet she has just to continue existing isn't all that great an experience for her. She’s stuck between life and death, “like a ghost,” on account of that she should be dead, but her mom broke the pendant in half to bring her back from the brink. Vasquez is desperate because she knows, as Catrina does, that Brian Cage + Aztec god gauntlet = Everyone’s flesh frying when the war comes, so she asks Catrina to use her hold over Mil Muertes to get Mil to take the gauntlet away from Cage. I am all in on Mil and Cage having a Superman/Doomsday match in which they punch each other repeatedly in between trying to powerbomb one another through the mat. Vasquez is so desperate for Catrina's help that she offers to trade the other half of the immortality amulet to Catrina for the gauntlet; apparently, when the pieces are rejoined, Catrina can fully cross back over into the world of the living. Catrina notes that this means that Vasquez will lose all her immortality protections and thus die, but Vasquez is clear about the trade: “I don’t fear death; I fear the gods.” Catrina accepts this deal from her ma and blit-blurts away. Do I even have to tell you how much this interstitial ruled? All the blah wrestling just gets in the way of the storyline stuff and the fun acting that I actually care about. If I were grading only the wrestling on this particular episode, the episode would earn zeroout of five lucha chants. If I were grading only the interstitials on this particular episode, the episode would earn five out of five lucha chants. On that note, here’s the final score! 2.5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

What, no pics of Tony Curtis sniping at Marilyn Monroe on the set of Some Like It Hot?

OK, I take it back, this Hornbaker Flair book is the height of hagiographic nonsense that glosses over Flair's failures and exalts every single little thing he's ever done to the height of ridiculousness. However, if YOU are looking for a once-read, slightly-used Hornbaker book on Ric Flair to read, I am happy to offer it to you for the low price of zero dollars and zero cents, and I'll throw in free shipping on top of it. Just DM me if you're interested.

This is a fair point. I feel like Ricochet was always going to end up there, but Cuerno probably needed the exposure from LU to get a call from the dub. Penta and Fenix, though, came in here and got featured as potential main eventers, then did the jump to AEW and then the dub anyway. That seems pretty impressive. And looking at Penta's Wikipedia page (I know, I know), he seems to have just been a midcard talent kicking around AAA until the point at which he showed up on LU and got way over.

Season 3, Show 29: “The Hunger Inside” or Bad Day L.A. Recap: More Cueto Cup! Mundo and Misterio Jr. continue to feud! And oh yeah, Matanza Cueto is still mad at Misterio for defeating him back at Aztec Warfare III (Season Three, Show Eleven). Seedy backstage interstitial: Matanza Cueto’s back in his cell, where Dario Cueto taunts him with a platter full of uncooked animal flesh while talking about a metaphorical hunger that Matanza has to get revenge on Rey Misterio Jr. Dario argues that this hunger has unfocused Matanza and also driven him to do nutty things like knock Dario out (Season Three, Show Fourteen), which isn’t nice, dude, Dario’s your older brother, man. At least, that’s Dario’s argument. Dario suggests that unless Matanza get his worldly mortal desires for things like revenge under control, the Aztec gods might have to intervene and strip away any humanity that still exists inside the hulking vessel that is his body. Or maybe add him to the Permadeath Count. Either/or. Dario places the platter of bloody, raw meat that he brought in front of Matanza’s cell and tells Matanza to control his hungers, both physical and emotional. Matanza huffs and grasps the bars of his cell, but he does his best to maintain a semblance of self-regulatory control. I note here that both Dario and Kobra Moon (Season Three, Show Sixteen) believe in the strategy of starving people as a way to mold their behavior. And I mean, in both cases, it appears to have worked. Good to know! I mean, not that I’d ever do something like that. No, sir. Forget that I wrote that this was good information to know. *cough* …and in other news, the Cueto Cup rolls on! Here are the Elite Eight quarterfinal matchups that show on screen while Striker hypes the Cup: Pentagón Dark vs. Texano; Mil Muertes vs. Jeremiah Crane; Prince Puma vs. Dante Fox; and Pindar vs. Rey Fenix. The latter two matches will be wrestled on this show. We’ll also be getting a Johnny Mundo vs. El Dragon Azteca Jr. match that will probably break down into more interference just as last week’s P.J. Black/Rey Misterio Jr. match did [Editor's note: Dario Cueto made sure that I was wrong about this...at least during the match itself]. While Drago crashed out of the tournament last week and Vibora didn’t escape the first round, Kobra Moon’s got one more Reptile Tribe hope left in the tourney; she escorts Pindar to the ring to wrestle Rey Fenix for a spot in the Final Four. We see a shot of Rey’s wife in the crowd sitting right next to Eddie Guerrero’s child Dominik. No, just kidding, Rey won paternity in a ladder match, so Dom is Rey’s kid by all legal rights. Seriously though, Rey’s kid is here, or at least one of them is. Meanwhile, Melissa Santos is openly blowing kisses at Fenix at this point. The Moth is probably seething in his little perversion room with all the Missy Santos pics as he watches this. Fenix naturally scores a Fenix on my little thigh slap scale before Pindar takes control and tries to hit a few power moves. Fenix quickly escapes and lands kicks, so Kobra Moon leaps onto the apron and chokes Fenix for long enough to hep Pindar land a corner charge wheel kick. It doesn’t help him that much; Fenix lands a bunch of strikes anyway, though Pindar sneaks in a forearm and then manages a monkey flip. Fenix tries to fight out of a heel control segment from Pindar that has all sorts of power moves, some weirdly complex. Pindar spins Fenix around a bunch…for a sit-out slam. I mean, the sit-out slam was fine, but why not just drill him directly? Fenix makes a comeback with, you guessed it, kicks, and actually there’s a neat spot where he tries to land a German suplex on Pindar, but each time he fails to get him over, he lands a flurry of strikes and tries again, coming closer to scoring the move until on the third try and after the third flurry of strikes, he gets Pindar over and bridges for two. I liked that sequence. Fenix really earned that suplex. Though Fenix shows that he’s able to work the power game alongside Pindar, Pindar is not able to do the same when he goes up top, where he’s in no-man’s-land against a skilled aerialist like Fenix. Fenix catches him up top, yanks him down to the mat, and lands a pretty tough-looking double knee strike from the top that puts Pindar down for three. Sorry Kobra, but the Reptile Tribe won’t be controlling the LU Championship. At least not yet. Seedy backstage interstitial: Dario has called the various flunkies within the Worldwide Underground (and also Taya) to his office. Whatever injury Jack Evans shoot suffered, he got his jaw wired shut for real, and he frustratedly tries to explain how much it sucks to an amused Dario. Dario is less amused when P.J. Black “translates” for Evans, who gets mad at Black’s nonsensical translation and starts to bicker with him (as much as Evans can do so in his current state, that is). Dario shuts them up and then chews them out for being a woefully ineffective heel group at taking down any of the babyfaces. Dario wants them to keep their asses in the back for tonight’s Johnny Mundo match and then attempts to keep them in line by telling them that if they obey him, they’ll be in matches for three Aztec Medallions – hey, glad to see those being redistributed – next week. On the other hand, if they disobey him, they’re fired! He should have said exactly those two words in Vince McMahon’s cadence, IMO, but he used corpo-speak about losing all future opportunities in the Temple or something like that instead. BOO. I think Prince Puma vs. Dante Fox will tell us a lot about Puma’s development at this point. Can he corral Fox and get something watchable out of him or will he indulge all of Fox’s worst fucking instincts? The answer is that second one. They no sell one another’s dives to hit dives. FUCK OFF. Fuck this match. This sucks so bad. They start out by literally no-selling two suicide dives apiece to hop back in the ring, kick the guy who just hit a suicide dive, and hit one of their own, and they do this FOUR FUCKING TIMES IN A ROW. I’d rather watch the Equalizer throw weak forearms at Charlie Norris as Norris makes an uninspired comeback attempt than this. I’d rather watch a comp full of Tugboat matches than Fox matches. I refuse to talk about this match anymore. I protest. I’ll just tell you the finish, which I acknowledge solely because it tells us how the Cueto Cup tournament will develop. Puma wins with a 630 Senton. This was the worst match this show has ever put on…so far. Prince Puma and Rey Fenix will meet in the semifinals of this Cueto Cup tournament. Killshot runs out to attack Fox after the match, by the way, and he gets booed because the fans were like WHOA FOX DID SO MANY FLIPS AT HIGH SPEED, WOW, WE'VE NEVER SEEN THE LIKE OF IT EVEN THOUGH MOST OF US SPEND TIME WATCHING THIS SAME STYLE OF WRESTLING IN RESEDA and therefore, Fox is a babyface to these fans even though Fox sneakfuckily attacked Killshot and knocked him out of the tournament weeks ago. Someone in the crowd yells GO BACK TO TACOMA at Killshot. Nah, we don’t want him back. AEW can keep him on the road and maybe urge him to get him a nice house in Jacksonville. Killshot grabs a mic and promises to continue this fucking feud as this crowd shits on him. Fox is a heel for doing heel shit no matter how many WHOA, FLIPS AND SHIT that he does, and Killshot is a heel for promising to continue the feud with Fox. That’s what I’m going with. Seedy LAPD precinct interstitial: Someone finally figured out that Brian Cage killed a fucking ACTIVE CITY COUNCILPERSON weeks after it happened (Season Three, Show Twenty-Two). Wow, the LAPD moves quickly! Captain Vasquez watches video of Officer Cortez Castro Reyes getting murked by Cage while under the Veneno mask from a few weeks back (Season Three, Show Nineteen). Reyes is also in the room, watching the video and wincing at his failure. Even after seeing that footage, Vasquez demands that Reyes get the gauntlet away from Cage. Reyes is like LOL NOT GONNA HAPPEN, NO MAN IS ACCOMPLISHING THAT TASK, so Vasquez waves him off disgustedly. She waits until he leaves, then takes her half of the amulet out of her desktop and mutters about the "no man" part of Reyes's diatribe, “You may be right.” I presume that the amulet half keeps her alive, but if Cage punches her head off her shoulders, she’ll just be alive and in extreme agony without a head, right? This would be a gorier Death Becomes Her situation, wouldn’t it? Whatever, Vasquez is a dolt as far as I can tell. Her ancient Aztec father unfortunately had to pin the hopes of the Aztec peoples on a moron. And also a very ineffective Aerostar. Geez, the good guys are absolutely fucked, aren’t they? Can we stop here and talk about how this show ignored a bunch of (what I consider to be) necessary storyline to instead pack these episodes with mediocre-to-bad Cueto Cup matches? Delgado’s brazen murder at the hands of Cage should have triggered a ton of movement on the LAPD storyline, but instead, Cage is walking around a free man and wearing that gauntlet, the LAPD is seemingly like We’ve got video of the guy who did this since he killed Delgado in his office, but we’re not going to do anything about it, and Dario Cueto hasn’t even mentioned Delgado, nor have we seen Delgado’s mysterious Dr. Claw-like master showing up and asking questions about Cage killing his minion with a single punch. But we’ve sure had time for guys like Dante Fox and Jeremiah Crane to stink up the joint each week! ARGH, I WANT THIS SHOW TO BE GOOD AGAIN What I want and what I get are two different things, though. Because what do I get next but a Johnny Mundo vs. El Dragon Azteca Jr. match? Striker hypes this match as a first-time one-on-one bout, but Azteca has looked pretty much like an ineffective, over-his-head rookie who can’t do anything right. So pretty much like Prince Puma back in the first season. Striker mentions a somber-looking Ron Funches. I’ve never seen Funches that un-smiley before. The extremely low quality of this show is killing Ron Funches’s joy, dammit! Striker also talks about Dominik Misterio being a huge fan and potential future practitioner of the fine art of pro wrestling. I still can’t believe this dude Dom is apparently a massively heat-getting heel. I’ve only ever seen that wrestling clip of him talking about surviving in prison even though he clearly only spent a day at the city jail; Dom trying to act hard with his Henry David Thoreau overexaggerating ass is a funny concept. Otherwise, I have no idea about any of his work whatsoever. There’s a huge spinebuster that Mundo drills on the mats less than a minute in. I don’t know. I think the last time I felt this way about writing about actual matches, the matches themselves were happening in late 1999 and the middle of 2000 in WCW, so they were at least usually pretty short. These matches are ten or fifteen minutes of constant movement that signifies nothing. Mundo is – and I can’t believe I’m typing this – one of the best workers in this company because he understands things like pacing (even with that spinebuster on the mats spot less than a minute in) and putting together basic heel control segments and stuff like that. If Mundo is one of your best singles workers, your company is in a spot of trouble with its talent level. LU has so many young guys who can dive and flip and run, but not enough ring generals to turn that enthusiasm and athleticism into good matches. Azteca just did a running plancha over the corner strut, and I didn’t actually care. That is a bummer. This match is fine for what it is. I’m burned out on this company, though. Too much wrestling, not enough storyline progression. And I think that as I get deeper into the show, the more I become certain that I shouldn’t bother trying to watch any current wrestling shows because they are likely going to have a lot of similarities and won’t be for me. It’s fine: There is so much wrestling that I want to watch and that I’ll never have time to get through, probably. But man, I keep writing the same thing again and again, over and over as LU crystallizes its house style. Mundo wins this match with an End of the World after tripping Azteca as the latter goes up top. Rey Misterio Jr. runs out and saves Azteca from Mundo’s attempted Pillmanization of his neck. Rey then walks over to his family and shows them some love before going to slap fives with some fans. Mundo walks back down the stairs and jabbers at Dom, who seems like he has no charisma whatsoever when he attempts to respond. They face off while Dario’s guards try to split them apart. Mundo piefaces him; Rey finally tries to make his way back over to intervene when the Worldwide Underground, now able to come to ringside since the match is over, runs out and grabs Rey so that Mundo can waffle him with the LU Championship belt. I. Don’t. Care. I can’t wait until we get through that match. Only a couple more shows. Seedy parking lot interstitial: Rey Fenix walks Missy Santos to her car. They have like zero romantic chemistry as they attempt to have a flirty conversation, by the way. Anyway, guess who’s watching this whole walk to Melissa's car? Yep, it’s the Moth, who monologues a plan to take Fenix’s mask in the hopes that Melissa will see his full face and react like we all did with people we met during the COVID era who wore masks, and then one day we saw their full face, but we had filled in facial features more pleasing to our brains than what they look like even for the people who we acknowledge are clearly conventionally attractive, but of course, Marty’s forgetting one thing: MELISSA. THINKS. YOU. ARE. A. FREAK. AND. IN. FAIRNESS. MARTY. YOU. ARE. Best-laid plans and all that, Moth. For all the reasons laid out both in terms of the in-ring and the storyline progression, this was my least favorite LU of all the LUs. -3 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Season 3, Show 28: “Booyaka! Booyaka!” or If this episode is any indication, a theoretical Lucha Underground video game would have a smaller CAW moveset than WWE WrestleMania 21 for OG Xbox We are almost three-fourths of the way through season three as we start November. With a little luck, we’ll be about three or four episodes deep into the fourth season by (U.S.) turkey time. But man, does it seem that there’s a long way to go… Recap: There are only two Cueto Cup matches tonight to cement the rest of the Elite Eight entrants; Rey Misterio Jr. opposes P.J. Black in the third bout, a PROVE YOURSELF match for Black (and a chance for the Worldwide Underground to soften up Misterio before his big title match with Mundo down the road). Also, Drago is now a heel and there’s an ongoing Son of Havoc/Son of Madness biker feud that is pretty meh. This El Conjunto Nueva Ola song that incorporates the THIS IS AWESOME chant into the lyrics is absolute devilry. Mother plays this song on repeat in The Null. I don’t like it, is what I’m saying. Vampiro reminds us that Drago vs. Pentagón Dark and Willie Mack vs. Texano are the final two Sweet Sixteen matchups in the Cueto Cup. In fact, Willie Mack and Texano open the show against one another. Texano proffers his hand before the match; Mack accepts it. I assume that Texano won’t be so friendly by the time this match is over. He really only ever turned babyface because Blue Demon Jr. wasn’t creatively working in that role opposite Chavo Guerrero Jr. anyway. It was quite the abrupt babyface turn considering that he was just heeling it up against Alberto El Patrón immediately before he turned. He should probably be a heel, and that turn should probably come soon, if not tonight. They have a whole sequence that starts with a beefy shoulderblock standoff and goes downhill from there because they have to do lucha armdrags and a bunch of roll-throughs and trips and leg sweeps and a dual flip into a standoff. They could have just thrown meaty forearms instead of doing the same sequence the smaller guys do…and the women do…and everyone in this company does. They shake hands again. Then Willie Mack starts violently slapping his thigh. OK, I see where this match is going. It’s nice that Mack can do a slingshot senton and all, but this could have been more of a beefy guy match to contrast with practically every other match that happens on this show. Mack wants to do a ton of flips instead. There’s a decent chop exchange in there, but mostly this match is just above acceptable at its best. It’s got your typical ringside brawl in it, which is dull, but Mack hits a huge tilt-a-whirl backbreaker on the floor and sells that he hurt his knee, which is novel. Also, Texano yanks Mack’s tights before quickly sliding into the ring to try and win a cheapie count-out victory. Too bad for him that these refs have been ordered to be lenient as fuck by Dario Cueto. Mack hits an Exploder and a Norman Smiley-style swinging slam (!!); the cover gets two, and I must admit that I popped for the swinging slam. Famous B. slides into the ring and shoots Mack with H20 from a dollar-store plastic water gun. Mack responds by hitting B. with a Mack Stunner, but turns around into Texano’s boot to his gut and eats a quick sit-out powerbomb for three after pretty much dominating the match. Speaking of pretty meh: This match, everybody! Seedy dive bar interstitial: Son of Havoc is waiting for the bartender to slide his drink to him, but Madness steps in, takes it, sips it, and then fights to a standoff with Havoc. Havoc says that he’s “not going back; not after what happened,” but Madness says that he’s going to harass Havoc into the ground until Havoc comes back home to “the Invisible Cult,” I think is what he said. Madness says that Havoc is coming home to the cult willingly or Madness will bring his head back to the leader of the cult as tribute. Who exactly leads his biker cult, King Herod? Like damn! Seedy psychedelic cult interstitial: Paul London and Mala Suerte are using Saltador – and Saltador’s checkered bodysuit – as a draughts board. London jumps Suerte’s final two pieces to end the game; just then, Mascarita Sagrada walks in holding a huge gift, wrapped all pretty with a bunch of nice little bows stuck to it. The Rabbit Tribe apologizes to Sagrada for not making their way successfully through the tournament, but Sagrada simply drops the gift and swaggers out. The excited Rabbit Tribe members read the card – “Hope this brings you better luck” – and then they tear through the packaging peanuts to try and find the gift itself. It’s a single rabbit’s food. The Tribe screams in horror that someone lopped the back right foot off a poor defenseless rabbit, which honestly I agree with them about. All in all, though, I think this signifies that Sagrada doesn’t want to be their leader, and also I hope it’s a fake rabbit’s foot! The second and final Cueto Cup match of the night commences as Drago (w/Kobra Moon) wrestles the extremely dangerous, extremely over Pentagón Dark. Seriously, he consistently gets the biggest pops on this show. Was anyone’s career helped more by being on this show than Penta’s? Fenix’s was helped probably about as much, but otherwise? I get a wry kick out of the opening, which is almost the same as the one from the first match with a ton of leg sweeps and trips into a standoff. I know that I’ve gabbed on far too much about this sort of thing, but do you see what I mean in this latest slew of season three reviews? Why is everyone who makes this show so insistent on having all the in-ring stuff feel vaguely the same? I think this is also how WWE pretty much was by the time I stopped regularly watching it. This seems like a huge issue with modern pro wrestling, but then again, I don’t really watch modern pro wrestling (this show excepted, obviously), so what I’ve typed is a hunch rather than an observation out of experience. The rest of this match is fine. I just wrote about Bray Wyatt’s work as the Fiend, and I noted that he’s all aura and mic work and a ouple of big moves. That’s pretty much Penta in a nutshell. His matches depend on him hitting his signature spots (low dropkick into the abdomen, Sling Blade, huge SHHHH slap, package piledriver, arm breaker) and having a ton of presence (in this match, he attempts a cocky pin that is done so disrespectfully that he deserved to eat a follow-up running Blockbuster DDT from Drago, even if the timing on his bump was off). Drago kicked out of one package piledriver, by the way. He does manage to hit a DDT on Penta for two and then an overelaborated top-rope Frankensteiner and top-rope splash after surviving that particuar Penta big move, but Penta kicks out in kind and then scores a weak-looking diving Canadian Destroyer for two before landing a double-underhook package piledriver for three. This was watchable enough, I suppose, but only because the crowd loves Penta so much that they act like a hyped wrestling crowd instead of focusing on all the meta-chanting they usually do. After the match, Penta superkicks Kobra as she tries to stop him from snapping Drago's arm, but Aerostar tries to bring his friend back to the light side by attacking Penta and making the save. You can guess what happens next; Drago refuses Aerostar’s help by repeatedly kicking him, and then slides out of the ring as Penta snaps Aerostar’s arm in irritation for his having interrupted Penta's attempt to snap Drago’s arm. The crowd booed the babyface Aerostar when he broke up Drago’s arm snapping and then cheered Penta for snapping Aerostar’s arm, so yeah, Penta is a babyface in the Temple no matter what he does. Seedy backstage interstitial: Catrina blit-blurts up to Pentagón Dark in the dimly lit Temple halls after that last match and reminds Penta that, oh yeah, she and Mil Muertes still have it out for Penta attacking Mil as Muertes entered Aztec Warfare II and directly causing his near-immediate elimination (Season Two, Show Nine). Catrina touches the side of Penta’s head to induce a flashback to that event. Catrina threatens that Mil will be coming to get revenge on Penta, who responds with a hand signal that indicates that – you guessed it – he has zero fear. Catrina notes that Mil and Penta are on the same side of the bracket and suggests that if they both win their Elite Eight matches in the Cueto Cup, Mil’s going to put Penta on the Permadeath Count in their prospective Final Four match. Then, she blit-blurts away. However, Penta, like Bonecrusher, AIN’T NEVER SCARED. Y'know, this interstitial essentially promoted a match that won't happen until two rounds from now, thus basically spoiling the results of two matches in the Elite Eight. I wonder if Rey Misterio Jr. ever wrestled P.J. Black when Black was in WWE and wrestling as the former Justin Gabriel. I’m going to look it up while the opening happens. You’ll never guess what moves were performed in the opening, by the way. Yeah, trips and a standoff. It was worked more smoothly than either of the other two match openings, sure, but man have the match layouts become crazy stagnant. Anyway, they wrestled one another in tags, but not in singles, so this is kind of a novel matchup. They also wrestled one another in the indies. I found a Rey vs. Ricochet vs. Black Triple Threat Match in an indie called Destiny World Wrestling in 2015. Interesting. As for this LU match that I'm currently reviewing, is what it is. Black does some arm work before engaging in a kick exchange with Rey in the center of the ring, losing that exchange, and ending up hit with a springboard moonsault on the floor. I think that the joy that I extract from this match is really in watching Rey be incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Rey is what, 43 or so at the point he wrestled this match? Leaving aside the little things that he’s so good at, his athletic ability in general is amazeballs at this point in his career. His bumping, his movement, and how clean he is are all insane for a wrestler with as much mileage as he’s got on him by this point. To that point, they’re able to work a knee injury for Rey when he gets violently hung up in the Tree of Woe because he’s been blowing out that knee with semi-regularity since about 1996. And yet, he still moves like this! Insane. He’s got to be one of the greatest athletes that I’ve ever seen in a wrestling ring. And he’s in a business with guys who participated in high-level professional sports! I’m putting Rey, Lesnar, and Liger in the top tier of my list of most insane athletes ever to work in pro wrestling. Black works a decent heel control segment after that worked injury, even landing a Styles Clash in there for two, but Rey fights back with a tornado DDT that, unfortunately for him, takes out the ref as he completes it. It doesn’t take much time at all for Johnny Mundo to run down here and attack. Mundo lands some kicks and knees, then helps Black up. Jack Evans joins them, and hey, it’s Jack Evans in the ring again. I presume that he was injured. Come to think of it, Evans disappeared for a while, Ivelisse seemingly legit hurt her knee (again!) and hasn’t been around to do any build to her big Ultima Lucha Tres match with Catrina, and Angelico immediately got hurt as soon as he came back. It’s been a tough year for injuries here in LU. El Dragon Azteca Jr. rushes the ring to make the save, but he’s cut off by the heels and Taya destroys him at ringside before tossing him into a barrier. Mundo puts Black on top of Rey and retreats as the ref comes to, but Rey kicks out at two. Azteca recovers, grabs a chair, and chases the interfering Worldwide Underground members away. In the ring, Black tries a crucifix bomb, gets countered into 6-1-9 position, and quickly gets rocked with a 6-1-9 and a springboard Frog Splash for three. This was alright. I mostly enjoyed watching Rey put in yet another strong shift. After the match, Rey grabs a mic and says that Mundo’s stick-and-run tactics won’t be worth a damn when they face off in a month for the Lucha Underground Championship. Rey can get away with this pure babyface promo in the Temple because he’s a legend. Poor Aerostar gets booed and the crowd loves it when Penta’s snapping his arm, but Rey can do the typical WWE-style quickie babyface comeback after a long beatdown and then cut a fightin’ babyface promo, and these animals eat it up. That’s almost as impressive as his continued high level of athleticism. This show passed without much incident, but maybe don’t have three trip/trip/sweep/sweep/standoff openings in three matches next week? Or ever again, for that matter? 2.5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Probably an unpopular opinion here, but I've just seen all of this Bray Wyatt/Fiend/Firefly Fun House stuff for the first time and I loved it. It was extremly high-concept (for pro wrestling) and was only held back by two things: 1) Bray not being much of a worker and 2) WWE not being a great place for this sort of concept. Maybe it's because I'm so focused on the show right now, but I think this would have been perfect for Lucha Underground, both in terms of fitting the supernatural tenor of a lot of its storylines and because Wyatt's matches would have the benefit of post-production and could rely on lots of blood and weaponry. Also, it's very dumb to have Seth Rollins standing in the ring watching a Firefly Fun House on the TitanTron and responding directly to it. This would have been better served in a LU-style interstitial rather than trying to jam a FFH-based promo battle into the typical in-ring yapfest structure. (Also, why the fuck is your world champion reacting to the Fiend like said champion is the final girl in a horror film? And maybe that's not even fair because final girls in horror films find their pluck and become badasses. Laurie Strode would have slapped the shit out of Rollins for cowering like a punk motherfucker. Actually, every facial expression that Rollins is directed to make in these promo battles and confrontations is completely wrong. Like, why would he be grinning with fondness at a Wyatt-affiliated rabbit puppet that is proclaiming to be his biggest fan? Rollins absolutely sucks, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't also tanked by the terrible treatment of his character in these segments.) It also doesn't help that when Wyatt starts blit-blurting into the arena and attacking people, Michael Cole's lack of talent combined with his being poorly produced lead to him flatly declaring things like OH NO, NOT HERE, NOT NOW or HE'S ATTACKING WITH THE MANDIBLE CLAW, FOLEY'S OLD MOVE and just completely undercutting the tenor of what I'm watching. I have no idea how people watch modern WWE merely from an aesthetic standpoint. It's so incredibly bland. Then again, most modern WWE fans seem...let's say a little dull and a little slow, present WWE-watching company obviously excepted. Probably it's mostly the too-online ones, but the crowds in 2019 were fucking quiet for everything they were watching from these clips. I also approve of Bray bringing back the Mandible Claw. This gimmick does go off the rails by about late October, though I still think Bray is doing good things in the gimmick and that the problem is the rest of the company around him. And Goldberg being the one to get the rub from beating him is peak corporate-era WWE. I liked what I saw of this Firefly Fun House Match against Cena, which was a neat sort of bow on the whole deal (at least for me), but I'm sort of surprised that Cena let his whole character get critically eviscerated by Bray like that, pitching him as a bully who secretly was driven by massive self-doubt and fear of failure. By the end of it, I wanted to see Bray tear down the Hulk Hogan character next. After that, I saw annoying ass Alexa Bliss and even more annoying ass Braun Strowman and figured that it was time to exit the stream. Any of you who read this, I'm excited to finally join you in 2019, and I'm confident that the years ahead will all be smooth sailing!

We could stick the whole Mid-South Jake and Barbarian run on there and, like a bunch of Demos matches and Repo Man squashes. And I guess Nikita would have to be on there too since he was also at Robbinsdale High. I'm not a Nikita guy at all, but he probably had at least a couple of matches against Magnum that would be good to add. Oh, and he was in the Sting's Squadron/Dangerous Alliance War Games bout, which is almost certainly the best match that he's ever been a part of.

Season 3, Show 27: “Fade to Black” or The Cueto Cup is basically a series of radiant quests Like Bikertaker’s annoying theme song suggests, we should keep ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’. Recap: Cueto Cup! Killer Cage! Biker dudes! Legendary luchadores! Dark Puma! Seedy rooftop interstitial: Speaking of Dark Puma, he stands on the Temple roof and overacts while having flashbacks of battling with Mil Muertes and losing his mentor Konnan over the past couple of seasons. Vampiro blit-blurts up here and tells him that he can ease his mental unquiet by becoming the Lucha Underground Champion…and if he doesn’t, the madness that he’s experiencing will consume him, OOH YEAH! But not OOH YEAH because that would be fun, like Macho Madness. More like OOH NO because Puma eternally reliving the experiences of Mil putting both he and Konnan in a coffin and leaving them for dead is the opposite of fun, basically, um, not-Macho Madness? Yeah, like not-Macho Madness. As it just so happens, the Worldwide Underground are noisily entering the building, and Puma catches sight of the Lucha Underground strap hanging over Johnny Mundo’s shoulder. I was hoping he was going to dive onto the guy like Batman, but no, he just gets flipped off by his opponent for tonight P.J. Black when Black notices him standing up there. Puma re-dedicates himself to his Dark Master Vampiro and to ultimate victory in the Cueto Cup. Are we headed toward Vampiro’s former charge Pentagón Dark meeting his current charge Prince Puma in the finals of the Cueto Cup? It sure feels like it, but I’m not quite sure about how the brackets are lined up. Speaking of, here are Striker and Vampiro at the desk. Vamp says that tonight, the “cream [will rise] to the top.” CUP ‘O COFFEE. Sorry, now I wish Macho Man had been able to participate in the Temple. Pindar (w/Kobra Moon) opens the show hoping not to get his lizard-looking ass beat by Brian Cage (w/Aztec god-powered Gauntlet of Doom). Melissa Santos is supposed to be in love with Fenix in kayfabe, but she gets so charged up announcing that Cage is FROM THE FIVE-FIVE-NINE that even Striker notices. Tone it down, Melissa! You gotta keep kayfabe! So, right at the bell, the ref is like, Cage, you gotta take off that gauntlet and Cage is like Haha, no and the ref is like, Well, look, buddy, I’mma have to forcibly take it from you and Cage is like, Haha, no, and also, eat this lariat and Pindar is like, AW, FUCK and Cage is like, I’m just gonna hit you with a Steiner Screwdriver now, no tears, only dreams, and the ref is like, Ow, that lariat hurt, I’m DQ’ing you, Cage and Cage is like, OK, then I’m just gonna hit YOU with a Steiner Screwdriver and he does and Pindar wins and Kobra Moon grins like Pindar actually did some shit even though he decidedly did NOT do some shit, not in the least. The crowd was not happy about that result, by the way. Pull out the pommel horse! Set up the rings! Choose some energetic music for the floor exercise! It’s Dante Fox! Vampiro tries to put Fox over by noting that he (Vamp, that is) grew up idolizing the Great Muta and the Road Warriors, and he attempts to favorably compare Fox to those guys. I mean, you tried, Vamp, and I appreciate that, but if Fox was showing even a sliver of 1989 Muta’s charisma and ringwork, I wouldn’t be dreading his matches so much. It’s too bad that Fox doesn’t have Gary Hart around to talk for him. Shit, now I wish Gary Hart had been able to participate in the Temple. It doesn’t help that his opponent Son of Havoc’s favorite thing to do is flip a whole lot, and I don’t want to see this match, but Son of Madness immediately tries to help a brother out by choking Havoc with a chain on the stairs as Havoc makes his way toward the ring. Havoc uses his forward momentum to flip Madness over his shoulder, and they end up brawling in the stands, where Havoc is like, I love springboarding off shit, it rules, and nothing about it can ever go wrong and then Madness is like **punches the springboarding Havoc in the jaw with a chain-wrapped fist** and then Dario Cueto steps out of his office and is like, Get your bitch ass up and get in the ring, Havoc, or get the fuck outta my tournament. Havoc promptly gets his bitch ass up and gets in the ring, so good for him! And bad for me since I think another quickie cheap finish that avoids having the actual wrestling match would have been a better watch! Fox jumps Havoc and immediately lands a kick to the mush. Do I even have to do this? Nah, fuck it, I’mma do this even though I shouldn't have to. On a thigh-slap scale where “least obvious” is Prince Puma, “most obvious” is Fenix, and dead in the middle is Alberto El Patrón, these thigh slaps score a…Fenix, obviously. Fox hits a huge plancha over the corner strut, which is a great athletic feat. So there’s that. He also lands quite a bit of offense, but can’t get the pugnacious ([tm] Jim Ross) Havoc to stay down. Fox knows the remedy for that: more somersaults! He triple-flips himself right into a predicament that gets him bashed into the raised guardrail, actually. I take back that Fox knew the remedy. The remedy ended up with him getting smashed into a guardrail. Springboard, flip, flip, springboard, ostentatious thigh slap, two count. Just imagine who did which of those. It doesn’t matter. This house style makes me sad. It makes me so sad that at some point early next year, I’m going to be randomly reviewing individual matches from across the European promotions from before 2000 so that I can wash my brain out after viewing all this LU. See, Havoc just did that rebound cutter of his that looks dumb and contrived. I'm gonna need to cleanse myself by watching Jimmy Breaks maneuver his hapless opponents into Breaks Specials about a thousand times. Havoc sure seems unaffected by getting clocked in the jaw with a chain earlier. It might as well not have happened at all. This is just your basic “overelaborated move trading with 2.9s” match that LU has as its standard “epic” match that happens practically every week and that looks pretty much the same as the standard LU epics from previous weeks. Do you think I like getting old and being a fuddy-duddy and using ancient-ass colloquialisms like “fuddy-duddy?” I sure wish I could enjoy a bunch of big moves with no interesting connective tissue or match flow, but how hot can I get for an apron DVD to the floor mats when it’s just another high-risk move that I will forget happened by the time I write the review of the next show? Anyway, Havoc misses an SSP; Fox grabs him and hits a Foxcatcher for three. It’s mercifully over. Shitty fuckin’ match, as you might guess I’d judge it. Seedy backstage interstitial: Johnny Mundo discusses his new movie opportunity (Ghost Dad 2 – no ghosts, no dads, which is his hot new take on the concept) with the agent he’s hired to represent the group, Benjamin Cooke. I believe that David Arquette was supposed to play this part, if I’m remembering what I read correctly, and let me tell you, that would have been pretty funny, and I’m bummed that it didn’t happen. P.J. Black joins the group, having rushed into the room on Mundo’s request, and listens to Cooke’s “inspirational” speech in which he mispronounces Mundo’s last name and tells Ricky Mandel that he sucks. Actually, I wish Paul Heyman was playing this part. Cooke tells Black to get out there and win his match tonight so that he can use this victory to put pressure on Dario Cueto w/r/t more opportunities for the group. Oh,and Cooke thinks he’s going to get along with Dario. Oh, brother. Striker briefly promotes next week’s Cueto Cup matches: Drago vs. Pentagón Dark and Willie Mack vs. Texano. I am kinda wishing that emo Prince Puma was in the midst of some other storyline in this company. Mostly, it’s because of his bad acting as he attempts to show that he’s conflicted and troubled, but also, he just seems like an aimless character even though he’s part of a major storyline with Vampiro. He’s almost certainly the best of the flippy guys in this company, though (not counting the legend Rey Misterio Jr., obviously, who is just marking time in the Temple). Puma and his opponent P.J. Black do some mat wrestling that exists so that Puma can get sick of trading arm wringers and show some aggression by punching Black in the face instead. This opening is pretty solid, as it picks up from trading holds and into quick counter-counter-counter stuff after that Puma right hand. Puma sends Black scuttling to the floor, where he cowers as Puma fakes a dive and poses. Back in the ring, Black finds that his shoulderblocks have little effect, and Puma does a cool move where he stops short as Black leapfrogs and smoothly snatches Black out of mid-air, transitioning him right into a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. Why is Puma so much better than the vast majority of the other wrestlers in this company who work his style? Part of it is that he actually tries to escalate his offense properly, unlike all the other bomb-throwers in this company who have seemingly no desire to structure their matches in such a way. Also, while Puma's mic work kinda stinks at this point, he’s got more physical charisma than most people in this company, and certainly more than any of the consistent high-flyers that work this company. Someone like Penta coasts on physical charisma and strong promo delivery, but Puma actually has good matches while also being physically charismatic. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Black his due in this match. His major heel control segment is pretty fun, with Black applying holds and trying to slip Puma into flash pinning combinations, methodically using a combination of power and guile to defeat his foe. Puma does manage to slip a Black corner charge and land double boots to the face and a springboard lariat to halt Black’s control of the match. When both men get back to their feet, they counter and counter again until Puma can hit a huge DDT and a running SSP for two. Puma tries another DDT off a tilt-a-whirl after another exchange, but Black halts his momentum and hits a brainbuster for two. The crowd has chanted THIS IS AWESOME or THIS IS LUCHA or maybe even THIS IS AWESOME LUCHA for what feels like the whole show. What if you folks just, like, cheered and booed instead? Puma hits a lot of big moves that should end the match. He scores a high-angled back suplex that I sort of wish got the three. One big issue that I have with this house style is that after you’ve eaten like four death moves, I feel the fifth one should probably end your night, especially if you’re a midcarder like Black. And this match has been comparatively restrained, too! I type that, and then they do a bunch of kicks and knees and strikes back and forth in the middle of the ring while slapping the shit out of their thighs and biceps. That feels like a bit much at this point in the match. This bout was better than I probably would have guessed, but it, like many matches in this company, was five minutes too long. These main events are particularly prone to going longer than they need to. What has happened to all the story progression on these shows? Instead of eighteen minutes for this match, what about thirteen and you give me some fucking progression on whatever Captain Vasquez is doing? While I felt that the twenty-six episodes of the second season weren’t enough to really let the criss-crossing Temple narratives breathe and grow, the forty episodes of this season is way too much, as were the thirty-nine episodes of the first season. A flat thirty shows per season was probably the perfect amount for this show. As I said many, many reviews ago, LU is better when it talks, and this many shows in a season is going to inevitably rely on wrestling for long stretches of episodes. Both guys hit about a billion mega-moves that I know will never put either of them away because even though they hit so many high-risk, high-impact moves of which any one should have knock out power at any time, this is the United States, and straight-up matches here only end with finishers or flash pinfalls. Puma lands a front dropkick and a Senton 630, and since the latter is his finisher, it ends the match. I should note that Striker and Vamp did do a good job of selling Puma’s newer and more aggressive style throughout the bout. There were objectively well-done things about this match, but LU is at the point where the in-ring style has hit a ceiling and there’s nowhere left to go but turning up the deathmatch-style violence, which, ugh, not interested. Seedy backstage interstitial: Dario Cueto handles a phone call from Benjamin Cooke, but he hustles off the line when P.J. Black enters his office. Cooke has apparently called Dario seventeen times since Black lost that match to Puma “five minutes ago.” Dario says that while he can’t re-enter Black into the Cueto Cup, he’ll give Black a shot to redeem himself by defeating Rey Misterio Jr. next week. Meanwhile, Cooke has realized that Dario’s not answering his office phone anymore, but he has somehow gotten Dario’s personal cell number. Do I sort of feel sorry for Dario for once? Yeah, I kinda do. LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking), LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking), LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking)… 2 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Holy shit, four years later, Nintendo was like "Never mind, we said we weren't, but we ended up making more stuff for this game." I suppose this means no new AC until late 2027 at the absolute earliest.

If you enjoyed KotOR, you'll probably like TOW well enough.

I picked up The Outer Worlds 2 even though I'm not quite done with Yotei. Will report back. I also pre-ordered a physical copy of Hades 2, which I am mega-hyped to finally play.

Which one was your favorite?

To those who would have better perspective on this: Was there any conceivable way that the Crockett family could have avoided having to sell to Turner? For example, if they simply had not spent the millions to purchase the dying UWF from Bill Watts, would that have allowed them the capital to keep going? Or was it just a case that they had neither the revenue streams nor the personal wealth to make the transition to a national touring company?

Havoc '90 having Steiners/Nastys and DOOM/Arn and Flair on the same show...whew. Absolute bangers. Totally made up for me having to watch a Freebirds tag match. Which actually is also how I feel about '89. DOOM/Steiners and Road Warriors/Skyscrapers made up for having to watch the MF'in Freebirds. JCP's/WCW's tag team division was undefeated until like 1993 or so.

Here's a lot of stuff that I read that I don't think I've previously mentioned in an earlier post. Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - I don't think I mentioned reading these books, but I was sort of low at one point this summer for some reason, and I decided to read Psalm because my wife had suggested it to me. I loved it so much that I went right out, bought Prayer, and I think convinced the lady who checked me out to read the Monk and Robot books, too. We live in a country built upon a series of systems that not only work inefficiently, but that are explicitly designed to do so, and this book is a reminder that it doesn't have to be that way. We can make better choices. I also like, though, that making better choices about the systems we develop doesn't mean that we won't be individuals who still have ennui sometimes. Dex still needs other people, not just better systems. Or other robots. Either/or. When we engineer better systems to facilitate society, we make more space to build better communities and friendships. These books are lovely and optimistic in a way that I think I needed. I would encourage y'all to read these as well. (And never forget: You are wonderful!) Elizabeth Lunday, The Secret Lives of Great Composers - I loved The Secret Lives of Great Authors as a fun little "before bed" book, and this also functioned that way. I read about one or two composers before bed each night. Dmitry Shostakovich had quite the life. We need a biopic post-haste. Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea - This was a neat idea for a book. It's about standing up to tyranny and fascism, but also it's about how people often ignore basic scientific explanations and instead substitute nonsensical mystical imaginary explanations for things. Also, once you're about a hundred pages in, the letters (as in epistles) lack letters (as in characters that help form words), which is a cute concept but also which makes reading this book a pain in the dick, which is the point. The very last epistle in the book really drives home the "ignore science and technological advances in favor of mystical thinking at your own detriment" message, by the way. I mean, this is an allegorical novel, so you'd expect as much. I liked it! It's short! You should read it! John Grisham, The Street Lawyer - It's meh Grisham. Just read The Runaway Jury again instead. I recognize that there are still a series of books that I bought and probably mentioned earlier in this thread, but that I still haven't read yet. I have yet to crack open The Crossing, but funny enough, I did grab a copy of Streets of Laredo that I'm about to start even though if you'd asked me in the summer, I would have said that I wanted to get right to more of the Border Trilogy, but that I didn't feel a desire to read a Lonesome Dove sequel. Yeah, I'm capricious.

Season 3, Show 26: “A Fenix to a Flame” or What do the Sega Saturn, Virtual Boy, and this episode have in common with one another? They're all interesting even when they miss their mark! The Cueto Cup rolls on…and on…and on, and man, let’s move it along to Ultima Lucha Tres already. Recap: We’re now into the Sweet Sixteen in the Cueto Cup. Let’s get it down to eight! Marty Martinez and Fenix are in a match and feuding over the heart of Melissa Santos. I mean, Fenix and Melissa don’t know that they’re in a feud over her heart, but that’s not stopping Marty! Speaking of matters of courtship, Texano was being courted by Famous B. when last we laid eyes on him; I suppose B. has driven his previous client Dr. Wagner Jr. into the desert and dumped him there like Brian Knobbs dumped Al "the Dog" Green(e). Is that what happened, do you think? Wagner, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay, Wagner? Jeremiah Crane tries to move on in the Cueto Cup by defeating Taya Valkyrie in tonight’s opener. This is a weird matchup. Crane charges Taya, who bids him to stop. He does. She slaps the shit out of him and then shimmies. He boots her in the jaw. Uh, that’s quite the opening sequence. Crane hits a suicide dive through the middle and bottom rope, clearly pulling his momentum because he doesn’t want to crush her. Then why do the move? He also practically bumps himself on a running cannonball to a seated Taya. It reminds me of Bubba Ray Dudley – er, Buh Buh Ray Dudley – powerbombing women through tables, but actually mostly powerbombing his well-padded ass through the tables. What if they simply didn’t do moves that Taya wasn’t big enough to catch properly? On the one hand, I respect that they’re trying to have Crane’s preferred style of LU wandering brawl anyway – I type this just as Taya dives off the raised railing and lands a crossbody – but I can see the strings being pulled in this particular marionette show. The illusion is lost. Back in the ring, Crane’s had enough of Taya hitting diving crossbodies and fists. He knocks her down and then charges her, but she sticks her boot up and he jams his junk. Taya gets up and unloads with a series of running knee strikes that keeps Crane down for two. This crowd is very into Taya, and I definitely get it. A crazed-looking Crane invites Taya to slap him, so she obliges with a series of slaps and chops; he responds with two slaps that make her wobbly-legged and knock her down. That was the best spot of this match; it was pretty violent. Alas, they then screw up the vibes with a contrived-looking Taya reversal of an Alabama Slam into a Canadian Destroyer. Taya goes up top to try a moonsault, but Sexy Star saunters to ringside and right into Taya’s cone of vision, which freezes her for a second. Crane takes that opportunity to pop up, forearms Taya in the lady parts, kicks her in the ass, and then powerbombs her into the corner. She manages to squirm into a flash pinfall that gets two, but Crane immediately shuts down her comeback attempt after he kicks out with a back leg front kick ([tm] Eric Bischoff) and a Cranial Contusion for three. After the match, Star enters the ring and nudges Taya with her boot, mockingly asking if she’s okay. Taya is definitely not okay, and that goes double after Star loads her fist and pops her with the Power of the Punch. This match tried to fit into Crane’s wild and violent arena brawling style even though his opponent couldn’t really eat the impact of Crane’s biggest moves. I don’t think they succeeded at this, but I do think it was an interesting failure. I respect that they tried their best to have that type of match even if it maybe wasn’t the best option considering the workers in the bout. Seedy backstage interstitial: Fenix has insane core strength. I say this because of his workout, in which he holds himself in the air on a heavy bag by his legs while throwing punches at it. I mean, that is impressive as hell. Aerostar walks in and daps up Fenix, then tells Fenix that since he’s lost in the first round of the Cueto Cup (to Drago, remember), he’s putting his money on Fenix to win it. Fenix asks if it’s fair to let a time traveler gamble, then tries to make Aerostar feel better about Drago returning to the Reptile Tribe. Aerostar doesn’t share Fenix’s optimism that Drago will break free from the tribe again: “I’m not so sure…Optimism is not always easy for a man who has seen the future.” Fenix is shook by Aerostar’s proclamation. No, wait, actually, he’s shook by the fact that Aerostar can see the future and therefore knows if he's going to win in tonight's main event. He calls his buddy back to ask if he’s going to leave that match victorious. Aerostar makes me chuckle by hemming and hawing a bit, shrugging and indicating that his prognosis is iffy before throwing him a thumbs up. Fenix sure seems to have wanted a stronger indication either way. Hey, it’s Mil Muertes (w/Catrina), and I guess that brutal chair attack that Jeremiah Crane perpetrated upon his person a couple of weeks ago meant all of nothing. I don’t know, man. Even the Undertaker sold extreme beatdowns like that one. I also find it interesting that Mil and Catrina wouldn’t bother to intervene in Crane’s opening match tonight. Maybe there’s a narrative reason that I’ll find out about, but I don’t know that I believe that Mil would just let Crane’s attack pass without having a good reason for doing so. He certainly didn’t let Puma get away with any such attacks earlier this season. I digress. Mil’s opponent is Paul London, who thrusts his junk at Mil as Striker tries to put over that London's not just some weirdo druggie junk-thruster by talking about his ROH match against Samoa Joe at Death Before Dishonor ’03. The juxtaposition of these two things amuses me. London looks completely unserious as he wiggles his hips like a psychedelic Elvis Presley and ducks away from Mil’s lunges while Striker opines upon his toughness. I do appreciate Striker essentially saying that though London was able to endure a ton of damage from a monster like Joe, Mil is another matter entirely. London continues to frustrate Mil, tripping him, then running away and circling the ring like four times while Mil stands there, seething. The comedy isn’t working for me at all, and I appreciate it when Mil finally mows him down with a shoulderblock and London does his best Shawn Michaels impression on the bump. Mil spends the next portion of the match ragdolling London, but London does score a surprise wheel kick as Mil charges him. Alas, when he tries to follow up, Mil drives him back into the corner and lands a series of corner lariats followed by a boot to the mush. All London has is his ability to stick and run, but it doesn’t do much to save him from eating a beating. He hangs Mil’s arm up on the top rope, but Mil barrels into him and knocks him off the apron, then slings him into the side of the announcers’ table. London rolls away after Mil tosses him back into the ring and, uh, does his best Shawn Michaels impression with a series of superkicks once Mil follows him outside. The other two Rabbit Tribe members run out here while Mil turns things around on the floor and lifts London back into the ring. Mil continues to play with his food by sending London in, and London fires back with a series of kicks, then a double-stomp off the top rope to a stooped-over Muertes. That puts Mil on the mat…for a second. Mil gets up and catches a London leap with a goozle, then drills a chokeslam that gets 2.5. The crowd is chanting THIS IS AWESOME, and no, it absolutely is not awesome, but it is different and a little weird and therefore somewhat novel, even if I’m not particularly into it. Saltador and Mala Suerte hop in the ring as Mil clubs at London, and though they aren’t very effective at landing offense, they do enough to distract Mil, who turns around and eats a boot. London goes up and quickly hits an SSP for two, then goes right the hell back up again and lands another one for about 2.8. Well, you tried your best, buddy. London remonstrates with the referee about the cadence of his count before turning around into a spear and taking a Flatliner straight on his mug for three. Catrina gives Paul London the lick, and I wonder if it’s like licking a toad. Do you think she’s seeing in the magic of technicolor, maaaaaaaaaaan?! The results of tonight’s first two matches set up an Elite Eight matchup between Muertes and Crane, by the way. Seedy dive bar interstitial: I don’t know how anyone with Brenda’s voice would convince anyone else to buy her a drink, but she shoots her shot at Texano, and it works. Back in the day, there was scuttlebutt that one of the film companies was planning to shoot a comedy in which Jason Alexander played a blind dude who could only hear a love interest played by Fran Drescher (obviously doing her The Nanny voice) but not see her. I think the idea is horrible, and I'm not even sure how close it came to being made, but if you wanted to get at least a sense of what that movie might have played out as, here are Texano and Brenda! She wants “something strong, like [Texano],” so he orders two whiskey shots. She downs her shot and immediately starts acting somewhat tipsy. She then tells Texano that he is good at fighting but bad at sports entertainment, PAL! Texano takes it well, at least for someone with his temper. He limits himself to breaking a beer bottle with his bare hands in anger. Brenda’s response, paraphrased: Don’t be so aggy, dude, I’m going to fuck you until you’re fun to be around! Texano immediately stops being aggy. Famous B. creepily watches this play out from a table in the corner and uses his hands to motion that he is reeling Texano into his agency, where Texano will pay him a 35% cut of all monies made both in and outside of the ring in perpetuity, I’m sure. Striker and Vampiro run down next week’s Sweet Sixteen matches in the Cueto Cup: Brian Cage (w/Aztec god gauntlet powers) vs. Pindar (w/Kobra Moon, hopefully); P.J. Black vs. Prince Puma (w/new outlook on life, thanks to Vamp); and Son of Havoc vs. Dante Fox (w/never-ending Killshot feud). Marty “the Moth” Martinez (w/Mariposa Martinez) has a thoughtful little gift for Melissa Santos! He packed it in his very own lunchbox! Not his favored MLP: Friendship is Magic one! In the one that’s yellow with AZTEC PRIDE written on it in bold black lettering! The Moth stands uncomfortably close to Melissa as she announces his presence, and she makes it through that introduction safely. Marty didn’t do a single thing to her. She’s gone unscathed, and it’s all smooth sailing from h—no, sorry, Marty just opened the lunchbox and stuffed a sandwich into her mouth as she began introducing Rey Fenix. Melissa swings her head around and spits the morsel of sandwich that she bit down upon right onto Marty’s chest. Psst, I think she prefers her turkey sandwiches without cheese, dude. Anyway, Fenix enters the ring while Melissa gets the tingles in her heart. And I don’t know, probably in other places, too. She seems pretty into this guy. I mean, he does have impressive core strength. Marty is so gross, man. He’s the sleaziest guy in this Temple. No need for Joey Ryan’s discount sleaze act. The Moth has things covered. Marty doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with Fenix early, but luckily for him, his entirely-too-loving sis at ringside distracts Fenix by grabbing his ankle on a rope run. This allows Marty to get control at ringside for a bit, but Fenix quickly recovers and ends up landing a somersault dive. Mariposa senses that her dopey weirdo brother is in trouble again, so she trips Fenix as Fenix springboards onto the ropes; Marty takes over as Missy Santos implores him to get up. Marty tears at the eyeholes of Fenix’s mask; Mariposa soon does the same as Marty breaks the count and distracts the ref. Marty rolls Fenix into the ring and covers, but he only earns two. The Moth embarks on a heel control segment full of mask ripping and face gouging, with forearms and the occasional impact move thrown in. Marty manages another two count on a nice German suplex in there, but eventually he tries too many corner charges and ends up taking a couple of boots and then a round kick to the jaw. Fenix hangs Marty up and leaps off the top with a double-stomp – man, the wrestlers in this company love the hell out of their double-stomps – but that only gets two. The crowd is chanting THIS IS AWESOME, and wow, they have a low bar for declaring awesomeness. This is perfectly fine, but I’m not sure it’s much more than “solid.” The Moth avoids an overelaborate Fenix moonsault and lands a boot for two, then butterflies Fenix’s arms and hoists him into Northern Lights position before dropping him in what starts out as a Dominator, but ends up as a Codebreaker. His follow-up cover comes close, but only manages two more. Marty works himself into trouble when he tries to attack Fenix in the corner, but when Fenix tries to leverage into position for a headscissors, Marty manages to keep Fenix across his shoulders; he lands a neckbreaker out of DVD (no VR) position for two more. Marty backs into the corner and waits for Fenix to rise; Fenix stumbles as he gets up, and Marty goes over, grabs him, and can’t do anything with him. Fenix wriggles away and ends up landing a superkick. Mariposa grabs the lunchbox and tries to hand it to Marty so that he can tee off with it, but Missy Santos cuts her off. Mariposa can’t believe this lady is all up in her face, but she does nothing. Well, nothing except for watching Marty turn back to Fenix and end up flash-bridge-pinned for three. Marty then chooses that point at which to crack Fenix with the lunchbox. He goes through his packed lunch to dig out the fork that he was going to use to eat his potato salad, but that he is now using to gouge chunks out of Fenix’s head. Mari grabs Missy and makes her watch as the Moth goes all Abdullah the Butcher while declaring to Missy about his attack that THIS IS FOR YOU! I LOVE YOU! It’s pretty disturbing, folks! Of course, Marty then licks the blood of the fork after he’s done because, I mean, what the fuck, this guy is a goddam mess. The match was fine, but the post-match was very good. As Melissa finally breaks free from Mari and runs over to comfort the bloodied Fenix, I now understand why Aerostar was like, Um, yeah, you’re gonna win the match, but uh, you know, it might get rocky! Hey, does he happen to know Saturday’s Powerball numbers? The matches themselves weren’t that great, but I feel like they all tried to do something interesting, and I think they deserve credit. Interesting failures should get a bit of extra credit for at least being interesting, right? Also, the post-match gaga in the main event was so fucked up that most of the Temple stopped chanting and just looked disgusted as hell at Marty’s antics, and getting the majority of these cornballs to stop chanting for two seconds is genuinely an impressive feat, so bump this score up another .5 LU-CHA chants! 3 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

True! Though I feel like if Tony said it, we'd have heard a story on a pod about Bischoff blowing up on him after the show. Jesse Ventura in WCW is something. Saying crazy stuff, calling Ross "JR" and asking why he doesn't wear a cowboy hat if he's an Okie, wearing a Malcolm X cap and a ruffled vest in one appearance. What a guy!

I love hearing Atsu's inner monologue, but when I'm holding a fox statuette to put it on a stand, and I take a second to look, and she mumbles something about putting it on the stand that matches the fox statuette's pose (or whatever, that's an off-hand example), it's super-annoying. It happens enough that I notice it. I didn't play Ragnarok, so maybe that game was louder or more insistent about it. For me, this is pretty noticeable.

Just caught Goldberg/Sid Vicious on the Halloween Havoc stream on YouTube, and yeah, that is a great fucking match. Actually, it's probably the best match WCW had from 1999 to the end. If you wanted to argue that I'm wrong because the best 1999-2001 match in the company involved Rey Misterio Jr., that'd be fine (I think the next three best matches in death-stage WCW involved him). But damn, Sid/Goldberg rules so hard. What a match. I think it's the biggest pleasant surprise from death stage WCW. It had no business being as good as it was. EDIT: Jesse Ventura, at a Havoc in New Orleans, dressed up as a doctor and just declared himself BOURBON STREET'S NUMBER ONE GYNECOLOGIST. The lady in the front row got a genuine kick out of that statement. Man, I guess you can get away with saying that sort of stuff if you're Jesse.

dammit

After a surprising amount of hours in Yotei, I have come to the conclusion that I prefer Tsushima, but this is still decent. I think by going bigger with stuff like shrines and making them very long climbing experiences in a game where climbing is fucking boring, combined with a lot of the new side stuff being less engaging (the reliquary puzzles are snoozers), they've sort of populated this world with stuff that I don't care about. What I like are basically Atsu and the Ainu peoples, but this game is way less fun than the previous one. Annoying ass Nine Tails hiding in bushes and shit. And don't get me started on the developers' method for refilling your spirit. The trade-off of using sake, but getting fuzzy pictures is fine, but the carry count is too low, and forcing me to call my horse so I can camp to do it is nonsense, a total time-waster of a method. Same thing with crafting. Let me just craft some heavy arrows with the material I have; don't make me call my horse, camp, craft, then leave the camp to do it! Also, I'm over these Sony first-party games screaming the solutions to light puzzles at me because I took more than three seconds to look at the screen and think. Fuck off. Anyway, Sony's first-party designers have something of a sophomore slump issue with me. Tsushima and Zero Dawn are two of my favorite games ever, but I found their sequels underwhelming and ultimately forgettable. I haven't touched Forbidden West since I (mostly) finished it, but I've 100%'d Zero Dawn twice in the original and once in the remaster. I've 100%'d Tsushima twice and will probably do it again for fun in a few years, but I doubt that I'll touch Yotei after I finish it (and maybe any DLC just for the heck of it). I dug the hell out of the first Spider-Man game and did not dig the hell out of the second one (though I did love the Miles Morales game). I have faith that Team Asobi will be able to overcome that with the next Astro Bot game, but the rest of these in-house developers...I don't know. In an industry where exploiting IP through sequelitis is the preferred corporate approach, I feel like maybe Sucker Punch would be better off not doing any more Ghost games unless they have an amazing idea for one. I'm also not thrilled about Insomniac becoming a Marvel games farm, but that's a different story. I actually do think they'd kick ass on a new R&C game and care more about one of those than Spider-Man 3, Venom, and Wolverine combined. This is much easier than the first game's method of trapping a Koopa Troopa shell on the steps at the end of 1-1 and doing a series of quickfire ricochets. Six-year-old me could do it in my sleep, but now I'm old and tired and cranky and infirm.

On the one hand, launching a Halo: CE remake without the multiplayer maps is a sin. On the other hand, do I really want getting teabagged and racially slurred by eleven-year-olds to ruin my memories of all the fun I had in Blood Gulch, Hang 'Em High, and Sidewinder during countless LAN get-togethers?

Season 3, Show 25: “Left for Dead” or Yeah, watching this was kind of like enduring a zombie attack, but not in the fun “Valve co-developed a neat game” sort of way It’s a rainy Sunday morning, so let’s watch two! Recap: The Killshot/Dante Fox feud refuses to fucking end. It’s probably running all the way to the end of this season. Prince Puma is still mad at Rey Misterio Jr. for beating him back at Ultima Lucha Dos (and presumably is also still under the strange leadership of unholy bishop Vampiro). Finally, Son of Madness makes his Temple debut against Son of Havoc in the Cueto Cup tonight. Not-all-that-seedy Boyle Heights interstitial: Dante Fox goes for a jog through Boyle Heights’s industrial area. As he does so, he has a war flashback to… Seedy P.O.W. camp somewhere in Afghanistan: …a seedy P.O.W. camp somewhere in Afghanistan. Killshot is in the process of blasting his way out and leaving Fox behind to get his ass beaten by a bunch of dudes in the Taliban. In fact, Fox almost got beheaded on camera when, just before he took a sword to the neck, he was saved by the troops of the good ol’ U.S.-of-A.! Hooray for the troops! Hooray for forever wars that get people killed! U-S-A! Raise your 2x4 in the air! Old Glory kneedrops for all! Not-all-that-seedy Boyle Heights interstitial: Anyway, Dante has that flashback to his stay in Afghanistan and then either legitimately sees or merely hallucinates Killshot standing on a warehouse roof, peering down at him and blasting his finger guns at Fox’s person. God, this was stupid. I don’t rate Swerve or Fox, but their presentation in this company isn’t only doing them no favors; it’s doing them negative favors. Alright, let’s finish up the first round of the Cueto Cup. P.J. Black opens the show against Sexy Star in a matchup that I really don’t think we needed to see again. Then again, this match has a floor in quality because Star can’t just run out here and launch herself off shit while doing five backflips in a row. In fact, this match is based around Black being bigger and stronger and Star needing to get on the move and use her agility to attack. Basically, this is the story of LU: In week-to-week television matches, the promise of a decent match floor means more to me than the possibility of a high match ceiling. Star being a mediocre athlete (at least as far as pro wrestling goes) means that her matches have to escalate at least somewhat reasonably and that the match has to be worked around a clear narrative because she can’t just bust out a bunch of high spots and call it a bout. This is maybe the only company I’ve ever watched where the limited athletes are the ones who feel the safest to watch. In a decent match during which Star gets momentum by going to the air, Taya Valkyrie joins her buddy Black at ringside and trips Star on a rope run. Taya then distracts the ref and throws brass knucks at Black. Black slips them on, but he whiffs on the Power of the Punch. The knucks fall to the mat; Star grabs them, and Taya wisely drops off the apron and frees the ref up to turn his attention back to the match, just in time to see Star land a Power of the Punch. Star gets DQ’d, and while I don’t have beef with this particular finish, boy, do I have beef with how Striker tries to frame it by saying the following: “Dario Cueto has ordered our officials in the Cueto Cup to really enforce the rules.” I didn’t mention this in the previous review, but Striker literally explained a long segment fought outside the ring in the Killshot/Crane match by noting that Dario wanted the refs to relax the count because he wants a winner, not a cheapie finish. I blame Striker for the bad announcing, though, because everything else about that episode was consistent with Dario wanting strictly-enforced rules for the Cup matches: London won by countout, and in the Crane/Killshot match, not two seconds after Striker said that Dario wanted the refs to be a bit more lax, Crane deliberately rolled back into and out of the ring to break the count. Get your fucking story straight, Striker! Anyway, Star frustratedly slugs the ref while Taya grins with pleasure that she was able to adjust to Black’s incompetence in order to pull off her plan. Hype video: More Rey Misterio Jr./Johnny Mundo stuff. They’re really trying with these, but I’m never going to buy into this matchup's supposed magnitude. It’s a shame because, once again, these packages are objectively very well-made. One note: Rey calls Prince Puma “my friend.” Does he know if Puma agrees with him about the nature of their relationship? Son of Havoc meets Son of Madness in our next matchup. Who is Son of Madness? Let’s find out. While I’m doing that, I’d like to note that Havoc meets Madness halfway up the steps and then beals him off the steps and to the mats at ringside, which is a cool spot…twenty seconds into the bout. Can you imagine if they saved that spot for a major escalation in an eventual grudge match instead? Striker asks Vampiro for his insight into this feud, noting that “[Vampiro’s] been to Sturgis.” Striker has alluded to the pomp and circumstance of the illustrious Road Wild PPV before, and I hope that he continues to do so as often as he possibly can. OK, I looked the guy under the Son of Madness hood up and do not have the indie wrestling chops to know him from anything else before laying eyes on him here. The match starts as a ringside brawl before it re-enters the ring where they do a stupid corner spot in which they duck each others corner lariats and then switch places. It’s like that Family Guy gag in which Peter Griffin hurts his knee and then painfully clutches at it in that it goes on like three beats too long, though that’s the point of the Family Guy gag. I’m not sure that it was the point of the corner lariat spot. Striker mentions Jake “the Milkman” Milliman, in what is a Family Guy-like move because he asks Vampiro about if he should maybe make a Milkman reference instead of just going ahead and making a relevant Milkman reference. The joke isn’t in the mentioning of a funny name from the death throes of the AWA, Striker. Dammit. You’ve got to make the joke itself, and if it’s bad, we’ll just crap on it. It's okay. Madness hits a double-stomp and brainbuster-ish suplex combo, only gets 2.5, and shakes his head in disbelief like he unloaded on the Undertaker, but the guy still kicked out. Or like the Undertaker if the Undertaker unloaded on Brock Lesnar, but Lesnar still kicked out. Someone please win this match already. I don’t care who wins it. Just someone. Anyone. Eventually, one of these myriad double-stomps will connect and keep the opponent down. Or not! Actually, what happens is that Madness rolls out of the way of a Havoc SSP attempt, but Havoc lands on his feet. Madness tries a quick rollup with a yank of the tights; Havoc kicks out at two. Havoc does the same to Madness without a yank of the tights and manages to get three anyway. Madness attacks Havoc after the match and steals his biker jacket. Shades of PCO yapping Bret Hart’s jacket in 1995! Stop borrowing dumb WWE angles from 1995, Lucha Underground showrunners! Prince Puma shouldn’t have much issue putting away Ricky Mandel in this penultimate first-round Cueto Cup match. Mandel comes out dressed like Mundo; he attempts to mimic Mundo’s entrance taunt, but the fans cut out and his hair doesn’t flow seemingly effortlessly in mid-air as it does for his hero. Honestly, Mandel looks way more like X-Pac in this get-up than he does Mundo. Mandel gets on the house mic, declares that he’ll be taking Puma to Slamtown, and then immediately gets kicked in the face. Mandel actually kicks out of a suplex combo and lands a superkick of his own, but Puma eats it for breakfast and returns yet another kick, then lands a spinning cradle Tombstone for three, and that’s a pretty cool move, actually. Vampiro seems pretty stoked about Puma’s performance from his spot at the desk. Seedy backstage interstitial: Rey Misterio Jr. meets El Dragon Azteca Jr. in the back; Rey is here to support his young charge, who hopes to battle with Rey for the big gold at Ultima Lucha Tres. Dark Prince Puma cuts in and tells Rey that he wants a rematch at Tres, and since he’s planning to win the Cueto Cup, he hopes that Rey does his part by beating Mundo rather than losing his shot at the gold and thus the rematch. Rey and Azteca are displeased with Puma’s mercurial attitude, but Rey shrugs the intrusion off and re-focuses Azteca (“One match at a time”) like the awesome mentor and claimant to the title of Greatest of All-Time that he is. Striker and Vampiro preview the Sweet Sixteen round of the Cueto Cup with a focus on next week’s matches: Paul London versus Mil Muertes – if Muertes still has working vertebrae after Crane snapped his neck with a couple of chairs last week, that is – Jeremiah Crane versus Taya Valkyrie, and Marty “the Moth” Martinez versus Rey Fenix in a battle of dudes who like Melissa Santos (but she only likes one of them back). Dante Fox meets El Dragon Azteca Jr. (w/Rey Misterio Jr.) in the final first-round Cueto Cup match. This bout will be improved if more people get involved. Give me gaga. Get Killshot and Prince Puma out here to interfere. As both men embark upon a pacey opening that is alright, man, because they keep it in the ring and there aren’t just wild dives every-fucking-where, I am just waiting for the jibber-jabber in the finish. Vampiro is over at the desk selling that he is threatened by Rey Misterio Jr., complaining about Rey being at ringside even though he’s not in the match and audibly preferring the “darkness” and violence that Fox displays. I don’t think Rey is going to stop you from corrupting Puma, Vamp. You can calm down over there. This match is what it is. Fox does stuff like a guillotine legdrop to Azteca on the apron that I really think should be saved for a big spot in a big match, but you know what, my philosophy of wrestling is completely different from what’s in, what’s hip, and what’s popular! I am just old! And that’s fine! I am owning the fact that I am old! I used to know what was jiggy, but now I have no idea! I am the Val to the modern wrestling fan's Daria Morgendorffer! I don’t like that a lot of my commentary on LU’s weekly matches is so same-y, though. It’s hard to say much more about the house style. You know what I like, dear reader, and I know what I like, so what else is there to discuss, really? I’m actually glad that there are only four seasons of this show because I feel like even that much LU is more than is necessary for me to analyze how I feel about it or how I (don't) fit into the modern big-time TV wrestling fandom. I do think that because the show has essentially signaled me that Killshot is going to get involved somehow in the show-opening recap, it’s also impossible to get into the nearfalls at the end of the match. I get why LU does this; the show is heavily serialized. The reminders are often useful. Alas, they also indicate that the feuds showcased in the recap are getting progression that night. Ah, here’s the gaga! Azteca sells an injury while the Worldwide Underground swarms Rey and eventually beats him down at ringside. Azteca ducks a Fox lariat and dives onto the Undrerground to break it up, then tries to springboard back into the ring, takes a boot to the face on one of what feels like a billion superkicks on the night, and then falls to a Dante Fox Foxcatcher for three. Well, look at this: Killshot didn’t get involved in the finish. Still, it was clear enough that there would be some fuck shit going on in the finish of the main, so ultimately, my inability to bite on any near falls was pretty much pre-ordained. Technically, this was better than last week’s show, but the bar is in the Ninth Circle of Hell and being used as a toothpick to get all the leftover bits of Cassius out of Satan’s teeth. 1.25 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Season 3, Show 24: “Macho Madness” or Since we're alluding to Macho Man Randy Savage in the title of this show, here's a syllogism for you! Good wrestling : This episode of Lucha Underground :: Macho Man's entrance music at WrestleMania 8 : Macho Man's entrance music in an early '90s LJN WWF video game on SNES or Genesis Wow, I’m allowed to sit down and write about some wrestling? I didn’t know that was still a possibility at this time of the year! (I am genuinely bummed because I had aimed for finishing this watch-through by the end of the year, but now I’m relegated to hoping that I can finish it by the end of January. January 2026, I want to be clear. January 2026. If I’m still somewhere in the middle of season four by January 2027, I’m going to need an admin to figuratively nuke this thread from virtual orbit.) Recap: Oh no, Killshot and Dante Fox are still feuding. I had blissfully forgotten about that. Jeremiah Crane is still striking out with Catrina, as you may recall, and as you may recall even more recently than that, the Cueto Cup started and continues tonight right alongside all the other drama in the Temple. Seedy meditation room interstitial: Catrina interrupts Mil Muertes’s said meditation to issue him a new order of commands. Cat sends him out there to win not only his first round match in the Cueto Cup, but the whole shebang. Mil says that he’ll win it for her because she is his “love.” She is not his love, but in a move that Vince Russo would claim is JUST LIKE WOMEN, BRO, she responds to Mil's claim with a kiss to keep Mil doing the stuff that she wants him to do. Mil, she’s not into you, dude! You are the stereotypical unloved husband whose wife just keeps him around to pay a chunk of the mortgage! Oh yeah, also, Jeremiah Crane sneaked into the meditation room and saw that whole exchange from a dark corner, so not only is he irrationally enraged, he’s just as confused as Mil is about who Catrina actually loves. That is, if Catrina was even telling the truth about actually being in love with Fenix. She doesn’t seem all that bothered by Fenix macking on Melissa Santos, after all. Probably what we should take away from anything Cat’s done is that the only person she is truly in love with is herself. Matt Striker and Vampiro hype the Cueto Cup. We don’t see tonight’s quadrant, though. Veneno, AKA Officer Cortez Castro Reyes or whatever the hell order I've been naming him in, I haven’t watched this show in a while so forgive me, is out here to get destroyed by Mil Muertes (w/Catrina). I find it hilarious that Veneno/Reyes is still getting tossed into matches where he’s going to get slaughtered even though conceivably, Dario doesn’t recognize that it’s even him. I might guess that Dario has figured it out and is doing this on purpose, but sometimes he gets lucky and does an accidental sadism instead of his usual purposeful sadistic behavior. Mil just murders this dude with a spear to start, throws a ton of soupbones, lands a chokeslam, and drops Officer Cortez Castro “Veneno” Reyes with a Flatliner for the **Shang Tsung voice** flawless victory. Melissa Santos had better stop with her nonsense. She announces Paul London as being “from down the rabbit hole,” which is not my issue. My issue is that she uses her left hand to point toward the mat while circling it around as though it is swirling down a drain. Is Melissa Santos the worst ring announcer ever? I think she might be! Vibora (w/Kobra Moon) is hailed as “from when reptiles ruled the earth,” and you know what, I’m not taking any of this shit seriously. Look at Vibora! That mask makes him look like a goomba from the shitty live-action Super Mario Bros. movie! London’s initial offensive flurry, unlike Mil’s in the previous match, is woefully ineffective, so he grabs a carrot and holds it threateningly to Kobra’s neck while Kobra yells VI-BO-RA in the same cadence as the Swiss guy from the Matterhorn yelled RI-CO-LA in those old cough drop ads from the ‘90s. That’s now two random (unintentional?) callbacks to media from the ‘90s just in this match. Why doesn’t this show next call back to WWF and WCW in 1997 next and have a good wrestling match or three? London does a forward flip off a lariat to the back of the head, but had he just snapped himself to the mat face forward, it would have made the move look more vicious. The comedy in this bout didn’t land for me, and this is a worse squash-y type match than then one that came before it. For some reason, the other two Rabbit Tribe members run into the ring, and though they don’t actually do anything, I guess it serves as a distraction that allows London to use his legs to yank Vibora to the floor, where Vibora then completely fails to catch London on a trust fall. The ref leapt right the hell out to the floor to check on him because it looked like London injured his neck. As it turns out, this isn’t a squash at all; the Rabbit Tribe members grab Vibora’s ankles and keep him from beating the count, which is a problem that London doesn’t have. London wins by countout. This match was an abomination unto the wrestling gods. We see a bracket update: Jeremiah Crane versus Killshot and Joey Ryan versus Taya Valkyrie are the other two matches in the quadrant. KEEP JOEY THE HELL AWAY FROM TAYA. Taya is pretty rad, IMO. I would assume that she’s actually going to win this match. She’d better not be jobbing to Joey Ryan’s punk ass. Speaking of, here’s the dude with the absolute worst shtick in a Temple full of questionable third-season gimmicks. The camera zooms in on his dick as he enters the ring. Yuck. Ryan does his fucking nonsense that grosses Taya out, like ew, and she throws some forearms, then follows with a clothesline and double knees that send Ryan to the floor. Taya goes out there and brings Ryan back into the ring by his short hairs (on his chest, mind you), but my least favorite transition happens and Ryan scores a superkick. Ryan tries for a countout victory, then decides to go out and land some strikes before putting Taya back in the ring and taking about fifty years to consider a possible top rope move. Naturally, he gets caught up there and tossed to the mat, Ric Flair-style. A follow-up double-stomp earns her two, but she misses a corner charge. Ryan smacks her and tries an electric chair move, but she wriggles away and to the mat, then manages to duck a wild Ryan swing. Taya stays hooked around Ryan’s waist, hits a Northern Lights Suplex, releases her grasp, and lands another double-stomp that this time does keep Ryan down for three. There is only one more match on this show, but there are twenty-three minutes left in this show. Let’s all hope for a bunch of interstitials and not a twenty-minute Jeremiah Crane/Killshot match. For the love of all that is holy, please, no. Seedy backstage interstitial: Mil Muertes checks his tie in the mirror of the dingy locker room bathroom, then saunters out into the hall…and right into a chair attack from an enraged Jeremiah Crane. Crane knocks him out and declares that Catrina is his lady even though she doesn’t seem interested in him at all, and I doubt that she’s just going to agree to date him or whatever because he says so, not even if Crane does a combination Pillmanizer/Con-chair-to sort of deal to snap Mil’s neck. Whoops, he does that combo move anyway, thus illustrating the futility of love or some shit. Is the meta-joke here that Paul London will keep getting matched up against monsters in the Cueto Cup, but somehow he'll manage to stumble all the way into the semis? Hype video: Sorry, but I can’t get up for Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Johnny Mundo, though Chavo Guerrero Jr. tries his best by giving his analysis. So does Brian Cage, who I note does not have the gauntlet on his hand. Puma is also called upon to comment and notes that this is the first time these men have wrestled…in the Temple. Exactly my point, man! We've seen this matchup before! Many times! Striker also hypes this thing, and he does some real sports comparison in which he likens this Mundo/Misterio close-cut rivalry to others in both real and real-ish sports: Ali/Frazier (thinking big with the comparison there, but okay), Tate/Rousey (uh, not that close-cut), and Flair/Steamboat (is Steamboat Flair’s best opponent…or is it Terry Funk? No, it’s Steamboat because he didn’t have a nightmare match against Flair in early 2000 WCW like Funk did). This is objectively a quite good hype package for a match that I simply feel zero hype for. Also, kayfabe predictions: Chavo chooses Rey, Cage chooses Mundo, and Striker is a broadcast journalist and therefore invokes the Heenan rule to pick the heel. Whoops, sorry, actually he doesn’t pick because he wants to appear impartial, just as Heenan was an impartial broadcast journalist who would never pick the heel. Puma angrily picks Rey and makes it obvious as he does so that he is reliving his own loss to the guy (Season Two, Show Twenty-Six), thus keeping that iron in the fire for a future rematch that probably won’t happen. At least not in this company. (Also, Cage suggested that Mundo would win because “he cheats, he’s cagey,” and the way he sorta paused as he said that last word made me think that he realized what a viewer might say back to the screen, which is that who could possibly be more cagey than Cage himself?) I bet you can guess how this Killshot/Jeremiah Crane match begins. Go ahead, guess. No, silly, not with a mat wrestling exchange. No, you goof, not with a series of well-worked punches as both men brawl with one another. Yes, that’s it, with both men exchanging dives at top speed while also no-selling the effects of the dive they were hit with to then subsequently hit their own dive. If you wanted to book a match that I wouldn’t give a single shit about, you’d toss these two guys into it. There’s nothing like one dude hitting another dude with an Exploder Suplex on the floor two minutes into the match, thus rendering such a huge spot meaningless. This match fucking stinks. I’ll tell you how it ends or if anything that means anything happens in it (other than the finish). I just want reasonable escalation in my matches. Is that so much to ask? There’s nowhere to go when you start a match doing wild shit and two minutes in, you’ve had someone hit an Exploder on the floor. It just turns into a big spot fest with a ton of such spots that feel small because they don’t mean anything. There are also lots of contrived flips and, in the case of this match, some annoying facial expressions from Crane. The crowd chants FIGHT FOREVER, which of course is a marker on Smugly’s personal map of crowd chants that indicate that a match is actually godawful. This is the sort of chant you’d hear from a crowd full of demons in hell while you are strapped to a front row seat with your eyelids yanked upward, A Clockwork Orange-style, and being forced to watch modern (circa-2020s) wrestling. Also, I guess there’d be hot pokers stabbed into your private parts at the same time or something since it’s hell. But the point is, you’d have hot pokers stabbed into your private parts while being painfully subjected to Killshot/Crane, which is a level of torture heretofore unimaginable. This thing finally ends when Dante Fox gets on a house mic and is like I STILL HATE YOU, KILLSHOT, which allows Crane to grab a distracted Killshot and land a Cranial Contusion for the victory. You can do anything to Killshot and he’ll kick out…except for distracting him on a house mic. That one move is worth a million Exploder Suplexes on the floor. This match was aggressively bad, as was most of this show. Ater this match, the lights go out and when they come back on, Catrina has blit-blurted to the top of the stairs. She has her mystical Aztec stone and looks, um, annoyed? Constipated? Kind of interested in Crane? Who knows? Crane blows her a kiss, and then… Seedy backstage interstitial: …Dario Cueto reorganizes his Cueto Cup board after tonight’s matches while excitedly talking to someone off-screen about how rad this tournament has been so far. Well, sure, that’s an opinion that one might have. Dario is especially excited about next week’s bouts, which we can see on the board. Here is the fourth quadrant’s worth of matches: Prince Puma vs. Ricky Mandel; Sexy Star vs. P.J. Black; El Dragon Azteca Jr. vs. Dante Fox…and the fourth bracket is not yet filled. Hold on. A guy in a Son of Havoc-like mask sits across from Dario; Dario has just hired him. He’s Son of Madness, and he’ll be facing Son of Havoc as the final match in the fourth quadrant, in what promises to be a battle of masked guys who ride motorbikes. I definitely stopped watching by this point the first time around because I don’t remember Son of Madness at all. Well, this was bad! 0.75 LU-CHA chants out of 5.