Lucha Underground 3×16: The Battle of the Bulls

Matches

The Mack won The battle of the Bulls final over Jeremiah Crane, PJ Black and Cage (good)

• PJ Black beat Cage with a 450 splash (6:01)

• Mack beat Crane with a middle rope stunner (10:29)

• Mack beat Black with a stunner (11:31)

Johnny Mundo beat Sexy Star to keep the Lucha Underground championship (escape after mask pull, 12:07, ok) – first defense

Developments

Johnny Mundo is your Lucha Underground champion, and he won it all by himself this time. He didn’t do it cleanly, because he is Johnny Mundo, but he’s still champion and I doubt much else matters to him. Mundo escaped the cage to win, in a match where Sexy Star had most of the chances to escape. She also had the clearest close call, getting free at the top of the cage, but opting for a top rope plancha on Mundo instead of escaping. Vampiro loudly insisted Sexy wanted to make a statement about never running away. Sexy didn’t run, but, like in telling Mack not to help out a few weeks ago, it wasn’t the right decision as far as winning the match. Mundo and Sexy battled next to the cage soon after, with Mundo pulling off Sexy’s mask and escaping as she scrambled it to the back. (Striker sold this as Sexy choosing the mask over her title; he probably would’ve aged better if he had explained more as a distraction technique.)

Mundo’s next opponent will be the Mack. Mack won the four way Battle of the Bulls match, which was elimination rules for the final. Cage was dominant early, but a Texano lasso punch followed by big moves from the three legal participants set up his elimination. Crane was caught via middle rope stunner from the Mack. PJ tried to beat Mack at his own stunner game, only for Mack to no sell Black’s stunner and pull of one of his own for the win. The Mack and Sexy Star hoped to have a title match, but the show instead ended with Mack dishing out one more stunner to his future opponent Mundo.

Crane’s loss might have been because he had other things on his mind. After his match, he went to Dario to request a match for next week, and to reach into Dario’s ceiling to pull out a stone table object Crane claimed he’d left there when he was a child. Dario was a befuddled by that sequence as the home viewer (and it seems pretty miraculous it wasn’t damaged in last season’s Matanza/Muertes roof collapse.) Crane immediately confronted Catrina, revealed the match he asked for was against Mil next week, revealed he knew Mil’s real Mendoza identity, promised to have Catrina all to himself, and passed thru her like a ghost. We’re still over due an explanation of what’s going on here, but at least we’ve got a match out of what we’ve heard so far.

In business for last week, Fenix and Drago searched the bathroom for any sign of Drago. They didn’t find him, but they did find Kobra Moon. Kobra insisted Drago had rejoined her tribe, but the trios champions didn’t believe it. Kobra, Pindar and Vibora beat up Fenix & Aerostar and told them to leave Drago to them. Later, we saw Drago was chained in Kobra’s throne room, not having rejoined the tribe and not happy with his current situation.

Is that it? There was a spider in the Sexy Star/the Mack vignette, though they didn’t see it. That seems like it.

Thoughts

This is not one of my favorite episodes of Lucha Underground, by any means. The bathroom fight had the most satisfying action on the show, even if it was heavily edited and stylized making it a bit hard to follow.

The cage match is getting a Gentleman’s OK. It didn’t really work for me at all, it had just about all the same problems as other singles matches during this run, and the announcer’s lines trying to hype Sexy Star were the hardest thing to believe on a show that had reptiles fighting a spaceman. Striker talking about the strength and athleticism between Sexy Star and Johnny Mundo was among the craziest things he’s ever said. He did slightly back away from it late in the match, but it took me out of the match to a degree that surprised me. They fell into a trap of insisting Sexy was the equal of every man she was facing, when her most competent offense in this match was running in place on Johnny’s back. Sexy as an underdog who was showing heart to sneak out victories might have been plausible, but they insisted on trying to sell a dynamic that anyone possessing two – or maybe even one! – good eye could tell was not plausible. There’s more to criticize here beyond the presentation, and it’d be easy to argue for a lower grade, but I’m mostly happy it’s over. Sexy Star will be around, but she thankfully won’t be in A stories, won’t be having a singles match every other week, and we’ll get to see what Mundo can do as a champion with someone who might be able to do a little bit more.

I trot out the point about some matches likely being better received when they’re watched without commercials on demand. Maybe that’ll be the case for the fourway, but I’m not even sure this time. Cage was always going to be the most over guy and likely the most impressive guy, but by having him do his run of super offense (and it was absolutely a super run of offense) before he was eliminated first, everything else felt a lot less impressive. It followed the normal pattern of these matches, where the guy who’s going on next takes over the match so the guys who are left at the end can save their spots until then, only Cage as so good, no one was really going to be able to follow him. It didn’t help that three guys left haven’t been on Cage’s level until now. Plus, the Texano/Cage thing is so not over, Cage being pulled back into that felt like a downgrade. The last segment going under a minute, just moments after an ad break, made the finish flatter than it should’ve been. They needed more time to build some momentum, and just felt like it got cut off suddenly. Maybe it was planned that way, maybe they had to edit a longer section into a small time because they needed the minutes elsewhere, but it didn’t come off like the big deal end of a tournament.

The bathroom fight was good, and someone worked hard to make Drago’s flame look much better here than it did in the season preview trailer. I’m not in love with the Crane back story – even if it was clear to me, they’re bordering on too many people with secretly intertwined histories – but Crane/Muertes sounds like a really fun match and I’m all right with that.

(Maybe the biggest deal on the show was a commercial advertising the Blue Demon show as airing on Unimas, with English captions even. Unimas seems like a fine place for a lucha libre show.)