Day: July 13, 2017

Matches

Jeremiah Crane beat Taya (6:23, Cranium Contusion, good)

Mil Muertes beat Paul London (9:29, flatliner, good)

Fenix beat Marty Martines (10:31, backslide cradle, good)

Developments

The Cueto Cup moved onto the second round, but it didn’t really move on in content. There were only three matches this week, but it remains purely on this the tournament. The tradeoff is having one less match meant everything got time; two matches went about ten minutes and they still had time left to let the main event angle fully play out.

The first two matches went as mostly expected. Jeremiah Crane defeated Taya in the opener, with a little interference from Sexy Star. Her appearance didn’t cause Taya to immediately lose, but things went downhill for her soon after and Crane moved on with a win. Sexy Star has not moved on from her tournament loss, waking Taya up here to knock her right back out with a brass kuncks aided punch. Crane has a fantastic chance of winning this if he can keep fighting people who have other issues. Unfortunately for him, the guy he faces next round has a big issue with him.

Mil Muertes showed absolutely no affect from Crane’s attack to him a couple weeks back. Paul London’s silliy antics and randomness didn’t affect him much either. Paul London spamming the superkick button did seem to work for a moment, and Mala Suerte running into a Mil Muertes punch did open the door for a London shooting star press. That only got two, a follow up SSP still got two, and Mil finished taking care of business soon after. Mil faces Crane in the quarterfinals.

The main event got a bit more serious. Beforehand, Aerostar and Fenix chatted for a moment, with Aerostar’s encouragement being meant by a well meaning wisecrack – “It’s not really fair to let a time traveler gamble!” Aerostar tried to diffuse any notion he actually traveled time, but that ability to see the future is making him a bit pessimistic about freeing Drago from the Reptile Tribe. The good news for Drago is Aerostar probably can’t see the future that welll, or he would’ve warned Fenix about his match with Marty.

Marty was putting himself in Melissa Santos personal space from the get go, bringing a lunch box and trying to force a sandwich in her mouth pre-match. Melissa escaped and cheered Fenix strongly during the match. Mariposa tried to pass the lunchbox to Marty late in it, but Melissa got involved for the first time to stop it. Fenix won soon after (don’t get distracted!) and will be in the quarterfinals against the winner of Cage & Pindar. Fenix might be still hurting when that match comes around: Marty smacked him with the lunchbox post match, pulled out a metal fork from inside, and repeatedly stabbed Fenix with it. LU stuck with this bit for a while, as Marty licked Fenix’s head and the fork for good measure. Mariposa forced Melissa to helplessly watch the entire attack. That ended the show, but this issue is clearly not over.

The announcers revealed next week will have three more second round matches: Cage versus Pindar, PJ Black versus Prince Puma and Dante Fox versus Son of Havoc. That leaves Pentagon versus Drago and the Mack versus Texano for two weeks from now. We saw a bit of the last man in a bar. Brenda showed up to flirt with Texano (when she wasn’t calling him boring), and a gleeful Famous B watched from afar. Maybe they’ll have made a deal by the time we see Texano next.

Thoughts

Everything felt good on this show and it was an enjoyable hour, even if nothing felt specifically great. If this is generally the pacing of show we’re going to get the next two weeks, it’s going to be a better round.

Still, the show being so totally on the Cueto Cup has caused so many other things to just disappear off the side. The two skits didn’t really advance anything, but just seemed to exist to remind you the Drago mindwashed slave plot and Famous B recruiting Texano plots are still active plots even if they haven’t been seen in a month. There’s stuff like Cage’s murder of Delgado and whatever happened to Matanza which have just not gotten the attention they needed. (Conversely, there was no Mundo/Rey bit this week and I didn’t even notice until I got to writing this.)

The opener felt disappointing, but only because I had heard it was a really noteworthy match and it was just a good match. It was more the story of the match, of Taya coming back after being squashed for the first couple minutes, that made it work even more than the moves. The crowd reacted to it a lot stronger than we were seeing on screen, so maybe it got lost in the editing a bit. That crowd reaction did help Taya come off as a big star, and also kind of turned her face in the process. Which made the Sexy Star thing come off more vindictive than it probably was meant to be – like, congrats for knocking out someone who was already semiconscious, great accomplishment.

London/Mil got there in the end, but it took a long bit of London playing his character and getting occasionally beat up to get to that point. The checklist seemed something like Mil being a monster, London being weird, and getting the one convincing near fall off a shooting star press, and they hit everything on the list, but it felt like it was wasting my time for a bit. Maybe if London doesn’t fool around for seven minutes and doesn’t seem to get his hope comeback with infinite superkick spot then the first shooting star press doesn’t have that feeling of a maybe shocking win, but I spend a fair chunk of this time wondering why it wasn’t going to the opener instead.

I had no such reservations about the main event. My perspective is colored by other events, but Fenix & Marty have surprisingly good chemistry for being very different wrestlers, and Marty doing the frustrated for not being able beat anyone bit everyone does actually works a lot better with the story they’re telling. I wasn’t looking for forks in my lucha libre, but they did get 100% out of this one, giving it time for Marty to make the attack count instead of rushing to something else, and even having the announcers quiet down when the visuals were all we needed. The distraction finishes are still coming too often, though they were self conscious enough in this set to make sure the finishes didn’t come exactly after, and this story needed Melissa to get involved for the first time to actually advance the story.