Lucha Underground 3×27: Fade to Black

Matches

Pindar beat Cage (0:31, DQ for punch ref, no rating)

Dante Fox beat Son of Havoc (9:12, foxcatcher, good)

Prince Puma beat PJ Black (15:52, 630 senton, great)

Developments

Week six of the Cueto Cup continued the spotlights on specific characters. This one was heavy on Prince Puma’s current status quo. He’s still tortured by visions even despite beating Mil Muertes. Vampiro advised him to do that, and now he’s telling Puma that he’s got to win the title back to be free of his torment. Puma took one step closer to that goal by defeating PJ Black in one of the longest matches on this show in some time. With Black’s elimination, all the members of the Worldwide Underground are out of the Cueto Cup.

PJ Black did get a consolation prize. An earlier vignette revealed Johnny Mundo had hired an enthusiastic if under-informed and perhaps foolish agent to market Worldwide Underground. The agent, Benjamin Cooke, badgered Dario Cueto into giving him a non-tournament next week: it’ll be PJ Black facing Rey Mysterio, before Mysterio takes on Mundo for the title.

Puma’s quarterfinal opponent will be Dante Fox. That was a bit of surprise, and it was helped a bit by Son of Madness thrashing Son of Havoc before this second round match. Havoc didn’t show a lot of wear during the fight but Fox still seemed to take most of the match.

The opening second round match barely counted as a match. Cage was very unwilling to remove his gauntlet, hitting referee Justin Borden and Pindar with it at the start of the match. Cage was immediately disqualified, but gave a Borden a Drill Claw anyway. (Striker foreshadowed a referee decision by hurriedly mentioning a meeting between the referees and Dario just before Cage hit the ref.) Pindar will face Fenix in the next round of the Cueto Cup.

Thoughts

It’s been a long time since a Lucha Underground show felt this unbalanced. Between two breaks, one vignette, one non-match, and one attack prior to a match, they went about 19 minutes before any real action started. And then they went nearly that long in the main event! Weird short segments are always the tradeoff when they go all out for a big match at the end of the show, but the sequencing was a problem. If the Fox match is first and the Cage match is second, maybe it flows a bit better.

Sequencing is a problem with Cage’s story too. Cage’s scene with Councilman Delgado – a character treated as very important to the show’s mythos who was killed off in a big way four weeks ago and has never been mentioned again, you may have forgot – would’ve made more sense airing around this match than before the Vinnie one. Cage was still willing to take the gauntlet off at that match, even though he wasn’t during the vignettes. He’s the out of control Cage now and showing it later would’ve reduced this bizarre gap between when LU did a major story point and when they finally get around to following up on what it means.

Fox/Havoc felt like it was missing a little bit of substance and they brushed off Madness’ attack a little to easily, but it was still two athletes doing cool things in impressive fashion. Totally watchable. Dante winning is a bit of an important choice; no one’s made by beating Son of Havoc, but it does move Dante up from the fringe part of the roster to someone worth paying attention to. His matches warrant the same attention.

PJ Black/Prince Puma had to pace themselves and had to work in points of Puma being angry/frustrated/dark and had to overcome no one having any idea what PJ Black’s big moves are because he hasn’t won a match cleanly on this show in a 50 or so episodes. (Maybe his finish is still the 450 splash? Striker called something “the Wellness Policy” because he’s Dr. Black on Twitter and the WWE wellness policy guy is Dr. Black but no one in the crowd knew anything other than it was a move. It would’ve helped PJ to beat Sexy Star with a move, but priorities are what they are.) This was another one of those weekly LU matches where I wasn’t feeling it for a while but they did so much that they got in the end. Evil Puma’s power moves, his suplexes out of tough positions, come off as even bigger feats than his flying. There was a strike exchange really late that looked good and felt like the turning point to something bigger, and then they went and did crazy stuff out of the corners. PJ looked good, really smooth on his flying, and it came off as the best spotlight he’s had on the night. It’s odd to bring him back against Rey next week, but at least it should look fine.

I hope there’s a good payoff for the Agent Cooke thing later, because it feels like there’s two dozen different plots lines LU could be advancing and they did a rando comedy segment for no reason instead. It seemed to serve no purpose here; Dario could’ve announced PJ vs Rey and it would’ve made no difference. It wasn’t terrible, but it was frustrating to see them add another thread to the pile when there’s so many there already.

As someone who watched a lot of AAA, Pindar versus Fenix sounds awesome. Dante Fox versus Prince Puma will be pretty good too. They are getting to the big matches, and I hope they take advantage of how long this tournament is by pounding home all the people who each quarter-finalist (and then semi-finalst and finalist) they had to beat to get there.