Lucha Underground Season 2 Episode 20: The Contenders

1. Marty The Moth Martinez vs. Killshot

ER: This was my kind of Killshot match! It was only a minute long and never made it into the ring! They brawl on the floor and Moth hits a brutal powerbomb, launching Killshot painfully into the guardrail (the one in front of the fans who are up a level), then takes a nasty bump into the announce table as they were getting counted out. The end of the segment, however, is truly embarrassing as Moth tries to steal Killshot's super duper special dog tags, and they fight over them with Killshot pulling Moth's hair as Moth screams. But Moth escapes with them, and then they do one of those silly overplayed WWE standoffs, where one guy is in the ring and the other is standing on the entrance ramp, and the camera darts back and forth at their faces as the glower and flare nostrils and breathe spittle out of their mouths. Except the Temple is really small, so they're standing like 6 feet apart from each other. In WWE you at least have a guy way up on the stage, but here the ring entrance is just right next to the ring. So Killshot is glowering at Moth like "you got away this time!" but Moth is basically standing a quick jump away from him. Killshot just could of hopped out and tried to wrest his precious dog tags away some more. So...so so stupid.

ER: At any given hour of the day you can find 60 years of televised cop shows on TV, and I challenge you to find any sort of procedural that is as terrible as these LU cop segments. I mean this is a genre with literally thousands of hours to lift from, there's just no excuse for it being this bad. Cisco tries, and the bead of sweat running down his temple was a nice visual, but Ryan and Castro are just brutally bad. I still have no idea what tone they're going for, as they haven't succeeded in any sort of tone I can think of. Lynchpin for the End of Days? Is this going to evolve into Dario doing some sort of Pacino in Devil's Advocate type of spiel? That could work, actually...

2. Nunchucks Match: Jack Evans & PJ Black vs. Aerostar & Drago

ER: This had the feel of a jumbled mess for awhile, a sloppy tag with a silly stip. Aerostar looked clumsy, Jack Evans had to wait around ages for Aerostar/Drago to hit some unnecessarily complicated offense, just felt like a bit of a mess. Evans being a loon saved things for awhile, and everybody wiping out while Evans/Black went for the nunchucks the first time snapped me awake. But a couple minutes later, when Drago got a set of nunchucks, suddenly things got completely awesome. The visual of Drago whipping the nunchucks around was great, then he whips Evans in the face and does a flip dive onto everybody, Aerostar hits a huge crossbody off the office (filmed from behind so it looked like he launched 20 feet out), the sound sweetening actually made sense for once on the nunchuck shots, and Drago's finish was killer: Misting Evans for what felt like forever (where was he keeping all of that!?) then hitting his slick armdrag/roll up pin off the top for the win. This whole thing really went out on a high note.

3. Prince Puma, Rey Mysterio, Son of Havoc, The Mack, Texano Jr., & Sexy Star vs. Fenix, Ivelisse, King Cuerno, Taya, Johnny Mundo & Pentagon Jr.

ER:  Everybody's reaction to Pentagon's return was kinda strange. As he destroyed Chavo the rest of the match participants just kinda stood around in the ring giving knowing smiles. Were they supposed to be more in awe of a supposed quadriplegic returning, walking again, and wrecking Chavo? They all acted like they had no clue who this dude was, but were just admiring this guy laying a beating on Chavo. That oddness aside, this was a real fun match. If you give it the proper amount of time it's really hard to mess up a big multiman match. Sexy Star stuff was kept to a minimum, and she even got to hit a nice flip dive during the trainwreck sequence. Fenix was probably my favorite in this, this fed has really been an awakening for him. Mundo and Texano take a couple big bumps to the floor (love Mundo bumping in sunglasses), Taya takes a big bump past the ringpost and down the steps, the dive train was really great, Mack had several nice moments (he's really great in these kinds of matches), and yeah, this probably could have had 10 more minutes added to it and really gone for broke. Super fun match.

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