Lucha Underground Season 4 Episode 1: El Jefe

ER: Yeah yeah, we're back. We're late because of me, but we're back. I am still doing this spoiler free, which is seeming like an exponentially stupid thing to do considering I've liked each season less than the one that preceded it. I'm hoping for a nice return to form this season. Saying that, I don't actually know who is still involved with the fed, which is part of the fun/horror of going into this thing blind.

TL: Hilariously, if we didn't avoid spoilers, we might cherry pick through things instead on here. There's a lot of horror in this one, though. A LOT of horror.

ER: I immediately regret falling behind at the very beginning of the season, since we get introduced to Papa Antonio Cueto, which I imagine caused quite the varied reactions. I both love it for its ridiculousness, and hate it for its everything else. This is clearly a show with some money behind it, surely we have some extra dough in the coffers for a better wig? Cueto's wig was a 0.8 on the Amanda Bynes Courtroom Appearance scale. The beardwork was okay. The voicework was sub-Christian Bale Batman growl voice. The framed photo was as good as any funeral portrait you've seen, but they lose major points for not having a Temple flower arrangement. Okay this was fucking awful.

TL: So, we get the saga of Dario, the feds, and the power glove, complete with Lorenzo Lamas’ removed eyeball and some dude in a Puma mask who may or may not look like someone who has a big match coming up at NXT: Takeover Brooklyn 4. But THEN we get Dario not only dying, but his father coming to his sparsely attended funeral.

AND IT’S THE SAME GUY THAT PLAYED DARIO WHO IS PLAYING HIS FATHER.

Imagine after the aborted Vince car bomb angle that got shelved because He Who Shall Not Be Named did That Which Shall Not Be Described, you get Vince coming back as the ghost of Vince Sr. haunting Raw on a regular basis. It would have been way better than the Twitter bot that played the Raw GM for months upon months. I understand LU is a pulp show on a pulp network and there is some goofiness going on, but this goes beyond the pale on the goofiness scale. Of course, Antonio berates his son, knocks down his memorial portrait in the ring because he finally has control of HIS promotion, and then announces Aztec Warfare for the LU title. That is definitely a way to start off the new season of this show.


Aztec Warfare 4!

ER: Okay, THIS was fucking awful. What a terrible, sluggish, boring, uninteresting match to start your 4th season off with a fart sound. This whole mess was designed to show the dominance of Pentagon, and for a lazy dude he turned in one of his absolutely laziest performances I've seen. Maybe because it was so long and one-note? It was bad. It started with him and Tommy Dreamer having a super slow mo kendo stick battle, and continued with him hitting his finisher on approximately 10 guys. The new entrants appear to be coming in every 30 seconds, and there's an elimination every 30-60 seconds. New guys come in, new guys take one move, new guys leave. It was fucking awful. Even Matt Striker wasn't trying, and brother they don't come more try hard than Matt Striker. In arguably the least inspired moment of a match filled with uninspired moments, Vinny Massaro comes out, gets a pepperoni pizza delivery, starts to eat a slice and in the flattest tone I've ever heard from him Striker weakly says "PizzaGate". That's it. That's the joke. The joke is that there is no joke. There's a reference, but no attempt at a joke. And the reference is already nearly 2 years past expiration. When Pentagon hooked Massaro's leg on the pin I expected him to flatly sputter out a Sandy Hook reference, but no. I rooted pretty hard for Chavo, just because he was infinitely more interesting in this match than Pentagon, and the crowd clearly hates him because he's...well, no LU fans were ever able to give any actual reason why they disliked Chavo. Striker points out how hot Catrina looks, and normally the golf with eyes bugging out and a tongue on the floor reaction from Striker is the lamest, but in an aggressively shitty match like this Catrina's hotness really was a genuine highlight. Fenix was easily the most interesting of the wrestlers involved, and it really wouldn't have taken much effort from him to earn that title. Awful, awful, boring, lazy match.

TL: I actually wrote out a play by play for this because I'm absolutely crazy and also thorough when it comes to pro wrestling things I feel like I have to watch. Good lord almighty was this a slog to get through. I mean absolutely terrible in most ways. The idea behind it was to absolutely make Pentagon The Guy in the promotion, but instead, it's like a Cliff's Notes version of the folks you might see on this program week to week, and it really doesn't do a good job of selling that here. Pentagon is in at 6, and it doesn't get actually entertaining until Fenix is in at 13, where he outshines his brother in like 1/25 the time. The biggest issue I had with this is that all the guys you'd be excited to see, especially someone like Muertes, are in the match for all of like...2 minutes? I mean, Chavo gets a producer's run? Marty gets a shot to try and score an upset on Pentagon as the final guy in the match? Especially after Marty lost to Fenix in the way he did last season? This isn't even a reset. It's like taking the neuralizer from Men In Black. And after this I need it. There isn't a single thing coming out of this that makes me excited for what's to come, and that's a terrible omen for a show that already blows so hot and cold.

ER: And we get more from Papa Cueto, which was a character that just could not have sounded good at any step of the writing process. I'm not as imaginative as I perhaps once was, but I cannot actually imagine a worse way to start a new season of LU. This honestly has to be the worst episode in the history of the series.

TL: Can we get Lorenzo Lamas back up in this thing again please? More Godfrey? Papa Cueto has worn out his welcome and it's only been one show. I started reviewing these with a Sexy Star match. This whole show was worse than that feeling.


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