Longtime Dirgers may remember that my very first article here was a short primer on Lucha Underground, the best Robert Rodriguez-produced noir telenovela about a supernatural pro wrestling league on television. In that piece, I did my best to give y’all the elevator pitch version — which, in hindsight, is literally “a Robert Rodriguez-produced noir telenovela about a supernatural pro wrestling league” — but I had to leave out a lot of what Lucha Underground does best: character development. And there’s no better example of LU‘s storytelling mastery than the years-long journey of Pentagón Jr. Across Lucha Underground‘s three seasons, Pentagón Jr. has evolved from lackey to main event threat and from hated villain to beloved antihero. That evolution is bound up in the character’s own quest for self-actualization, which is, naturally, achieved primarily via pro wrestling violence. We’re going to put this aggro skeleton ninja on the psychiatrist’s couch, but stand back in case he decides to flip it over and start breaking our arms.
If you’ve ever seen The Last Dragon, Pentagón’s story is basically the same thing: he’s a young man attempting to achieve self-actualization through achievement in the martial arts, and he’s looking for a capital-m Master to show him the way. Unlike Bruce Leroy, though, Pentagón’s need for a strong mentor is rooted in deep insecurity. As you might be able to gather from his name, our violent young friend is the chosen successor of the original Pentagón, a one-note villainous counterpart to the legendary hero Octagón. When that guy chose a successor, Pentagón Jr. was brought in to face him, but was left directionless almost immediately when Octagón Jr. left Mexico to make millions of dollars in WWE. That left Pentagón Jr. as the heir to a punchline legacy, and with a sizable chip on his shoulder.
The first time LU viewers — and the fans live at The Temple — saw Pentagón Jr., it was as part of a three-way match, the main event of the second-ever episode. Without any context, we saw some sort of skeleton ninja tangle with a dragon guy and a phoenix guy, and he was objectively the least impressive of the three. Drago had hustle, an underdog’s spirit, and a huge, Stan Winston-ass dragon getup. Fénix was an athletic phenomenon who seemed, at times, eerily close to literal flight. In the end, Fénix pinned Drago while Pentagón watched from ringside. He hadn’t won, and he hadn’t even lost.
Luckily for those of us attempting to psychoanalyze him, Pentagón has a very unique interview style. Rather than ranting and raving and asking what we’re gonna do, brothers, our dude prefers to stand alone in the ring and tell the Believers what’s on his mind. Humorously, he always ends these airings of his anxieties with his catchphrase, “cero miedo” — zero fear. The first time he did this, he said he’d been disrespected in Mexico — by the fans, the promoters, and the other Pentagóns. He thanked Dario Cueto, The Temple’s shady-ass proprietor, for the opportunity to prove his dominance, and lost in short order to Fénix, who’d won the triple threat the week before.
Despite his proclamation that he was ready to show the world his destructive potential, he clearly wasn’t, and soon found himself serving as a lackey to Chavo Guerrero. If you had to pick a guy that a Pentagón might gravitate toward, Chavo would be an excellent choice. As the last scion of a legendary clan of lucha libre scumbags, Chavo might indeed have a lot of great advice for a violent young man trying to escape someone else’s shadow. If he weren’t also the type to immediately bash his apprentice’s face in with a steel chair for almost zero reward. “If” is pretty operative here.
Suddenly, Pentagón’s fireside chats started to mention a mysterious master, one who would teach the young luchador how harness his rage and hone it into a cutting edge. And sure enough, his matches started getting shorter and shorter, and kind of stopped being matches. Pentagón was basically just mauling guys, explicitly as a tribute to his unseen Master. These interactions felt less like athletic contests than ritual violence, and two things began to happen: first, Pentagón began ceremonially breaking the arms of his fallen opponents as a sacrifice to his sensei; and second, the Believers started to get super into Pentagón Jr. The feeling was mutual, and this hyperviolent skeleton ninja started to become a genuine hero to the fans at The Temple.
One of Pentagón’s newfound fans was Vampiro, Lucha Underground‘s color commentator. Once a Misfits-themed psycho known for using weapons like fire and attack dogs on his opponents, Vamp had defaulted to a chummy Canadian dad who lived vicariously through this young luchador. All that changed when Pentagón decided to challenge Vampiro to a “match”, which he refused. After all, he was long-retired, his body was basically held together by chewing gum, and he wasn’t really up to getting savagely beaten as part of some kid’s Dexter-ass fantasies. Ultimately, Pentagón was able to coax Vampiro back into the ring with a well reasoned argument by pouring gasoline on him and holding a lighter over his body until he agreed. Vampiro and Pentagón Jr. met in a brutal “cero miedo” match, in which both men bled everywhere, repeatedly got hurled into broken glass, and tried to kill each other with fire. After the carnage finally subsided, Vampiro demanded that his arm be broken to complete the ritual. Afterward, as he cradled his ruined arm, Vampiro congratulated Pentagón; he had been the Master all along.
It was a major moment for the young luchador; not only had he defeated a living legend, but he had gained a master, one who was actually concerned with his welfare and development. That’s why Vampiro warned his pupil away from challenging the the Lucha Underground champion, the monster known as Matanza. As I’m sure I mentioned last time, Matanza is a reincarnated Aztec god, and basically Jason Voorhees in the body of a legit Olympic wrestler. For the first season-and-a-half of Lucha Underground, all we saw him do was terrify people from inside his cage, and eat one guy’s face. He’s a tough cookie, is what I’m getting at.
However, cero miedo and all that, and Pentagón got the match he wanted. Well, not exactly; he wanted to fight Matanza, but he almost certainly didn’t want to get ragdolled for five minutes before having his back broken, forcing Vampiro to jog out and help load him into an ambulance. While the injury caused Pentagón to take months off to rehab, it also forced Mr. Cero Miedo himself to confront the fact that he could indeed feel fear.
Pentagón Jr. returned to the ring and fought his way to earning a rematch with Matanza at the Ultima Lucha Dos, a year after his career-changing bloodbath with Vampiro. Before the match, Vampiro led his disciple into a cave, where he confronted his fears, which manifested as an army of doppelgängers that he had to kill. If this were any other show, I’d assume this was psychodrama, but Lucha Underground has earthquake demons and cannibal cage monsters, so I’m fully willing to believe Vampiro has access to some kind of Dragon Ball Z training techniques. The end result was the emergence of Pentagón Dark.
The DBZ comparison is particularly apt, as Lucha Undergound is fond of marking major character evolutions with clear changes in visual presentation. For example, when Mil Muertes was sealed within a casket in season one’s legendary Grave Consequences match, he returned from the land of the dead even harder to defeat, and with stark white eyes to mark that increase in power. As Prince Puma, the show’s nominal protagonist, journeyed from wide-eyed rookie to jaded veteran, his jungle cat-themed costume has darkened to reflect his own loss of innocence. When Hollywood wannabe Johnny Mundo embraced his inner dickheadedness, he started trying to wrestle in sunglasses. The point is that Lucha Underground does nothing by accident, so when a guy goes into a cave, murders a bunch of his own shadow selves and emerges more black than a Spinal Tap album cover, it’s probably going to be a big deal.
Indeed, Pentagón Dark lived up to the hype, taking Matanza to the fucking woodshed for roughly 13:42 of a fourteen minute title match. Before this, no one had managed to dominate Matanza; only the thrice-resurrected earthquake demon Mil Muertes had even been able to go toe-to-toe with the monster, and here was Pentagón beating him so badly that Dario Cueto had to jog out in a tuxedo to save his brother. It was a nearly-perfect inversion of their first match, with Pentagón poised to win LU’s biggest prize, vanquish its biggest monster, and complete his own redemption arc, on the one-year anniversary of his apprenticeship under Vampiro. You couldn’t write a better ending.
And then Pentagón Dark lost. After nearly a quarter hour of absolutely mauling Matanza, he looked to his master for advice. Vampiro produced a Negan-style barbed-wire bat to deal the killing blow, which was subsequently yoinked by Dario and used against Pentagón. It was enough to keep him down for three seconds, and the Cueto brothers fled with the championship. In a pointed inversion of the events of a year earlier, Vampiro was on his knees before his pupil. Rather than pledging fealty, he was begging forgiveness. Disgusted, Pentagón left the ring. He returned after the main event to attack Vampiro with the bat, and left him lying in a pool of his own blood. “Yo soy El Maestro”, he said.
Before, when I said that you couldn’t write a better ending than Pentagón Dark becoming champion? That’s only true if this were a story about glory, and it isn’t. It’s a story about self-actualization. It’s a story about an angry young man who craved respect, and adulation, and the love of a father figure. He found them all, and learned that none of them are the magic ingredient that would make him the best in the world. After all, his championship match didn’t close out the biggest show of the year; it was his attack on Vampiro, and his rejection of any Master but himself.
Cero miedo? It finally seems that way.
Want to watch Pentagón Dark destroy all who oppose him? El Rey Network is available via Sling TV, and individual episodes of Lucha Underground are available for purchase on iTunes.
