Lights Out Confuses The Crap Out Of Me

Duckfaces are everywhere these days.

This article has some spoilers about the latest episode of "Lights Out" on FX, so don't read this if you haven't seen it yet.

For those of you who don't know, FX airs a drama series about a fictional retired boxing HW champ named Patrick "Lights" Leary, every Tuesday at 10 p.m. EST. Also, as I'm sure most of you know, during a recent episode, two of the characters were discussing the issue of a boxer cutting weight (eight pounds in two weeks) and mentioned how he may have to start using crystal meth "like those MMA guys do." The clip from the show has gotten around the interwebs, but for the life of me I can't find it anywhere. Anyway, I'm sure this little blurb kind of annoyed a lot of you, and for a couple reasons. A) I'm pretty sure 99.9% of MMA fighters don't use crystal meth, or any type of drugs for that matter, and B) Eight pounds in two weeks is not a huge deal. If you only have to cut that much, you're probably going to be out-sized come fight time.

About halfway through this week's show, Leary and his father go to the bar to watch some boxing. When they get there, they see that the bar is playing a Bellator event instead. They talk to the waitress and are told they can watch it but only with the sound down. While they're watching, the two characters complain about how they used to be able to watch great boxing matches every Friday, but are now lucky to see them once or twice a year. Nice little jab at the boxing world there.

Also featured this week was other than El Guapo himself, Bas Rutten. This was interesting. The writers, or producers, or casting director, or whoever, showed enough wherewithal to cast an "MMA guy" to play an actual mixed martial artist for the series. That's about where they stopped though. Bas' character works for a criminal as a debt collector/goon, pretty much beating the crap out of whoever this guy wants him to, like the main character's brother. But, the character is also described as a "former MMA fighter, world-class." I guess that's the best job former world-class mixed martial artists can get after they retire.

Eventually, the main character Patrick Leary agrees to fight Bas' character (I think it was something like Dochage) in an underground cage match to make some money. "Lights" lands some boxing combinations, Dochage takes him down and armbars him, Leary escapes and lands in full guard, and the fight pretty much goes on that way for a couple more minutes. It was actually well-choreographed, and I understand that the whole point of that scene was to have Leary win. I really do. And I guess they have to show Dochage using some MMA techniques, to prove that he was "world-class." But, you know, James Toney and everything. Old boxers would lose MMA fights. Boxers in their prime would lose to MMA fighters 99 out of 100 times. Yet, Leary escapes three submissions and a mount to eventually knock Dochage out with an uppercut to the throat and a punch to the back of the head. Frankly, I'm surprised they even showed the ground game in the scene. I'll bet Bas had something to do with that.

I guess one of the messages of this little scene was that Leary is still a tough SOB and could make a comeback in boxing, which is a central theme to the series, but it's not really doing MMA any favors. In the world of the show, MMA fighters are criminal crystal meth tweekers who would still be beaten by old, retired boxers. This isn't a big deal to me, because I know it's not true. I'll bet a lot of the viewers of the show know this isn't true as well. It's the little things that bother me, I guess. In the long run it's not going to hurt the "legitimacy of MMA" at all. It's already legitimate, and it's not going anywhere. But to me it seems like the writers kind of half-assed their research and took a bit too much poetic license when they wrote the scripts for this season. Just my two cents. At least they wore MMA gloves during the fight. That's a step up from the norm.