The Pendari Champion is the predecessor to what Johnson’s career would become literally and and spiritually, because they are literally just the Rock with some Star Trek alien forehead makeup applied. Perhaps then, it is the ideal form of Johnson’s highly specific niche. The idea at its purest, when the Rock being the Rock, But Askance, was a novel thing. You could even say that Johnson has spent almost two and a half decade long acting career chasing the same high as “Tsunkatse,” but finds himself unable replicate the joy of the first time he could turn the Rock into a trans-medium performance.
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Everything that Dwayne Johnson is—at the height of his wrestling career then, at the height of his acting one now—is in the Pendari Champion. The taciturn nature, breaking ever so slightly for a trademark People’s Eyebrow. The canonization of the Rock Bottom as the second greatest act of martial combat in Star Trek, just behind the double-fisted punch. The fact that he barely has dialogue, the fact that his costume had to have a very cheap harness put in so he actually looked slightly different than he does on any regular episode of Smackdown. It is the embrace of Johnson entirely into a bizarro Star Trek plot about trying to escape a dangerous alien fight club: he is there to be Johnson, and yet not Johnson. Is Dwayne Johnson the Pendari Champion, or is the Rock the Pendari Champion?
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We have Star Trek: Voyager to thank for this timeless question, the humble, ridiculous episode of television that launched the only career capable of tanking an entire superhero movie universe in one go. At least Seven of Nine survived a Rock Bottom the DCEU couldn’t.
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