 |
| BASKING SEASON HAS BEGUN (Photo Credit: WWE.com) |
It's so weird to be doing something for months on end and have no real complaints of substance. "I like almost all of these people and they should all win and never get called up" is a fine idea, but it's not a complaint. "They never should have made that super racist Jordan Myles shirt so he'd get rightfully pissed and quit the company" is, but WWE memory holed that so quick and let ACH be independent again (in addition to the fact he didn't have anything pressing happening on NXTV at the time of the release) that while it's certainly a predictably depressing thing, it doesn't really rise to the level of full-on complaint. "And I should win things by watching!" is a fine Simpsons joke that I will use semi-regularly until the day I die, but again: not really a genuine complaint.
So it was on the last episode of NXTV before Worlds Collide became A Thing, another fun two-hour romp full of logical character advancements, excellent matches, and the first title change on NXTV in...well, almost a month. (It hadn't happened for a long while before that, though.)
GOLD: And NEW North American champion!
Some of us wondered if this match was merely going to be a stepping stone to Keith Lee POUNCING Adam Cole into ex-championhood -- something, that, quite frankly, is still on the board. But it turned out this wasn't an amuse bouche but the main course, the coronation of the burly Limitless Texan.
It was a three-segger and borderline instant classic, set up by Keith getting Pillmanized by Roddy & the Era the week prior; we found out as he came to the ring looking focused that he'd refused any medical attention for the ankle (and to be fair, he felt safe enough to do some damage to NPCs before that episode closed its curtain). So the story was in place, with a weakened Lee still with enough HOSS POWER to try and fend off the modern day Malenko in Strong. Strong would use some teased interference and the steps to help him gain the advantage and actually got Lee gimping but his earliest pinfall attempts couldn't even get a count put on them. It became evident in Act III when Lee's response to an avalanche Angle Slam was to sit up at one that Roderick had enjoyed a long, fruitful life, but he kept fighting onwards and even landed a Sick Kick for a nearfall. Unfortunately, he ran right into The Finisher Formerly Known As Ground Zero and became the fifth ex-champion.
Lee v. anyone is a money match for NXT, will provide even more prestige to the short lived North American title, and they know it. Based on the fact he got to mix it up with BORK at the Rumble, it's clear eyes are on Keith all the way up Stamford's totem pole. To make things even worse for the Era immediately after losing the secondary championship, Imperium came back out to ruin their evening (more about which imminently) and Walter hit Adam Cole with a chop so hard the reigning Goldie holder almost landed into the Atlantic, presaging the UK unit's win at Worlds Collide. As with last year, the Era is starting to show some cracks. In 2019, they rebounded and accumulated all the gold. But this is a new year with new threats, and when your enemies include Keith Lee and WALTER...well, you know the line from South Park.
GOLD: the Dusty Classic
As the announce has stressed to us from jump, the signature tag tourney has a history of disparate singles stars coming together to walk out with the bronzed boots. Hell, year one saw Finn Balor and Samoa Joe capture the whole thing; last year saw 1.5 Black Guys win it in Aleister Black and Ricochet. So despite the slipshod nature of the Broserweights coming together it isn't exactly a full-out surprise to see them in this week's finals, getting there by overcoming the Barthel/Aichner unit out of Imperium with a surprising amount of tandem offense culminating in what could be best described as an Enzuiguiri 2 Sleep. As usual, the European Union showed off their bonafides - barring something calamitous, it's not if they become tag champs on one of the NXT brands, but when - but M&P were just too much to overcome.
The surprise of the show and the tournament came in the opener, as the Undisputed Era swaggered out with all the gold and then lost clean in the center to the Grrrrrrrrrrrrrizzled Young Veterans. Sure, technically at the end Imperium came out to the Solomon Crowe's Nest to look stoic and European over everything, drawing Cole & Roddy away from the ring. But winning is winning, and punching two Tickets to Mayhem have put the former UK Tag Champs in position to really annoy the crap out of audiences on both sides of the pond as was witnessed when Gibson & Drake came out after the Broserweight victory to smarm all over the mic and their future opponents. +10 to Gibby for calling them "Full Sail neckbeards", but it got obscured by a cloud of 420-friendly jokes and then obliterated when Dunne rightfully pointed out that he was the Globetrotters to their collective Generals, bro. Honestly before the final came to pass it seemed sure what the match and the winners would be, then expectations got subverted/used for the Worlds Collide main and here we are. One thing is for sure: if this ends up with Dunne turning on Riddle, it's going to be highlarious.
GOLD: yet again, the [ ] Division
First off, the Man went on Backstage and apparently obliterated the W word for, at the very least for now, NXT. Rhea Ripley is the NXT champion. Adam Cole is the NXT champion but in a different way. There you go, you're all caught up. Like everything else initially weird the E's done in the 21st century, you'll pick up the nomenclature offhandedly by Memorial Day without realizing you've even sipped the Kool-Aid.
On this side, there was nothing but sweet, chewy goodness to be found all the way around. To pick the "smallest" thing first, God's Production Team was spinning their visual Heisenberg and put together a potent 90 second clip worth seeing. It's an old trope, but when the players are this good, who'd complain? What, really, is more pro wrestling than "babyface gets pushed too hard by former bestie which awakens the heel inside them but it's okay because they want JUSTICE"? Spandex, maybe?
First of all, there needs to be a bigger warning before matches like Toni Storm v. Choke Me the Fuck Out, Io Shirai But Also Get Better Soon :( just get dropped onto television. Some of us need to get our last testaments in order and pay off some actors to weep emotionally at our funerals, first thing. Secondly, one of the greatest heel moves an NXT star can pull off in this day and age is to deny closure of something approaching a dream match, and so it came to pass after two segments of Mae Young revisited that Bianca BelAir showed up to end the match and wreck both competitors. You may not be surprised to garner that this is exactly the sort of thing that drew out Rhea, or that ahead of their title match at Worlds Collide that Toni ended up holding the American Shiny Shiny to a loud and mixed reaction while she smirked a bit. (On NXTUK, for those of you unaware, dropping the title to Kay Lee Ray has made Toni 'lose herself' and severed her friendship with Piper Niven while she tries to become a champion again, so while she isn't wrestling full black hat she isn't a pure beam of light - TV character wise, anyway - so this worked on multiple levels like a vintage Simpsons joke, getting the story across to everyone not keeping up with the sister show while working in additional depth for those of us who do keep up or at least have a vaguely current outline of things transpiring there.)
But the bulk of the division's work may have been done for the Shayna Baszler/Shotzi Blackheart match, which thankfully for us workrate worshippers wasn't an Initials On A Pole match. Again, this went back a week where a surprisingly uneliminated Shotzi eliminated Shayna from the #1 contender battle royale. In addition for Shotzi getting a stinger to make the audience familiar with her character (one of those necessary evils but especially in the USA age), we got the Queen of Spades appropriately seeing that and raising it with a fire promo in which she told Queen Cathy that Shotzi hadn't made a statement the previous week, she'd ended her career before it started since Shayna wasn't going anywhere except maybe through the entire division yet again to become Shayna IIIX, beginning with the Blackheart (non Ciampa division). Shotzi didn't back down and took the former champion on for a solid 10 minutes or so. Unfortunately for her, that last couple of minutes was spent for her in the Kirifuda Clutch. It said a lot about what they see in Shotzi that it took about a full minute for her to submit, as was Baszler keeping it on for a lengthy period of time after the bell. Either way, the future looks bright for Mrs. TCB, and if Shayna wants to stick around Florida cranking out four stars on the regular, alls the better for us.
That leads us into another baby Takeover this week, with Team Kick exploding, the Dusty Cup finals, and Adam Cole's Portland opponent being named. (Good God! Is that... is that Not Quite Marilyn Manson's music?!) So come back NXT week for more raves, and, if we're lucky, more classic Simpsons jokes.
So it was on the last episode of NXTV before Worlds Collide became A Thing, another fun two-hour romp full of logical character advancements, excellent matches, and the first title change on NXTV in...well, almost a month. (It hadn't happened for a long while before that, though.)
GOLD: And NEW North American champion!
Some of us wondered if this match was merely going to be a stepping stone to Keith Lee POUNCING Adam Cole into ex-championhood -- something, that, quite frankly, is still on the board. But it turned out this wasn't an amuse bouche but the main course, the coronation of the burly Limitless Texan.
It was a three-segger and borderline instant classic, set up by Keith getting Pillmanized by Roddy & the Era the week prior; we found out as he came to the ring looking focused that he'd refused any medical attention for the ankle (and to be fair, he felt safe enough to do some damage to NPCs before that episode closed its curtain). So the story was in place, with a weakened Lee still with enough HOSS POWER to try and fend off the modern day Malenko in Strong. Strong would use some teased interference and the steps to help him gain the advantage and actually got Lee gimping but his earliest pinfall attempts couldn't even get a count put on them. It became evident in Act III when Lee's response to an avalanche Angle Slam was to sit up at one that Roderick had enjoyed a long, fruitful life, but he kept fighting onwards and even landed a Sick Kick for a nearfall. Unfortunately, he ran right into The Finisher Formerly Known As Ground Zero and became the fifth ex-champion.
Lee v. anyone is a money match for NXT, will provide even more prestige to the short lived North American title, and they know it. Based on the fact he got to mix it up with BORK at the Rumble, it's clear eyes are on Keith all the way up Stamford's totem pole. To make things even worse for the Era immediately after losing the secondary championship, Imperium came back out to ruin their evening (more about which imminently) and Walter hit Adam Cole with a chop so hard the reigning Goldie holder almost landed into the Atlantic, presaging the UK unit's win at Worlds Collide. As with last year, the Era is starting to show some cracks. In 2019, they rebounded and accumulated all the gold. But this is a new year with new threats, and when your enemies include Keith Lee and WALTER...well, you know the line from South Park.
GOLD: the Dusty Classic
As the announce has stressed to us from jump, the signature tag tourney has a history of disparate singles stars coming together to walk out with the bronzed boots. Hell, year one saw Finn Balor and Samoa Joe capture the whole thing; last year saw 1.5 Black Guys win it in Aleister Black and Ricochet. So despite the slipshod nature of the Broserweights coming together it isn't exactly a full-out surprise to see them in this week's finals, getting there by overcoming the Barthel/Aichner unit out of Imperium with a surprising amount of tandem offense culminating in what could be best described as an Enzuiguiri 2 Sleep. As usual, the European Union showed off their bonafides - barring something calamitous, it's not if they become tag champs on one of the NXT brands, but when - but M&P were just too much to overcome.
The surprise of the show and the tournament came in the opener, as the Undisputed Era swaggered out with all the gold and then lost clean in the center to the Grrrrrrrrrrrrrizzled Young Veterans. Sure, technically at the end Imperium came out to the Solomon Crowe's Nest to look stoic and European over everything, drawing Cole & Roddy away from the ring. But winning is winning, and punching two Tickets to Mayhem have put the former UK Tag Champs in position to really annoy the crap out of audiences on both sides of the pond as was witnessed when Gibson & Drake came out after the Broserweight victory to smarm all over the mic and their future opponents. +10 to Gibby for calling them "Full Sail neckbeards", but it got obscured by a cloud of 420-friendly jokes and then obliterated when Dunne rightfully pointed out that he was the Globetrotters to their collective Generals, bro. Honestly before the final came to pass it seemed sure what the match and the winners would be, then expectations got subverted/used for the Worlds Collide main and here we are. One thing is for sure: if this ends up with Dunne turning on Riddle, it's going to be highlarious.
GOLD: yet again, the [ ] Division
First off, the Man went on Backstage and apparently obliterated the W word for, at the very least for now, NXT. Rhea Ripley is the NXT champion. Adam Cole is the NXT champion but in a different way. There you go, you're all caught up. Like everything else initially weird the E's done in the 21st century, you'll pick up the nomenclature offhandedly by Memorial Day without realizing you've even sipped the Kool-Aid.
On this side, there was nothing but sweet, chewy goodness to be found all the way around. To pick the "smallest" thing first, God's Production Team was spinning their visual Heisenberg and put together a potent 90 second clip worth seeing. It's an old trope, but when the players are this good, who'd complain? What, really, is more pro wrestling than "babyface gets pushed too hard by former bestie which awakens the heel inside them but it's okay because they want JUSTICE"? Spandex, maybe?
First of all, there needs to be a bigger warning before matches like Toni Storm v. Choke Me the Fuck Out, Io Shirai But Also Get Better Soon :( just get dropped onto television. Some of us need to get our last testaments in order and pay off some actors to weep emotionally at our funerals, first thing. Secondly, one of the greatest heel moves an NXT star can pull off in this day and age is to deny closure of something approaching a dream match, and so it came to pass after two segments of Mae Young revisited that Bianca BelAir showed up to end the match and wreck both competitors. You may not be surprised to garner that this is exactly the sort of thing that drew out Rhea, or that ahead of their title match at Worlds Collide that Toni ended up holding the American Shiny Shiny to a loud and mixed reaction while she smirked a bit. (On NXTUK, for those of you unaware, dropping the title to Kay Lee Ray has made Toni 'lose herself' and severed her friendship with Piper Niven while she tries to become a champion again, so while she isn't wrestling full black hat she isn't a pure beam of light - TV character wise, anyway - so this worked on multiple levels like a vintage Simpsons joke, getting the story across to everyone not keeping up with the sister show while working in additional depth for those of us who do keep up or at least have a vaguely current outline of things transpiring there.)
But the bulk of the division's work may have been done for the Shayna Baszler/Shotzi Blackheart match, which thankfully for us workrate worshippers wasn't an Initials On A Pole match. Again, this went back a week where a surprisingly uneliminated Shotzi eliminated Shayna from the #1 contender battle royale. In addition for Shotzi getting a stinger to make the audience familiar with her character (one of those necessary evils but especially in the USA age), we got the Queen of Spades appropriately seeing that and raising it with a fire promo in which she told Queen Cathy that Shotzi hadn't made a statement the previous week, she'd ended her career before it started since Shayna wasn't going anywhere except maybe through the entire division yet again to become Shayna IIIX, beginning with the Blackheart (non Ciampa division). Shotzi didn't back down and took the former champion on for a solid 10 minutes or so. Unfortunately for her, that last couple of minutes was spent for her in the Kirifuda Clutch. It said a lot about what they see in Shotzi that it took about a full minute for her to submit, as was Baszler keeping it on for a lengthy period of time after the bell. Either way, the future looks bright for Mrs. TCB, and if Shayna wants to stick around Florida cranking out four stars on the regular, alls the better for us.
That leads us into another baby Takeover this week, with Team Kick exploding, the Dusty Cup finals, and Adam Cole's Portland opponent being named. (Good God! Is that... is that Not Quite Marilyn Manson's music?!) So come back NXT week for more raves, and, if we're lucky, more classic Simpsons jokes.
