I know; I'm changing the format again. But this isn't really so much out of necessity (not that the other one was), but rather as I'm tired. I'm not tired of doing the separate columns for Raw and Smackdown and then another one for the NXT brands; I'm just tired this week. So many things going on in the main roster shows have made things just so fucking exhausting. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt. So there were some good things, some medium things and some very very bad things, and this is encompassing all of the things that happened this week, including Money in the Bank, Raw, Smackdown, NXT and NXT UK.
I'm honestly not going to go over everything that did work, but I will go over some of my favorite moments from this week.
I was a little bummed that Becky Two Belts is no longer Becky Two Belts, but I'm glad that that Bayley cashed in her Money in the Bank contract she had just won on Charlotte instead of Becky. This served the over-arching story in two ways: it effectively ended the rivalry between Charlotte and Becky (at least for now), and it will give Bayley a run with the Smackdown Women's title, making her the first Women's Triple Crown Champion. The booking for all the women's matches at MITB were terrific, so that was really the highlight of the show for me. And if it wasn't to be expected, Seth Rollins vs A.J. Styles was all kinds of awesome. It was the kind of face-vs-face booking we should get and so rarely do.
The rematch between Pete Dunne and champ WALTER (is it really supposed to be in all caps?) for the UK title on NXT UK was terrific as well. I liked how they booked the involvement of Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel to not only help WALTER retain but also to keep Dunne looking strong. It is weird seeing Dunne without that belt in his mouth, though.
I loved all of NXT. Gargano saying to Adam Cole, "Clearly you didn't shock the school system" gave me wondrous giggles, the interaction between Velveteen Dream and Tyler Breeze, the match between two actual developmental talents, Io Shirai giving Shayna and the Horsewomen a whole fuckload of whacks with a kendo stick as they tried to beat down Candace LeRae, completing the full card for TakeOver XXV, and the match between Riddle and Gargano vs O'Reilly and Fish... really, there wasn't a moment of NXT that I didn't pretty much out and out adore. Everything clicked into place and it proves that NXT is the best reason to have the Network.
As far as the main roster shows and the rest of MITB... well, not so much. And anything good that did occur was overshadowed by everything that went horribly wrong.
Let's start with the introduction of the Wacky Races/Scooby Doo Championship... sorry; the 24/7 Championship. With Mick Foley introducing it, it seemed like the right person and the (sort of) right time to introduce a Legends title so that some of the returning legends can come and get their big paychecks at Saudi shows or on the occasional PPV to fight over. With Goldberg and Undertaker clashing for the FIRST TIME EVER at Super Showdown (and I think it's hilarious that they keep saying that it's in Jeddah, instead of saying Jeddah, Saudi Arabia because they're still trying to keep the whole Saudi thing under the radar, and just saying Jeddah makes it seem foreign, but not specifically Saudi foreign), that would be as good a place as any to introduce a relatively meaningless but still somewhat decent title. Also with Foley introducing it, the other big speculation was that it was going to be the Hardcore title, but they said it was going to be a "brand new" title, so that was out. Instead, Foley got to introduce the brand new "24/7" Championship to a chorus of disappointed boos on Raw, and no one should ever boo Mick Foley, or more to the point, WWE should never give the crowd a reason to boo Mick Foley. For those who didn't watch this week (which would have been my personal recommendation), the 24/7 Championship is to literally be defended 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As long as the champion is there and a referee, anyone anywhere on any show (yeah, like Triple H is going to allow this shit on NXT) can challenge for the title and it can change hands at any time. This could potentially build some suspense, but the first "match" for it was just a mad scramble of the under-card WWE talent to see who could get to the ring first and grab it for themselves. That's what the introductory match was, and if you think it would get better, you clearly haven't been paying attention. All of the under-carders and some mid-carders tried to get to the ring to grab it, but it was Titus O'Neil who was the first to actually hold onto it making him the inaugural 24/7 Champion. But while he was heading to the back, he was blasted from behind by Robert Roode, and the title changed hands again. We then got to experience the absolute sadness of Roode being chased through the backstage area by the under-carders like it was the stupidest cartoon ever where he would run into the perpetually confused R-Truth who was asked to help Roode hide. He did, but as soon as it was clear, Truth bounced Roode off his rental car and with a ref sitting in the passenger seat, got the pinfall and became the third 24/7 champ. This bled over into Smackdown, where it ended up ruining a match between Mandy Rose and Carmella.
The ideal behind a new title like this is that it would give the performers who are generally relegated to WWE Live an actual title to fight over, but instead of it being actual matches, it's just a stupid chase that will lead to silly disguises, a lot of running backstage and through crowds, and a lot of heelish behavior that we'll excuse depending on who's doing it. Truth pretending to help Roode only to bounce him off a car to steal the title is a heelish thing to do, but because it's R-Truth, we can forgive it. The real tragedy of this title though is that we have to expect a lot more of this every week. This isn't Vince at his least creative (we'll get to that), and I guess there's a part of me that almost respects the audacity of putting such an utterly meaningless championship title into the world, but this is just all sorts of wrong. Word has come out through the dirt sheets that some kind of new title was insisted upon by NBC Universal, and this is what they came up with. To be fair, a belt that could be defended at any time, in any place and by any wrestler could be really interesting. But they instantly made it restrictive by throwing out the jobber squad to fight over it, and also made it more restrictive than that in our heads by sending a bunch of men out to grab it. This could and should be an intergender title, and when Carmella was helping R-Truth with his "disguise", she could have easily turned on him to grab it to signify that this was something that was going to be defended at all times by all comers, male or female. Of course the likelihood of that is very slim because WWE is still way too afraid to do intergender wrestling unless they're built like Nia Jax. I know it's basically being played like a comedy title right now, particularly since R-Truth has it and is running around dressed like Carmella. If you want to do that, do that. Don't make it seem like it's a big deal. Don't have people ruin matches that might be really interesting just because you think that it's a good moment to have a comedy bit or at least to remind people that this title exists. I know that the most alluring part of any championship is the chase, but it doesn't need to be a literal chase.
And now we move to the finale of the Men's Money in the Bank ladder match to show Vince at his worst.
Since Sami Zayn was attacked and hung upside down by a mystery assailant that was assumed to be Braun Strowman, the Men's MITB match was down to seven competitors: Finn Balor, Ali, Andrade, Randy Orton, Drew McIntyre, Baron Corbin and Ricochet. With high-flyers the caliber of Ali and Ricochet, we knew there were going to be some amazing spots and there were, but a lot of them were thanks to the body of Balor, who took an almost unreal amount of punishment. And considering we just had a great episode of Chronicle showcasing Ali, it seemed like there was going to be a significant sea change in the title picture, particularly at the end. Ali, all alone in the ring, was fingertips away from grabbing the case.
That is, until... the music of one Brock Lesnar hit.
Accompanied by Paul Heyman, Lesnar ran down to the ring, pushed Ali's ladder over, and scaled the ladder to get the MITB contract.
I was texting my best friend that night about these events, because wisely, he didn't see it happen, and he had a very interesting thing to state and that was simply:
"Desperation is a nasty perfume".
And it really fucking is.
I've never seen a crowd turn so fast on a match as I have here. Usually you can tell that the crowd is getting kind of pissy when a match is pretty dull, but this is a Money in the Bank ladder match. We saw seven elite performers doing some really remarkable work and taking some terrifying bumps only to have the King of the Part-Timers come in and steal something that should have been someone else's. This is the ultimate representation of the relationship that Vince has with Lesnar. When things are looking down ratings-wise, he hits the panic button and Lesnar appears, basically to fuck over a phalanx of extraordinary performers so that Vince can put a "star" on the show to try to increase the ratings for a bit rather than attempt some good booking or a strong long-term story. And of course, Brock stuck around for Raw to tease a potential cash-in on either Kofi Kingston or Seth Rollins, but neither happened, because Brock doesn't get paid enough to fight on Raw. I can just imagine Brock in the backwoods of Minnesota, taking aim at a small animal with a high-caliber rifle and then suddenly, Vince hits the Brock Signal and he lays down his rifle, goes back to the house, grabs his Jimmy Johns shorts and simply tells Sable, "I'm needed", gets into the Brock-Mobile, which I can only assume is one of those super-douchey Ford F250's with the 85-inch tires and drives off to wherever the PPV is, gets handed a steel attache case by Heyman that's filled with a few hundred thousand dollars in unmarked, small-denomination bills, and heads out to the ring to make the crowd and the viewers seethe in disgust. Yes, Brock Lesnar is Batman if Batman's true calling was making everything worse for the good people of Gotham City rather than the bad ones.
The only real saving grace to Lesnar having the contract is we get to see more of Paul Heyman cutting good promos, but even that is starting to wear thin because it's very hard to separate one from the other. We see Heyman, and we know he's going to work his ass off to get a strong reaction from the crowd, but we still know that this means Brock is around. Apparently Brock has either taken an indefinite hiatus from MMA competition or just flat-out retired, which means we're bound to have more Lesnar which is something we don't need or really want. But he's here, and this is where we get Vince at his worst impulses. When I did my Hopes and Predictions column for MITB, I put what I believed to be the best booking reasons that someone would win the briefcase and why some shouldn't or couldn't, and while I admit to still believing that Bayley didn't really need it, I was glad she got it and glad that she cashed in to stop another prolonged Charlotte title reign because it put her on top which is where she should always be hovering around anyway. But putting a briefcase in the hands of Brock Lesnar not only is totally unnecessary because there's a thousand different ways that Vince could book him into the title picture, but it also pretty much guarantees him another run with a title. The only thing that's suspenseful at this point is the question of which title he's going to go after and win (because there's no fucking chance in hell that Brock will lose on a cash-in especially after the last two men who won the briefcase lost their cash-ins). Will it be Kofi's WWE Championship or Seth's Universal title? Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the optics of the Aryan poster child of Lesnar beating down a black man to get something that he earned, and the obvious choice for Lesnar would be Seth because Seth took his Universal title away, and one of the main reasons he was able to take it was by going low.
As far as how Sami was taken out of the match, this should lead to Sami wanting to extract some sort of revenge on Brock, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty much nil since Brock is probably not going to appear on Raw or Smackdown to face Sami, and that sadly is not a PPV-worthy match. As we should know by now, Brock ain't gonna show up if there isn't a title that he can take or defend, and even that isn't any kind of guarantee. So this is another major problem with the booking that's now being presented to us. There are at least two potential feuds that could come about from this, but only one is going to have any kind of actual feud. And if we're back to a part-time champ, then why the fuck did they bring Lesnar back in the first place? It's not like that's going to bump up ratings in the long-term, and that's what WWE should be thinking about. As much as I'd love for AEW to be the super competitor that it should be, unless they're able to get big name crossover stars, the match quality and storytelling won't matter to the Johnny-Come-Lately's in the world of televised pro wrestling. And this is Vince all over: it's all about fixing things for the short term. The path of least resistance. The road more traveled.
If somehow Vince and WWE are able to prove me wrong, no one will be happier to eat crow than yours truly. And as much as I want to say that I'd rather just watch the pirated clips that show up on YouTube as recaps, the reality is that I'm still going to watch. There are still a lot of extremely talented people on the roster that will be enough to maintain my interest in their product, and that's how Vince can keep getting away with this shit. He just fucking knows that you're out there more or less hate-watching the main roster shows in order to get to the parts that you're actually interested in, but will end up watching the rest because something interesting or compelling may happen by accident. This is how Kofi and Becky became the biggest things in the last several months. Roman Reigns is still over with the audience, but the boos are starting to reemerge thanks to Vince making the mistake of putting him on both Raw and Smackdown for the last few weeks thanks to the "Wild Card" rule, and that's the difference between a dull push and a good push. I know that we had that whole Kumbaya moment last winter when Vince and Steph and Trips came out and declared the fans the Authority, and of course we knew it was bullshit. They're still going to push the wrong people until we naturally gravitate toward someone we really love and we start getting all their merch and making signs showing overwhelming support for that person that we'll start to see a push that is totally organic. Or we could get another Rusev; someone who didn't get the push we wanted to see, and they waited too long to strike that iron and then we started to lose interest again to the point where we don't even see him on TV anymore.
It's just all sorts of depressing knowing that you're a willing consumer of a product that you just don't have faith in. But at least we have NXT, where we can actually get all the things we're looking for from this ridiculous and beautiful art form.
Well, that's it for this week! I don't know if this format is going to continue or not; frankly, with the way my work schedule is, this seems like the way to move forward, but this format might lend itself better to the weeks where there are PPV's. We'll see what the future has in store! Just keep an eye out and for more content and bizarre stuff, you can always find me on Twitter where my username is @donnelly92274.
Until next time, kids...
I'm honestly not going to go over everything that did work, but I will go over some of my favorite moments from this week.
I was a little bummed that Becky Two Belts is no longer Becky Two Belts, but I'm glad that that Bayley cashed in her Money in the Bank contract she had just won on Charlotte instead of Becky. This served the over-arching story in two ways: it effectively ended the rivalry between Charlotte and Becky (at least for now), and it will give Bayley a run with the Smackdown Women's title, making her the first Women's Triple Crown Champion. The booking for all the women's matches at MITB were terrific, so that was really the highlight of the show for me. And if it wasn't to be expected, Seth Rollins vs A.J. Styles was all kinds of awesome. It was the kind of face-vs-face booking we should get and so rarely do.
The rematch between Pete Dunne and champ WALTER (is it really supposed to be in all caps?) for the UK title on NXT UK was terrific as well. I liked how they booked the involvement of Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel to not only help WALTER retain but also to keep Dunne looking strong. It is weird seeing Dunne without that belt in his mouth, though.
I loved all of NXT. Gargano saying to Adam Cole, "Clearly you didn't shock the school system" gave me wondrous giggles, the interaction between Velveteen Dream and Tyler Breeze, the match between two actual developmental talents, Io Shirai giving Shayna and the Horsewomen a whole fuckload of whacks with a kendo stick as they tried to beat down Candace LeRae, completing the full card for TakeOver XXV, and the match between Riddle and Gargano vs O'Reilly and Fish... really, there wasn't a moment of NXT that I didn't pretty much out and out adore. Everything clicked into place and it proves that NXT is the best reason to have the Network.
As far as the main roster shows and the rest of MITB... well, not so much. And anything good that did occur was overshadowed by everything that went horribly wrong.
Let's start with the introduction of the Wacky Races/Scooby Doo Championship... sorry; the 24/7 Championship. With Mick Foley introducing it, it seemed like the right person and the (sort of) right time to introduce a Legends title so that some of the returning legends can come and get their big paychecks at Saudi shows or on the occasional PPV to fight over. With Goldberg and Undertaker clashing for the FIRST TIME EVER at Super Showdown (and I think it's hilarious that they keep saying that it's in Jeddah, instead of saying Jeddah, Saudi Arabia because they're still trying to keep the whole Saudi thing under the radar, and just saying Jeddah makes it seem foreign, but not specifically Saudi foreign), that would be as good a place as any to introduce a relatively meaningless but still somewhat decent title. Also with Foley introducing it, the other big speculation was that it was going to be the Hardcore title, but they said it was going to be a "brand new" title, so that was out. Instead, Foley got to introduce the brand new "24/7" Championship to a chorus of disappointed boos on Raw, and no one should ever boo Mick Foley, or more to the point, WWE should never give the crowd a reason to boo Mick Foley. For those who didn't watch this week (which would have been my personal recommendation), the 24/7 Championship is to literally be defended 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As long as the champion is there and a referee, anyone anywhere on any show (yeah, like Triple H is going to allow this shit on NXT) can challenge for the title and it can change hands at any time. This could potentially build some suspense, but the first "match" for it was just a mad scramble of the under-card WWE talent to see who could get to the ring first and grab it for themselves. That's what the introductory match was, and if you think it would get better, you clearly haven't been paying attention. All of the under-carders and some mid-carders tried to get to the ring to grab it, but it was Titus O'Neil who was the first to actually hold onto it making him the inaugural 24/7 Champion. But while he was heading to the back, he was blasted from behind by Robert Roode, and the title changed hands again. We then got to experience the absolute sadness of Roode being chased through the backstage area by the under-carders like it was the stupidest cartoon ever where he would run into the perpetually confused R-Truth who was asked to help Roode hide. He did, but as soon as it was clear, Truth bounced Roode off his rental car and with a ref sitting in the passenger seat, got the pinfall and became the third 24/7 champ. This bled over into Smackdown, where it ended up ruining a match between Mandy Rose and Carmella.
The ideal behind a new title like this is that it would give the performers who are generally relegated to WWE Live an actual title to fight over, but instead of it being actual matches, it's just a stupid chase that will lead to silly disguises, a lot of running backstage and through crowds, and a lot of heelish behavior that we'll excuse depending on who's doing it. Truth pretending to help Roode only to bounce him off a car to steal the title is a heelish thing to do, but because it's R-Truth, we can forgive it. The real tragedy of this title though is that we have to expect a lot more of this every week. This isn't Vince at his least creative (we'll get to that), and I guess there's a part of me that almost respects the audacity of putting such an utterly meaningless championship title into the world, but this is just all sorts of wrong. Word has come out through the dirt sheets that some kind of new title was insisted upon by NBC Universal, and this is what they came up with. To be fair, a belt that could be defended at any time, in any place and by any wrestler could be really interesting. But they instantly made it restrictive by throwing out the jobber squad to fight over it, and also made it more restrictive than that in our heads by sending a bunch of men out to grab it. This could and should be an intergender title, and when Carmella was helping R-Truth with his "disguise", she could have easily turned on him to grab it to signify that this was something that was going to be defended at all times by all comers, male or female. Of course the likelihood of that is very slim because WWE is still way too afraid to do intergender wrestling unless they're built like Nia Jax. I know it's basically being played like a comedy title right now, particularly since R-Truth has it and is running around dressed like Carmella. If you want to do that, do that. Don't make it seem like it's a big deal. Don't have people ruin matches that might be really interesting just because you think that it's a good moment to have a comedy bit or at least to remind people that this title exists. I know that the most alluring part of any championship is the chase, but it doesn't need to be a literal chase.
And now we move to the finale of the Men's Money in the Bank ladder match to show Vince at his worst.
Since Sami Zayn was attacked and hung upside down by a mystery assailant that was assumed to be Braun Strowman, the Men's MITB match was down to seven competitors: Finn Balor, Ali, Andrade, Randy Orton, Drew McIntyre, Baron Corbin and Ricochet. With high-flyers the caliber of Ali and Ricochet, we knew there were going to be some amazing spots and there were, but a lot of them were thanks to the body of Balor, who took an almost unreal amount of punishment. And considering we just had a great episode of Chronicle showcasing Ali, it seemed like there was going to be a significant sea change in the title picture, particularly at the end. Ali, all alone in the ring, was fingertips away from grabbing the case.
That is, until... the music of one Brock Lesnar hit.
Accompanied by Paul Heyman, Lesnar ran down to the ring, pushed Ali's ladder over, and scaled the ladder to get the MITB contract.
I was texting my best friend that night about these events, because wisely, he didn't see it happen, and he had a very interesting thing to state and that was simply:
"Desperation is a nasty perfume".
And it really fucking is.
I've never seen a crowd turn so fast on a match as I have here. Usually you can tell that the crowd is getting kind of pissy when a match is pretty dull, but this is a Money in the Bank ladder match. We saw seven elite performers doing some really remarkable work and taking some terrifying bumps only to have the King of the Part-Timers come in and steal something that should have been someone else's. This is the ultimate representation of the relationship that Vince has with Lesnar. When things are looking down ratings-wise, he hits the panic button and Lesnar appears, basically to fuck over a phalanx of extraordinary performers so that Vince can put a "star" on the show to try to increase the ratings for a bit rather than attempt some good booking or a strong long-term story. And of course, Brock stuck around for Raw to tease a potential cash-in on either Kofi Kingston or Seth Rollins, but neither happened, because Brock doesn't get paid enough to fight on Raw. I can just imagine Brock in the backwoods of Minnesota, taking aim at a small animal with a high-caliber rifle and then suddenly, Vince hits the Brock Signal and he lays down his rifle, goes back to the house, grabs his Jimmy Johns shorts and simply tells Sable, "I'm needed", gets into the Brock-Mobile, which I can only assume is one of those super-douchey Ford F250's with the 85-inch tires and drives off to wherever the PPV is, gets handed a steel attache case by Heyman that's filled with a few hundred thousand dollars in unmarked, small-denomination bills, and heads out to the ring to make the crowd and the viewers seethe in disgust. Yes, Brock Lesnar is Batman if Batman's true calling was making everything worse for the good people of Gotham City rather than the bad ones.
The only real saving grace to Lesnar having the contract is we get to see more of Paul Heyman cutting good promos, but even that is starting to wear thin because it's very hard to separate one from the other. We see Heyman, and we know he's going to work his ass off to get a strong reaction from the crowd, but we still know that this means Brock is around. Apparently Brock has either taken an indefinite hiatus from MMA competition or just flat-out retired, which means we're bound to have more Lesnar which is something we don't need or really want. But he's here, and this is where we get Vince at his worst impulses. When I did my Hopes and Predictions column for MITB, I put what I believed to be the best booking reasons that someone would win the briefcase and why some shouldn't or couldn't, and while I admit to still believing that Bayley didn't really need it, I was glad she got it and glad that she cashed in to stop another prolonged Charlotte title reign because it put her on top which is where she should always be hovering around anyway. But putting a briefcase in the hands of Brock Lesnar not only is totally unnecessary because there's a thousand different ways that Vince could book him into the title picture, but it also pretty much guarantees him another run with a title. The only thing that's suspenseful at this point is the question of which title he's going to go after and win (because there's no fucking chance in hell that Brock will lose on a cash-in especially after the last two men who won the briefcase lost their cash-ins). Will it be Kofi's WWE Championship or Seth's Universal title? Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the optics of the Aryan poster child of Lesnar beating down a black man to get something that he earned, and the obvious choice for Lesnar would be Seth because Seth took his Universal title away, and one of the main reasons he was able to take it was by going low.
As far as how Sami was taken out of the match, this should lead to Sami wanting to extract some sort of revenge on Brock, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty much nil since Brock is probably not going to appear on Raw or Smackdown to face Sami, and that sadly is not a PPV-worthy match. As we should know by now, Brock ain't gonna show up if there isn't a title that he can take or defend, and even that isn't any kind of guarantee. So this is another major problem with the booking that's now being presented to us. There are at least two potential feuds that could come about from this, but only one is going to have any kind of actual feud. And if we're back to a part-time champ, then why the fuck did they bring Lesnar back in the first place? It's not like that's going to bump up ratings in the long-term, and that's what WWE should be thinking about. As much as I'd love for AEW to be the super competitor that it should be, unless they're able to get big name crossover stars, the match quality and storytelling won't matter to the Johnny-Come-Lately's in the world of televised pro wrestling. And this is Vince all over: it's all about fixing things for the short term. The path of least resistance. The road more traveled.
If somehow Vince and WWE are able to prove me wrong, no one will be happier to eat crow than yours truly. And as much as I want to say that I'd rather just watch the pirated clips that show up on YouTube as recaps, the reality is that I'm still going to watch. There are still a lot of extremely talented people on the roster that will be enough to maintain my interest in their product, and that's how Vince can keep getting away with this shit. He just fucking knows that you're out there more or less hate-watching the main roster shows in order to get to the parts that you're actually interested in, but will end up watching the rest because something interesting or compelling may happen by accident. This is how Kofi and Becky became the biggest things in the last several months. Roman Reigns is still over with the audience, but the boos are starting to reemerge thanks to Vince making the mistake of putting him on both Raw and Smackdown for the last few weeks thanks to the "Wild Card" rule, and that's the difference between a dull push and a good push. I know that we had that whole Kumbaya moment last winter when Vince and Steph and Trips came out and declared the fans the Authority, and of course we knew it was bullshit. They're still going to push the wrong people until we naturally gravitate toward someone we really love and we start getting all their merch and making signs showing overwhelming support for that person that we'll start to see a push that is totally organic. Or we could get another Rusev; someone who didn't get the push we wanted to see, and they waited too long to strike that iron and then we started to lose interest again to the point where we don't even see him on TV anymore.
It's just all sorts of depressing knowing that you're a willing consumer of a product that you just don't have faith in. But at least we have NXT, where we can actually get all the things we're looking for from this ridiculous and beautiful art form.
Well, that's it for this week! I don't know if this format is going to continue or not; frankly, with the way my work schedule is, this seems like the way to move forward, but this format might lend itself better to the weeks where there are PPV's. We'll see what the future has in store! Just keep an eye out and for more content and bizarre stuff, you can always find me on Twitter where my username is @donnelly92274.
Until next time, kids...
Comments
Post a Comment