Yo-Yo's Roomie

It's really unforgivable to start running this Brandi recruiting people angle when they just started doing something similar with the Dark Order (and doing so in a cool way with those commercials). I'd be pissed if I was the Dark Order. I enjoy this show, but I wish they had better wrestling, or at least more variety in the way people work. That Trent/Fenix match made me want to rip my eyes out. Utter dogshit. Even Dustin Rhodes is doing Canadian Destroyers for fuck's sake.

I thought the broom with the barbed wire was dumb too. I got the cleaner reference, but it's still a guy carrying a broom. Maybe he should wear a pair of those slippers that have dusters on the bottom of them, wrap them in barbed wire, and then he can superkick Moxley in the face.

Why is it all on Nattie? Charlotte put her in a no-win situation really.

I watched the ppv and thoroughly enjoyed it. Probably my favourite show of the year, actually. I think all the matches delivered to some degree, with Hart/Aries, Thatcher/Lawlor and especially Park/Fatu being really strong. The main event had everything I wanted it to have, except for a new champion. Definitely worth the money.

People say it all the time about all sorts of guys in all sorts of promotions. Yes, I've seen it said about Rey too.

To be fair, she invited the comparisons on herself by giving herself the same job title as Steph, and playing something of a mother hen to the women's division.

I've had this one too. It was at a WWE show, and they were trying to find obscure guys to shout, but it was just guys like Rikishi they were coming up with. And yeah, they all thought it was the funniest thing ever. At an indie show I had a bunch of guys in front of me being super obnoxious. They were shouting out jokes about Zach Gowen, who was wrestling, and they called one of the wrestlers a faggot. My wife had to stop me from saying something at that point, and I'm the most non-confrontational guy ever. I mean, apart from anything else, there's kids in the crowd. We ended up moving.

It's fucking garbage booking. Let's just call it what it is. They did the same thing with Becky having to apologise to Stephanie in the lead-up to Mania. They make the whole roster look like a bunch of pussies working paycheck to paycheck, just grateful to be there.

Guy with false bravado who caves in when someone with more power threatens him is not exactly the sort of character I would think fans would want to get behind.

Yeah, some of these are just gimmick tweaks, or management deciding to push someone, which doesn't really count as a rehab unless the circumstances are extraordinary. Like, Mahal was just the company giving him the world title for whatever stupid reason. And it didn't really rehab him, since it actually just shone a light even more on how much he sucked. JBL was a bit different because he changed up his whole gimmick, did really well in the role (character-wise at least), and got a several year run as a top act out of it. I'd put Mark Henry in this category too, just for the way he knocked it out of the park during his Hall of Pain run and completely rehabbed his image to where people who always thought he was a waste of space were admitting that he was actually pretty good. Matt Hardy becoming broken is a good shout, as the guy had become a bit of a punchline in the years before that. CJ Parker I think was too early in his career to really need rehabbing. It's certainly surprising and to his credit the amount of success he's had in Japan though.

Cody did pretty well after leaving WWE.

Spears is a close friend of Cody. He's also a guy that, while he worked for WWE for a long time, was never all that visible. He didn't really have a WWE cast-off feel to him. Dolph would be the epitome of a WWE cast-off, whether that's fair on him or not. I don't think it would be a good look if they signed him.

Would AEW even want Dolph? I can't see it. As for that Charlotte/Evolution idea, no thanks. She's already booked like 2003 Triple H, don't need to add the stable to the equation.

The crowd, or what is left of the crowd, completely shit on the Stomping Ground main event. They popped for Becky because Becky is a bigger star and cooler than Corbin or Seth 'Patty Hearst' Rollins will ever be. I don't think any of this is evidence that Corbin has been anything other than death in this role. And for the record, I'd go as far as to say I like Corbin, and feel bad for him that he's been put in this position and is constantly made a scapegoat for all WWE's problems. But the fans have spoken, and at the least, Corbin needs to be taken off TV for a while.

Warrior wasn't just some garden variety bigot, like your out of touch uncle that everyone rolls their eyes at. The guy was on a mission to spread his hateful rhetoric to as many people as possible. WWE trying to present this guy as some sort of symbol of goodness is nauseating and should be called out at every opportunity. The fact that his wife is complicit in this makes her fair game in my opinion. Yes, she might be sincere in her feelings towards the LGBTQ+ community, but in that case she should distance herself from her husband's image or, in any case, should be expected to be asked some pretty tough questions.

I only watched my first Tessa match a few months ago, and I thought she was awesome right from that first match, but, yeah, this was the first thing I noticed about her too. And I was watching her at some podunk indie, where she came out from behind a curtain in a high school gym in front of 50 fans. And it just looked ridiculous. Like she was auditioning for WWE.

Hasn't wrestling always had effeminate men wearing makeup? Including some that were huge stars?

I noticed them doing that shot of the crowd watching the big screen from a couple of years ago, and it never looks good. Why would you want to draw attention to your live crowd standing around looking bored during your show?

This ep was a lot of fun. I love it when a wrestling show has a concept like this. And I'm never gonna complain about seeing more Salina on my screen. I'm assuming we get Hammerstone Vs Pillman in the finals of the Openweight tournament, with Pillman winning the belt. Weird that they had Gringo Loco job here, when he's going to be in that tournament too. He sucks anyway, so whatever. I'd prefer them to have done an 8-man tournament. They have a big enough roster to pull it off. I've never seen Jacob Fatu wrestle, so I'm looking forward to that next week.

Thanks, guys.

I actually just started watching this last week. I'm enjoying it enough to keep going at this point, but already I'm a bit concerned about the amount of garbage wrestling, interference and beatdowns there seems to be on the show. There also seems to be a few too many random guys in masks on the show. However, I'm enjoying the presentation, and I like Cornette on commentary a lot. Can someone explain the beef Cornette has with Callihan? I vaguely know where it comes from, but would like it explained more fully.

A couple of really odd points here. When has Alexa ever shown that she can play a face? When she was a pixie in NXT? When she cut that pandering babyface promo after winning the elimination chamber before quickly changing tack and heeling on the crowd? Meanwhile, Sasha had the high quality series with Charlotte as a babyface, and actually some of her biggest in-ring attributes (specifically her bumping and selling) are strong babyface characteristics. Sasha is actually probably the most adept female they have at playing both heel and babyface. Also, one of the reasons people think Sasha should be pushed better is precisely because she's so good at the media/ambassadorial stuff, and she's someone they always send out to do that sort of stuff. I've seen or heard of Alexa doing very little of that stuff.

I just see it as a night in which an assortment of people who were once employed in the wrestling business get to talk for a while about their careers. I especially like hearing who they thank. I really liked Torrie giving a shout-out to Fit, and then people like Candice and Michelle McCool. Or Waltman thanking Bret for the Raw match they had. Remember when Lita just had a huge list of people to thank? "Manami Toyota.... I never met her".

At this point I'm okay with anyone getting in. In fact, it's the seemingly 'less deserving' people that interest me most. It was more interesting hearing Torrie Wilson's take on her career than, you know, someone we hear from all the time, or whose credentials are more easy to discern.

Was it Triple H who posted something quite nice when Misawa passed?