Usually I start these recaps with positive stuff and work my way into the misses.
There were very few hits this week. No more than two smaller things and a whole segment/match got a smile out of me. A majority of this show was just lame.
I’m gonna just throw this here now – check out the live blog by Claire Elizabeth and show her love. She deserves it. More than I.
So Miz TV kicked us off, and John Morrison was wearing garlic around his neck, and while that’s not how you repel zombies, I appreciate the effort. Also a… drip stick? Yeah. A drip stick.
Miz spewed on about how he needed to be back to be a support for all superstars. He introduced Charlotte Flair and Morison provided music to accompany her entrance. Flair made Miz stand for her even with his injury. That’s what a Queen does.
Flair said she had her fairytale WrestleMania victory and she’ll be sending Ripley to hell, standard Hell in a Cell speak. Of course that brought out Ms. Brutality who proceeded to tell her to go to hell.
Morrison asked basically if she was a vampire, which got a chuckle out of me. Miz brought up last week’s two minute loss and hey look its a rare two week sighting of Nikki Cross. I genuinely didn’t expect them to even push it further.
She tried to angle a match with Flair to become the new contender. So Flair decided that she could beat Cross in… ONE minute! However the time to beat clock showed two minutes which… okay.
And the reason why it was two minutes is because they had to have Cross duck her for a full minute and chase Flair to the announce table, where Flair spent 15 seconds trash talking Ripley. At the 15 second mark Flair finally got some real offense and the clock ran out.
So… literally what happened last week happened this week with the same players featuring the exact same finish. So creative!
I love all three of these women, and I couldn’t care less about any of this. This is shit. Complete shit. Moronic. Stupid. Dumb.
And my girl Nikki Cross has been picking up wins in all of this. Still moronic. Still stupid. Still dumb.
Why should I care about any of this? Both the champion and the challenger are made to look stupid. Neither can beat Nikki Cross in two minutes. How does Nikki not get added to the Hell in a Cell match?
This is shit.
More of the same
We were so close to something different.
So close.
I should have expected it after this show, but damn it WWE sucks sometimes, don’t they? They had backstage promos with Drew McIntyre and Kofi Kingston on the show, and I couldn’t even listen to Drew’s. Sheesh that guy is dull as hell these days.
But then they went to Kofi, and he took his own “cheap shot at Drew after Drew talked about his seven second loss to Brock. He alluded to some reality-ish explanations of that without actually getting into the specifics.
We all know how trash that was. And there could have been a bit of a get good by having Kofi go over here and let him have a good rematch with Lashley at Hell in a Cell.
Nope.
See how awesome that would have been? I love Xavier and Kofi.
Look they had a good match, and the final Claymore was pretty good.
Who cares about this really? It’s the same damn thing we’ve been seeing since WrestleMania. Drew needs to be away from the top title for a bit. His ex-best friend is the damn US champion! Do something there!
It’s just lame. Lame is such an apathetic word for me.
And that’s how I feel about all of this – apathetic. It’s Drew and Bobby. Again. Rinse and repeat. Instead of doing something interesting and something people would want.
That’s the story with a majority of WWE these days.
You’re just a doll
I’m just putting this extra thing here to follow the last thing you’ll read on this recap.
Reginald has been such a pawn in the women’s division feud that he is being used to get Alexa Bliss with Shayna.
Her magical powers aren’t good enough to just start a feud. No it has to be because Reginald is an invited guest on the playground.
And it was mainly because Lilly wanted to know what his life as an acrobat was like.
So Shayna took him out and then said she needed to talk to Alexa… next week. Not right now as she’s sitting there… but next week.
And then she got in the doll’s face and called it a stupid doll.
What an image.
She’s likely to get murdered now, as horror movies have taught me.
Take a look at the end of the recap to see my full thoughts on all of this.
Bro Derek outta nowhere!
It was so great that right after the first shit half hour of this show, we got one of the best parts of the show.
Riddle was backstage with Damian Priest (sorry bud you probably wish Bad Bunny was still around) and he was asking Priest how to say stuff in Spanish. When he asked how to say hey Randy, Priest just said “Hey Randy” because Randy was behind Riddle. It was a good moment but I‘d like to see more than this from him.
Orton asked him to come out and watch the match with Woods to take some notes and get in the groove as a tag team, and they did the bit with the lock and key so Riddle would shut up. It just works with Riddle.
Orton at one point was getting beat up pretty good with an explosive elbow to his head (or dome as Jimmy Smith put it) and it led Orton to cheat to get an advantage. Orton told Riddle to watch and it cost him a quicker victory because Woods fought out of the DDT.
Randy Orton did a f****** Bro Derek. Literally what I said aloud (without the stars!). I did not expect that and I absolutely love the little details here.
Riddle is great here.
Orton tried to show Riddle how its done his way, and it didn’t work. So he remembered that Riddle did the RKO outta nowhere last week and won, So Orton did a Bro Derek outta nowhere.
This is entertaining. All the characters are clicking, making sense, and are into what they’re doing. Hey, whaddya know that leads to a smile on my face! More please!
The Rest
AJ Styles and Omos defeated Elias and Ryker
So Elias basically decided to leave the tag title match when Ryker was going to tag him in. Before the match, Elias asked Ryker if he had ever been in battle after borderline scolding him, to which he turned around and said he served in Iraq. Now it’s Memorial Day here in the states and that felt quite a bit babyface-ish in the way it was presented. I’m not on the Ryker train but okay the dude served so I have respect there.
Now what I took from this is that Elias doesn’t care about that and getting pushed around by Omos is worse than fighting a literal war. Elias instead said that Ryker hasn’t been on his side when he needed help, but last week Ryker beat him with his help. Ryker’s unpredictable and he dumped him. Okay then. There was a match here. It was fine.
Ricochet defeated Sheamus / Humberto Carrillo defeated Sheamus
So is it just me or has Sheamus been a bit more… Irish… than he’s usually been presented? Like I feel like he’s almost a caricature of himself since this open challenge stuff started. Accent is thicker and more pronounced, like he’s trying out for a live action Lucky Charms commercial. That’s how it feels to me. The accent doesn’t bother me at all, it just sounds much different. Anyway Carrillo assisted Ricochet, and Ricochet assisted Carrillo. Also Carrillo busted Sheamus’ nose hard. Hope he’s alright.
MACE and T-BAR defeated Lucha House Party
MACE and T-BAR said that tonight would be the night of Lucha House Party’s extinction. These dudes look silly as hell still having the face paint on without masks.
Dana and Mandy defeated Lana and Naomi
There will be a lot more of these because there are literally only 5 main roster women’s tag teams. 4 out of 5 were on this show.
Cedric Alexander defeated Shelton Benjamin
There will be a lot more of these because they will never stop feuding. Same exact thing as last week. Potentially the same exact thing next week.
Reginald defeated Shayna Baszler
More stupid shit. My God. F*** this. I could spew 1,000 words on this but it doesn’t deserve any more time.
Grade: D+
What were your thoughts, Cagesiders?