Craig H

This is eventually what I'm going to do when we buy a new house. Check these out: Actually, there's a bunch of videos you can see of builds like this. This is just the fanciest one, but I like the guy and his work. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a full line of Festools, a giant workshop, excellent milled lumber, etc.

Someone brought up this idea somewhere else, can't remember where. The general idea is that someone in the background is orchestrating these groups and attacks on the Elite and then that someone is eventually revealed to be Marty Scurll and he's doing this out of revenge for saying they're his friend and leaving him behind. As a true villain, he's masterminded all of these groups to chip away at the Bucks, Cody, Page, etc. It was all basically proposed as a long, comic book-y or MCU type of storyline. I liked the sound of it.

WHY WASN'T THIS ON DYNAMITE?!

I think the beard is fine on Ciampa and maybe Dain, but that's it in NXT. Vince also apparently hates beards, which makes the dearth of wrestlers with scraggly unkempt beards really weird. Daniel Bryan? Fine, he's been rocking it longer than most of these guys. The rest? Get your beard trimmed and tailored and this is coming from someone with a beard.

Can we call this group Phish? Or Credence Clearwater Revised?

I disagree. Thought the opening tag match was outstanding, Fenix vs Trent advanced the storyline of Trent seeking singles success and having it at the expense of the Lucha Bros. and now there's the question of where he goes from here, Cody's promo was on fire even if he did tend to bury MJF a little bit, Nyla Rose was a fucking beast and demolished Leva Bates and Rick Knox and Shanna, then you had Jericho's promo that was really funny and then played into building up both Luchasaurus AND Jungle Boy, Statlander got a big win in a good match that raises her profile and gives Shida something more to fight for, and then came the two worst segments with the weird Awesome Kong stuff and the sloppy-ish CD vs Penta match. CD has always looked weird with his paunch and his pants that look too long for him. And the main event was pretty good. I love watching Moxley work with guys smaller than him and you can tell he's having a blast as well. The ending sets up Moxley as the clear #1 contender and sets the stage for what should be Moxley saying "fuck it" and attacking the entire Inner Circle next week. Another positive to point out was that the commercials didn't take away from much and felt less frequent. They went to commercial each time when a submission or rest hold was applied or the heel (in the match) was getting heat on the face (in the match). I watched all of the P-i-P stuff and it was all skippable and when they returned they turned things back up a notch for the tv production. There's a ton of positives there with them mixing and matching good in ring segments with good story or promo segments and they're always building to the next week or two weeks away while making what's going on during the show important as well. If anything was skippable it was last week. This week returned to form and put on a good two hour TV show that went by pretty quickly.

Here's what I think...I noticed the audio issues pop up immediately with the Young Bucks pyro. Right when that went off the audio to everything but the announcers cut out and the levels for the announcers went way down. And then for the next 10 to 15 minutes you'd hear the ambient and crowd audio come back in only to cut back out or the levels would shoot way up for the announcers and then come back down. It finally sorted itself out by the end of the opening match. I'm guessing the pyro caused one of their mixers or other equipment to malfunction and they scrambled to fix the problem or someone accidentally knocked some wires loose at that exact moment. And it seemingly was just for the TNT feed so it might have just been that equipment.

And both shows were really good, as usual, I thought. Of all of these weeks, I can only think of one or two weeks where I thought NXT wasn't that good and I obviously thought last week for AEW wasn't that good. I think it's great that they're both hovering around the 800k to 900k for viewers and I hope they both eventually get over the million mark on the same night. It would be fucking fantastic and a good sign to see more people tuning in to what are the two best weekly wrestling shows on tv.

But but but but Meltzer said this was a real story! Again, I love Dave and it may seem like I don't because he has about two dozen Dave-isms that get on my nerves, but the whole "this is a real story" thing always gets on my nerves. He did it with the SmackDown rating on FS1, he did it with another SmackDown rating, he did it with AEW's rating last week, etc. Thankfully Bryan was there to tell him that it isn't a story and thing to look for would be what happens today, which, sure enough, is business as usual. EDIT: lol some 300k people DVR'd AEW last week. Gee, I wonder why.

There were a couple things they left out that were in other documentaries, but that's fine. Paul Newman's one of my all time favorites, but man, that would not have worked.

Interesting hypothesis, but MJF isn't in the Inner Circle. MJF is doing his own thing with Wardlow.

JFC is right. If you told me Tim Ryan also went full Calvin Candie and explained that the bumps in Jackson's skull are also different then I would probably believe you. It's going to be 2020 and people in these positions have only become dumber or more bigoted for fucks sake.

This was more like it. Aside from audio issues in the first 10 minutes, the sound production was good. I enjoyed nearly every match this week and liked the stories being told as well. Really good show tonight.

I know we're not supposed to comment during the show, but I'm sick and fucking tired of these audio problems. It fucking sucks. Get this shit figured out already! This is the 4th or 5th show on a row where the audio is all fucked up. EDIT: Nevermind, sounds perfect now.

Drew was being protected for a long while until he lost to Ziggler. Now it seems they've put them in the Braun Strowman tier.