Firebreaker Chip

Two days after the best women's match in the company's history blows the roof off the same venue, Mike the Miz gets a babyface pop for loudly shouting at all of the women in the ring to shut up, because the segment is so terrible who wriiiiites thiiiiiiis shiiiiiiiit First hour had some of the greatest comedy heel stooging I've ever seen, I cannot believe they had the only payoff to the Summerslam main event be Brock Lesnar being cheerfully instructed to Bolieve + Xavier Woods on a trombone mournfully serenading Kalisto getting pinned

New Day being revealed to be some clandestine cult with tentacles that reached far further than anyody realised, including to the WWE Champion and the guy conveniently booked to host Summerslam

Timekeeper revealed to be corrupt, Undertaker revealed to be in league with the Authority who are still heels outside of NXT, Lesnar not around to take revenge but some kind of brooding "vigilante" figure is I mean Okada was there with Joe but yeah probably not him

Amell having the worst physique out of everyone in that match was kind of ridiculous Barrett, Rhodes, Ziggler, Miz all kinda stuck with that "2010 future top guy" stink where it's now impossible to actually imagine them as main eventers in a post-Punk/Bryan world, the last survivors after Ted and Johnny Nitro got the fuck outta dodge

Four way tag match was definitely one of the best of the night, everyone in it seemed to be crazy over, New Day immediately in the zone of having overshot heel heat back into massive babyface heat despite doing the cheap heat/deliberately bad singing combo Isn't Lesnar not scheduled for Raw tomorrow? Potential spoilers about the guy who is already circulating

Nobody bumps better than Lesnar for a chokeslam, it's true

Thought the Cena-Rollins match was good in that OTT spotfest way Cena's been doing, but it felt a bit like an attempt to portray Rollins as being more legit than his title reign made him seen, followed by the most counterproductive finish imaginable, but now he has both belts anyway and [flippant reaction gif]

not actually sure the main events of that show warrant more than flippant reaction gifs

they should just replay the entirety of Becky/Sasha on Raw with "9.99" intermittently flashing on screen

Xavier Woods screaming "yeaaaaaaah" in the most annoying voice imaginable is pure gold Second week in a row where they've had a really fun OTT finishing streak to end the main event

Re: the UK shows, is "WWE presale" just like a code they'll announce somewhere for a certain amount of people to get tickets on the Thursday?

The commentary was intermittently annoying overall, but Graves was very alert in immediately putting over how potentially damaging that heel hook was I didn't even know Corbin had any kind of grappling background til they showed the NAGA photo in the video package - it at least gives him something else to work with when he gets into wrestling big guys he can't pin in 23 seconds. Always amused that they actually want to publicise his hilariously pudgy football years At the start of the womens' match where Bayley actually got a slightly mixed reaction I thought yeah they're actually gonna have to work very hard to get the right kind of reactions here, then when Bayley countered the Bank Statement to the crossface and everyone went nuts it was just like oh yeah they fuckin got them now All the brutal methodical limbwork stuff must just have Regal sitting back with a massive grin backstage, I guess the Regal-Danielson-Del Ray lineage shows though pretty clearly a lot of the time in that division

I dont get how the next set of tapings is working, they've already done a set that suggest [some kind of weird booking] and now they're taping next week's episode before the PPV tonight, thus spoiling the result of the PPV for the 13,000 people who are about to watch it live?

I still think that RAW is one of the ten best episodes they ever did. That show just felt so real. And I'll admit, as a kid I totally bought Shawn passing out. And as far as 1997 Bret Hart? 4/21/97. The greatest RAW ever. And it was all booked on the fly in less than 24 hours because Bret got injured the night before and needed surgery. Desperate WWF was so much better than complacent WWE. Just started watching this, in the first ten minutes Vince has said that Ahmed Johnson united all of South Africa, "something even Nelson Mandela tried and failed to do", then Lawler compares the "nation of Africa" to the Nation of Domination, stellar stuff Even more impressive if he united Africa while sporting that immense wedgie

OK the second half is significantly darker once it gets into stuff about Benoit/Nigel McGuiness/CTE/Butlins/foreshadowing Bryan's inevitable self-destruction

The Bryan book is very good so far. For a guy who's so overwhelmingly obsessed with wrestling he seems to have a pretty keen, easygoing ability to identify the things about it that are comical and ridiculous; it's a pretty funny read. It may just be that being friends with Brian Kendrick is an intrinsically hiilarious lifestyle though. 100 pages in and it's already had Kendrick happily wrestling his first match in charity shop pyjamas with Genie in a Bottle by xtina as his entrance music, AND having a disgusted Nick Bockwinkel walk in on him while he was giving a terrified indie wrestler an unsolicited demonstration of how to autofellate Not such a big fan of the overwritten wrestlemania diary bits interspersed with it, it very much reads like the ghostwriter is some weird superfan of Bri and Bryan's marriage and likely exploited the assignment to surreptitiouslly accumulate a collection of her fingernails and hair

Henry's Ron Simmons impersonation is flawless

Flair's career never really recovered once people started reversing the pressure on the figure 4 imo

Lol at them saying nobody ever kicks out of the cena leg drop then not saying it about the avalanche AA

Idk man I almost find his determination to come back more worrying at this point, though more power to him if he can somehow do it and stay well

He's said the interview is fake on Twitter and that he'll be back.

God forgive me but Billy and Chuck's wedding

Rusev's selling in the mini-match with Cena was so great, and I also liked how when the no-longer-triple-threat match called for him to get caught on the top rope by Cesaro, the crowd had happened to start chanting about Lana, and he opportunistically acted like that was what had got inside his head and distracted him up there

Yeah that was on the live version and was never explained, maybe Cole thought it was intended as a moving tribute to Japanese wrestling's love affair with the head drop

I thought the tag main was perfectly good and enjoyed the extended Ricky Morton bits from both guys, it's just that it had that "random guys thrown together having a fun match to finish a house show with a good vibe" thing, whereas Balor vs Owens felt like a major PPV match with massively bigger stakes - felt like they were from two different shows. They also seemed keen to go back to emphasising that Finn winning was the biggest thing to come out of the show so why not put it on last Think that was definitely Finn's best match in WWE so far, first time it felt there was real emotional investment in/from him; the idea that he might get a bit OTT violent and get DQ'd from frustration is something they could take further with him in terms of the Demon gear being a bit of an escalation/oh shiiit moment in a feud fun hearing the crowd gasp in anticipation the instant Finn first teased the reverse bloody sunday it's unbelievable how weird it was to hear ad-libbed, spontaneous commentary on a WWE show, Cole just kind of shooting the shit during the brief video packages between matches like he's chilling out with a beer while covering Eurovision or something