HumanChessgame

The briefcase is a ringer with Moxley's clean underwear in it.

Unless they're going through with one or more parties involved turning, it makes no sense having it after the title match. Having the tag match first and Hobbs pinning Moxley would do far more to set up the world title match and give at least some hope Hobbs might win. Unless it's some type of special rules Cibernetico gimmick match, having more than 4 or 5 people on a team is just overkill with too much shit going on. I do remember liking those 5 tag teams on a side Survivor Series matches, but they got 30+ minutes and had the stipulation of the team being eliminated if one guy got pinned.

Omega is back and seems more or less fine. Private Party look like geeks two weeks in a row. Samoa Joe is back! But he's getting involved with Christian and his posse.... Hey Megan Bayne is here! Double J: "Hey MJF, Yo mama's a ho!" Lol Moxley wins. Granted when Hobbs kicked out of the DDT I thought for a brief minute they might do something interesting, but nope. As much as I like FTR, saddling them with Edge in this whole angle is doing no one any favors.

Statham was less over the top action-y and more serious in Wrath of Man.

Will the stip for Graves/Mcafee be a "loser has to share a commentator desk with Booker for a year" match?

Hard no. I like Claudio and Pac, both of whom are deserving of upper midcard pushes (for the love of beans please convince Chris Hero to do one more Kings of Wrestling run) but this is a waste of their talents. Yuta is decent and is someone who should be a top guy in ROH until he's ready for primetime. Moxley's promos are rambling and incoherent and I think he's a lousy worker. I don't buy him as any sort of unhinged badass and even if he just wants to be some agent of chaos with no real agenda he doesn't get this across in anything he says or does. What's more is that they do nothing but beat up jobbers or whatever main guy they're feuding with. The rest of the roster doesn't seem like they view them enough of a threat to care about them one way or another. No matter if it's Darby, MJF, or someone else it's time for Moxley to drop the belt and go do deathmatches or something for a while. Let him lose the strap then have the rest of his crew drop him because they don't believe in his cause anymore or whatever.

Is Beth Phoenix still under WWE contract in some way or is their a chance she gets brought in as an equalizer against Marina?

Matthews/Osperay really cooked if you like that kind of thing. Will's post match promo was kind of odd...there's never been any dissension in the HOB and Malakai has never treated King and Matthews like expendable stooges so convincing them to break up was kind of pointless. I'm in for a Black/Osperay match though. I guess MJF's plan is to help JJ cheat to win the belt because he figures beating an over the hill Jarrett is easier than beating Moxley? Regardless I have no desire to see Jarrett in the title picture. MJF challenging him to a match for some sort of contendership would be more interesting.

They compensated for no commercials by it being a massive shill of a show in every other way. That Hogan segment is going to go down as one of the cringiest and most tone deaf things ever. The crowd was absolutely eating his lunch and I could feel the secondhand embarrassment from everyone there (aside from Hogan himself as that would actually require self-awareness). How much did they pay Taker to do a lap around the ring on his motorcycle? I understand he can't walk but that was incredibly pointless. Cena winning the Rumble in yet another "I've got one last run in me before I retire" story is a bad enough idea that it might happen. Wasn't Penta supposed to debut? I was looking forward to that and figured he'd get a good pop it being LA and all. I guess he's the luchador Gable was calling out for next week. The opening match was a predictable clusterfuck. Liv/Rhea was fine but nothing we haven't seen before. I'm glad Rhea has the title back but it didn't feel like that much of a moment. Uso/Drew was fine. I was surprised Punk went over Rollins cleanly. Decent enough match. I get this was more of an event than an actual wrestling show, but 4 matches in over three hours? Woof.

I never watched more than an episode or two of BTE because I never found them entertaining. This is a me problem and I realize a lot of people do enjoy the content so if wrestlers want to do them then fine, though I think there is a fine line in pulling the curtain back a little too much or coming off the wrong way in some of them. A 30-60 minute youtube reacap show of what happened the previous week on Dynamite and Collision featuring some clipped matches, promos, as well as new interviews with some of the talent that normally don't have air time on the main shows would be a good idea. Maybe even air a dark match or two. RJ City is an entertaining guy and letting he and Rene anchor something like this would probably work well.

I'm digging Nakamura's new look. People talk about him dogging it but maybe it's because he and Andrade know eachother so well, but he really brought it here. The MCMGs and DIY have a lengthy banger of a match in them and I hope they get a chance to have it on a big card, but with WWE's attitude towards tag teams these days I'm not hopeful. This was the first time I've watched Smackdown in it's entirety in a while and maybe it was the first three hour show, but this was good overall. Also, it was one of the first time I noticed just how much other promotions and wrestlers get mentioned on air in the post-Vince era. There was discussion of the IWGP feud between Nakamura and Andrade, plus mentions of MDogg20, Josh Prohibition, and some other midwest indy stuff from Graves.

I've watched the first 4 episodes and much like the last new season I think it's better than it has any right to be. The tendency to milk a franchise for all it's worth by making prequels, spinoffs, soft reboots, etc is really tiring and this didn't really need to be made, but it's not bad.

You want scissors? I can get you scissors, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you scissors by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with gold polish I'd argue any one of these might be ok as a challenger for a non-ppv title shot (the current angle with Edge is fine in that regard) but all of them sniffing around the title picture at once isn't doing anyone any favors. Christian is at least doing something with younger talent and not hogging up a tremendous portion of the show, but they've gotten all they're going to get out of Edge. As far as Jarrett, no one wants to see him get any kind of run near the top at this point in time. The whole "banged up veteran wants to have one more run to see if they've still got it in them" angle is really getting tired. It made sense with Daninelson, and he has the ring work to back it up. Dustin is doing it the right way in his team with Sammy in ROH - helping elevate other people and not clogging up the main event scene. Jarrett has a wealth of knowledge he can share with the rest of the roster, but he doesn't need to be in the ring. MJF calling Moxley out on the other hand is something that could be potentially interesting, should that be the long game after Edge's placeholder angle. There are a lot of moving parts in the Hurt Business angle and I'm interested in where it goes. Ricochet auditioning just makes me think they're going to let him think he's in, only to give him a beating and tell him he doesn't have what it takes. Julia and Jamie got a decent amount of time for two people who are recently off the injured list. Hayter is still not back to where she was pre-injury (maybe it's the different look?) but is still solid. Julia remains one of the better "AEW Originals" if she can get her momentum back.

Maybe it's because I thought the show was on tonight and not last night and watched it this morning with the benefit of being able to skip around, but it felt like a fairly brief show. There were a lot of people missing and agreed on how it was missing a tag titles/trios match or an appearance by HoB or some of the other prominent members of the roster. Speaking of turns, was anyone else expecting Bennett and Taven to turn on Cole?

Yeah I was going to say, as a preteen in the early 90s the only exposure I had to Lawler was as a commentator. While I kind of figured he had some wrestling background, he basically never worked a match in the WWF until the Bret feud and he was hardly a physical specimen. I had no reason to think he'd be any type of physical threat to Bret.

This was one of the better Dynamites I can remember in a while as far as the in-ring product was concerned. I actually thought Brody was going to win for a minute after the piledriver/lariat combo. He would have in a just world, but I get they want to run Osperay/Fletcher again.

My shift was ending tonight and I saw there were some openings at the local Alamo, so I went to see Nosferatu a few days earlier than planned. It's probably my favorite of Eggers movies and faithful to the source material (both Dracula and the Murnau's film while putting his own style with some subtle nods to German Expressionism and other classic horror. The use of color and shadows was exceptionally good, especially in the scenes featuring Orlok (Skarsgard had better get acknowledged for this come awards season) and the blue hour scenes when night was falling really brought home the impending doom. The things that kept Bram Stoker's Dracula from really being top tier for me was Keanu being miscast and how much Hopkins hammed it up as Van Helsing, but none of that was the case here. Dafoe's character is definitely extra, but you get the sense his over the top persona is the result of his work driving him insane and doesn't cross into scenery chewing territory. I'm not a fan of unnecessary remakes, but this is a great movie from a horror and filmmaking standpoint.

I want a Mortos/Mark Briscoe team featuring vignettes of them hanging out on the chicken farm.

I just finished Final Battle and it's another case of an AEW PPV under-promising and over-delivering. While I keep up with ROH sporadically these days, so much of this was thrown together last minute but pretty much all of it delivered in-ring. The tag title was a good example as it was set up as some sort of blood feud and even had Dutch using Dusty's cowbell, yet there was very little actual buildup and the end result was nothing special (maybe NYC blood rules had something to do with this?). Nigel coming back was a surprise and the match really played to what he's able to do. I'll co-sign the Survival of the Fittest being the match of the night. All guys got a chance to shine and Blake Christian has taken his current indy character here, which suits him. This may veer into hot take territory, but Blake's weasely undersized high flying heel is everything Adam Cole wishes he was. Speaking of face/heel dynamics, Cardona is incredibly miscast as a face here when his big time former WWE wrestler gimmick he uses across the indies is so much better established and a natural fit for him, even if he is working a schmuck like Jericho. Athena and/or Billie are ready for the big time.

I wonder if they're hesitant to push some of the luchadores more because AEW's relationship with their home promotion is tenuous or there are questions about long term availability?

Maybe it stems from being a teenage Raven fanboy when I started watching ECW at 15 or so, but I was always a big fan of his as well. He put a sudden, aggressive snap to it that just made it look that much more impactful. A lot of guys hitting a DDT just kind of fell/sat down, but Raven practically took a full back bump when he would give it to someone. Completely random thought but I remember watching WWE in the early 00s and remember that Val Venis would sell a DDT better than anyone. He'd pretty much dive head-first and get vertical, rather than just kind of flopping down.

There's one more episode to go in this Day of the Jackal miniseries and I've enjoyed it so far. The rising tension as the walls close in on the seemingly super-competent hitman is very well done. I also just finished Deadloch, which is a darkly comedic murder mystery taking place in small town Australia. The characters are all quirky and hilarious, even if they do need subtitles some of the time. It looks like the show has been picked up for a second season starting soon.

Speaking of flippy guys, I noticed Vikingo is wrestling again but haven't heard him mentioned in AEW. Is whatever the situation he has with his home promotion keeping him from working there or something? Granted I wasn't all that impressed with him, but other people seemed to be and his appearances got a ton of hype.

I wonder if they pull a swerve and have some big hug it out moment to further solidify their partnership.

The women's match was what it was, honestly it just came off as too thrown together for a build to something like Wargames. It would have been better as a traditional SS elimination match. Speaking of the women's roster, where are Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss? I know Alexa was pregnant but I see it's been almost 2 years since she wrestled. I had all but forgotten about Nakamura until he came back with this new gimmick and it's good to see him back again. Knight will always be an "and then the bell rang" guy for me so it will be interesting to see what Nakamura can do with this new push. As much as three ways being excuses for plunder matches are these days, I thought this one was good stuff. Bron is one of the best guys in the company right now and the other two carried their weight just as well. Priest and Gunther put on a banger. With two big guys, you'd expect more of a hoss fight but there was a lot of smart ringwork going on here. Gunther went after the arm and Priest did a lot of smart selling and adjusted his offense accordingly. Finn's interference was a bit of a shitty way to end things, but it made Priest look stronger in defeat. Despite all the seemingly extraneous bells and whistles thrown onto the men's Wargames match, it ended up all coming together perfectly. The sitdown between Punk, Roman, and Heyman worked a lot better than it had any right to. Some people have talked about how the Punk/Roman angle is taking away from the Bloodline Black and White vs Wolfpac storyline, but I think there's room enough in a match for weaving more than one thread. When the faces had Solo surrounded I kept expecting some kind of swerve.