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| Yeah, he does that Photo Credit: WWE.com |
If you were to sum up the final October Main Event of 2014, you could do so easily in three words: so that happened.
It wasn't that anything horrible like last week's Game Show Ripoff Segment That Shall Not Be Named took place, or that there was a stealth two-segger TV MOTY candidate lying in wait somewhere along the course of this hour. Some episodes you get the feeling this is called Main Event because calling it the Perfectly Cromulent Wrestling Hour doesn't really have pizazz as a sellable name to audiences. (Plus, how would you fit all that on the bars next to and hanging over the TitanTron?) Yet, ironically enough, that is Main Event's primary directive especially in a Networkified era for Stamford's McMahons and associates. Even if nothing lasts about the show moments after you're done watching it, the sense of having watched some pro graps without facepalming can serve as its own form of comfort food.
Ironically enough, a variation of facepalming was one of the centerpieces of the final evening, in which Bo Dallas...well, you see the picture. You know what happened. How that ended up happening was that beforehand the former NXT kingpin was playing quite the gnat to the United States Champion's attempts to swat him. Dallas matched mat wrestling with Sheamus and even busted out the around-the-ring victory lap before offering a handshake. It's still undetermined as of now how someone could be a former World and WWE Champion and earn the King of the Ring while being too slow to reciprocate. When Dallas offered another, Sheamus slapped his own hand back up into his face, thus good and angering the Floridian. The last forty-five seconds saw an exchange of slaps from Dallas and body shots from Sheamus, almost as if they were firing each other up, before Sheamus realized "hey, this smiley jerk is within kicking range". For one of it's few times in its history of OUTTA NOWHERE DEATH FINISHER it felt wholly deserved and sent the crowd to the SmackDown taping happy.
You know, the way Tyson Kidd is with his cats. Left to his own devices while his wife battles Paige in a fun little sprint, he'd rather put his feet up on the announce table and give the credit to his cats for getting him through his recovery. While he was navigating the verbal gauntlet with Cole, Saxton, and special guest star JBL, the former Divas Champions were going from chain wrestling to steadily escalating stiffness. There's a related joke in there about Paige staring down Kidd before she licked Nattie's face, but the Wrestling Blog is a family web publication and Best Coast Bias was in its bunk when said licking occurred. ANYHOW, that pissed off Nattie enough to flip out and beat her like a rented goalie culminating in a discus lariat and a release German suplex that was nastier than any sapphic overture the Englishwoman was going to throw her way. Paige survived an attempt at a Sharpshooter and fired off a Paige Turner (no, not her, the move) but Nattie survived and reversed when Paige's hubris led her to think she could Sharpshooter a Neidhart, only to fall victim to a rollup probably enhanced by fabric assistance. Should you have cackled as Kidd got in the ring and patted his wife's back and then her head in one of the laziest examples of sympathy ever? No. If you did, however, you wouldn't exactly be blamed for it.
Blame, however, may be coming Damien Sandow's way, and as you might expect it may be thrown his way for something that he technically didn't even really do wrong. Main Event started with a MizdowTV ripoff, wherein Damien's stunt double did one of the most heelish things any WWE superstar can do: he pointed out that the good guys pulled an Eddie, and backed it up by showing the footage. This brought out the Usos, more interesting in stoking chants than any actual rejoinder for their switchoff actions. The better team and you're reaching back into the previous decade's playbook to lift notes from pre-entertaining Nikki and Brie? Dubious. Then they started acting like Mizdow who was acting like the Miz, and in short order it devolved into a "who would you like to see get hit in the face the most?" four-way race. Fortunately this lead immediately to a two-segger tag with Lil' Naitch reffing instead of the faceless drone who drew that duty on RAW and screwed Miz/Dow over. Unfortunately for the Miz, he managed to cram some more pain and suffering on top of the sharknado of Ferdinand excrement he's been trying to wade through since Summerslam. His ego lead him into a virtual handicap situation while the crowd alternated for chanting for the Usos and wanted Sandow.
He tagged his former briefcase holder in after a pregnant pause to prove he could do it only to bring himself back in almost immediately. When things started breaking down in Houston and the Usos went back to the trickery well, Miz was astute enough to notice and call Robinson's attention to it. So the Usos couldn't pull off the switch; well, at least not for another 11 seconds. As Lil' Naitch got Mizdow out of the ring for being the illegal stunt double, they did it again and a few seconds later had beaten them again with the same trick. Cole, the proto-Mizdow was quick to note they'd fallen for something twice in a 24-hour span without mentioning it was cheating both times and Charles Robinson heard their complaints and saw the same replay ostensibly before putting his response in the "mistakes have happened but why you gotta bring up old stuff?" folder. That's more than a little slightly frustrating and insulting to a viewer with operational brain cells, but then again if they watched this show it probably faded from memory a few seconds after it was over.
It is not a perfect world. But sometimes a perfectly serviceable one will suffice as a bridge to get to a better place.
It wasn't that anything horrible like last week's Game Show Ripoff Segment That Shall Not Be Named took place, or that there was a stealth two-segger TV MOTY candidate lying in wait somewhere along the course of this hour. Some episodes you get the feeling this is called Main Event because calling it the Perfectly Cromulent Wrestling Hour doesn't really have pizazz as a sellable name to audiences. (Plus, how would you fit all that on the bars next to and hanging over the TitanTron?) Yet, ironically enough, that is Main Event's primary directive especially in a Networkified era for Stamford's McMahons and associates. Even if nothing lasts about the show moments after you're done watching it, the sense of having watched some pro graps without facepalming can serve as its own form of comfort food.
Ironically enough, a variation of facepalming was one of the centerpieces of the final evening, in which Bo Dallas...well, you see the picture. You know what happened. How that ended up happening was that beforehand the former NXT kingpin was playing quite the gnat to the United States Champion's attempts to swat him. Dallas matched mat wrestling with Sheamus and even busted out the around-the-ring victory lap before offering a handshake. It's still undetermined as of now how someone could be a former World and WWE Champion and earn the King of the Ring while being too slow to reciprocate. When Dallas offered another, Sheamus slapped his own hand back up into his face, thus good and angering the Floridian. The last forty-five seconds saw an exchange of slaps from Dallas and body shots from Sheamus, almost as if they were firing each other up, before Sheamus realized "hey, this smiley jerk is within kicking range". For one of it's few times in its history of OUTTA NOWHERE DEATH FINISHER it felt wholly deserved and sent the crowd to the SmackDown taping happy.
You know, the way Tyson Kidd is with his cats. Left to his own devices while his wife battles Paige in a fun little sprint, he'd rather put his feet up on the announce table and give the credit to his cats for getting him through his recovery. While he was navigating the verbal gauntlet with Cole, Saxton, and special guest star JBL, the former Divas Champions were going from chain wrestling to steadily escalating stiffness. There's a related joke in there about Paige staring down Kidd before she licked Nattie's face, but the Wrestling Blog is a family web publication and Best Coast Bias was in its bunk when said licking occurred. ANYHOW, that pissed off Nattie enough to flip out and beat her like a rented goalie culminating in a discus lariat and a release German suplex that was nastier than any sapphic overture the Englishwoman was going to throw her way. Paige survived an attempt at a Sharpshooter and fired off a Paige Turner (no, not her, the move) but Nattie survived and reversed when Paige's hubris led her to think she could Sharpshooter a Neidhart, only to fall victim to a rollup probably enhanced by fabric assistance. Should you have cackled as Kidd got in the ring and patted his wife's back and then her head in one of the laziest examples of sympathy ever? No. If you did, however, you wouldn't exactly be blamed for it.
Blame, however, may be coming Damien Sandow's way, and as you might expect it may be thrown his way for something that he technically didn't even really do wrong. Main Event started with a MizdowTV ripoff, wherein Damien's stunt double did one of the most heelish things any WWE superstar can do: he pointed out that the good guys pulled an Eddie, and backed it up by showing the footage. This brought out the Usos, more interesting in stoking chants than any actual rejoinder for their switchoff actions. The better team and you're reaching back into the previous decade's playbook to lift notes from pre-entertaining Nikki and Brie? Dubious. Then they started acting like Mizdow who was acting like the Miz, and in short order it devolved into a "who would you like to see get hit in the face the most?" four-way race. Fortunately this lead immediately to a two-segger tag with Lil' Naitch reffing instead of the faceless drone who drew that duty on RAW and screwed Miz/Dow over. Unfortunately for the Miz, he managed to cram some more pain and suffering on top of the sharknado of Ferdinand excrement he's been trying to wade through since Summerslam. His ego lead him into a virtual handicap situation while the crowd alternated for chanting for the Usos and wanted Sandow.
He tagged his former briefcase holder in after a pregnant pause to prove he could do it only to bring himself back in almost immediately. When things started breaking down in Houston and the Usos went back to the trickery well, Miz was astute enough to notice and call Robinson's attention to it. So the Usos couldn't pull off the switch; well, at least not for another 11 seconds. As Lil' Naitch got Mizdow out of the ring for being the illegal stunt double, they did it again and a few seconds later had beaten them again with the same trick. Cole, the proto-Mizdow was quick to note they'd fallen for something twice in a 24-hour span without mentioning it was cheating both times and Charles Robinson heard their complaints and saw the same replay ostensibly before putting his response in the "mistakes have happened but why you gotta bring up old stuff?" folder. That's more than a little slightly frustrating and insulting to a viewer with operational brain cells, but then again if they watched this show it probably faded from memory a few seconds after it was over.
It is not a perfect world. But sometimes a perfectly serviceable one will suffice as a bridge to get to a better place.