Sami Callihan, Hacker?

So, Sami Callihan made it to NXT and was given the appellation "Solomon Crowe" from the Developmental Name Generator. I assumed he would be working an extension of his indie persona with a little more WWE flair to it, but you know what people say when you assume. Anyway, he made his long-awaited debut attacking Kalisto, aka the former Samuray del Sol, while the lights were turned out. The catch? He controlled the lights from his tablet device. Yes, Solomon Crowe has been bestowed with a hacker gimmick. See after the jump:


My thoughts on two minutes of video first go to Kalisto, who got extensive amounts of mic time. I've seen a little of what he can do in the ring, but from that limited amount of footage, I saw a guy who will translate well into WWE. Onto Crowe and his gimmick, he feels like a 20 year-old anachronism on the surface. The hacker gimmick was dated in movies as soon as it was implemented, mainly because Hollywood had no fucking idea what being a hacker actually entailed.

However, Crowe blacking the lights, beating up Kalisto, turning them on with a tablet, and then leaving under the cover of dark feels like a simple enough introduction to me. Already, NXT's creative team seems to have gotten "hacking" better than Hollywood, but again, Crowe's debut is the very definition of a small sample size. However, gimmicks in NXT have been mostly hits so far. Of all the name characters in developmental, the only one I feel has an awful, awful persona attached to him is CJ Parker. Everything else seems pitch-perfect.

And hey, even if the hacking shit turns out to be a turd of a gimmick, I certainly know Crowe has the chops to succeed based on his insane charisma and supreme ring skills. Either way, his developmental run has gotten off to an interesting start, par for the course for the man formerly known as the New Horror.