Lol I do think Rother is criminally underrated. I could envision every little action during that “official coronation” opening segment. These guys are deliciously slimy heels with their only redeeming qualities (rightfully) being their entertainment value-- Rother’s charisma in particular, in this case. Kamijo really shined here, so great intro by the Elysian Empire who pulled some fun face shenanigans.
Short, safe segment from the Keisters. Nothing groundbreaking if you’ve seen the characters before but it’s still an important introductory piece that’s better served on the show than not. Leading into Keisters vs EE, a quick nitpick-- I would’ve just had the Empire already in the ring since, theoretically, the opening segment was just a few moments before the beginning of the tag match. Small thing. Ended up having a really fun tag match where the Keisters came off as dirtbags and the Empire gained momentum so all went well here.
Solid seg from Stryker and Noelle. Wouldn’t mind seeing this evolve into a tag team. I think the feud with Izzy brought a lot of that fire back out of Noelle, which is great to see with the maturation of the character. The pairing is definitely good for Stryker at the moment to get his foot in the door, so to say. My only gripe are the coding issues surrounding Spencer Burke’s name.
I hope we get a solid 8 months of “LOWRI MOSS- COMING SOON.”
I thought the Valero segment was nice with some cool soundbites. A little over everybody calling themselves God in some form or another these days. (Coming from a handler that has a character named Don God, I know, this sounds hypocritical, but stay with me.) If everyone’s God then no one’s God, right?
But this did a good job at pretty much confirming that, yes, indeed, Ricky is a full-blown heel, HOW DARE YOU PALMFACE THE GOOD BURKE LIKE THAT.
The People’s Elbow will never get old. Solid win for Mistress Ai in a match that probably had more near-falls than I was ever expecting it to. I’m criminally uncultured when it comes to Ai so hopefully the winning streak continues and we hear more from her in upcoming episodes.
No idea what went down between Stunray and Daniel Widdel after, but I’m a sucker for people with history carrying their feuds into other feds-- especially when it’s written naturally. Nothing seemed forced here. Stunray walked through gorilla and ran into an old friend and my imagination takes care of the gaps… for now. Color me interested. The Jimmy Jam segment occurred and I don’t know if anything significant happened but thank sweetness for contributions. It reminds me of the old-school WWF mini-hype interviews they would (and inconsistently still do) play in the corner before a match. The match between JJR and Widdel moved the show along as a nice midcard bout and both dudes came out of this looking good.
HEY MY SEG
Johnny Karma’s segs continue to reel me in tbh. He and Izzy are two characters that I’ve always just genuinely enjoyed reading about, and it was nice to see him reflecting on his one-time-inability to protect Cherry Baum. It reminds me of a storyline I’d done years ago with THAT GOON CHRIS MADISON. Great dynamic between these characters though that you honestly just don’t see from every one-handler duo. The confrontation between Karma and Izzy was the stuff of gold that built the already-high tension nicely. Izzy’s monologue was perfect and Karma’s reaction was spot-on for what I’d expect (wrong word-- maybe *want*?) from someone in his position.
Blake Rogers’ seg was next. Cool to see the feud with Malicious Enrique Iglesias continuing, though I feel I’d rather avoid comparing wrestlers to “the Kardashians.” I know, it doesn’t count, but the Bellas exist and aaahhhh it’s all too close. Overall though, the content was fine. Schweet. !
Julian Tijerina makes me uncomfortable because of how uncomfortable he makes Spencer Burke. This was a funny seg that, again, I could picture in my head. A little disappointing that Julian doesn't seem nearly as worried about Blake as Blake is about him-- but the fact that he’s more caught up in himself and his win-loss record makes up for that, and may have been done on purpose. I dug this seg. I THINK!
Camp Envi vs Noelle and Stryker was very well-written. I love the way Sadie was portrayed (though I think Evan’s “WOOOO!”ing during chops may have broken continuity a bit and SSF may be correct as opposed to SFS, NITPICKNITPICK). Really though, this moved both stories along nicely. No one came out of this looking bad, though I do hope Stryker is able to score that first key pin/sub on his own soon. That’s a bit of a story in and of itself. Good job to all involved.
The Dom/Annie/Spencer segment had me lol’ing at points. I do sometimes get the vibe that Dom has run out of things to do in FGA but this should still be a fun match to read, as Annie v Dom always is. Sometimes it’s hard to “believe” a feud between two characters operated by the same handler. You feel that the dynamic is always so different than it would be with anyone else, but Benny does a good job of balancing these things and I am legitimately excited to see how this concludes, especially with the MAL title on the line.
Izzy vs the returning Chris Bond happened. I went back and forth on how I felt about this, since I’m never a big fan of hyping a return and then having that person immediately lose on “free TV.” But considering that he was inactive due to injury for such an extended period, this is a reasonable (albeit, maybe heartbreaking) loss. Great to see Izzy push forward anyway, since a loss here might’ve hurt her image in the context of her feud with Karma.
Madison and Molly had a good back-and-forth, but some of that dialogue just dragged way too long (to the point where Molly may have forgotten her second announcement altogether). Something interesting I noticed was Molly’s need to explain herself and her actions so defensively in this seg. The dynamic between champ and challenger continues to change each week, and now I’m getting the vibe that we may be seeing a Reid heel turn. Coupled with Reid’s entourage, it wouldn’t be a wildly difficult (or necessary) transition to make but it would be different, and a fun read.
Ricky vs Dom went quicker than I imagined it would in my head. Ricky’s heel persona continues to evolve and DOM HARTER DOING THE JOB, WAHAHOW, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT SHIT. Great, protective ending, but I “lol” every time I realize he’s making his entrance to “The Game” by Motorhead. Lawd.
I didn’t mind the Chris Bond segment. I feel bad calling it bland, and it probably would’ve come off better if it happened prior to his match, but this seg just felt really off to me. (It may have also been aesthetic, due to the quotation marks which weren’t uniform with the show.) It just might have resonated more had Bond shown some vulnerability, or restraint, during this segment since he may not truly have leverage in this rivalry. I dunno. An upside is that it segwayed perfectly into the main event.
Mah gahd Izzy Anders is busy tonight. I don’t hate it though. I think this was a great main event, marred by interference just like any respectable free TV main event in 2017 should be! But really, a good story was told here and it was nice to see Savannah walk away with the win, especially since the Karma/Anders story kind of dominated the end of it. No one gets lost in the shuffle in this particular match.
I liked the show-ending segment but I’ve always had a bit of an issue with segs where there are just chunks of dialogue isolated from one another rather than a back-and-forth. I don’t know if it was stated “each person has ___ to say ____” somewhere, but it came off structured as such and took me out of the moment a bit. This doesn’t detract from the content though. Zero and Cordy went
in on each other here and it was pretty sick tbh. Oddly I felt something was missing from this feud heading into GK but the addition of Scott as the special ref adds a new layer of uncertainty to the whole thing. I always dug his dynamic with Zero so that’s one more thing to look forward to.
Good show overall that reminded me of an old-school episode of RAW without the Smoking Gunns. God the Smoking Gunns sucked.
