Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE NXT: Ricochet did this incredible ninja-ass jump from the ring to the floor and popped pretty much the entire free-thinking world.
If you missed this episode, you can watch it here. If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, click right here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything is terrible.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for June 6, 2018.
Best: Nikki Cross As Shia LaBeouf
This week’s opening segment comes in two parts.
In part the first, NXT Women’s Champion Shayna Baszler shows up to cut a promo, which is not necessarily her strong suit. It’s mostly about how everybody’s afraid of her, and how she’s going to kick Nikki Cross’ ass. She gets it out clearly and relatively concisely, but you don’t ever really buy that she means anything she says. Which totally works here, because the underlying idea, at least as I understand it, is that Baszler is suddenly weirdly uneasy being face-to-face with a crazy person who doesn’t buy into any of her scare tactics. She’s shook.
In part the second, Nikki Cross illustrates the entire story by showing up, laughing about Shayna’s bullying, literally begging her to “do it” already (a la Rorschach), and then getting the best of her in a physical fight. I love that the brawl isn’t a “pull-apart,” but that it comes in waves. At first, Cross dominates. Then Baszler takes advantage of Cross’ biggest weakness — her focus, clearly — and suckerpunches her out of the ring. A normal brawl to sell a Network special match might end there, but here it’s important to show that Cross can weather the mental AND physical game of the champion. Cross recovers quickly, gets back into the ring, and regains physical control. The last bit of the segment is Cross being drawn to the belt, but never really doing anything with it, not even holding it. She just kinda sweeps it out of the ring. That feels like some pretty direct symbolism.
All in all a good opening segment, with purpose. It’s still crazy to me that of all the people they employ, Nikki Cross isn’t asked to go out and anchor the show with promos.
Best: The Midnight (Express) 61
My favorite part of this week’s episode might’ve been this tag team jobber squash near the beginning, which is the most Midnight Express-ass jobber squash I’ve seen on WWE TV in a while. WWE sometimes thinks “big guy defeats little guy” is the only kind of jobber squash that works, so only folks like Braun Strowman and Baron Corbin and Nia Jax get Local Talent to beat up. One of the strengths of the old NWA was any time a heel tag team would get put into a weekend TV match with enhancement chumps and just beat the ever-loving dog shit out of them to show that yeah, they’re cheaters who can’t be respected, but they’re also top-class athletes who will take you to the damn woodshed if you’re not special.
TM-61 take on Robbie Grand and Mike Hughley, who don’t even need name changes to sound like NWA World Championship Wrestling jobbers. Highlights include this dropkick, in which Shane Thorne jumps so high he’s practically kicking downward, and the finish, which skips the tandem finisher in favor of an assisted donkey punch. Seriously, the finish is a cruiserweight-sized guy punching another guy in the back of the head, and it WORKS. More heels like this, fewer who get beaten up 24/7 and have to have their feet on the ropes and a handful of tights to win even the easy matches.
Best: You Betta Work, Burch
The centerpiece of this week’s episode is a 5-minute thing between Roderick Strong and Danny “Twoey” Burch, meant to tread a little exciting water to keep us moving forward on an Undisputed Era vs. Pete Dunne and Company six-man tag. The match is fun while it lasts, and is built around the ongoing idea that Burch and Oney Lorcan kinda-sorta have Undisputed Era’s number because they’ve done some basic research and “hang in there” until they’ve taken these guys out of their rhythm and are in control.
It’s also mostly only here to set up the run-in from the other members of the Undisputed Era, which triggers a run-in from Dunne and Lorcan. That clears the runway for a cheap “come from behind” victory from Strong, who is successfully leaning into a very Tully Blanchard kind of character who’d be one of the best wrestlers in the company if he didn’t have such an inferiority complex. He only wins here by getting off a lucky move after a distraction, when “Mr. NXT” or whatever should be able to relatively steamroll someone on Burch’s level. Not to say Burch isn’t great, but socially (or whatever) he’s still a pretty low-level guy. Strong’s in here floundering because he can’t micromanage his ego against guys he sees as lesser, but who can’t seem to stop kicking his ass.
Best: Liberty Fell
This week’s show also brings to a close (?) the mini-feud between Kairi Sane and Lacey Evans, who have been trading victories and kinda vaguely gesturing at the idea of what it means to “be a lady” and “make an impact.” The feud kinda hinges on Evans’ character work, which is somehow really good aesthetically and wildly unfocused contextually, so “mini-feud” is the right way to go. At least right now.
The best part of the match is the fact that Sane finally got to work with a little aggression, instead of being an aloof “pirate princess” with a cool finish. That’s not her fault, she was just introduced in a tournament without a lot of in-universe connotation, and since winning the Mae Young Classic has felt a little more like a Very Special Guest than a member of the roster. I think putting the exclamation point on her beef with Evans will be good for it, as it allows her to sorta dip her toe into actual on-screen storylines and make her more of a part of the ecosystem. Plus, Sane is her best when she’s unexpectedly turning it up to 11 and murking you. Good to see her break out some submissions and deep-cut moveset choices.
Best: Ciampa’s In Gargano’s Head
Finally (other than the predictably great Velveteen Dream/Ricochet match video package) we have the “main event,” which is a promo from Tommaso Ciampa that serves more to finish its thought than introduce new ones.
The past few weeks have been all about Tommaso Ciampa adapting his attacks on Johnny Gargano to be increasingly personal, because Gargano proved at TakeOver: New Orleans that he can beat Ciampa in a straight-up match. This one’s getting booked as a “street fight” because the AJ Styles/Shinsuke Nakamura feud took the much more logical “last man standing” stipulation at the last second, and they can’t book two in the same weekend. Gargano also kinda proved he could win a “fight” with Ciampa in New Orleans by offering him a chance at redemption, then going HAM hardcore when it was refused.
To compensate, Ciampa has effectively “broken” Gargano, sending him into a crazy kick-punching fury every time he shows up. Gargano, the whitest-meat of the white-meat babyfaces, was interrupting other people’s matches last week just to announce he’d signed a contract to fight this guy. He’s off his rocker with madness. It’s like in Final Fantasy games where you cast berserk on a magic user so they’ll do nothing but heated physical attacks over and over. Ciampa cast berserk on Johnny Gargano, and now Gargano’s magic is gone.
He wins the fight here, recovering from being put in his own submission to Hulk Up and bloody Ciampa on the LED board, but there’s no way he wins the larger battle. I was gonna say “the war,” but that’s whatever the next match in the series ends up being. Maybe we can have Ciampa win here and still do Last Man Standing in a couple of months in Brooklyn? The only way to pay off the feud at this point is one of the two being beaten to death. And since we don’t have Lucha Underground’s coffin gimmick to actually send them to a noble Symbolic Fictional Wrestling Death, maybe it ends when one of them beats the other to such a degree that the loser disappears for months. One of these two HAS to leave NXT soon. Draw that line.
Next Week:
It’s the go-home show for NXT TakeOver: Chicago, EC3 takes on a boxing Monchichi, and Aleister Black attempts to add something to a feud besides saying he’s going to make somebody “fade to black.” Be there!
