The Best And Worst Of WWE NXT 5/8/19: No Country For Cole Men

Previously on the Best and Worst of NXT: Velveteen Dream sang a deeply unfortunate ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ parody, Jaxson Ryker continued his Terrible Wrestling World Tour, and Domnickovic Dijakenstein tried to murder a dude via throwing.

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 and everyone is terrible.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for May 8, 2019.

Best: Hair Apparent

Up first this week is a match in the long-simmering feud between Philosophically Undefeated Bianca Belair and Head TV-PG B-Word In Charge Mia Yim. They’re both strong personalities and have been getting in each other’s faces at the Performance Center while Robbie Brookside tries to teach Stokely Hathaway the Iconoclasm or whatever, and this is the payoff.

The best aspect of the match for me is the finish, in which NXT finally realizes Bianca needs character development beyond “hair,” “strong,” and “claps while shouting,” and gives her an unexpected foreign object: her hair. And yeah, she’s been using her hair as a weapon for a while, but she’s evolving the attack. Here she pins Yim by countering a sunset flip, wrapping her hair around the middle rope in an instantaneously makeshift lever/pulley system, and holding onto it for leverage. It’s kind of brilliant, honestly.

It’s a great finish for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it shows that Bianca’s attempting to make up for the recent blemishes on her record by developing her attack and using some of that naturally occurring confidence to turn her into a MacGyver-esque ring general. She knows she’s going to have to use something besides strength and an unflappable sense of self to defeat NXT’s top stars. Secondly, it allows for a “cheap” victory with a little bit of creativity, meaning you can actually get excited for a Yim vs. Belair rematch. Bianca cheated, sure, but it was clever enough that there aren’t a bunch of rules on the book to disqualify it. It’s unique. Yim clearly didn’t lose fairly, so she’s gonna want another shot. NXT is occasionally very, very good at doing WWE’s “build a feud by having people wrestle each other over and over” thing and knowing how much to add to each step.

Bonus: the NXT women’s division is coming up with new ways to win matches, which is great, because Shayna Baszler’s still the champ and “fighting” and “trying to pin her” aren’t working.

Best: Backstage Attacks Done Right

Another thing I loved about this week’s episode is how they chose to film “backstage” segments. On Raw or Smackdown, characters go backstage and are suddenly in this multi-camera action sequence where it doesn’t make sense why cameras would even be around. Back in the day, if characters like the Four Horsemen wanted to attack someone backstage and have it be seen, they had to drag a camera man back with them. The “you need to see” aspect made it even more dastardly.

On NXT, someone remembered that Full Sail and the Performance Center are grounds zero and zero-1 (not that one) for an endless string of television and reality shows, where someone’s around at all times filming for the PC YouTube channel or NXT TV. They also work and operate in modern buildings with security cameras, and people who might be around filming for training purposes. So when the Forgotten Sons attack the Viking Whoevers backstage, we see it through the security camera. That helps the realism so, so much, and makes it look like the Sons cared more about the violence and the attack than in “filming a segment.”

Similarly, the issues with Shayna Baszler’s crew and Io Shirai are shown through static cameras at the Performance Center. It makes sense that the company training a bunch of wrestlers to work on TV would have cameras filming their practices, sparring, and matches, doesn’t it? NXT simply remembers that and does everyone in the company a favor by not making it look like a bunch of bad soap opera actors got together to stage a confrontation. It’s the little things!

Best/Worst: Catch A Beat Runnin’ Like Riddick Moss

Riddick Moss is back this week, looking like someone in 2011 gave Lucky Cannon the Simon Dean gimmick. He’s promoting the “Riddick Regiment,” which is great, because the one thing NXT needed was another “arrogant” character. Kona Reeves can only shoulder so much of that burden. He also does a bit where he has a customized Thermos he ordered from Cafe Press or whatever with his name on it, and he drinks from it during matches to maintain “hydration.” He also tries to make his opponent drink it, making me wonder if Riddick’s like my 8th grade English teacher and just calls it “water” when it’s really vodka.

Anyway, Moss takes on Raul Mendoza and loses, because he’s not going to get pushed until Tino Sabbatelli returns with a Slap Chop gimmick. Mendoza’s very good — I prefer his work to Carrillo’s, even — and at least Moss is going for something. After all, there’s nothing I end up loving more than a homegrown NXT wrestler getting a gimmick from 15 years ago and committing to it so hard it insists on working. I’m sure in like six months I’ll be mad there aren’t Riddick Moss bottles for sale at the merch table at War Games, or whatever.

Best: Adam-Matt-ium

The week’s main event is a great one; Adam Cole vs. Matt Riddle in one of those weekly quarter hours when NXT decides to just give you a TakeOver-quality match to reward you for watching. That’s one of my favorite things about NXT weekly TV. Even though TakeOver has become the “pay-per-view” where most of the important stuff happens, they still give NXT TV enough content and gravitas to make it appointment viewing. You can’t just skip a month of NXT and watch the pay-per-view, because you wouldn’t WANT to. I always laugh when people talk about WWE not caring about ratings because of PPV numbers and revenue, or about how having good weekly TV doesn’t matter now because of how the product is consumed. Wouldn’t the better plan be to give people reasons to watch everything? You shouldn’t be able to skip six weeks of Raw and still know where all the stories are at.

Cole is an awesome opponent for Riddle, and I think WWE realizes that Riddle’s a “big match” kind of wrestler. Even his littler matches against guys like Punishment Martinez feel like fights or at least exciting wrestling contests, because he’s more of a personality and a presence than a by-the-numbers pro wrestler. It’s the same thing Brock Lesnar has going for him. Adding a master strategist like Cole gives Riddle something truly fantastic to work with, and reins him in enough to communicate the little things about the character to a bigger audience. NXT’s doing great at creating “larger than life” characters like Riddle or Velveteen Dream, and succeeds the most when they use the characters pulled from real life to wrangle and contextualize them. Riddle is a fantastic pro wrestler, but Cole makes him seem more like a “wrestler” than he normally does. Does that make sense? I’m just saying they’re both good at what they do, I guess.

Riddle wins with the Bromission after Roderick Strong attempts to help Cole win but fails, continuing their beef. There’s even a backstage followup where Strong takes off the Undisputed Era shirt and throws it at Cole, and Cole yells at him for not deserving to be on the team. I’m not trying to predict the future or anything, but assuming Cole ends up challenging Gargano for the NXT Championship again as promised, this feels 1000% like one of those nWo Buff Bagwell swerves. Strong’s clearly still a part of the crew, he’s just creating enough doubt that when he shows up at the end of the championship match to “make sure O’Reilly and Fish don’t interfere” or whatever, it’ll feel extra bad when he drops Johnny and gives Cole the title like a good little soldier.

Additionally,

Next Week

Japanese star KUSHIDA defeated NXT’s worst guy in his debut match. But can he defeat the SECOND worst guy? We’ll find out, next week!