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And now, the Worst and Something Best of WWE Fastlane 2017.
Best: A Joe-case
Back when Samoa Joe and Sami Zayn were feuding in NXT, this is how I described the best of their matches:
And that’s the match. A brilliantly wrestled, brilliantly executed, not always super exciting pro wrestling classic you might never watch again. Does that make sense?
That theme continued at Fastlane, with Zayn selling his ass off to make Joe look like a destroyer, Joe doing his part to physically BE a destroyer, and a lot of good, not necessarily memorable pro wrestling happening. It’s hard to explain that sometimes pro wrestling doesn’t have to be exciting to be “good,” but that’s where Joe and Sami kinda settle.
Up until now, Joe’s been destroying Sami on the regular. Sami Zayn’s entire character is built on trying hard and doing well but consistently coming up a little short, and/or on a rare occasion succeeding, only to walk directly into a massive loss. See literally everything else he did in NXT, and most of what he’s done on the roster. This is the guy whose highest profile main roster victory came against Kevin Owens at Battleground, only to have it followed by several months of disappearing into oblivion while Kevin Owens became the Universal Champion. In contrast, Joe’s “new” to the main roster and got built up (both accidentally and purposefully) by taking out Seth Rollins. This is Joe’s WWE proper pay-per-view debut, and he’s going up against the guy defined by high-effort losing, so you know how it has to end.
All those Sami beatdowns left him clearly not at 100% for this match with Joe, so he spends most of it on his ass. Joe beats him relentlessly and sometimes creatively, Sami fires up and gets intelligently lucky long enough to get within a breath of the Helluva Kick, then gets bodied to the ground and choked out. It’s the story you have to tell, and it’s a good one. It’s a little disheartening to see Zayn lose all the damn time, but wrestling needs guys like that, and eventually he’ll win, and it’ll make us very happy. And then he’ll unknowingly skank into unimaginable tragedy.
Worst: And Speaking Of ‘Defined By Losing’
From our Fastlane predictions:
If I know my Raw booking, the Club looked like chumps in two weeks of 2-on-1 handicap matches against Roman Reigns and lost a one-on-one to Big Cass last week so they could illogically win here and stay the champions. And if Enzo and Cass are winning the belts before Mania, they’re losing a few times and then winning on a random Raw.
Sure enough, that’s what happens. After weeks of struggling and/or losing handicap matches and then losing one-on-one to one of their challengers — not to mention the seemingly infinite number of title match losses they suffered to New Day before the Demolition streak got broken and they finally pulled one out — The Club manages to defeat their top challengers by being opportunists who evoke the damned numbers game. Enzo jumps on Gallows on the outside, but as he’s stepping through the ropes he gets hit by a running knee from Anderson and gets pinned.
To make sure that’s as ineffective as possible so the Club doesn’t get any shine, Enzo has his foot on the rope during the pin, only for Gallows to push it off before the referee can see it. That’s a solid heel move, but after months of looking like the dumbest and worst team in the world (…ski), it’s more of a gaseous one.
Cass takes off Enzo’s head at WrestleMania now, please and thank you.
Best: Sasha Banks Is An Actual Wrestler Again
For me, two things needed to happen here:
1. Sasha Banks needed to be Sasha Banks again, and cut it out with this meandering, constantly injured, always backstage rubbing the back of her neck and pensively looking off to the left of the camera character. She’s been that way since she lost at ROADBLOCK: NO ADDITIONAL DRIVING ALLOWED. It’s been a bummer to watch her be such a non-factor.
2. Sasha Banks needed to win, because Jax keeps beating her, and Sasha Banks is not supposed to be Sami Zayn. If the Women’s Championship is caught in this bizarre back-and-forth limbo with no proper alignments and an obsession with streak minutia, we need the women without the championship to throw some competition in the mix. Wrestling needs to feel like these people are fighting each other, not like they’re taking turns.
The good news is that it accomplished both of those things. Like Joe vs. Zayn it wasn’t particularly memorable or thrilling, but it told a good story, mostly based around Sasha Banks weighing less than zero pounds and Nia Jax being ruthlessly overconfident. At one point she’s got Sasha in a torture rack and just walks around the ring playing with her instead of trying to hurt her and finish her off. She’s beaten her a couple of times already, and WWE seems to have forgotten that Survivor Series tapout, so why worry? That lackadaisical attitude lets Sasha counter into a guillotine choke (because she’s done her homework, and that’s how Bayley beat Nia down in NXT), and they do a fun thing with Nia trying to throw Sasha around and Sasha just switching positions on her body. She switches arms with the choke, so goes into a sleeper, and so on.
Eventually Sasha’s able to roll Nia up for a quick win, which I think works because it’s (1) not a distraction roll-up, and (2) doesn’t revisit the mistake of having tiny baby Sasha Banks tap out an unstoppable monster or worse, knock her out with some knees to the back. Nia’s Look of Death™ after the match means more to come, and Sasha’s continued garbage interference in the Women’s Championship scene means we’re almost done connecting the dots to form a fatal four-way for the strap at Mania.
Worst: How Did This Shitty Raw End Up On My Pay-Per-View
The middle stretch of Fastlane might be the most brutally boring and backwards pay-per-view stint since they threw an Elimination Chamber on a Christmas-themed ECW show and stuck Test and Bob Holly in it. On Twitter I described it as feeling, “like somebody died backstage and they’re just killing time until they can figure out how to tell us.” I was worried Bill Goldberg had taken all the medicine at once and was staggering around backstage like an old man.
This stretch includes:
- Rusev and Jinder Mahal’s tag team breaking up on the pre-show, leading to Mick Foley making randomized matches for them and telling them to figure out who’d get to wrestle first
- Rusev and Jinder Mahal fighting amongst themselves, twice, while nobody reacts because it’s two mid-card foreign heels with an ill-defined beef, an angle that’s like an hour old and no announced opponents
- Cesaro facing Jinder Mahal and taking 8 minutes to pin him instead of zero
- An 8-minute match feeling like it went 45
- Rusev not only getting squashed by Big Show, but getting squashed by Big Show
The Rusev thing seemed … excessive. They have him get into a shockingly even fight with Jinder Mahal, pick Jinder’s bones once he’s been defeated by someone else, then cower to Big Show and lose to him via three chokeslams and a stinkface-positioned knockout punch. How fucking depressing is it to see Rusev take a “knockout punch” when he’s already unconscious? Is that supposed to make Show look cooler? It felt like the referee should’ve stepped in and stopped that shit, and also like Rusev pissed off a promoter in 1980 and will be leaving the territory.
Two years ago, Rusev was the United States Champion, entering WrestleMania on a tank. Now, he’s on the ass-end of a Jinder Mahal story and getting punched out while he’s already out, a month before WrestleMania. The lesson we’ve learned from Rusev’s career is never get married.
Best: Gallagher, The Maddest
Best match of the night awards go to the Cruiserweight Championship match, which was exactly the match it needed to be. Jack Gallagher looks, acts and seems like a stereotypical chibi cartoon character compared to Neville, and asking me to buy them as athletic equals is like trying to convince me that the Green Bay Packers would lose a football game to the nephews from Ducktales. To compensate for this, at least in my brain, Gallagher needed to take the match seriously, adapt his goofy in-ring style to something more actively competitive, and push Neville to his limit. What we got was very close to that, with the added bonus of Jack trying to kill himself to get the crowd back into it.
The best part of the story is the finish, with Neville busting out the Red Arrow to win. Neville’s made a point of explaining that the WWE Universe “doesn’t deserve” the Red Arrow, because it’s extremely signature and dope and exciting, so he tries to win his matches with like, armbars. He kept trying to finish Gallagher off with other stuff, including one of the sickest German suplexes of the year, but nothing was working, so he HAD to go Red Arrow. That says a lot about Jack as a competitor, and elevates him in the eyes of well-meaning doubters like myself. Wrestling is all about suspension of disbelief sometimes, and WWE far too often skips the work necessary to build the suspension.
Plus, people really love those thigh-slap headbutts. A head hitting another head doesn’t make a clapping sound, but Pro Wrestling. It’s the same way I felt when Wade Barrett would run into the corner and hit someone in the stomach with his knee with a kneepad on it and smack his leg. Bruh, you’re padding them in the stomach.
Best: Big E Smalls
I’m far beyond the ability to genuinely enjoy a New Day segment, but something was seriously wrong with Big E during this, and it was kind of amazing. He appears to be on some if not ALL of the drugs. Kofi accuses him of “sipping on something” before they came out. What’s interesting to me is that the WWE Fan Nation video leaves in all the dumb ice cream bike shilling, but edits out E’s hilarious interruptions, both the performance of Randy Orton’s Rev Theory’s ‘Voices’ and the performance of Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Juicy.’ It ends with E hugging the side of the ice cream cooler and, like, … communicating with it?
I don’t know what they’re doing, but if Big E loses his mind and becomes a colorful Lisa Frank-ass cult leader, I’m ALL IN.
Best/Worst: Expect The Expected
So, just to say it again, Braun Strowman RULES. He does things a man that size should not be able and/or willing to do.
His match with Roman Reigns wasn’t the barn burner I wanted it to be, but like Zayn/Joe and Banks/Jax, it told a good story. The idea here is that Strowman has been asking for competition for months, and even when he went up against a guy like Sami Zayn, he only scratched the surface of his moveset and ability. Usually he’s just tossing dudes by their armpits and throwing them at the ground by their necks. Roman Reigns kept embarrassing him and putting him down, so he interjected himself in Roman’s business to guarantee a WWE feud, then made Mick Foley arrange a contract signing to legally ensure it. He’s so worried about competition that he’s gotta jump through all the hoops to get it, and when he gets it, he’s not quite sure what to do with it.
That’s what Roman does. Roman has “big match experience” and is kinda sorta a total (kayfabe) piece of shit, so he’s (1) able to absorb way too much punishment and (2) dig deep and persevere when the odds are against him. That manifests itself in a Cena-esque no-selling more often than not, because Roman isn’t a perfect pro wrestler, but it defines the character. The guy was taking Brock Lesnar to the limit at WrestleMania before Seth Rollins interfered, and he went half a goddamn hour against Triple H, a Master of the Universe version of Stephanie McMahon and a zombie skeleton army or whatever. He was the muscle in a swat team. He wrestles in a bulletproof vest covered in decals and SNEAKERS now. He’s been here before.
So Roman just rope-a-dopes Strowman, because he knows Strowman HASN’T been here before. Strowman keeps thinking he’s got Roman put away, but Roman isn’t even close, because he’s ROMAN REIGNS. Sorta like how stupid it was for Braun to need a contract signing to make sure Roman Reigns would fight him, like you need ANYTHING to make Roman Reigns fight you. He just doesn’t know better. He’s a monster, but he’s a monster in its infancy. He doesn’t have any experience, say, jumping off the top rope, but when he needs to throw down a trump card to finish Roman off, he goes up. He misses, because of course he does, and Roman capitalizes and finishes him off, because of course he does.
Now, all that said, I’m as bummed as you that Roman Reigns pinned Braun Strowman and gave him his “first loss” a month before WrestleMania, but it is what it is. Roman Reigns is The Guy to the old folks in charge, and it’s a month before WrestleMania. Dude’s got an Undertaker match to look good for. It sucks for those of us who are tired of the Roman Reigns Character, but this is the one show a year where business truly steps in front of logic or creative effort.
Remind me I said this a couple of Worsts down when I’m mad about Goldberg winning.
Also remind me I said that during this Worst, where I’m mad about Charlotte losing her pay-per-view winning streak a month before WrestleMania. What the hell are they doing.
Worst: Seriously, What The Hell Are Y’all Doing
The devolution of Bayley into a smug, entitled cheater — aka “a WWE main roster babyface” — continues here with her victory over Charlotte Flair. Instead of like, winning the match and proving that she’s Charlotte’s equal, she convinces Charlotte to keep Dana Brooke in the back only to have Sasha Banks run out, attack Charlotte without a disqualification being called, have Sasha distract Charlotte long enough for her to hit a belly-to-belly on the floor, still almost lose to an inside cradle, have Sasha get on the apron to tell the referee Charlotte’s cheating and have the referee AGREE AND ADMONISH CHARLOTTE, THEN after all that roll up Charlotte to retain the championship. Dana Brooke stayed in the back. Sasha and Bayley hung out on the post-show wearing matching sweaters.
… Bayley is the heel now, right? Is this another example of “turnabout being fair play,” where a heel is known for taking shortcuts or does one bad thing and therefore has justified an infinity of faces cheating and colluding to beat them? Charlotte got seriously fucked over here.
The part that sucks the most for me is that Bayley’s apparently happy with it. They’re like, “we didn’t cheat to win, Sasha just helped me prevent cheating, which theoretically could’ve happened but wasn’t actually happening here.” Charlotte grabbed the tights, sure, but if you’re using turnabout is fair play you’ve gotta point out that Flair’s out there against two people, one she’s wrestling and another who won’t stop attacking and tattling on her.
The only thing I can think is that they could reverse the decision on Monday night and say Charlotte won by DQ to keep the “winning streak” alive without her actually getting the title back. She certainly deserves it. But man, I hate it when WWE heels call out faces for shit and then are totally right about them. At this point I kinda want Bayley to just go full evil and turn on Sasha, instead of the other way around.
The only other positive I can think is, “Stephanie McMahon didn’t run out and jumping chair Charlotte in the face to give Bayley the victory,” followed by, “and then challenge Bayley for a title match at WrestleMania,” followed by like six other nightmarish fantasy booking pessimisms.
Worst: [Deep Sigh]
Finally we have … man, you know what happens. The entire thing fits in a GIF. Here.
It starts off with another “good but not exciting” Kevin Owens gameplan, where he powders and walks around the ring for a few minutes to wait for Goldberg to “cool down” and like, wear himself out. It’s not a bad plan, because Bill is sweating bullets by just standing still in the ring, is 50 years old and is sometimes already concussed before he gets to the ramp. This all goes to hell, of course, when the bell rings and Raw goes to its old favorite, the musical distraction. Owens hears Jericho’s music start, gets mad that Jericho is walking toward him doing nothing, and walks into a spear. 22 seconds later, it’s over.
What sucks the most here is that they could’ve done ANYTHING else. They could’ve had Jericho actually interfere in the match, for one. Milwaukee is where Jericho and Goldberg had their infamous backstage fight back in WCW. They could’ve had Jericho show up and Codebreaker Owens, “keeping his promise” that Owens was leaving Fastlane as Universal Champion and setting up a Universal Championship shot for himself at Mania. They could’ve had Brock Lesnar show up and do ANYTHING to hurt Goldberg or Goldberg’s chances at success. Paul Heyman showed up earlier in the night, so they teased it, but nothing came of it. There wasn’t time for anything to come of it. Goldberg just punked the guy who carried the show for eight months, has still not taken a bump in 13 years and, counting the Royal Rumble, has wrestled a total of 5 minutes and 9 seconds since 2004. Your champion who is main-eventing WrestleMania has wrestled 5:09 since George W. Bush was in his first term.
And again, wrestling is a business. It makes “more sense” to WWE to go for the money they can get RIGHT NOW and have Goldberg going into WrestleMania as champion. Goldberg vs. Lesnar for a championship will do better business than Jericho vs. Owens for a championship. It would probably make them more money in the long run if they invested the time and effort in establishing some of these non-50-year old non-part-timers as big enough stars to make the same amount of money, but that’s not where we (or they) are at. We’re still living for nostalgia, and we’re powerbombing Sting into the buckles until he almost dies, and we’re bringing back Hulk Hogan at some point and it’s gonna take something grander than you or I to turn the tide.
So long live Goldberg, the man who won a title to impress his kid who appears to not give much of a shit about any of this.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night
Hough610
“That’s why I’m walking the way I’m walking” – Roman Reigns, who is not walking noticeably differently.
TheBazz
I kind of love that Goldberg’s entire run so far has been an uninterrupted string of anti-climaxes. He’s like the wrestling equivalent of One Punch Man.
Beige Lunatics, King of String Style
Goldberg to child: “You’re here because of Make a Wish? Me too.”
Clay Quartermain
Mick: “Hey Joe! Where you going with that gun in your hand?”
NotACrook
“Hey, people are really starting to buy into Braun.”
“WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT!”
thedoorsdk
Here’s hoping that, just before the spear, Roman reaches down and pumps up those sneakers.
Jonathan Dye
Yeah Neville’s hurting Gallagher, but to be fair so does direct sunlight
Werner Herzog
“Here at WWE we listen…”
-Austin Aries, with the joke of the night
Harry Longabaugh
Panting, Big Show grabs a mic post-match. “That’s…for hindering…Jinder!”
Mr. Royal Rumble, JSF
Little do these USA chanters remember Show’s father is French.
That’s it for the Best and Worst of Fastlane. Thanks for reading, and I hope maybe you enjoyed the show a little more than I did. This is the face I made watching most of it:
Be sure to drop down into our comments section to let us know what you thought about Fastlane, and what you think this all means for WrestleMania. Does Lesnar finally beat Goldberg and then vanish for several months until Roman Reigns beats him at SummerSlam? Are we okay spending the next six months like that? Or does Goldberg just win in 20 seconds again? Where do we go if THAT happens? Kevin Nash returning with a cattle prod? Conquering hero The Ryback?
Onward to WrestleMania, I guess!
