NWA Powerrr Episode 19: Review, Results, Recap

Previously on NWA Powerrr: Cowboy James Storm desecrated the sacred Crockett Cup trophy, Royce Isaacs managed to get his feet on the ropes to pin a 61-year old man, and Marty Scurll offered to cut Nick Aldis a check for $500,000 if he can’t win the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

If you’d like to keep up with these columns, you can do so on the NWA Powerrr tag page. Remember, NWA Powerrr and all its extra Rs is free to watch on YouTube, so check out episode nineteen if you haven’t already:

Don’t Do What Danny Deals Does

Episode 19 of NWA Power Are Are opens with Tim Storm paraphrasing The Waterboy and talking about how offensive the whole “Momma Storm” trolljob has been. This brings out Thom Latimer (who is like, “deuces, grandpa”) and eventually the man behind “Momma Storm” herself, Danny Deals.

If you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, neither did I. The show has a tendency to bring on a new character without a lot of backstory or explanation and act like they’ve been around since the beginning, like they’re Roy from The Simpsons. All you really need to know about Danny Deals is that he’s sort of a pro wrestling Jigsaw from Saw who offers you opportunities and punishes you if you don’t take them, and that he looks like Daniel Bryan got the kid in him brought out by Frosted Mini-Wheats. Also he looks like he’s in Talking Heads. Danny Deal’s deal is dealt; he’s got a tag team partner for Storm to help him get back to the top, and if Storm refuses him, Storm has to fight the guy. LIVE OR DIE MAKE YOUR CHOICE.

Storm refuses, of course, and Danny Deals’ dude turns out to be Vanilla Godzilla Jax Dane, aka the guy Tim Storm originally beat to win the NWA World Heavyweight Championship back in 2016. Storm’s eventual loss to Nick Aldis 400 days later kinda sorta kickstarted the NWA getting back on its feet as a visible pro wrestling organization, so there’s a lot of history here. Plus, there’s the really interesting note that back when all that was happening, Storm was getting by on cheating, ref bumps, and belt shots to the face. So now Storm’s found this honest to God wrestling “family” and is consistently working hard to get better the right way and make his momma proud, but his past is catching up to him.

If you’ve never seen Jax Dane before, he’s 6-foot-4, thick as hell, and sounds like John C. Reilly. Dane vs. Storm is the epitome of mid-2010s NWA muscle dads bashing into each other like big horn rams, which may or may not be your jam.

Where’s The Wrestling?

It’s been a light as hell couple of weeks for the “wrestling” part of the National Wrestling Alliance. This week’s show has a Ricky Starks vs. Matt Cross vs. Zicky Dice triple threat (which Dice wins using the WWE video game technique of waiting for one wrestler to hit his finisher on the other, tossing him out of the ring, and taking the pin yourself) that goes just over three minutes. That officially makes it the longest wrestling match on NWA programming in two weeks. The other two matches on the show are a 35 second squash and a 1:45 non-match that ends on a count-out. If you’re keeping track, that’s five minutes of wrestling on 51 minute show. And that show was the followup to 2:55 of wrestling on the almost 24 minute debut episode of Circle Squared. I know the actual matches aren’t always the point of these shows, but you still have to do it.

To make matters worse, that 35 second squash is Trevor Murdoch completely murking The Question Mark and pinning him after a top rope bulldog that looked more like a splash onto nothing. I like the idea of utilizing Murdoch’s talents as much as anybody, but why in the world do you take the organic popularity of The Question Mark — one of those ridiculously serendipitous things that just works and gets people talking — and have him be SUPER DOMINANT OVER EVERYBODY for WEEKS only to blow that all in a half-a-minute loss to Trevor Mudoch? Are you really counting on Trevor Murdoch to be the face of the show?

I don’t know, man. I know a lot of this is just the fact that I like The Question Mark and think it’s funny and don’t necessarily like watching guys who were mildly popular in WWE 12 years ago meander around at the top of the card — Mr. Kennedy, I’m looking in your direction — and maybe I’m not the demographic they’re trying to hit with this. But it just seems wildly counter-productive, at least given the character development we’ve been watching on the first 18 episodes. It’d be kinda like if they put Kamille in the ring and had her get her ass kicked by ODB in 30 seconds. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Speaking Of Kamille

♫ here she comes to save the day ♫

Melina, who is smart, gets an NWA Women’s World Championship match against the woman she helped make champion and takes a purposeful count-out loss, because she’s smart. She then walks up the stairs pointing to her head, to show she’s smart, and gets her way blocked by Allysin Kay. Because she is very smart.

Kay gets Melina back in the ring and just kinda stands there going YEAH WE’RE GONNA FIGHT for a minute until Kamille sneaks into the ring and football tackles the ever-loving shit out of her.

My first thought was that Melina’s constant manipulation and insistence on her intelligence while making dumb moves and doing dumb things was building to the reveal that this was all a trap to bait in Allysin Kay, and that she, Thunder Rosa, and Kamille were all in on it together. But after the spear (and the excellent pose of extreme of dominance), the focus becomes Kamille and Thunder Rosa having a tense exchange. I’m SUPER into that, as they’re easily the two most engaging female performers on the show right now, but it still leaves us with a 90-ish second non-match main event with a lot of characters intersecting to tell us some stuff we already know. Thunder Rosa is champion, Kamille is dope and a monster, Melina says she’s smart but does stupid shit all the time, and Allysin Kay is bad at recognizing when she’s about to get sneak-attacked.

Graphics That Are Hilarious Out Of Context

Next week: Trevor Murdoch hits the top rope bulldog on the Dalai Lama.

In all seriousness it’s a bad week for Eddie Kingston, as he calls out The Pope (the wrestling one) only to find out that Pope’s paid off The Bouncers to betray him. Poor King’s got no luck so far on Powerrr. He can’t even get introduced for an interview with Dave Marquez without getting his heat stolen. Shout-out to Pope’s ongoing quest to promote wrestling’s worst-looking tag teams, though. I hope after The Bouncers he starts managing The Bushwhackers.

The Court Of Crimson And King

In other faction warfare news, Nick Aldis calls out Marty Scurll to give him a chance to back out of their match for Sweet Charlotte, sics Strictly Business on him, and ends up in a team brawl against Villain Enterprises. Well, it’s just Brody King — no PCO yet, although French-Canadian Old Man Frankenstein is 1000% a character I want to see on Powerrr — but that’s something. King, Scurll, Aldis, and the Wild Cards get into a big pull-apart brawl, and the highlight is Crimson out there desperately getting his hands up to keep the NWA World Heavyweight Champion from getting bopped on the noggin by an umbrella.

Brody King’s a great pick-up for NWA TV, though, for however long he stays. I think the show would really benefit from using its low profile and low stakes programming to actively showcase and promote its younger, more dynamic stars (and its ongoing, positive utilization of unique older stars) as its A-list talent and stop putting so much emphasis on ex-WWE folks who weren’t that good 15 years ago. Those people all learned exactly one kind of pro wrestling, and, at least in my opinion, it’s not the kind anybody needs to still be seeing in 2020. Even John Cena, king of Ruthless Aggression Style, got bored of that stuff and started working in springboard Stunners and rolling Attitude Adjustments.

I think the more succinct thing I’m trying to say is that a nostalgic 1980s wrestling show performed in 2020 should lean into 1980 or 2020 (or hell, both) and leave 2005 where it belongs. It’s great when it does, because pro wrestling was better 40 years ago and is considerably better today than it was for the first 10 years of the century.

Yes, You May

In other positive news, May Valentine’s Diary is back this week, and is mostly about how she loves Royce Isaacs but keeps hanging out with Sal Rinauro and Kamille and doing makeovers. There’s some wonderfully funny stuff happening here, from Isaacs being the focus of the words being said but visually only kind of existing in the background as a total dipshit, and (of course) Kamille rising up from the bowels of the earth (?) to no-sell the friendship and fashion.