The Best And Worst Of WWE NXT 10/4/17: Into The Unknown

Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE NXT: Adam Cole made his in-ring debut, Aleister Black name-shamed the Velveteen Dream, and Vanessa Borne still sucked.

If you missed this episode, you can watch it here. If you’d like to read previous installments of B&W NXT, click right here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where I primarily tweet about pro wrestling and emo bands, so if you fit into that Venn diagram, welcome aboard.

Click the share buttons and tell people (including @WWENXT) that you dig the column. We can’t keep doing these if you don’t read and recommend them! It helps more than you know, especially for the shows that aren’t Raw and don’t have hundreds of thousands of built-in casual interests.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for October 4, 2017.

Worst: Stranger Than Fiction

Three weeks ago, Ruby Riot was put in a tag match against the Iconic Duo without a partner, only to have Nikki Cross come to the rescue. Last week, Riot demanded a rematch, but still had no tag partner. So of course, tonight, Ruby Riot was put in a tag match against the Iconic Duo without a partner, only to have Nikki Cross come to the rescue.

(Now I know how Brandon feels when he reviews the broken hamster wheel that is the dusty middle innings of Raw every week.)

So, yeah: This was pretty much the exact same thing we already saw. Presumably, next week Riot will reiterate that she doesn’t need Nikki’s help, and then the week after that, they’ll wrestle again, and Nikki will show up again, and we realize we’re stuck in a Groundhog’s Day scenario.

Really, this Worst isn’t for any of the performers, as the wrestling was great (I loved Nikki being hit by Billie’s bulldog onto Peyton’s knee as a great false finish), but it’s moreso for whoever in the back thinks we need to see the exact same scenario more than once to understand character motivations.

Best: No Control

I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, Lars Sullivan is quickly on his way to becoming money. In his backstage interview, he coldly states, “I am always in control,” when it’s pretty damn clear he snaps all the time. Is he delusional? Or are his outbursts actually controlled, meaning he’s not so much a psychopath as he is a sociopath? Either way, I feel bad for Jason Statham Danny Burch, as he is definitely walking into a woodchipper next week.

Worst: No Substance

The following things about Zelina Vega’s promo really irked me:

• She calls herself a puppetmaster, which would infer that Andrade “Cien” Almas is her puppet, not Johnny Gargano, even though she was trying to take a dig at Gargano.
• She says that Almas beating Gargano over and over gets Almas — and by extension, her — closer to a shot at the NXT championship. I mean, I know WWE booking can be pretty dumb sometimes, but typically, someone has to beat multiple competitors to move up the rankings, and not just beat one competitor multiple times.
• Lastly: Where the hell was she going, anyway? She is walking through the parking lot in one direction, then at the very end, she randomly decides to reverse course and enter a propped-open security door. I’m no director, but man, the blocking for this scene made no sense whatsoever.

Best: Recipe For Hate

In a delightful subversion of a standard trope, Ring Of Honor standout Lio Rush gets his NXT debut — under his real name, with a pretty decent theme song, too — against Aleister Black completely ruined by the Velveteen Dream. I 100 percent did not see that coming, as Lio is a relatively big name on the indie scene, so I expected a competitive match along the lines of Black/Bobby Fish and Black/Kyle O’Reilly a few months back. Way to fool me, NXT.

Dream’s elbow on Rush was the best thing he’s done in a wrestling ring probably ever, and his continual taunting of Aleister Black (“What’s my name? What’s my name???”) is a nice extension of Black calling him “Patrick” last week instead of his chosen moniker. I don’t know if the eventual match between the two will live up to this build they’re creating, but I sure hope it does.

Best: Against The Grain

Watching Kairi Sane wrestle Aliyah (or Aloliyah, as I call her in my head because I’m a jerk), I realized what makes her feel so special in the WWE universe (and also the WWE Universe, which are two different things): Pretty much everything she does goes against what traditional WWE-style female wrestlers do, from the ways she executes offense to how she sells for opponents and how much danger she puts her body into for her bonkers finishing move. It doesn’t mean that everyone else is wrong and she is right or anything; it’s just that her entire existence, from her outfit down to her little moments of in-ring character development, go against the grain of pretty much everyone else we see on TV on a weekly basis. It makes it feel fresh, unique, and exciting, which are three words associated with WWE far too infrequently.

Also, credit where credit is due: Aliyah (whose character has apparently gone from from “sexy cat” to “tan woman,” I guess?) functioned so much better as a heel, and her offense looked way better than it ever did on her previous run on TV. You have to figure the Iconic Duo will be called up sooner than later, leaving a pretty big gap for a main event-ish heel, so maybe she’s on track to develop into that role. (Or maybe she’ll continue to job to everyone who even sniffed around the Mae Young Classic; whatevs.)

Super-tiny Worst, though: It seemed to be poorly thought out to have this match immediately following the Ali Black/Velveteen Dream segment, as they both featured massive top-rope elbow drops as the finish (or ad hoc finish, in Dream’s case). Obviously there’s room for more than one person to have the same finish, but to have them back-to-back on the same episode felt like a small mistake.

Best: The Dissent Of Man

I had a hard time getting into this match at first, mainly because I assumed the match was bound to end in interference from the Ring Of Dishonor crew. Maybe I’m too conditioned to main-roster main events ending in schmozzes. Furthermore, when was the last time an NXT championship of any kind changed hands on a random TV episode? I’m pretty sure it was way back in January 2015 when the Lucha Dragons dropped the tag titles to Blake and Murphy. So even though there was still more than 20 minutes of the episode left when the match started, indicating a long, competitive match was to come, I wasn’t buying it.

Obviously, I was wrong: McIntyre and Strong put on one hell of a match that made Strong look, well, strong (his Angle Slam on Drew was impressive, as was that top-rope superplex). I assumed he was going to go the more heelish route in the match given how he’s rocking a Hollywood Hogan beard now (plus his entrance theme got revamped and his Titantron graphics beefed up), but it was a pretty clean face vs. face contest that ended with McIntyre giving respect to a person for which he previously had little.

I was legitimately surprised and shocked that Cole, O’Reilly and Fish didn’t show up during the main event — which made the post-match stinger where they surround a beaten-down Roddy and try their best to recruit him all the better. We all know Strong functions better as a heel, so this could be a big turning point for his character in NXT, and I’m excited to see how it’s handled.

Next Week: Liv Morgan, Nikki Cross and Peyton Royce face off in a triple threat match where the winner advances to the NXT Women’s Championship fatal four-way, plus we get Gargano/Almas II, and most importantly, the disembowelment of Danny Burch by Lars Sullivan. See ya then!