5 Most Insane Things Happening In Wrestling Right Now (Jan 12)
Literally sickening.
How do you botch a RAW main event featuring Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, and Finn Bálor reunited with his former Bullet Club brethren?
Leave it to Beaver.
2017 was a dire year for the Demon; having missed out on WrestleMania 33 as a result of the shoulder injury suffered at SummerSlam '16, he returned on the post-'Mania RAW to a warm, fervent welcome in a tag match with Seth Rollins opposite Kevin Owens and Samoa Joe. The tentative treaty he shared with Rollins, the man who put him on the shelf, indicated a sort of welcome continuity. Bálor, an honourable babyface, accepted the injury as a byproduct of battle. He wasn't interested in petty revenge: he was interested only in reclaiming his Universal Championship.
Only, he wasn't; he barely mentioned new champion Brock Lesnar - instead opting to defeat a few jobbers here and there - depicting him as amnesiac at best, coward at worst. One such jobber, Jinder Mahal, concussed him very early into his return run, which can't have done him any favours with Vince McMahon, notoriously cagey about pushing slighter (read: "weaker") performers.
It didn't; Jinder was rewarded with the dumbest mega-push ever. Bálor, meanwhile, caught a dose of cholera from living corpse Bray Wyatt in what would have occupied the upper reaches of 'Worst Of 2017' lists, were it not for virtually everything else Wyatt did. Then came the Kane business, depressingly and comprehensively documented elsewhere.
When WWE finally put Bálor in a position worth watching, they rendered it absolutely unwatchable...
5. Motion Sickness
We need to talk about Kevin - because the Executive Vice President of WWE Television Production really is going to killing us one day. You can literally die from motion sickness, and the man is doing his level best to do it.
Twitter user @aguirre_eric is doing the Lord's work; on a recent post, he braved full motion sickness in order to count how many camera cuts Kevin Dunn directed during Roman's multiple corner clotheslines spot on Monday's RAW. There were 12 in 15 seconds; Dunn filmed each clothesline with a weird, consecutive mirror image effect that was barely in sync. It's as if the sh*thead genuinely hates wrestling to such an extent that he cannot bear to watch it for more than one second at a time. It was almost excusable as an experimental one-off. Less excusable was the follow up; as Reigns rolled Bálor over to deliver a big boot to his face, Dunn instructed no fewer than three cuts in one and a half seconds. This was almost parodic. The WWE TV product is illogical and repetitive enough as it is; we don't need another migraine trigger.
WWE: almost literally death by a thousand cuts.