Saturday, April 29, 2017

PREDICTIONS: WWE Payback

Yeah I don't need to watch this live.
Ah, the first PPV afgter Mania. Traditionally a weird, half-assed affair, this year's Payback is extra special because of the weirdness caused by matches being set before the Superstar Shakeup. I have bad feelings about this.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Arrow: "Dangerous Liasons (4/26)

There's moral ambiguity, and then there's just amibuity.
There are two huge problems with the big Helix blowoff episode this week. The first is that the whole Felicity/Helix thing is built on Felicity's grief over Billy and desire for revenge against Promootheus, and that's the one thing this season the show has completely failed to sell me on.

NXT (4/26)

Pretzel Party on NXT!

A lot of OK stuff on this week's NEXT, but it's really all about the UK title match.

205 Live (4/25)

Still one of the best things going
It's amazing how much the end of the Alicia Fox storyline is livening up 205 Live. Some solid matches and furthering of the stories this week.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Agents of SHIELD: "All The Madame's Men" (4/22)

Another solid episode of Agents of SHIELD in the can, but it pretty much played out in a completely logical fashion from what came before it, so I'll touch on a couple of minor points instead of the plot.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Smackdown Live (4/25)

"I don't  exactly know what a House of Horrost match is, but for some reason I feel like Sunday, I'm going to find out."

God, Randy Orton sucks.

The Flash: "The Once And Future Flash" (4/25)

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
Honestly, by Season 3 Flash standards, this wasn't a completely awful episode. Oh, sure, it was full of the usual bullshit like Barry not listening to Iris, Barry standing around mouthbreathing while villains unleash their powers on him, and the eternal question of how, in the seven (or eight, according to the show) years between 2017 and 2024, nobody ever used the magic words "Iris wouldn't have wanted this" that turned Future Barry around. But beyond that, the show was watchable, I think.

Monday Night Raw (April 24)

Can this just keep happening forever?
If you watch wrestling for goofarounds on the mic rather than the in-ring action, this was actually a pretty good episode of Raw. For the most part.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Iron FIst: "The Mistress Of All Agonies

That was better, although, once again, largely because it couldn't have been worse.

Iron Fist: "The Blessings Of Many Fractures"

Yeah, they wish many fractures had blessings, because that episode was fractured as fuck. It was jacked up. It was the single biggest dumpster fire of the show to date, which is saying something.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

NXT (4/19)

Ten! Ten! Ten losses, one win!
Good news, everyone! NXT has a new theme, and has gone from having the best theme (I know, low bar) of all the WWE shows to the worst. It's fucking awful. It's like Kid Rock's cousin fucked a Hot Topic dumpster.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

205 Live (4/18)

Best Thing on a Bad Episode
I know I've been bad, and blown off covering 205 Live and NXT for a couple of weeks, but the same four storylines have just been playing out. And since they all advanced or culminated this week, I can talk about all of them and it's like you didn't miss anything.

Brian Kendrick and Akira Tozawa have been the best thing on 205 Live for a while now, and one of the best things in all of WWE. Until two weeks ago, Kendrick had been teaching Tozawa a series of heel "lessons" that involved Tozawa getting fooled or beaten up.

So, three episodes ago, the tables turned, with Tozawa beating Kendrick by faking a knee injury, then tricking Kendrick into losing to Mustafa Ali by sneaking in and ringing the ring bell to make Kendrick drop his submission before Ali tapped. It's a great story, and that's why I'm giving this week's sub-par installment a pass, because Tozawa distracting Kendrick so Tony Nese could hit Kendrick from behind over Kendrick costing Nese the match with Tozawa is not the best or most logical way to play out the "have eyes in the back of your head" lesson.

In other news, I think, hope, pray that the Noam Dar / Rich Swann / Alicia Fox thing is over, as this week saw Fox dump Dar and Swann reveal that the whole thing was just revenge on Fox for dumping Cedric Alexander. Go, angle, and never darken my door again.

Drew Gulak continues his quest to stop dangerous high-flying on the dangerous high-flying show, and now he has a protest sign and a bullhorn because I guess CJ Parker hasn't needed them for a year and a half so let's try this again, folks!

Oh, almost forgot. TJ Perkins is evil now. He got Sithed by Neville a week or two ago. He's helping beat up Austin Aries before the rematch at Payback. If you're feeling neither positively nore negatively towards this news, that's appropriate.

Smackdown Live (4/18)

OK, I guess?
The highlight, and inexplicably not the main event, of this week's Smackdown was a six-pack challenge to determine the #1 contender to Randy Orton's WWE Championship, in another move that makes me wonder if the US Title and WWE Titles are swtiching places, with the WWE Title being the secondary belt.

We all know Randy Orton's going to retain, assuming the Payback match is even for the title anymore, which I guess it is but they never mention it. So none of the three faces in the match (Sami Zayn, Luke Harper, or Mojo Fucking Rawley) were going to win. That left Dolph Ziggler (nope), Jinder Mahal (what), and Erick Rowan as the heels. I figured it'd go to Rowan to follow on with the Wyatt Family thing, but no, thanks to the help of the maybe called up, maybe guest starring Bollywood Boyz, Jinder Mahal earned the right to lose to Orton at Backlash in May.

Now, I could get behind this. An Indian heel stable with Mahal at the helm? There are worse ideas. ANd WWE implemented two of them. First, by having Mahal call himself "THE MAHARAJA", because really, WWE? And second, having him be from a rich famil, a trope stolen from generations of Arab wrestlers, some of whom, as you'll see on 205, are apparently still using it. Ugh.

Charlotte, meanwhile, became the #1 contender by beating Naomi clean in a non-title match while the other heels in the SDWD executed Natalya's brilliant plan of staring at her backstage twice. Good plan, Natty, Carmella, and Tamina. That'll really teach her to come in and be better than you.

The Shining Stars are now "The Colons", so I assume when Primo and Epico wrestle in singles matches, they'll be "The Semicolons". ZINGO! Anyway, they beat American Alpha to make us try to forget tje ;ast twp uears pf timeshare-shilling jobbing and it's not really working yet.

Kevin Owens beat Local Talent in a US Title Open Challenge, and in the main event, AJ Styles beat Baron Corbin in a decent match over them being mad at each other from the AUS Title A#1 Contender's match last week. See what I mean about the WWE belt being the midcard belt? And that's it.  couple video packages for Nakamura and Dillinger and that somehow filled two hours of show. Not very interestingly.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Monday Night Raw (4/17)

Yeah, we were due.
It's kind of weird to have an entire episode of Raw be mediocre and boring so that the big thing at the end seems even more spectacular, but the thing at the end happens so deep in the overrun that my DVR couldn't get it and I had to watch it on the Internet instead.

Agents Of SHIELD: "No Regrets"

Patriotism ain't what it used to be. 
Spoilers after the break, because it can't really be avoided.

Iron Fist: "Falling Tree With Roots"

That was... sorta OK, I guess?

Fast RMX (Nintendo Switch)

ZOOM ZOOM
I like racing games, but I haven't liked a racing game in a while.

That's because I like a style of racing game that hardly ever gets made anymore. Everything now is a large open world street racing game with some vague plot. And it's online. And there's no local splitscreen. And they want you to, you know, drive.

Saturday, April 15, 2017

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

That shit's gonna break soon.
I should hate thig game soooooooo much.

Nintendo Switch

GABBA HEY GABBA HEY CLICK CLICK CLICK HEY
Ultimately, looked at as a whole, the WiiU wasn't really that successful as a gaming machine. I mean, it was successful in that I enjoyed quite a few games for it, but in terms of what it was trying to do for gaming, with its pad and motion controls, well, the thing was really not ready for primetime. The pad was clunky, the system was underpowered, and it was too beholden on its Wii past.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Agents of SHIELD: "Identity And Change" (4/11)

IMPOLITE AND EVIL!
If there's a complaint to levy at Agents of SHIELD at this point, it's that it's so consistently competent, and the characters are so well established at this point, that actual surprises are kind of hard to come by.

Iron FIst: "Immortal Emerges From Cave"

Now, see, that's how you make a not particularly great, but at least watchable, episode of Iron Fist.

The Great WWE Superstar Shakeup of 2017

A bunch of people on one of the shows you're watching are on the other show you're watching, and vice versa. Did they make things better? Worse? Who knows.

Smackdown Live (4/11)

Sorry, dude.
As with Raw, we're going to deal with the non-shakeup portions of Smackdown Live.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Monday Night Raw (4/10)

OK, fine, I like Braun Strowman now.
I'm not going to talk about the Superstar Shakeup moves until Smackdown's over and all the moves are finalized, but some other stuff happened on Raw too

Iron Fist: "Under Leaf Pluck Lotus

In the fifth episode of Iron Fist, there's a scene, a moment in time, at encapsulates almost everything that's wrong with this show. Later, there's a kinda shitty fight that covers the rest.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Smackdown Live (4/4)

TEN! TEN1 TEN! TEN! TEN!
Remember how, in my Raw post, I mentioned how the post-Mania shows are good for debuting lesser superstars beloved by smart fans and letting the crowd reaction turn them into a big deal, like with Enzo and Cass a year ago? Well, hello, Tye Fucking Dillinger.

Agents of SHIELD: "What If..."

And why we turn their movie into a Netflix series.
So, you remember all those times when Barry Allen went to an alternative Earth or an alternative timeline and kept reacting like a complete moron even though he knew everything there was different and nobody there was who he thought they were?

Monday Night Raw (4/3)

Nope. Nobody likes you.
First things first. I know it's a tradition for the audiences after Mania to be a bunch of rowdy assholes trying to get themselves over and ignore the matches. And it's also the WWE's tradition to have the announcers present this as "none of this matters this is just fan passion". But we all know this is a mixed bag at best, really only useful for making debuting NXT people seem like huge stars as the smark crowd cheers for them. Last year we got Enzo and Cass, and this year, we got... The Revival.

Iron Fist: "Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch" / "Eight Diagram Dragon Palm"

Two more epiosdes of Iron Fist in, and I have good news, and I have bad news.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Wrestlemania 33

My favorite Wrestlemania moment.
Nobody needs to watch seven hours of pro wrestling. Ever. It's just not a thing that should happen. Six is pushing it as it is, but seven? I actually enjoyed a lot of Wrestlemania, but as with so many WWE shows over the last couple of years, what they think of as the "main events" are a bunch of bullshit I could barely stand to watch if I was fresh, and by hour five point five, I am not fresh.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

PREDICTIONS: Wrestlemania 33

The Ultimate... Something Or Other
Here we are again! Big show time! Six hours of wrestling and Pitbull performances!  As with Takeover, the predictions are divided into SHOULD and WILL, with what I want to happen and what I expect to happen.

PREDICTIONS: NXT Takeover Orlando

Probably the match of the night.
It's time for another NXT Takeover, also known the show that makes the real show look bad, and Orlando should be no exception, even with a main event that won't steal the show.