October 28, 2020 – Orlando, Florida
They treat this like a big show right out of the gate, giving host Shotzi Blackheart a big, spark-filled intro and having Damien Priest’s entrance music played by a live musician. Johnny Gargano, dressed as Jack Skellington, rips a giant inflated pumpkin on the ramp to be a jerk. Blackheart Spins the Wheel to Make a Deal and we get our first stipulation.
Johnny Gargano def. Damian Priest {NXT North American Championship Devil’s Playground Match}
That’s a dramatic name for a falls count anywhere match. The first commercial break robs us of a kendo stick vs. nightstick fight. What the hell?! The best gag in this match had to be Gargano getting scared by a Halloween gimmick and superkicking it out of frustration. This dragged a bit leading into the second commercial break with too much walking around the building, but other than that it was a fun brawl. Someone in a Scream costume (Austin Theory or Indi Hartwell) helps Gargano, giving him a gravestone with which he hits Priest and knocks him off of the wheel balcony. That’s enough for the win and the title at 13:58 (shown). This was frontloaded and petered out quite a bit before the end. ***
Pat McAfee and the new NXT Tag Team Champions are in the ring. McAfee is bitter because Adam Cole didn’t congratulate him on his well-fought debut at Takeover XXX. So he enlisted Ridge Holland to attack Cole. When Holland got hurt, he reached out to the guy who put his guy on the shelf, Oney Lorcan, but Lorcan said he couldn’t be bought. But after losing their contender match to the Undisputed Era, Lorcan & Danny Burch had a change of heart and decided they needed some help. It’s almost sick how much that makes sense. Kyle O’Reilly comes out with shredded Pete Dunne as his backup (since the tag champs put the rest of the Undisputed Era in the hospital). And then, because this alliance makes no sense (the Undisputed Era screwed with Dunne a ton), Dunne turns on O’Reilly and hits him with a chair. Burch seems really excited to be a heel, and I’m digging this new stable.
Santos Escobar def. Jake Atlas
Escobar is wearing Rey Mysterio’s pants from Halloween Havoc ‘97. Escobar made quick work of Atlas, who got a hope spot with the Rainbow DDT and a plancha onto Legado del Fantasma. But moments later, Escobar hit a double arm gutbuster for the win at 3:30. *¾
Michael Hayes puts Cameron Grimes in an unmarked van with zombies in the front seat so he can be taken to his match against Dexter Lumis. It’s a cinematic bit of business, not a match. If you’re curious in what it would be like to watch Grimes walk through a haunted house, this is for you. I found it pretty funny. The best bit was Grimes seeing a referee in a Blair Witch Project position and asking him what the rules of the match are before getting jump scared by him. The bit where Grimes forgets he’s in a haunted house and tries to hook up with a witch in a shower before being scared out of his mind is funny too. This Grimes, he makes me smile. He fights off Lumis and some zombies before running back to the Capitol Wrestling Center. There, Lumis and the zombies catch him in the ring until Lumis chokes him out. Again, not a match, but entertaining thanks to Mr. To The Moon.
Rhea Ripley def. Raquel Gonzalez
I like Gonzalez’s subtle pentagram top given the occasion. This was a lot of fun. You don’t usually get hoss fights from the women’s side of things, but Ripley has now given us that kind of match against Piper Niven, against Mercedes Martinez, and now against Gonzalez. I wish the match had been a bit longer and that there had been a portion where Ripley was in a bit more trouble, but that’s a minor quibble given her trajectory now seems like a straight shot against the champ. She hit the Riptide at 9:33 (shown) for the win. ***¼
Drake Maverick dresses up like Hulk Hogan and gets Dungeon of Doom treatment from a couple of giant Performance Center dudes. Then Killian Dain screws up his Shockmaster entrance by not screwing up, and Maverick ends up being the one who trips. But in true comedy sketch fashion, this goes on too long and doesn’t know how to end on a high note. Later, Tommaso Ciampa doesn’t recognize NXT anymore. Me either, man. He challenges Velveteen Dream to a match. That and Dakota Kai vs. Ember Moon happen next week.
Io Shirai def. Candice LeRae {NXT Women’s Championship Tables, Ladders, and Scares Match}
Poppy plays Shirai to the ring. Spin the Wheel, Make a Deal gave us this stipulation too. Aside from an early bit where LeRae unknowingly dumps out a bag of fake bloody body parts, the Halloween portion of this TLC match was almost entirely chromatic. These two took some wild bumps in this match. Some of the spots were a bit contrived, but I mostly felt like they were trying to win and not doing fancy moves for the sake of it. The Scream mask person comes out to give LeRae a Rhyno boost up the ladder, but Blackheart runs down to neutralize the threat. Shirai dumped LeRae from the top of the ladder through another ladder hanging off the apron (a real nasty landing too) and then retrieved the belt at 13:58. I’d call this on par with their very good match from Takeover 31 and not quite at the level of their amazing Toronto match. ***¾
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
