We’ve reached episode five! Five! FIVE! FIIIIIIIIVE! Ironically, Big E Langston does not appear in the NXT show that originally aired on June 19th, 2013, but that doesn’t stop Miles and MeganBob from discussing him, for reasons that will become obvious! If you don’t have WWE Network, you can follow along here.

In this episode:

We talk a lot about Adrian Neville in this episode, the kid from The Shire who made good and became an extremely muscular pro wrestler with perfect body control. He’s got a match against Bray Wyatt this week, but it ends in our first-ever disqualification! I wonder why that could be!

Of course, Corey Graves and Kassius Ohno run out to even the odds, and the show has already descended into the kind of chaos that happens all the time on the main roster, but is something of a rarity for NXT. We’re not complaining though, because it gives Bob a glimpse of one of WWE wrestling’s most notorious tropes…

Time to holla holla holla at your NXT General Manager…

That man’s name is “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. The man, the myth, the legend, the nigh-impossible-to-imitate accent! If you’re interested in the history of American pro wrestling, Googling him is highly recommended. If not, all you need to know is that he’s the man in charge of this show, and he’s turning this unsupervised brawl into a six-man tag team match in tonight’s main event. Makes you feel for whoever was originally scheduled to be in the main event, but whatever.

By the way, a six-man tag team match differs from a regular tag team match only in that there are six people involved, instead of four, and in that Bob can’t stop calling it a three-man match for some reason.

We’ll get back to the main event later. Until then, meet Angelo Dawkins! He’s pretty much a jobber here, as Sami Zayn gets a quick win. Sometimes it takes you a while to find the smoke, fam.

By the way, Zayn is still somewhat disgruntled despite his win, because it’s Cesaro he really wants to beat. Really just love his disgruntled face here.

More relevant to Miles’ interests (and the interests of wrestling a whole) is our introduction to Sasha Banks, seen here as a happy, smiling babyface without a character. It’s going to be some time before she evolves into Miles’ favorite wrestler, but it’s still pretty exciting to finally see her!

Unfortunately, she loses to another new face (to us), the so-called “First Lady of Wrestling,” Summer Rae. Summer is actually way better in the ring than she ever got credit for, but she’s also very much the mold for female wrestlers in 2013. As Bob points out, not a lot of body type variety going on in the women’s division.

Also they’re still wrestling like this:

Which is a shame. Hey Sasha, I think there’s a mirror somewhere backstage. You should go find it and look into it. No reason.

The last of our new arrivals takes on this man, Jake Carter, seen here non-verbally summarizing his career. His father was the wrestling legend Big Van Vader, but he would not see the same success, as this is his final match in NXT and fourth-to-last match ever. Spoiler alert: ringing the bell for him doesn’t provoke much of a reaction from Bob. Certainly nothing close to her reaction to his opponent…

We are so into Xavier Woods in this episode, you guys. He is an enormous nerd who drops constant Power Rangers references (he’s even announced as being from Angel Grove) and is clearly fighting as hard as he can against the stereotypical 1970s Black man gimmick NXT is trying to saddle him with. But as anyone who has followed his career knows, Woods has made something of a habit of breaking out of the boxes WWE tries to put him in. We love him and so should you.

By the way, Woods’ backstage promo is what prompts our discussion on race in wrestling, which only covers the bare bones of the subject and which we will surely be coming back to in the future. If you’re interested, Miles once wrote an article on Black women in wrestling, specifically. You can find it here.

As an aside, we learn in this episode that the guy on the right is actually French. Who knew?

And here’s Bo Dallas’ proof that he actually went to Disneyland after his championship win!

We now return to the three-man…I mean, six-man tag team main event! Basically all you need to know is that Bray Wyatt is bigger than Bob thought he was, and they fight for a while, until…

Neville’s aerial attacks eventually get him into a position where he’s about to hit his finishing move, the Red Arrow, on Bray Wyatt. Unfortunately, this is what happens…

And then this happens…

Let’s get one more look at that hobbit eating shit, shall we?

Hey kids, you wanna see another dead body?

This is relevant to the episode, by the way. We call this a teaser. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of teasers, come back for Episode #6, when the NXT Wrestling Fan welcomes our first-ever guest host…

As they say in the wrestling business, that ought to pop the crowd!

By the way, that is, in fact, our music! It’s called “Learnbuckle” and it was created by the uniquely talented Rafael Medina, whose work you can and should follow via his Twitter account, @EarthMeauxFaux! You can also follow Miles @mjschneiderman, MeganBob @meganbobness, and the show itself @nxtwrestlingfan, or visit www.nxtwrestlingfan.com

Additional music and sound credit to:

“Eyes Gone Wrong”, “Greta Sting”, “NewsSting”, “Samba Stings,” “Rising Game”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/