New Year, new episode! We bring you fresh, hand-made, artisanal wrestling shenanigans from Miles, MeganBob, and special guest Dan Mulkerin about the NXT episode that originally aired on August 7th, 2013. Dan lets us in on Miles’ long-running attempts to get him hooked on wrestling and gives us that theatre kid perspective on stage combat and costumes.

Also on this episode:

Our favorite hobbit boy (and his apparently hobbit-flavored Pop-Tarts) is all in silver for his match against United States Champion Dean Ambrose, for whom we all have different backstory pitches. We actually did run a poll on our Twitter account to see which backstory people agreed with most, featuring some additional crowdsourced responses. Anyway, the Shield are here and Bob still hates them and sees them as invaders, which means the story has been successful so far!

Despite Ambrose’s bullying tactics, Neville manages to come back with the aid of lots of Difficult To Screenshot Flying Moves (trademark Adrian Neville, The Shire). Note the one where he flies out of the ring to hit Ambrose on the outside, when theater nerd Dan recognizes the subtle physical shifts that indicate Ambrose is preparing to catch someone.

Neville manages to hit the Red Arrow on Ambrose and looks like he’s gonna win the US title, but WHOOPS, Seth Rollins (he of the half-blonde hair) breaks up the count, the match ends in a disqualification, and the Shield beats Neville down until Corey Graves and Xavier Woods run out to make the save.

As a side note, we have a conversation during this match about Adrian Neville’s comic book counterpart, and here are our contenders:

Hit us up on social media if you have different nominees, or if you have other comic comparisons for wrestlers, like the one sent to Miles recently by Twitter user @qwoortz:

*shudder*

After the Shield stuff, we’re treated to a backstage segment involving four of WWE’s favorite stereotypes: rednecks, Frenchmen, people from New York/New Jersey, and (eventually) hippies. The hippy in question is just the same guy from last episode doing more photobombing, but Miles does notice in this episode that whenever any of these four isn’t talking (particularly Sylvester LeFort) they are doing weird improv reaction takes in the background:

Also Mason Ryan is going to murder Scott Dawson next week, moving on…

…to the dance battle. Yes, the actual dance battle to determine the #1 contender for the NXT Women’s Championship. This is your standard class parable, with Summer playing the ivory tower know-it-all who actually learned classical dance (boooooooooooo):

And Emma playing the simple everywoman whose uses good old blue collar dances to win the hearts of the crowd (yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!)

Summer eventually responds to this by busting out “the Fandango,” a reference to this weird moment in wrestling in 2013 where Fandango was a huge deal, as evidence by the crowd participation despite Summer’s heelness:

To which, of course, Emma responds by doing “the Emma dance:”

Naturally Emma wins, and naturally, Summer beats the crap out of her afterward. Which, what a heel, sure, but don’t sleep on the fact that Summer Rae is doing ALL OF THIS in ACTUAL heels. That’s impressive whether you like someone or not.

Memorize that name and that face, and don’t forget it, it’ll be important later. Like, several years from now. For the time being, Danny Burch is a jobber who gets his lunch eaten by Tyler Breeze. The best part? Breeze is streaming video from his phone to the Titantron during his entrance, and after defeating Burch he takes a selfie ATOP THE DEFEATED CORPSE OF HIS ENEMY and streams that, too:

After which, of course, we learn that Tyler Breeze has left the building. Because that is our life now.

The main event is an NXT Championship Match between Leo Kruger and Bo Dallas, or as we like to think of it, Leo DiCaprio vs. Viggo Mortensen:

Kruger is clearly the crowd favorite here, as Miles and Dan are both of the opinion that NXT has recognized Bo’s recent audience response (despite the 5% still cheering for him) and is responding by turning him heel. Bob doesn’t quite see that yet, but she’s keeping an open mind. Anyway, some highlights of the match include Kruger’s facial expressions:

More of Kruger’s facial expressions:

And Kruger jumping onto Dallas’ knees:

The actual story being told here involves Dallas wrestling in a different, slightly more aggressive style than usual, as well as, according to Bob, a deep conversation between Dallas and the referee.

However, Bo Dallas’ confrontation with that most deadly of enemies — HIMSELF — must wait for another day, as he uncharacteristically makes Kruger tap out with a vicious (albeit, in this shot still silly-looking) submission hold:

That face was just too good not to include, guys.

Holy crap, guys, we’re so close to actually being caught up with these! Come back soon for more as we endeavor to actually be done with this nonsense before our next episode drops and we get behind again! Thanks for reading!

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”  
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/