BomberPat

I think this is unfair. He wanted to be a Faithful, sure, but that doesn't mean he would have known how much pressure he would feel being a Traitor. We've all had things we thought we could manage but turned out to be too much for us (kennethwilliams.gif), and he held it together for a while, who knows what else was going on that didn't make the edit. If nothing else, a Traitor actively giving themselves up at the Roundtable made for some good telly. I didn't think it was as good as last year's, but still had enough moments. It was disappointing seeing a lot of my favourites and the bigger characters voted out early, and most of the challenges were completely forgettable, but the finale came together well even if it was predictable.

Definitely adding the herd of horses gag to my repertoire! My all-time favourite gag is, "I think I'll have the ploughman's lunch - he'll be fuming when he finds out". My ex was fuming every time she inadvertently set me up for that one, which only made it even funnier. You can also make it work for shepherd's pie, and my brother once managed it with "Colman's mustard", which has led to us trying to figure out what the most ambitious angle you can take on it is - so far, I think it's, "I had the goat's cheese tart for lunch. Well, I didn't see his name on it".

I assume he's just had four more children.

that Frasier episode is brilliant too, a rarity for a post-Niles and Daphne marriage episode, and it's almost entirely down to Patrick Stewart knowing exactly how to play his part to just before the point of parody, so that it never becomes a lazy queer panic joke and instead the comedy entirely comes from Frasier being stuck in this maze of manners and politeness. There's a brilliant double-whammy line delivery of Daphne introducing herself as Niles' wife, Stewart looking at them both and just saying "...no.", followed by Daphne saying "we're expecting", and Stewart responding, "well I certainly wasn't!".

ah, fair, I hadn't twigged that it was the final tonight, I thought that was next week. Ignore me! The ending of that episode definitely felt set up for the expectation that Michael was getting murdered. If he is, it will be interesting to see if that makes suspicion fall on the actual Traitors, or if everyone is still pretty oblivious to it all.

I was never really a Star Trek guy. It's weird, people tend to assume that I am. I guess I'm into enough stuff adjacent to it that they fill in the blanks. Nobody in my family watched TNG, so it wasn't something that was around when I was growing up. I have maybe seen a handful of TNG episodes ever, the first few episodes of Picard, and the movies up to Generations. So I don't have the connection to Patrick Stewart as "my captain" that so many others do, but I absolutely loved him in everything I saw him in, and I've been desperately trying to figure out where I would have first known him from given it wouldn't have been Star Trek. I think it may have been Pagemaster or Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which aren't exactly anybody's career highlights, or even the old RPG Lands of Lore that he did a ton of voice acting for. I'm fascinated by the moments, as a child, that you first realise that the piece of art or media you're engaged with had to be made by someone. It's something you obviously understand, but there's a point where you intellectually recognise what that means, that whatever finished product you hold in your hand was a result of countless choices and decisions. Patrick Stewart might be the first actor I remember actively recognising was a good actor, even if I didn't necessarily know what that meant - I'd seen a kind of stagey, Shakespearean acting in old films, or mocked in comedies, to know that it was something old-fashioned and silly, but then when I saw/heard Patrick Stewart he seemed to be doing that in a way that wasn't silly, that wasn't old-fashioned, that felt utterly compelling and vital. I still don't think anyone has ever been better at taking the kind of rhetorical authority and gravitas that comes of being a classically trained Shakespearean actor, and making it work for regular TV or cinema, particularly American TV - Stewart as Picard could have so easily seemed stagey or at a remove from the rest of the cast, but in every episode or scene I have watched, he never does, it's always an ensemble piece. And what he brought to Picard was that depth and presence that comes of his background, but also a warmth and an emotional vulnerability that the Star Trek movies occasionally attempted to find in Kirk, but which neither the Kirk character or William Shatner as an actor could possibly convey. It's the same thing he brought to Professor Xavier, this immense dignity and capacity for forgiveness, this sense that he was capable of incredible power, but a reluctance to use it unless all other options had been exhausted.

The Traitors seem to be working on the logic that confusion is their best weapon; if they take out people that can't be traced back to one or two people's suspicions, it just leaves people guessing, and in fairness, up until this episode that was largely working and suspicions weren't going anywhere near the actual Traitors. It's hard to tell if that's them playing a good game, or them playing a bad game and the Faithfuls playing a worse one. Do the Traitors get another recruitment, or is it just down to the two of them for the remainder of the series now? Because both for them and for the series, I think the most interesting thing that could happen now would be Michael getting recruited.

Other than Cody Rhodes at that Wrestlemania where, after winning the World Title in the main event of the biggest show of the year, he proceeded to thank all the corporate suits in the back and put them over, has anyone ever talked about Bruce Prichard as a great writer, a great booker, or someone who was a significant influence on their career? Maybe Kane? That's the only gimmick I ever hear him given credit for. What I'm saying is that it feels like a sideways move. It's one guy who's completely embedded in the system being replaced by another, only the new guy has more cred on account of having been a good wrestler, which is often enough to convince people that they're also a good booker even when the actual evidence doesn't really support that. I don't know how actively involved Prichard was with day-to-day creative, and I don't suspect there to be any noticeable change to what you see on TV (though I fully expect that the moment anything half-decent happens, social media will fill up with "HBK IS COOKING~!" posts, treating it like the dawn of a new era), so the more interesting outcome might be what happens to NXT, where it's small scale enough and at enough of a remove from the big corporate interests that a change of booker could have a measurable impact. But I also wonder if they treat it like AAA, and give a figurehead "booker" position to a big name retired wrestler, while the actual business of booking the show is largely managed by people who actually know what they're doing.

it is interesting given how much they're (understandably) mining Swerve and Hangman's history, that nobody is bringing up that they did team together - and more recently than they have wrestled one-on-one. It does feel like a part of their story that AEW, for whatever reason, never followed through to fruition, so that's part of why I'm wondering if we end up back there, with both of them alienating their more reasonable friends, ostensibly out of hatred for each other, but ultimately with the realisation that they're more alike than they would care to admit. There would be some big storytelling hurdles to jump over to make it work, but both of them only having each other to turn to shouldn't take that much work, and could lead to Swerve & Hangman vs. both other teams, and I agree that I just don't see the ultimate direction of this being going back to "just" Swerve vs. Hangman again. With Hangman having already given up his future shots at the World Title, and presumably losing the Trios Titles at some point in this story (that's one bit I can't make fit yet - what happens to the Trios belts if this turns into a tag feud?), I can see desperation leading him to try and get the Tag Titles, then it's just a question of getting Swerve to the same realisation. Generally the difference between them is that Swerve is more calculating and Hangman more impulsive, but if there was a way to get to Swerve also offering up the stipulation of never being able to challenge for the World Title again, and maybe Hangman being the one to talk him out of it, that could get us somewhere.

I've contemplated for a while trying to write a "History Of Wrestling In 100 Objects" book, but usually give up on it because I expect too much of it ends up being this title belt, that trophy, a few different masks... Again, my interest would be of broader wrestling history rather than purely a WWE exhibition. But WWE have so much stuff crammed in warehouses, and control so much of wrestling's history, that it would be almost impossible to pull it off without involving them.

I think Kyle Fletcher facing Hangman was seen as making Kyle more credible by showing that he could come this close to being World Champion, that he wasn't there yet, but definitely will be one day. This is Kyle as an actual credible threat to the champion, and while I don't see him winning, he's not there as quite as much of a foregone conclusion. It's different to the Kane role not only because, as others have said, his direction of travel is different, but because one of the things about AEW (usually) making wins and losses matter more than WWE have in years is that it's not just wins that have to matter to make that work, it's losses too, and some of AEW's best character development has come out of how people grow and learn from their defeats. I was surprised to see Kyle Fletcher and Will Ospreay on opposite sides of a tag match last week, before they used it to start setting up to the Full Gear match, because they've been kept apart since the cage match. The reaction when they got in the ring together in that tag showed that there's a real appetite to revisit that feud and see them wrestle again, and I still think it was a mistake to give that away in a fairly throwaway tag rather than tease it a little longer. Whenever Kyle eventually turns face (I don't think he should any time soon), I imagine it will be in reuniting with Ospreay, so it never hurts to remind people of that history. I love The New Level not gelling with Swerve Strickland's way of getting things done, and they're charming and funny enough that I will let them off for what would annoy me from anyone else - them acting like they don't even know what a Texas Deathmatch is makes it sound like they've not watched any of the previous shows they happened on, which I would normally hate, but they pull it off. I love the dynamic of Brody getting angry and Hangman trying to play voice of reason, after a couple of weeks of things usually being the other way around, but there will also come a point where the New Level can't just keep saying, "it's Swerve, it's not us", because they're culpable for remaining friends and Trios partners with him. There was a guy I used to be friends with, who turned out to be a real piece of shit, and I always talk about the moment of realisation that comes of finding yourself telling someone, "it's okay, he's not normally like this" every weekend, and realising that you've said it so often that, no, actually he is normally like this. So there's three brilliant strands going on to this story - Hangman trying to play fair and put the worst of the Swerve feud behind him, and to not drag his friends down to the depths he's been to in the past, Swerve trying to goad Hangman and Brodido into accepting his challenge, and the New Level trying to just remain outside all of it, and there's a breaking point to every single one of those threads, all of which could be fascinating to see how they play out. I was trying to figure out what the outcome would be, and while we're nowhere near it yet, I can honestly see it one day leading to New Level vs. Swerve and Hangman.

I thought about putting Mistico on my list as well, but there's no way he's getting to the final, and no way he's taking enough clean losses to justify being in it otherwise. Which is a shame, I'd love to see him do something more interesting in AEW than his usual glorified cameos.

I don't object too much to Blood & Guts being a calendarised thing - War Games was a Fall Brawl gimmick for six straight years, and a Great American Bash one before that, and there's always enough of a heel faction around to warrant it. I think the women's match suffers more for always being a random assemblage of wrestlers rather than two factions, or a heel stable and the babyfaces united to beat them. I think this year is particularly odd because the same night they announced the competitors for Blood & Guts they kickstarted a completely different faction warfare storyline, and because Will Ospreay has had a long-running storyline of building his own faction, yet none of those guys are in the team he's presumably leading in Blood & Guts. That's just odd. The problem with Blood & Guts and War Games today is that they were traditionally built on heat, and modern wrestling is built on tension. Two heels ganging up on a babyface at the start of a War Games match works when you're invested in seeing that babyface defy the odds, and a dastardly heel being locked inside a cage with the babyface they've been tormenting, finally getting their comeuppance with nowhere to run, works when there's a catharsis or satisfaction to watching a face beat up a heel. But that's not really the language of wrestling any more, it's all escalation and near falls, so you have this long stretch of wrestling where there can't be any pinfall attempts, there's no tension, because there's no sense that anything important could happen.

Yeah, as much as a lot of the social media stuff is petty grievances that aren't really worth the effort, it has to be considered hand-in-hand with how difficult companies make it to actually speak to them any more. I've never been one for phoning a company, but it's not just phone numbers, there are massive companies that don't give out an email address, don't have a contact form on the website any more, if you're lucky the best you can get is an AI chatbot. I had flights cancelled on Friday, and had to try and figure out how to try and get reimbursed from Easyjet, and try and get through to someone at my hotel to let them know to hold the booking but that I wouldn't be there until Sunday. The entire "customer service" section of Easyjet's website just directs you to other pages detailing what they imagine you might want to know, so if your question isn't answered on one of them, you're fucked. If tagging a company on Facebook gets you a better response than that, I can see why so many people are resorting to it. EDIT: Case in point - my Premier Inn booking is showing an outstanding balance, even though everything was paid upfront. I just had to ask the AI chatbot the same question three times, each time getting an answer of some variation of "sorry, I don't understand, try rephrasing", until they eventually put me through to an actual human being who, on reviewing the chat for several minutes, said, "I see you would like to check your outstanding balance". I eventually had to (for a second time) give them all the details of my booking, and then got a generic response of, "sorry, I'm unable to help because this is a past stay", and telling me I need to contact a completely different team - there was no prior indication that the chatbot didn't deal with "past stays", no reason why I would expect that, and given that I had already given them my booking reference and the dates of my stay, it doesn't speak well of their customer service that they couldn't figure out from the context of my complaint or from me giving the actual dates that I was talking about something in the past. The contact form for the other department does nothing when you press the "Submit" button.

Fangtopia has just come out on Steam, with a discount for the next week. A mate of mine works for the developer, so I made sure to wishlist and play the demo and whatnot to help keep their engagement numbers up, and absolutely loved the demo. It's basically spooky Dorfromantik - match tiles together to create a landscape, use said landscape to unlock werewolves and ghosts and ghouls and whatnot to add to your little spooky land.

I think the issue with the tournament being for a World Title shot is that one guy gets a title shot by winning a gruelling two month tournament, another gets a title shot by insulting the champion and then "Tony Khan has made it official!". I do think it should be for a trophy that is seen as a major achievement in itself, rather than a regularly defended title. As a title, it should be viewed as almost equally prestigious to the World Title in order to warrant the tournament - the problem is, I think AEW think they have already achieved that equality of prestige when they really haven't, not least of all because it's a balancing act they're having to deal with around all the other singles belts as well.

CHIKARA's take on the Cibernetico was fun because it had an order of entry too, so you couldn't just tag out to anyone on your team, you had to tag the next one up. I don't think CMLL use that rule. It also means you don't have the entire ring blocked off by people standing on the apron!

Maya explaining the dagger to the other players made what should have been a massive error, but seems to have passed unnoticed. She said that they could choose to give the dagger to "another Faithful". But that isn't how it would work, because a Faithful doesn't know who else is Faithful - only the Traitors know that. It would have been framed as, "to another player".

I was sure there's a WCW VHS tape that had Hennig misspelled as Henning, though Googling makes me think that must be a Mandela Effect, as I can't see any evidence of it. A wrestler mate of mine said he misheard WCW commentators saying "Flyin' Brian" and for ages as a kid thought that Brian Pillman's gimmick name was "Brian Brian".

The big question for me is whether Jon Moxley makes it out of this one with the title. It's a really hard time to be booking him to drop the belt, but I think the C2 has more significant stakes if it's not just the Jon Moxley Show again. I don't think you need to explicitly continue the story of him dealing with grief, but maybe losing in the C2 could give him the crisis of confidence to move on to new things. I'm not sure about blocks, but I would go with a field of Jon Moxley, Ilja Dragunov, Tomasso Ciampa, Kevin Knight, Mark Davis, Konosuke Takeshita, Speedball Mike Bailey and Ricochet, with the remaining numbers worked out based on who is involved in other stories and other title pictures - it would be fun to have Swerve and Hangman in there, though it would mean the Trios Titles being put on the backburner for the duration, which I wouldn't be happy about. While I think it would be a downgrade in the usual match quality, I wonder if we see Adam Copeland enter it, given it will probably be his last opportunity to do so, and they could have him do an "old gunslinger's last stand" run for him. Maybe get Samoa Joe in there. It would be nice to have some NJPW or CMLL representation to vary things up, though other than maybe Hechicero I don't see it happening. Claudio is probably in again, maybe Gabe Kidd and Jay White, so there can be some Death Riders/Dogs/Bang Bang Gang tension. I agree that Ilja winning feels like the right move now. When he signed, my first thought was to stick him the C2 and let him build up people's investment in him by just letting him have great matches, and figure out a long-term plan once the tournament's over. But striking while the iron's hot is definitely the move, and I think he's a guy they could have take the title from Moxley without it feeling like a downer, because they'd just beat the shit out of each other and shake hands afterwards.

That felt like a really eventful show, in a way Dynamite hasn't for a long time. I have some nitpicks, which will be liberally littered through this post, but mostly I thought it was brilliant, with only the Opps/Jack Perry and women's tag backstage brawl being particularly weak segments. The Davis & Doyle/Young Bucks tag was superb. I assumed we'd get a standard Bucks TV match, with Renee talking about them working hurt just being to add some colour, but instead that line sowed the seed for what the match would be, and it was perfectly delivered. Love Davis & Doyle as a team, and they're the perfect choice to run that angle with, as are the Bucks - their match formula is so established as them escalating offence and kicking out of bigger and bigger near falls, to just get absolutely demolished meant more happening to them and it would had it been anyone else in their spot. The next tag was fantastic too, but they shouldn't have been formatted next to each other. Two Don Callis Family heel tag team wins in a row could have been avoided, and putting more space between the Bucks getting battered and then one of them coming out to make the save would have done more to keep Davis & Doyle's win feeling legitimate. I thought it was odd when this match was announced, that the first in-ring meeting of Fletcher and Ospreay since the cage match would be a barely promoted TV tag, and the reaction to them squaring off cemented that for me - it should have felt monumental to get those two back in the ring, and could have done with more weight being put behind promoting that. I wasn't at all interested in the prospect of a Copeland/Okada match, but then it became clear that this was all building to Blood & Guts rather than a pair of singles matches. I'm willing to forgive Blood & Guts feeling cobbled together given PAC's death likely changed all of their plans for the match, and Christian's injury changed their plans for Cope. They have some ridiculous talent in there, it should be great fun, and they've done a good job of actually making it all make sense in short order. My criticism, though, is that we've had months of Ospreay recruiting members of the United Empire, only to get to the big faction warfare gimmick and not be teaming with any of them. I feel bad for Wardlow, too - I think the ship has sailed on him as a top act, but he's reduced to maybe the seventh most important guy in the Don Callis Family. I would have had Don bring him back with loads of hype, only for Wardlow to reject him and just run roughshod through the Don Callis Family B and C teams. Mercedes and Marina felt massive. Mercedes mouthing "...fuck" when Marina's music hit, but then trying to big herself up and act tough once she was in the ring was a great character note. I don't know what the match will look like - Marina somehow manages to be brilliant and compelling while I still can't actually tell if she's any good by any of the usual metrics of whether someone's good at wrestling or not. She's been incredibly well protected for her entire run, to the point that I can't picture her in a Mercedes Moné match. The Dogs turn was weird. Jay White had some great babyface promos behind him, but the Bang Bang Gang were treading water and maybe will be better off as heels. The Dogs kicking out Gabe Kidd is probably the worst solution to the Dogs/Death Riders problem - I prefer The Dogs as a tag team to a trio with Gabe, but any version of this story that stays with Gabe as a Death Rider feels like the wrong direction. Again, I assume the PAC situation plays into it. I also found it very odd how much they allowed Claudio to fight back and batter everyone in what should have been a new super-faction showing their dominance. The Jericho/Nick Wayne stuff highlights something about Jericho - as a veteran, he's at his best when working with someone who reminds him of himself. Assuming he has a ton of creative input into this, it feels like Nick Wayne is just playing a younger Chris Jericho - you could picture Jericho doing the "I just beat...!" celebrations after a screwy win over someone like Goldberg in WCW, and the veteran trying to talk sense to the younger wrestler routine feels like him calling back to his feud with Shawn Michaels. It's fantastic how important they have managed to make Ilja Dragunov look immediately. The presentation, the teasing of the match with the metronome, how much they talked him up - brilliant stuff. Have they ever trailed a debut match all the way through a show like this before? A tiny thing that made me laugh - Excalibur running down the card for Collision, said that the Rascalz have been winning some Trios matches and want to get back into Trios Title contention....and so Myron Reed is having a singles match. And I checked, and the Rascalz have had six trios matches in AEW, and they lost five of them.

which is frustrating, because being a tag team of identical twins should be enough to get around at least some of that - they're not as big as an Earthquake or a Yoko, but there's two of the fuckers. They should have been Three Minute Warning before Three Minute Warning, fat lads doing moonsaults and fucking people up. But for all that 1997 gave us a lot of good things from the WWF, it was hardly an embarrassment of riches for the tag team division - if there were some smaller teams for them to lob about, maybe they'd have fared better, but it's all Davey Boy and Owen and the DOA and Nation of Domination, all other massive lads. And when they did get a proper team in Furnas & LaFon they never knew what to do with them either. It's just weird that twice they did a one-off appearance, got fucked off by Davey Boy, and then vanished.

I'd be amazed if I ever saw that segment as a kid; I never watched RAW, and I can't imagine that segment made it on to any of the highlight shows. I also think I was probably done with wrestling at that point - I think I watched from '94 to '96 and maybe a bit of 1997; I have a vague memory of seeing the clip of Shawn Michaels superkicking Bret when he was in a wheelchair, which would be about a month earlier than this, so maybe, but I still think it's unlikely. I'm mostly replying just to say what an awfully booked bit of business that is. Just like the Rumble you were in, you introduce these two massive heavyweights, only to immediately have Davey Boy bodyslam one of them, and then have them go evens brawling with the fucking Headbangers, even getting cut off while going to the top rope. Mental.

In terms of wrongful convictions, in the US the vast majority of exonerated criminals are black, and we don't really need to hand more of the machinery of the state over to enforcing institutional racism. There is also a concerted right-wing effort to paint any acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ identity or issues, any support given to queer kids, any education on queer topics, as tantamount to grooming. I don't think you can have a conversation about the death penalty for sex offenders without acknowledging that there are significant forces at play who are trying to paint being trans or queer in public as a sex crime in itself.

it doesn't look like there's any hope of someone else picking up the work, but the mention of getting the union involved seems to have ruffled the right amount of feathers. We have a weekly meeting with the member of SMT that in theory has oversight of our team - I don't trust him, and I've yet to see any tangible benefit from these meetings. Last week he didn't show up, and only apologised after the fact, this week he didn't show up and sent a replacement, which we only found out when said replacement joined the meeting. Whenever I next see him, I intend to tell him how disrespectful of our time I find this - it's fair enough that he can't always be available, but give us the courtesy of telling us ahead of time when that's the case! The person sent in his stead is one of the Deans of Faculty, who I have a lot more time for than the usual guy. He was a lot more receptive, admitted a lot of things that were at fault, and sounded a lot more committed to making sure our workload is better managed and other departments are expected to better pull their weight - whether anything comes of it remains to be seen, but it was reassuring to hear, at least. I didn't bring up my email, but a colleague did - not one I would have expected to have spoken up in my favour - and the Dean said that the email had been forwarded to him, and that he was planning to talk with management about making sure I was fairly compensated for the additional work I have been having to do. That addresses part of my email, it doesn't address the lack of management or respect of boundaries - there was one point in the meeting, before my email had been mentioned, when he said something about making sure that our team aren't asked to do anything that's outside of our remit, and I just involuntarily let out a short laugh, given that the person who has volunteered me for work outside of my job description is in my team and was in the meeting. The call is coming from inside the house! At least it's something, though, but it's something I am going to follow up on repeatedly until I get something in writing to say that I will be getting paid at a Grade 7 rate. What's frustrating is that I have had opportunities to apply for Grade 7 jobs in the past, and I have always been very clear that I wasn't interested - I don't want that level of responsibility, I find the work too stressful, and I'm happy with the work/life balance that my current grade affords me, and, thankfully, I'm in a position where I'm not desperate for the additional money. I'm confident that had I applied for those roles when they were available, I would have had a decent shot at getting them. Doing that work but not getting that money is, obviously, the absolute worst of both worlds. My preference would have been not doing this work at all, if I had to choose between that and doing it while also having to fight to be paid fairly for it.