FanPost

WWE Breaking Ground Recap and Review: Road Trip

Last night, we got the sixth episode of the highly entertaining NXT documentary show Breaking Ground. This week's episode takes the A-team to Louisville and Nashville for touring dates, while back at the Performance Center, we meet a new international recruit. Let's dive in!

Episode Recap

Goodbye, Cal

The episode kicked off with a recap of last week's ending segment, where Canyon Ceman showed up to dish out raises to Jason Jordan, Nia Jax, and Apollo Crews. Unfortunately, he was also there to give the hard-working but injury prone Cal Bishop his walking papers. Ceman remarked that "this is a competitive system; it's designed to be competitive" when explaining why Cal's injury history means he may not be physically cut out for this line of work. There is a lot of fanfare about Cal's professionalism, both in his work at the Performance Center and in handling his firing, and Ceman even made a note that the door is not closed on Cal, if he can make a name for himself and stay healthy working the indie circuit. Cal's final goodbye is with NXT head coach Matt Bloom, who asks Cal to keep in touch. Despite the setback, Cal is keeping his head up; in what was presumably his final talking head bit on the show, he vowed to overcome, and become something great. Here's to hoping that he does.

His release hit the rest of the NXT locker room pretty hard, too. There was a gloom for the rest of the day when news got out that he was let go. Nia Jax was especially emotional; she was in tears as she explained her guilt that she got a raise from Ceman's visit, while a good friend was fired. She puts over that the whole NXT locker room is a family. Jason Jordan also gets a bit to remark on Cal's departure, noting that he had wrestled Cal when they were both in college. Cal will surely be missed, but the Superstars can't dwell on it too much, as they've got a road trip coming up!

The Road to Louisville

The first stop on NXT's three day road trip is Louisville, Kentucky for the Louder Than Life music festival. Our coverage of the trip begins by checking in on the real life couple of Carmella and Big Cass, who've been dating for over a year and live together. They're up at the crack of dawn to get ready for the trip, and joining them on the journey is Carmella's best friend, our NXT Women's Champion, Bayley! Carmella notes that while she and Bayley have grown close in her time at NXT, she knows that Bayley will be leaving soon to head up to the main roster. Rather than letting this get her down, she uses it as motivation to step up her game so that she can join Bayley up on the main roster, someday. This tour is her next step on that journey.

The Louisville show is also pretty significant for Jason Jordan and Apollo Crews, as it is their first shows since receiving their raises. Both men feel a larger sense of responsibility to be at the top of their game now that the company has acknowledged the progress they've made and the work they've put in, and they're both using this performance at Louder Than Life to show that their bosses' faith was not misplaced.

New Blood

While the promotion's biggest stars are on their way to Louisville, a new arrival has just gotten to the Performance Center: Lovepreet Sangha. He's a standout in kabbadi, an ancient Indian combat sport. Canyon Ceman is hoping that his athleticism will lead him to WWE gold.

The Catapults

Back on the road to Louisville, Mother Nature has reared her ugly head on the NXT crew. Unexpected storms have turned the festival grounds into a veritable mud pit, and with a pretty long trek from the tour bus to their tent, the NXT Superstars have to make a pit stop to go...shoe shopping?!

Sure enough, you can't have the stars of tomorrow wrestling in wet feet and mud-caked shoes, so the crew hits a local department store to pick up some new kicks for their trek across the mud. While Enzo Amore goes the practical route and scores some steel-toed boots, Jason Jordan can't resist the allure of The Catapults; a very cheap, knockoff version of high-top Jordans. J.J. is thrilled with his purchase, despite being chided by Enzo and the rest of the guys and gals on the tour bus.

"Baymella"

When the NXT crew returns from their shoe shopping adventure, they remark on the massive crowds gathering at the festival, and wonder what the people attending the rock festival will think of the NXT performance. After wading through the mud in their newly-purchased shoes, they arrive to their tent and set up to meet fans and take pictures. One of the fans in attendance is rocking a "Baymella" t-shirt; "Baymella" being a word that has rose to prominence on Twitter regarding the house show pairing, and real life friendship, of Bayley and Carmella. Bayley shares a story of one of the things she loves about Carmella, and Carmella displays the aforementioned talent, which is some strange lip-based mime routine. Bayley thinks this is awesome.

The Louder Than Life Festival Performance

The coverage for the Louder Than Life Festival show really focused on Bayley and Baron Corbin, here. For Bayley, it was a huge opportunity: Matt Bloom asks her to help produce a quickly thrown together match between Alexa Bliss and Eva Marie. Bayley is briefly seen coaching Alexa, and sits with Bloom to produce the match from backstage. Bayley was extremely nervous, noting that she was almost more nervous for this than her own matches! But, it was an opportunity to add another "feather to [her] cap," as she put it, so she undertook the job with pride.

For Baron Corbin, it was a chance for him to work on connecting with the fans, which is currently his biggest issue, according to Bloom. He thinks that Corbin wants to be a top guy, but doesn't quite understand what it takes to get there. He needs work on the microphone, and Bloom doubts that he could sell a big pay-per-view match if they gave him a live microphone with where he's at in his development right now. Corbin addresses his struggles with connecting by pointing out that he was taught in football to never show emotion, and was used to having his face covered with a helmet. Because of this, it's hard for him to get people emotionally invested in him, but he's working on it.

I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost!

Unfortunately for him, Jason Jordan cannot lay claim to this section header. He was downright terrified when some of the NXT crew made a stop at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which is allegedly one of the most haunted buildings in the world. Coach Brookside says "not on your nelly" to Matt Bloom's suggestion that they may see a ghost at the abandoned mental hospital. While J.J. is visibly nervous about taking a tour of the place, Baron Corbin is quite excited; he loves to be scared, and claims to have seen ghosts before, both good and bad. Once inside the sanatorium, they're taken down the "body chute", which during a pandemic while the hospital was operational, was said to see one dead body per hour. Corbin chides J.J. that if something pops out at them, he'll just throw J.J. to the ghost, and will tell J.J.'s woman that he's not coming back. J.J. questions if Corbin would be fast enough to catch him, and warns Corbin against speaking to his woman. Despite how it sounds, the ribbing was all good-natured, and it was nice to see Corbin actually joking around with one of the boys. Later, as they continue the tour, J.J. notes that he felt a cold breeze on the back of his neck, and knew something was there. Even Corbin, who loves places like this, began to feel uncomfortable...

And then, the segment ends, just like that. It was rather abrupt, and devoid of any kind of payoff, which was strange and a little disappointing.

Nashville Bound

The next stop on the tour is Nashville, one of Corbin's favorite cities. He notes Nashville's love of music, and likens the deep, emotional bonds that fans can make with music, and how it can affect their mood, to how wrestling can do the same thing. At the venue, Bayley is pre-signing posters with Carmella, when J.J. arrives and asks if he can have one, made out to J.J. He and Bayley have a back-and-forth where they discuss the spelling of J.J., and the end result on the poster is "J period J period". J.J. asks if it would be weird if he hung it by his bed before heading off to confer with his tag team partner, Chad Gable, on their coming match. They'll be facing the hugely over team of Enzo Amore and Big Cass, and J.J. tells Gable that they need to kill it tonight.

Baron Corbin: Oddity Collector

Prior to the Nashville show, Baron Corbin takes some time to see a friend who lives in Nashville, and they take a trip to a rather strange shop, which houses objects such as mummified cats, skulls, shrunken heads (which Corbin refers to as "the coolest thing in the world"), and old medical tools. Corbin and his friend are collectors of these strange, macabre items, and his friend laments that he's still on the search for an old lobotomy kit. Before they leave, Corbin purchases a skull fragment and his friend buys a brain specimen from an insane asylum.

Promo Class

Meanwhile, back at the ranch the Performance Center, Lovepreet is partaking in his first promo class. He has some...interesting acts to follow, with Alexander Wolfe trying out a weird hypnotist gimmick, and Sylvestor Lefort (yeah, he's still a thing, apparently) cutting a promo as a world traveler. Lovepreet is concerned that the language barrier might be an issue for him, as the American accent is very different from his own, and cuts a pretty bad promo about the universe being his. Sami Zayn (!) is there to offer some constructive criticism, and urges Lovepreet to know where he wants the promo to go before he starts it, so that it doesn't just feel like he's meandering.

The Nashville Performance

We get clips of a triple threat Women's Title match between Bayley, Emma, and Alexa Bliss while Bayley talks about how she's surprised that they got 1,300 fans to come out for their show that evening. Why she's surprised is kind of confusing, since they just sold out roughly 13,000 at the Barclay's Center just a few months before. Following this, we get clips of Tyler Breeze vs Finn Bálor, Apollo Crews vs Tye Dillinger, and the aforementioned Enzo & Cass vs Gable & Jordan. J.J. talks about how all he wants is for him and Gable to get the call-up to the main roster, so that they can be the team that the Raw team relies on to always deliver. After the match, Matt Bloom is enthusiastically congratulating Gable and Jordan, and the narrator notes that Jordan has been consistently making major progress in his development.

All Botch Everything

And now, for the segment everyone has been waiting for since the commercials for this week's episode began...

Carmella is scheduled to have a match with Eva Marie at the Nashville show, and although she's fighting a cold, she still intends to compete. Carmella notes that there is a pretty significant gap at this point between Bayley and the other women in the division, and that she wants to be the one to step up and fill that gap. As Eva Marie gets in the ring, the camera focuses on a huge "If Eva Marie is here, we riot" sign hanging on the balcony. We're shown clips of the match, as Bloom notes backstage that the two ladies are doing well with their pacing. The match clips are intercut with Carmella talking about overcoming everything to succeed, and for anyone who knows in advance how this match ends, it's super foreboding. Sure enough, with Carmella perched on the apron, Eva Marie terribly botches a kick to the head spot, and referee Drake Wuertz sends word to the back that Carmella is legitimately injured. The trainer comes out, and the episode ends with Carmella on the verge of losing consciousness.

Review

All things considered, this was another great episode of what is probably the best programming that WWE has on the network right now. Carmella got a lot of time on this episode, and comes off as vastly more likable than her character.

The show continued its trend of humanizing Baron Corbin, after making the performer seem more like the dickish character in the beginning. It would be pretty cool to see them maybe work his real-life love of the macabre into a darker character for him.

Lovepreet's promo was really bad, and all things considered, he just seems like a black hole of charisma. But his English is far ahead of other imports like Hideo Itami and Asuka, so if he can find some kind of fire and inspiration, he should be just fine.

Jason Jordan continues to be probably the most likable person on the show, and it didn't seem like anyone would be able to reach the level of likability that Apollo Crews was on. But J.J.'s good nature and hard work, as well as his ability to lighten up and be silly when the situation calls for it and his in-ring talents that we already knew of, makes certain that pretty much any viewer will be dying to see more of him.

Next week, we return to Tino Sabatelli and his quest to finally start making an impact in NXT, the pressure is mounting for Lovepreet, and Carmella will be dealing with the aftereffects of her injury at the Nashville show. Will you be tuning in, Cagesiders?

The FanPosts are solely the subjective opinions of Cageside Seats readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cageside Seats editors or staff.