ROH on Sinclair – Episode 244 – 21st May 2016
After last week’s somewhat bland ‘Jay Lethal Special’, my hopes aren’t high for this week as we get a ‘Bullet Club Special’. If this delves into the history of the group in New Japan, going back to the days of Prince Devitt and Karl Anderson, through the leadership of AJ Styles, then on to Kenny Omega then I’m interested and think it would be a sensible leveraging of the ROH/NJPW relationship to get New Japan footage onto ROH TV. Given Bullet Club is the angle they are pushing over everything else right now it would make sense to give US viewers unfamiliar with the NJPW product some historical context and knowledge (and may also shill some NJPW World buys too). My suspicion, however, is that we’re in for an hour of ‘Bullet Club guys in ROH’…which is overwhelmingly less interesting.
Sure enough, we begin at War Of The Worlds 2014 with highlights of Anderson and Gallows against the Briscoes. It does provide a reminder that the Hammerstein Ballroom is an amazing venue for pro-wrestling and comes off much better than the quirky, intimate but drastically less-suitable Terminal 5.
We go to Global Wars 2015 when a five-man team of ROH ‘all-stars’ took on a Bullet Club squad featuring AJ Styles, Anderson, Gallows and the Young Bucks.
Now we go to Honor Rising 2016, and a look at ‘The Elite’ of Bullet Club – Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks – defeating the Briscoes and Toru Yano to become the new NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Champions. This one is shown almost in full (as it was from Night 2 of the Honor Rising weekend which didn’t get the full Road Rage treatment).
Up next it’s the Bullet Club 8-man from also Honor Rising 2016 Night 2, featuring the New Japan farewell appearances for Anderson and Gallows.
The episode ends by showing the Bullet Club takeover at Global Wars 2016 in full. Because why not air the hot angle you just asked people to pay out-dated PPV prices for on free TV just a couple of weeks later? We do at least get a new Adam Cole promo daring Jay Lethal to give him a shot at the World Championship, so he can take it back from him and join the elite group of individuals who can call themselves two-time Ring Of Honor Champions.
Tape Rating - DUD - Even moreso than the Jay Lethal retrospective last week this felt like a colossal missed opportunity. Ring Of Honor fans just saw a wonderful start to 2016 dramatically and controversially eclipsed by a hard reset on everything in favour of a 'Bullet Club USA' takeover angle. Whether you agree with that or not, my view is it becomes a more palatable decision if ROH took the time on a ‘free episode’ of the TV show like this to explore the history of Bullet Club in Japan. Sure it would have taken a little bit more time and effort, and they’d have had to ask their ‘friends’ in NJPW for some footage (which presumably could’ve had ‘NJPW World’ logos and advertisements slapped all over it), but would have been a far more relevant and rewarding hour. Instead this came off as a lazy rehash of stuff we’ve seen in ROH before…with an undue amount of time given to Anderson and Gallows, who are gone, rather than to the likes of the Young Bucks (who are the most over act on the roster).