Wrestling Wednesday: The Nexus and Kane: Summer Slam Follow Up

So, Summer Slam has came and went, RAW has came and went, and WWE still clearly doesn’t quite seem to know what they are doing with the Nexus. The big surprise of the night at Summer Slam came with the return of the (still horribly named) Daniel Bryan. As the seventh member of Team WWE, he finally got to shine on WWE television as a capable wrestler and helped beat multiple members of the Nexus. But the surprise came in the end when the final two members of Nexus (Justin Gabriel and Wade Barrett) fell to John Cena, only moments after Cena’s head was spiked on the concrete. It seems fitting that the regular focus of this blog is on superheroes, as John Cena clearly came off as one last night.

The follow-up made even more of a mess of the storyline as the Nexus’ membership dropped to six. Darren Young left the group after a defeat by John Cena in a match that amused me mostly for the fact that the two men look disturbingly similar (albeit with different skin tones). This did little to revive the Nexus from their loss the night before. It remains to be seen if the story can rise from this debacle in to something solid leading in to the next couple pay-per-views. I still expect this storyline to come to its end in November at Survivor Series and we will continue to monitor it going forward.

Kane’s big storyline comes with the not unexpected return of Undertaker at the pay-per-view. Surprisngly, Kane proved to be the winner out of the storyline so far. Even after his match with Rey Mysterio, he was able to stop his brother with little problem.

While I pretty much knew this entire storyline was a set up for Kane turning heel and feuding with his brother, I hoped that WWE would have waited to pull the trigger on this for awhile. We have all seen Kane vs Undertaker before as detailed in my first post about the superhero style feud between the two. I hoped that WWE would provide us with a few more twists in this plot line before the inevitable confrontation. Instead it seems Kane and Taker are on a one-way collission course sooner, not later.

All in all, despite the great feeling of seeing Daniel Bryan both back and allowed to shine, Summer Slam came off as rather weak to me. I think a lot more could have been done to make both these storylines fresh. Instead it seems WWE wants to shovel more of the same.

That’s okay. We have far more than WWE to check out in this column. We will take a look in that direction next week.