Here is the lineup for tonight’s episode of WWE NXT in Orlando, Florida at the Performance Center on the USA Network:
Eddie Kingston will require surgery for his leg injury that he suffered during his match with Gabe Kidd at the NJPW Resurgence event. Kingston suffered a tibular fracture during the bout.
Kingston confirmed to Pwinsider that he suffered tears to his ACL and meniscus and will need surgery. It is said that Kingston will be out for around nine months.
Kingston said, “This part of the game. Injuries happen. I will be back.”
Source: eWn
WWE might have lost Rhea Ripley to the injury bug, but reinforcements for the women’s division arrived on “WWE Raw.” Rumors from Pro Wrestling Insider on Monday alluded to former WWE Women’s Tag Team Champion Sonya Deville being backstage. The rumors turned out to be true during Monday’s episode, and Deville was seen backstage propositioning Shayna Baszler and Zoey Stark, introducing herself to the latter, with Baszler saying she wasn’t interested in what Deville had to say.
Deville tore her ACL in July 2023, in the midst of her tag title reign alongside Chelsea Green — she was replaced in the team by Piper Niven, who claimed one half of the championship without actually having won it. A late May/early June return would be about in line for the recovery time for an ACL tear. Deville has been a contracted WWE talent since 2015, but has never won a singles title in the promotion. Her former partner, Green, along with Niven, were recently drafted to “WWE SmackDown.”
Source: Wrestling Inc.
Another episode of WWE programming, another QR code leading to a lengthy trail of clues all seemingly pointing toward Uncle Howdy and, now more than ever, other members of his new faction. As the Chad Gable vs. Sami Zayn match that opened Monday’s “WWE Raw” went to a commercial break, the code quickly flashed on-screen, alongside the newspaper clipping that we’ve seen before about the missing therapist with a byline attributed to “Wendy Lucho,” an anagram for Uncle Howdy. Scanning the code takes viewers to the URL wwe.com/ecgpramstor, and deducing that the slug is an anagram for spectrogram will come in handy later down the path. The page itself says, “hello,” and then begins a survey featuring the following series of yes or no questions:
“Can you ever truly be free?”
“Have you ever lost your way?”
“Did you find your way back?”
“Do you want to be better?”
“Do you know that I’m proud of you?”
“Is love unconditional?”
“Have they been set free?”
“Do you believe?”
“Do you want to meet them?”
Once the questions are through (if you answer them correctly, that is) the page renders the message “soon.” Below that are 10 clickable, blank boxes that lead to even more content and clues, including a cipher that, when cracked, states, “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings,” and three separate audio files that, when run through a spectrogram, reveal a file named “ICU2” that just shows the word “hello,” another named “North_Star” that contains the familiar Bray Wyatt/Wyatt 6 upside down moth logo, and another named “WITNESS” that very clearly shows Uncle Howdy’s face.
WhatsApp, Glassboro, and the Allegory of the Cave
From there, the links in the boxes only get more intriguing, bizarre, and downright creepy. One goes to a newspaper article, positioned adjacent to the “Wendy Lucho” piece, titled “STUDY SEES NEGATIVE RESULTS.” The story refers to a “cruel and evil experiment” that actually look place in 1965, when Josie Laures and Antoine Senni set new records for time spent alone in a cave. The text of the story includes lines such as “I saved them,” “Give me a little more time,” and “I must give them the opportunity to repent. I hope, for their sake, they do.” It also features an image that appears to refer to Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave.
Elswhere, a sheet of notebook paper with “LIAR LIAR” scratched out in red and black marker contains the words “WhatsApp 5.22” scrawled in the corner, likely suggesting another clue dropping Wednesday. There’s also a quick video showing the veiled visage of a mysterious female figure, source code that contains an anchor link to the word “DOOR” within an H1 tag, a piece of paper with the glyph for Pluto all over it, the coordinates 39.7100 N and 75.1192 W, which points to Glassboro, New Jersey, which happens to be the location of Rowan University — likely a not-so-subtle reference to rumored returning superstar and former Wyatt Family member, Erick Rowan — and a piece of paper with “WENDY LUCHO” written on it, along with tick marks in each letter, perhaps showing its author working out the anagram before attributing it to the byline in the newspaper article.
WWE Shop recently released two shirts that fit right in with this mysterious journey, with one labeled as “Cavebird 1” and the other as “Cavebird 2.”
Source: Wrestling Inc.
Tonight’s WWE Raw live on the USA Network from the Greensboro Coliseum Complex in Greensboro, North Carolina.
WWE released several “NXT” talents during its latest round of mass cuts, and Fightful Select has revealed why some of those performers were let go.
Valentina Feroz and Boa were reportedly cut as they spent a lot of time on the sidelines through injury, which ultimately derailed their progress as they weren’t given enough opportunities to show what they could do. Meanwhile, Trey Bearhill was released due to his perceived similarities with Eddy Thorpe, but his departure came as a shock to many WWE employees behind the scenes.
Despite joining the promotion as an established celebrity who was touted for big things, WWE released the controversial Olympic gold medalist Gable Steveson during the mass cuts. However, this didn’t come as a shock to many backstage, as he wasn’t progressing at a decent rate. Booker T echoed these views when he reacted to Steveson’s WWE departure, noting that the former Superstar didn’t have the hunger or drive as he still had the amateur wrestling bug in his system.
Some “WWE: Next Gen” talents, including Julian Baldi, were also released during the wave of cuts. According to Fightful, the performers weren’t allowed to announce their contract status until after the show had aired, though their deals technically began after the reality series debuted. The report also claims that Drew Gulak is still employed by WWE, but he’s been informed that his contract won’t be renewed. Gulak was reportedly released in the wake of Ronda Rousey accusing him of grabbing the drawstring on her sweatpants backstage at a WWE show.
Source: Wrestling Inc.
AEW Collision and Rampage on TNT.
Collision:
Rampage:
The “Forever” ROH Women’s Champion, Athena, reportedly sustained an injury during the ROH portion of last night’s “AEW Collision” tapings. According to PWInsider, Athena suffered the injury during a spot which saw her charge through the middle ropes, landing hard on the outside, and was seen limping when she returned to the ring.
Upon her return, Athena landed a forearm smash to her opponent, who kicked out of the first pinfall attempt but stayed down for a second, wrapping up the match. It’s noted that Athena appeared to have relayed her injury to the referee in between the pin attempts. Athena was said to have remained in character after the match, but would not put any weight on her left leg and hopped out with assistance from the referee and another staffer. She was reportedly checked out after the match, but there has yet to be an update on the nature or the significance of the issue.
Athena has been the ROH Women’s Champion for 525 days, after first capturing the title from Mercedes Martinez in December 2022. Back in December last year, she outlined 2024 as the year she would like to take another stab at dominating AEW TV again, further setting her sights on the TBS and AEW Women’s World Championships as part of her goal of being the women’s triple crown champion. She had made somewhat of a stride towards that goal in April, returning to AEW programming to defend her title against Red Velvet at “Battle of the Belts X.”
Source: Wrestling Inc.
The trail of clues and mystique via QR codes on WWE programming forged forward on “WWE SmackDown,” with simpler content behind it than “Raw’s” 20 pictures to sift through and a far shorter duration than Thursday’s 55-minute takeover of WWE’s Twitch stream.
On July 16, 2020, the WWE On FOX YouTube channel released a video of “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt attending a therapy session with a psychiatrist named Rachel Bonnetta, who attempted to provoke Wyatt into speaking. Unfortunately for Bonnetta, her efforts were interrupted by a brief electricity blackout that resulted in Wyatt taking her place in the nearby chair, while Bonnetta mysteriously disappeared. Four years later, Bonnetta has now been found (albeit under a different name) alongside a cinematic recap of the Wyatt-related clues recently supplied by WWE.
Thursday afternoon, a new 55-minute WWE Twitch video opened with snippets from the July 8, 2013 episode of “WWE Raw,” which notably served as the main roster debut of The Wyatt Family. About two minutes in, however, the stream began to dramatically glitch before revealing an empty chair. This seat was later occupied by the aforementioned psychiatrist, Rachel Bonnetta, who appeared under the name of Wendy Lucho — a “missing” woman — in a series of images linked to a QR code seen on this week’s episode of “WWE Raw.”
Throughout the Twitch video, Bonnetta can be seen conferring with an unidentified client that later indicates that they’ve finally found their true purpose and family. As the conversation between client and psychiatrist progresses, flashes of QR codes emerge, routing back to several previous clues and messages reportedly connected to a new Bray Wyatt-themed stable.
But Friday’s reveal may have contained the spookiest breadcrumbs dropped yet.
This time it was more straight to the point, at least in the propped up landing page content itself. There was no optical illusion to solve to get there; no step-by-step, one-little-clue-at-a-time journey upon which to embark. Instead, the QR code that flashed during the tag team match between DIY and Legado del Fantasma led straight to a video wrought with the glitches with which we’ve become so familiar, flickering on and off through an image of a picture of a child in a Halloween-style costume getup, laid upon several drawings of the glyph of Pluto we’ve seen time and again. The audio in the clip says first, in a robotic voice, “He is nobody. He is all of us,” over and over again as it zooms in on the picture until it gets so close it goes out of focus. At that point, with the screen black, the voice asks, “Do you want to meet him?” before the video cuts to a black-and-white, grainy image of a hooded and/or masked figure staring back us.
But in digging past just the video itself, as has become customary in this saga, there was more to decipher.
The slug in the landing page is 22423, which refers to February 24, 2023 — the date of Bray Wyatt’s last appearance on WWE television, in a Firefly Fun House episode that also featured Uncle Howdy as the weatherman in a broadcast of “Fun House News.” When Wyatt and Ramblin’ Rabbit cut to Howdy, all he says is, “I am all of us.” The segment then ends with Wyatt promoting a game show called, “Can You Keep a Secret?” before it cuts to Wyatt in a black mask, asking, “If I told you a story, could you keep a secret?”
Meanwhile, images that flickered ever-so-briefly during the glitches in Friday’s video itself included a wooded area, an old promo from Waylon Mercy (a character portrayed in WWE by Dan Spivey in 1995 from whom Windham Rotunda drew inspiration for his Wyatt character, and whose name Joe Gacy, another name rumored to be a part of this eventual faction reveal, has invoked in the past as well), a woman looking terrified and/or tortured, what fans have suggested was a figure that looked like Uncle Howdy in the crowd at Monday’s “Raw” during a commercial break, and what looked to be the door from which Wyatt emerged at his 2022 Extreme Rules return, slightly opened, with light shining through.
Once again, as was the case on Monday, the announce team acknowledged the interruption, with Corey Graves and Wade Barrett remarking on the recurrence of these instances, seemingly indicating that the ultimate reveal could very well be imminent.
Source: Wrestling Inc.
WWE SmackDown will air live tonight on FOX from the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida.
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