Check out the posts below for our Marvel 75th Anniversary Omnibus thingy, and for this week’s podcast season finale!  Meantime, though, I’ve got a PPV to cover…

Money in the Bank has wound up an interesting pay-per-view (a term I’ll keep using for want of anything better, even though most US viewers will probably be WWE network subscribers) more by accident than design.  This is the show built around the annual Money in the Bank Ladder Match, in which the winner gets the right to challenge for the world title whenever they want in the next year.  Since “whenever they want” is treated as many “on any show, without having to give any notice”, it’s effectively a licence to ambush the champion and practically guarantees winning the title.  A couple of people have failed, but it’s still a pretty reliable indication that somebody is destined for the main event.

But WWE Champion Daniel Bryan is out with neck surgery.  The original idea was that he’d be back in time to wrestle on this show, so the company stalled on last month’s show and ran a bunch of angles with the idea that he’d resist the Authority’s attempts to pressurise him to surrender the title.  Then it turned out he wouldn’t be able to wrestle on this show either, so they did a screeching U-turn and stripped him of the title after all.

This in turn has led the Money in the Bank Ladder Match – which was already some way into having its participants announced – to be turned into a ladder match for the vacant title, and a second ladder match, with completely different wrestlers, to be added to the card for the contract.

There are also other matches on the card.  Just.

1.  WWE World Heavyweight Title – Ladder Match: Kane v Sheamus v Alberto Del Rio v Cesaro v Roman Reigns v John Cena v Randy Orton v Bray Wyatt.  This sounds… interesting.  Because it’s for the vacant title, they’ve had to put all the big names (who aren’t injured, which is alarmingly few) into this match.  Modern ladder matches have tended to be big on high-flying stunts but there are no immediately obvious risk-takers here.  I suspect they’ll be building this one on storyline as much as they can – which is for the best, since they really can’t afford an injury to any of these guys.

The main storyline here is that the Shield have finally split up after Seth Rollins turned heel and sided with the Authority (the evil owners).  That leaves Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose going their own way, both as babyfaces, but it’s clear that Reigns has now been marked as the star of the future.  The jury is still out on whether Reigns can do a decent main event singles match, something he’s never been called upon to do on television – though reports of his house show matches have been positive.

Reigns and Ambrose are feuding with the Authority, who didn’t want them in this match, but (in an angle best forgotten) Reigns got in by persuading Vickie Guerrero, a lesser authority figure who knew she was on the way out, to add him to a battle royal for the final slot.  The Authority’s preferred winner is their ally Randy Orton; Kane, who serves as an Authority henchman, appears to have been added to the match to help Orton win, rather than to win himself.  (Whether Kane shares this view is yet to be seen.)

Cena and Wyatt have been in their own feud for months, and this match seems like a good way of transitioning them out of it.  Wyatt is a heel, but since we’ve established that the Authority like their champions to be good-looking conventional wrestlers, it’s hard to imagine that they’d be thrilled to see him win either – their idea of the “face of the company” surely does not extend to a hefty psychopath leading a southern gothic cult.

Cesaro is getting a push with Paul Heyman as his manager but doesn’t have anything in particular going on by way of a storyline right now.  Sheamus and Del Rio are making up the numbers (and were both announced before it was decided that the match would be for the vacant title).

So who wins?  There are no ideal answers, which faces the WWE with a range of unhappy options.  Orton and Cena are safe choices but represent a back pedalling to something we’ve all seen before, and that a large chunk of the audience are likely to reject as repetitious.  Kane, Sheamus and Del Rio are all upper midcard wrestlers, and they would be very tough to sell as champion.  Reigns would be popular in the short term, since he’s the new hot babyface with the most momentum behind him – but precisely for that reason, you don’t want to throw away months of storyline where he chases the title by having him win it as soon as he goes solo.  Wyatt and (barely) Cesaro are conceivable, but there’s no point in either case unless they’re going to have a decently long reign, and other factors may point against that.

Bear in mind the schedule for the next few shows.  July is Battleground, a generic monthly show; it doesn’t really matter.  But August is Summerslam, which is meant to be one of the big shows of the year.  And September is Night of Champions – not an important show in itself, but one that happens to fall due at around the time when the first batch of six-month WWE Network subscriptions falls due for renewal.  So that needs to be a big show too.

This suggests to me that we’re not getting a new heel champion being sent forth to defend his title in those shows.  Another factor is that the company has strongly indicated that Brock Lesnar will be the title challenger at Summerslam; he’s a heel, so that points to a babyface champion. If we’re looking for a transitional babyface champion to lose to somebody more important at a bigger show in a couple of months time, Cena starts to make sense.  Reigns emphatically doesn’t.  On the other hand, there are plenty of rumours that it’s going to be Cena, and the WWE has a habit of changing its plans to surprise people when that happens.  But I think the big picture does point to him as a least-worst option.

2.  Money in the Bank Ladder Match: Kofi Kingston v Rob Van Dam v Dolph Ziggler v Seth Rollins v Dean Ambrose v Bad News Barrett v Jack Swagger.  Meet pretty much everyone else on the roster who’s healthy, isn’t in another match, and isn’t a comedy act.  Oh, except that Barrett separated his shoulder at the Smackdown tapings on Tuesday, so he’s probably out.  That’s unfortunate, since he’s being pushed right now and would have made a possible winner.  It’s hard to imagine Kingston, Van Dam, Ziggler or Swagger getting the briefcase, not least because three of them have had it before, so it can scarcely be used to elevate them; as for Kingston, he’s firmly slotted as a mid carder and I don’t sense any willingness to change that.

That leaves Rollins and Ambrose, who have paired off with each other after the Shield split.  Rollins sees himself as the “architect of the Shield”; in his eyes Reigns is a dimwitted thug and Ambrose a dangerous lunatic, both of whom he magnificently kept in line and channelled into an effective force.  Ambrose is indeed settling into a loose cannon gimmick; he’s in this match because Rollins reasoned that if he wasn’t allowed to compete he’d just run in anyway.  Either could conceivably win, but Rollins is the favourite; if he wins, it’s possible he could cash in at the end of the show for the big swerve, since Rollins as champion is a scenario with plenty of possibilities and fresh opponents.  (That would mean Lesnar having to fight someone else at Summerslam, but I don’t see that as a deal breaker.

With these seven, this ought to be a significantly more spectacular match than its main event sibling.

3.  WWE Tag Team Titles: The Usos (Jey Uso & Jimmy Uso) © v The Wyatt Family (Luke Harper & Erick Rowan).  Bray Wyatt’s henchmen take on the babyface tag champions.  The Usos won the title back in march, and I’m not sure they have anywhere much left to go if they win this.  A win for the Wyatts, on the other hand, would continue their rise, and mitigate any problems from having Bray suffer yet another high profile loss (something he’s thus far bludgeoned his way past by force of sheer charisma).  The Usos are good, Harper’s good, Rowan can at least usually be worked with – the match ought to be decent.

4.  Stardust & Goldust v RybAxel (Curtis Axel & Ryback).  Stardust is a repackaged Cody Rhodes.  He’s decided he was the weak link in his tag team with brother Goldust, and his solution is to reinvent himself as a second Goldust.  I’m not altogether sold on the wisdom of this in the long run – how does this gimmick work as anything other than Goldust II, and can you really make a career on that? – but it’s fine for now.  Since Stardust is the one needing to be re-established, I’m assuming he wins here.  (The obscure in-joke, incidentally, is that the Rhodes Brothers’ father used to bill himself as “Stardust” Dusty Rhodes for a while.)

5.  WWE Divas Title: Paige © v Naomi.  Paige hasn’t been particularly well written since winning the Divas Title; presenting her as an underdog rookie was probably not playing to her strengths, given that she got over in NXT as the ass-kicking goth.  This match seems to be intended principally to play into a break-up of the Funkadactyls, the idea being that Naomi is the deserving babyface who earned her title shot, while her partner Cameron seems to be the emerging heel, living vicariously through her friend’s successes.  I gather this somehow plays into storylines on the reality show Total Divas, even though that isn’t in continuity.  (Sort of.  Total Divas exists in a weird continuity grey area; as a modern reality show, it’s wildly fictionalised, but still does things like refer to Cameron and Naomi by their real names, Ariane and Trinity.  And despite being notionally a backstage reality show about the production of a fictional wrestling show, its stories somehow spill over to the women’s division.  This presumably saves the writers the trouble of coming up with anything better for the women to do.)

My guess would be that Paige wins here, with Cameron somehow being to blame.

6.  Summer Rae v Layla.  It’s unusual for WWE shows to have two women’s matches, so the fact that we’re getting two on this show probably says more about how few guys were left on the roster after the ladder matches were filled, than it does about any sudden interest in the women’s division.  This is a romantic triangle in which the two are feuding over the attentions of Fandango (who replaced Summer with Layla as his dancer a while ago).  The problem here is that Fandango is a punchable heel, so showing any interest in him makes both women unsympathetic too.  Fandango is the guest referee, so it’s going to be an extended comedy skit rather than a match.  As Summer seems to be intended as the babyface, I suspect the ending is that she comes to her senses and turns on him.

7.  Rusev v Big E.  Rematch from last month.  Rusev is still on an undefeated streak composed largely of squash matches, so putting him in a ladder match which he isn’t ready to win would have been a bad idea.  He’ll beat Big E again, and he’ll do it quickly.

Worth getting?  The tag title match should be decent and the MITB contract match should be good.  The ladder match for the title is more interesting in plot terms than it is as a match.  The rest is horrendous-looking filler.