Preamble: Okay, so.  I did a preview of this show, the first Chikara show of 2015, back in January, and then never came back to the topic.  But I figured it’d be interesting to look back on all this year’s shows a few months behind, to see where they ended up going.  It’s going to be more of an episode guide thing, I guess.  At time of writing, five shows from this year have been released (the fifth came out while I was writing this, and I haven’t seen it yet); a further three were taped in the UK last month and should be out shortly.

These posts are going to be pretty erratic, by the way – don’t expect any sort of regular schedule.  If anything, I’m confidently expecting to drift further and further behind.  “A New Start” is the season opener, so this is going to be unusually lengthy; most shows will have a lot more matches that we can skip happily over in search of the bigger picture, and the next show is particularly light.

With this show, Chikara took its video production in-house (and also started selling and streaming videos on its own website).  The idea is solid; the initial results are unfortunate.  The camerawork is erratic, the hard camera is set way too far back from the ring (which the editor obviously realises, since he barely uses it), and the sound levels are badly out of whack, so that the audience is way too low in the mix, at least if you don’t want to be deafened by the commentators.  This will improve over the next few shows as they find their feet, and it’s not quite as bad as I remember it seeing on first viewing, but it’s a definite irritant for all that.

When and where?  It’s the afternoon of 25 January 2015, and we’re in the 2300 Club in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – the former ECW Arena.  This is Chikara’s home territory, and it’s a decent turnout.  We’ve got an actual set and proper lighting.  The Royal Rumble is taking place across town later that day.

The Flood faction from 2014 has apparently disbanded with the demise of Deucalion on the last show – the Flood wrestlers who have stuck around (many of whom were only with him out of fear in the first place) are now back to entering through the regular entrance way, instead of coming through the crowd as they did last year.

1.  Sidney Bakabella’s Open Challenge: The Wrecking Crew (Max Smashmaster, Blaster McMassive, Flex Rumblecrunch, Oleg The Usurper & Jaka, w/Sidney Bakabella) v. The Throwbacks (Dasher Hatfield & Mark Angelosetti), Shynron, Jervis Cottonbelly & Princess Kimberlee.

Backstory: Wrecking Crew members Max Smashmaster and Blaster McMassive won the tag titles from the Throwbacks on the last show.  The stable is celebrating with an open challenge, and the Throwbacks have rounded up a somewhat random selection of tecnicos to accept.  Oh, and the seeds have been planted for a tecnico turn by Crew member Oleg the Usurper, with manager Sidney Bakabella starting to treat him (not without justification) as a blundering liability.

The match: I’m not doing play-by-play – if you want that, Kevin Ford is just down the hall.  Basically, it’s a hot ten-man tag to kick off the season.  Oleg surprisingly accepts Jervis’ handshake without taking advantage, much to Bakabella’s horror.  Kimberley, being the smallest person on her team, winds up as tecnico in peril.  After a while, the chivalrous Jervis can take no more and runs in illegally to rescue her, showing distinct signs of smittenness.  The rudo team wind up piled up in their corner together so that Shynron can hit the big showy spot of the match by diving diagonally across the ring to hit them.  This isn’t a tiny indie ring, either.  The guy’s good.  Kimberlee gets isolated by the tag champs, and gamely holds her own for a bit before finally succumbing to a belly-to-belly superplex for the clean pin in 15:39.  Jervis checks on her afterwards.

Upshot: Decent opener, wonky camerawork notwithstanding.  The Throwbacks/DevCorp angle is kept ticking over (we’ll see it again in February), Oleg’s angle continues (it becomes a big deal in March), and Jervis is aligned with Kimberlee for the first time (again, this is going somewhere next month).  And none of that overshadows the match itself.

2.  Nøkken v Ophidian (w/Amasis).

Backstory: Both guys won their last two singles matches, so a win here will give them three points and the right to challenge for the Grand Championship.  Loser goes back to zero.  Nøkken is a member of the ramshackle new incarnation of the once-dominant BDK; Ophidian and his regular tag partner Amasis are time travellers from ancient Egypt.  Ophidian is having a crisis of faith in his gods and is looking for a win here as a sign.

The match: Power versus speed – Ophidian outruns Nøkken for a while, but once Nøkken gets his hands on him the beatdown begins.  Ophidian kicks out a few times, and makes a comeback to hit his signature moves, getting 2 with a top rope knee drop.  Ophidian tries for his Death Grip submission, but can’t get it on, and Nøkken piledrivers him for the clean pin in 8:00.

The upshot: Nøkken gets his title match in March, so he gets to dominate an established guy with a clean win.  Unfortunately, as we’ll see when we get to March, the title match itself turns out to be a bit of an anticlimax.  As for Ophidian, he doesn’t get his sign from the gods, but hey, the Portal still have 2 points towards a tag title shot – maybe that’ll work out?  We’ll pick that up in February.

– Backstage promo: the BDK celebrate.

3.  The Colony: Xtreme Force (Missile Assault Ant & Arctic Rescue Ant) v. N_R_G (Race Jaxon & Hype Rockwell).

Backstory: None, really.

The match: Squash match.  Rockwell pins Arctic with a spinning backbreaker in 1:12.  Missile is disgusted by his partner’s performance.

The upshot: An N_R_G push begins, apparently.  Outright squashes are rare on Chikara shows, so they carry some weight.  The Xtreme Force’s story has yet to be followed up, so hopefully they get back to it soon.

4.  Juan Francisco De Coronado v. UltraMantis Black.

Backstory: On the last show, UltraMantis’ followers Hallowicked and Frightmare turned on him after being zapped with the mind-controlling Eye of Tyr by the departing Delirious.  UltraMantis says the Eye has been damaged and its effects are now unpredictable.  He hasn’t give up on his cohorts, and won’t rest until he has answers.  (We’ll see how long that lasts.  This is a guy who bills himself as “great and devious”, after all.  He’s very much a tecnico in name only.)

The match: Derek Sabato – a corrupt referee who was reinstated for mysterious reasons on the last show, and also refereed UltraMantis’ last match – comes out to officiate and is heavily booed.  He calls the match straight, but the commentary makes clear that he isn’t to be trusted and that we should all keep an eye on him.  A solid, straightforward singles match – back and forth, with JFDC working on the arm.   Mantis kicks out of JFDC’s German suplex, and pins him clean with the Praying Mantis Bomb in 8:40.

The upshot: Good match.  Despite the loss of his stable, Mantis has now won two straight matches, so a third win will give him a title shot.  We’ll come to that in March.  Subtle booking, because a lot of the storyline interest is in what doesn’t happen – i.e., Sabato calls the match straight, Mantis doesn’t fall apart without his stable, and Hallowicked doesn’t run in.  Sabato has yet to re-appear this year (unless they used him on the UK tour), so his plot seems to be on hiatus.

5.  The BDK (Jakob Hammermeier & Pinkie Sanchez) & Soldier Ant v. The Colony (Fire Ant, Silver Ant & Worker Ant).

Backstory: Soldier Ant used to be in the Colony, but now he’s seemingly a brainwashed cyborg who (under circumstances yet to be revealed) has fallen under the command of BDK leader Jakob Hammermeier.  But Jakob’s actual control over Soldier is a bit erratic.  Soldier is bitter over being replaced in the Colony by Worker Ant.  Oh, and the other BDK member, Pinkie Sanchez, infiltrated the Colony years ago, so they don’t like him either.

The match: Fire Ant doesn’t want to fight Soldier (though his Colony teammates are more willing).  Soldier is perfectly happy to fight the Colony, but isn’t exactly co-operating with his own team-mates – he hurls Pinkie out of the ring whenever they tag, and it’s only Pinkie and Jakob who actually muster any coherent double-teaming.  But Soldier’s powerful enough to outweigh that.  Fire and Soldier are left together at the end, but Soldier starts wavering when Fire salutes him.  Jakob immediately hustles Soldier out of the ring, then submits Worker with a modified Scorpion Deathlock for the clean (if somewhat out of nowhere) heel win in 20:27.

Upshot: Too long – there’s a lot of long-term storyline set-up in there, but not enough immediate story to need 20 minutes.  It also suffers badly from the show’s dodgy production values, which has the crowd noise way too low in the mix, sapping the atmosphere.  Soldier will be stuck with the BDK going forward, as we’ll see, while the Colony will shortly find themselves tied up in other stories for now, so that explains why the trios match is being done here.

6.  Kevin Condron (w/Troll) v. Eddie Kingston.

Backstory: This is the in-ring Chikara debut of Kevin Condron.  He used to be Kid Cyclone, a trainee who led a group of trainees against the Flood last year, and got them all killed by Deucalion.  Kingston, at that point, was allied with the Flood and had a minor part in that exchange; being essentially a bastard, he is unrepentant.  At the last show, Cyclone attacked Kingston with a wrench, then voluntarily unmasked to show his contempt for Chikara’s lucha-derived values, which he now sees as bizarre and hypocritical.   Condron also liberated the Flood’s prisoner Lithuanian Snow Troll; the Troll is now tagging along as Condron’s followed, calling himself “Troll”, and wearing new gear which is basically a sadder, dishevelled version of his old costume.

Kingston won his last three matches but can’t challenge for the Grand Championship on this show because Chuck Taylor is first in the queue.  Kingston is risking his three points by taking this match (if he loses, he’s back to zero and forfeits his title shot), but he’s no rocket scientist and he wants to get his hands on the guy who hit him with a wrench.

The match: Pure angle, basically.  Condron heels it up to the nines, tries to encourage Kingston to hit him with a chair (so that he wins by DQ and Kingston loses his title shot); tries to get a draw by brawling outside the ring; hits a grand total of one offensive move in the whole match; and finally takes advantage of a ref bump to feign a low blow and get Kingston DQ’d at 5:39, Guerrero-style.

Upshot: A lot of people were treating Condron as an anti-hero going into this show, so this match is clearly intended to send a clear marker that, no, he’s a heel.  Not a stellar in-ring debut, but it wasn’t designed to be; part of the angle is that Condron is deliberately trying to get cheap wins as part of his show of contempt for the promotion.  He can’t do deliberately cheap finishes forever, but I can see that there’s potential heat in building up to the point where Condron really has to wrestle a proper match for once.  As for Troll, he hasn’t appeared again since this show, but I’m assuming he’ll be back, not least because his former faction-mate the Estonian Thunderfrog is returning later in the year.  (We’ll come to that in future shows.)

7.  Hallowicked & Frightmare v. The Batiri (Kodama & Obariyon).

Backstory: See match 4 above.  This is the first time we’ve seen Hallowicked and Frightmare since they got zapped – what’s their condition?

The match: Hallowicked and Frightmare come out with weird new music and bizarre new gear – a sort of sickly version of their old costume in red white and black.  They’re carrying a banner with a weird symbol on it.  They wrestle more aggressively than before, but they’re still working as a team and aiming to win, not just to hurt.   Mantis, on commentary, seems troubled by the idea that he’s responsible for all this – but also quite impressed.  Good fast-paced match, even if any semblance of actually obeying the tag rules breaks down after a while.  A combination of teamwork and occasional cheating gives Hallowicked and his mini-me the upper hand.  Frightmare gets the clean(ish) pin with a crucifix in 13:02.

Upshot: Strong debut for Hallowicked and Frightmare’s new gimmick.  The Batiri will wind up being allied with Mantis in March (whether they like it or not), so this gives Hallowicked a head start on claiming that he’s beaten all Mantis’s allies.

8.  CHIKARA Grand Championship: Icarus © v Chuck Taylor.

Backstory: Taylor and Icarus used to be teammates in the rudo faction F.I.S.T..  Icarus has reformed now, thanks to the existential threat to Chikara posed by Titor and the Flood.

The match: Taylor is in outright cheating rudo mode – though he’s also more serious than usual.  At first Icarus wrestles clean, but after a while he cheats right back.  It’s retaliation, but after a while he responds to Taylor’s powder-throwing by producing his own powder, which he clearly brought with him to the ring in the first place.  Icarus gets a visionary clean pin during a ref bump, and kicks out of Chuck’s finisher (and a low blow), but ultimately wins by whacking Chuck in the head with the title belt (which draws boos), then submitting him with the CHIKARA Special in 11:40.

Upshot: Interesting but not completely successful; I think they intended it to play mostly as a throwback to Icarus’s rudo days but the degree of his cheating seemed to confuse the crowd.  I suspect the longer-term plan here is that with the threat of the Flood behind him, Icarus is starting to backslide.  That would also play into the story that previous champion Eddie Kingston became obsessed with the belt the longer he held it.  (The title belt was commissioned when the evil Titor Corporation were in control, and there’s a fan theory that it might be Not Quite Right.)

Bottom line:  Largely decent matches (leaving aside the squash and the Kingston/Condron angle), and some notable storyline points, particularly the debut of Hallowicked and Frightmare’s new gimmick.  But you do have to put up with some production values that are likely to test the patience of someone who isn’t already a fan.  Still, if you’re following Season 15, a pretty key show, as you’d expect.