wrestling / TV Reports

411’s Total Divas Report 3.8.15 (Hour One)

March 9, 2015 | Posted by Ryan Byers
WWE Total Divas Season 3 Image Credit: E!

Do you like Ryan’s exasperated ranting about Total Divas? If so, check out his exasperated ranting about numerous other wrestling-related topics on Twitter.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your 411mania Total Divas report for March 8, 2015. Actually, it’s the first of two Total Divas reports for March 8, because what WWE and E! have been billing as a “two hour season finale” is not, in fact, a two hour long episode of the program but rather two separate episodes being run back-to-back. Trust me, I’m no fan of watching this show any more than I have to, but I think that consecutive episodes are better than an extended episode, just because I don’t think that I could handle two hours worth of the normal TD format of simultaneously running three to four storylines by cutting back and forth between them every ninety seconds.

Anyway, let’s just get right into this so that we can put the season to bed as quickly as possible.

In Buffalo, the threesome of Paige, Rosa, and Alicia (we really need to come up with a group name for them) are hanging out in a hotel room and planning a trip to Key West to get away from the stresses of work for a while. Call me crazy, but it seems like the women on this show take a vacation every two weeks. Plus, with reality show cameras following them everywhere, their vacations ARE work. In preparation for the trip, the trio waxes Rosa Mendes’ bikini area on camera. That may be the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on a pro wrestling show, and I saw Sid Vicious’ leg snap like a Slim Jim.

The next morning, Paige picks up some clothing that she apparently had shipped to the hotel while Ariane looks on. Who orders something online and has it sent to a hotel? Paige also receives a telephone call from “Bradley,” the lead singer of a band that she has been seeing . . . I mean she’s dating the singer, not the band. She’s not that big of a wild child. Bradley and his bandmate are also invited on the Key West trip. Paige blows off his phone call using work as an excuse, and Ariane asks if she’s dating him or if he’s just a “fuck buddy.” Paige readily admits that he’s just a fuck buddy. That’s not my terminology, by the way, they actually call him a fuck buddy on the show.

Backstage at Raw in Buffalo, Nattie and TJ meet Grumpy Cat, who is hosting Monday Night Raw. Nattie says that she’s not been this excited since the Muppets were on Raw. They have a conversation with Grumpy Cat’s owners which goes on for twice as long as some scenes of this show that included key plot points. Eventually the couple leaves the cat’s locker room (I can’t believe I just typed that), with Nattie regretting that she didn’t get the number for Grumpy Cat’s “people” so that she can try to get some work for their own kitties.

Nikki Bella wrestles Emma, with Brie explaining in a confessional that Nikki’s heel character has exploded and that she’s going to be receiving a championship match soon. Nikki beats Emma with the Rack Attack, and Brie slaps AJ Lee, who was on commentary, post-match.

This leads into an odd segue in which an extended cut of AJ’s entrance music is used as the background for a montage of Rosa Mendes and her newly bald “Grumpy Cat” traveling to Key West. The whole crew arrives at their vacation house, and the girls listen in to Bradley signing in the shower. He catches them in the act. Everybody teams up to throw a pineapple into the swimming pool, which Alicia then takes a big old bite out of. After some wacky antics with pool noodles, Paige goes back into the house to shag her singer.

Elsewhere, the Bellas are hanging out with some of their cousins. I swear, based on what we have seen on this show to date, these two have a herd of at least 5,000 cousins. In the middle of the party, Nikki receives a naked selfie from the Bellas’ brother Dot. (Nikki is insistent on referring to this as a “melfie” a term that I have never heard and am refusing to google.) Great, Vince McMahon is finally getting that incest angle he’s always wanted to run. The brother immediately messages Nikki again and says the photo was intended for his girlfriend. Brie tries to convince the group to forget this ever happened and not give Dot any crap about it. Nikki does not seem as though she will be so gracious.

Paige and company are taught how to ride jet skis by a man who sounds remarkably like Ludvig Borga. No point to the scene, they just ride jet skis around for a while. Are there really people who are entertained by things such as this? Who gets excited by watching d-list celebrities ride jet skis?

In Phoenix, Brie Bella and Bryan Danielson are picking up dog shit in their backyard. Bryan is writing his memoirs for WWE, and Brie wants to know how much she is discussed in them. Thiis leads to the couple reliving the story of when they first attempted to have sex, which was foiled by a run-in from two other members of the WWE roster because Bryan did not deadbolt the hotel room door. One of them is identified as Sheamus, though they don’t out who the second guy is. Brie uses this opening to tell Bryan the story about the naked selfie. He’s about as impressed with that as you would expect Bryan Danielson to be.

Nattie Neidhart is driving and gets a telephone call from her mother, Ellie Hart. She says that she talks to her mother a hundred times a day. HOLD ON A DAMN MINUTE. Just last week, we ran a storyline in which Ellie’s house was COMPLETELY DESTROYED by a flood, and Nattie was totally unaware of this for WEEKS. Now you’re going to try to tell me that they talk to each other a hundred times a day? They talk to each other a hundred times a day and the little topic of severe property damage never once came up? Riiiiiiight. Anyway, the point of the current conversation is that Ellie is going to go take care of Nattie’s cats for an afternoon.

Back in Key West, Paige is freaking out because there are problems with her credit card statement. She throws some furniture around. I guess the producers decided that her character was just too likeable, hence here behavior here. Like the jet skis, Paige’s Ram-Paige appeared to have nothing to do with anything in terms of the greater plot. After the other girls calm her down, the group walks around Key West, with the scene being edited in such a way as to demonstrate that Bradley is being cut out of the fun. To really drive the point home, Paige calls him a “friend with benefits” to his face and in front of other people. Somebody tell Steve Austin his gimmick is being infringed upon, because that was Stone Cold.

Bella Brother Dot visits Brie in Phoenix because she’s asked him to hang a decoration of some sort on one of her exterior walls. She said that she invited him to do it because he’s “a man.” Number one, women are fully capable of doing that. Number two, don’t you live with a man if that’s what you really needed? It’s not as though Bryan Danielson is some metrosexual office worker. He’s a freaking lumberjack/hippie hybrid from rural Washington state. His father was a log scaler. I’m pretty sure he can operate a power drill. Once he arrives, everybody realizes that Dot can’t hang the decoration after all, because he purchased a new drill for the occasion but didn’t realize the battery pack was sold separately. This is really gripping television. Anyway, this blabbering about the drill goes on forever, after which Brie says that Nikki showed Dot’s junk to all of their cousins. He is rightfully pissed off.

In Tampa, Nattie and TJ realize that her mother has redecorated their home a bit, including maple leaf place mats because, you know, they’re Canadian. As if on cue (because it is), Ellie walks in with the couple’s cats, who she has had groomed. Nattie is not happy with the style at all, particularly because one of them has been given a lion cut. Nattie is doubly pissed because she’s apparently still in hardcore negotiations with Grumpy Cat’s manager, and she thinks that the bad grooming will inhibit that. This is the last that we see of this storyline for the rest of the episode. Yes, they completely dropped the plot halfway through, not even attempting to approach a resolution.

The Key West crew goes on a sunset cruise. Alicia Fox wears a tuxedo t-shirt, immediately making her my favorite cast member on the show. Once the sun goes down, Bradley gets behind a microphone and sings a love song that he has presumably dedicated to Paige. Yeah, because that’s something they let any random passenger on a boat who is not part of the cast of a reality show do. All of the women think this is remarkably sweet, and Bradley earns himself a lengthy lip lock from Paige as a bunch of internet wrestling fans grab torches and pitchforks to storm Bradley’s home. I can just see a bunch of nerdy neckbeards dropping #GiveDivasAChance and tweeting at Paige with #GiveMEAChance.

Once they get off the boat, Paige loudly announces that she has to pee and runs into a random building to do the deed. While she’s gone, Brad voices some frustrations about Paige to Foxy, namely about her seemingly hot and cold attitudes towards the guy. Alicia essentially tells him to man up and be honest with Paige about his feelings for her. It’s odd to hear one of the regular cast members of this show acting as the voice of reason.

The Bella Twins meet up with their mother Kathy and Bryan Danielson for drinks. Of course, the topic of conversation immediately turns to their brother’s penis. I can sympathize, because all of my family conversations go exactly the same way. Kathy is critical of Nikki. Bella Brother Dot was supposed to attend this party, but he no-shows and sends his wife Lauren in his place. Once she realizes that he’s not coming, Nikki cuts the family drinking session short and heads to his home in order to, presumably, make amends.

After a commercial break, Bradley asks Paige if she wants to go out with drinks for him, alone, after dinner. When she’s evasive, he calls her out on the mixed signals that she has been sending. He’s in love with her, and she tells him that the point of this trip is for her to have fun with her friends and for her to fuck him, nothing more. Again, she is really just that blunt – that is not my embellishing for the sake of humor in this review. Brad tries to convince Paige that she’s really in love with him and she tells him that, if he’s going to be doing that, he needs to get the fuck out of her rental house. She also calls him a presumably nasty word which is bleeped in such a way that I can’t tell what it is meant to me, even through lip reading. It may have been “pussy.” Anyway, Bradley obliges his non-girlfriend and walks out.

The Bella Twins visit their brother. He doesn’t even want to let them into the house at first. Nikki’s tactic is not to apologize but rather to repeatedly say that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. Dot says that, just because Nikki wants all of her stuff hanging out all the time, he doesn’t necessarily want the same. Nikki still refuses to believe that she’s done anything wrong, starts yelling at her brother, and then walks out the door. Nikki even drops a “Garcia family” reference during her exit, one of the very few times during the course of this series that the family’s legitimate name has been acknowledged in anything more than a chyron.

Because Nikki isn’t a horrible enough person, we go back to Paige, who tells Foxy and Rosa about her conversation with Bradley. She acts tough at first but then, for seemingly no explicable reason, breaks down and starts crying. She starts mumbling something about how a bad relationship in the past has lead to her being unable to commit and, between her accent and every other word she says being bleeped, I honestly have no clue what what any of the particulars of this situation are, presuming that she is giving particulars. Anyway, we are lead to believe that Paige’s past heartbreak is what caused her to act like such an insufferable, sex starved harpy in her earlier interactions with Bradley.

On the other side of a break, the girls convince Paige that she should try to make amends with Bradley. She pulls him away from packing up the last of his luggage and explains her backstory and her difficulty committing. Of course, Brad was already looking for any excuse to glom on to Paige, so he immediately accepts her apology and decides to stay for the rest of the trip, because he’s spineless.

Now we move to the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, where Rosa, Paige, and Alicia are back on the road with WWE. In what I’m sure is a COMPLETE AND TOTAL COINCIDENCE and something that was NOT AT ALL CONCOCTED BY THE PRODUCERS OF THIS TELVISION SHOW, Paige stumbles across a “love note” composed by Nikki Bella and directed towards John Cena, which was posted to Nikki’s Instagram account. The note is a poem and a photo montage glued to a construction paper heart, and Nikki is royally embarrassed by it. Paige reads the whole thing aloud, and it sounds as though it was drafted by a second grader with a massive head injury. Nikki thinks that her brother must have somehow been involved in this, a theory that she lays out to Brie. She jumps to this conclusion even though she’s talking to somebody else who is very close to her who she shares all of her professional social media accounts with.

When Brie voices her support for their brother, Nikki starts to put the pieces together and ultimately realizes that Brie was the real perpetrator. Nikki takes the news relatively well, though she does say that Brie will be the next one to get embarrassed . . . and then the episode comes to an end.

So, no, Brie is not embarrassed by Nikki, and you can officially add that to the pile of dropped storylines along with the rising star of Nattie’s cats being shot down by Ellie Hart.

Overall: One of the things that I’ve read commentators other than myself saying about the current Season 3.5 of Total Divas is that the show is better than ever, largely because, they claim, Paige has been added and her personality alone is such that it makes the whole show more enjoyable. I’ve never really bought into that line of argument. To me, it feels like people who are rabid Paige fans from her wrestling work are praising her involvement in this show not because the show is any better but rather because they feel the need to blindly compliment anything in which their heroine is involved. Meanwhile, I am trying to objective evaluate things (and I personally find Paige as a wrestler to be overrated – not bad, but overrated) and can’t possibly see how Paige makes anything about this show are better unless you’re wearing some serious rose colored glasses. There are systemic flaws in the show and how it is structured and what its overall messages are that no change in the cast is going to be able to correct.

The reason that I mention all of this is that, if you’re a person who has argued that Paige’s presence has improved Total Divas, you HAVE to admit to me that this episode made Paige utterly unlikable and undid any prior good that her presence may have created. Though her male counterpart Bradley was no great shakes either, the fact of the matter is that Paige here was nothing more than an immature, manipulative brat, even though they tried to babyface her in the end by claiming that her completely inexcusable actions were the result of some prior bad life experiences of her own. Near as I can tell, throughout Season 3.5, there have been no “heel” characters on the program (after Summer Rae filled that slot for a bit) and we’re supposed to be rooting for all of the women. Paige was impossible to root for here, and one o the things that I hate most about television is when a program tries to get me on the side of a character who is totally irredeemable, which is precisely what happened here.

The scary thing is that, when it comes to taking an awful human being and trying to turn them into a babyface, Paige wasn’t even the worst example on this show. That award goes to Nikki Bella. It was just a few months ago that the entire internet went through a sickening episode in which the private online storage accounts of many celebrities were hacked, leading to the distribution of several personal photos. This was a tremendous invasion of privacy, and the actions of those who initially obtained and then distributed those photos are inexcusable. It was disgusting, and it essentially amounted to a sex crime. Now, on this “reality” show, we have a storyline in which ONE OF THE BABYFACE CHARACTERS, Nikki Bella, is doing something very similar to none other than her own brother. Again, I am firmly of the opinion that this whole show is a big ole’ work, but you cannot have a character, work or not, engage in that kind of behavior and then portray that person as somebody the audience is supposed to root for (which Nikki definitively was on the next episode, if not here). This made me sick to my stomach.

And, of course, given the fact that the people who put this show together can’t focus on a story for more than five minutes, we don’t even get an appropriate resolution to a storyline of this nature, i.e. Nikki realizing her mistake and apologizing to her brother.

In other words, if you like to watch an hour of heels with no babyfaces, this was the episode for you.

Do you like Ryan’s exasperated ranting about Total Divas? If so, check out his exasperated ranting about numerous other wrestling-related topics on Twitter.

article topics :

Total Divas, WWE, Ryan Byers