Fastlane 2018: 5 reasons to watch WWE’s March PPV

Five reasons to watch, huh? Are we married to that number? Oh, hold up, the readers are here, let’s pretend we are super stoked for this pay-per-view, they’ll never catch on.

I’m kidding, but only kind of, which is the best way to kid, because I can both inform you about WWE Fastlane as planned while also hiding behind ironic detachment as often as I have to.

Fastlane will air at 8 p.m. on the WWE Network on Sunday, March 11. If I can’t convince you to watch, you can at least follow along with our live blog that’ll kick off right before the event.

Nakamura’s entrance into WWE’s main roster was a dud, because they didn’t know how to utilize the superstar for what he can be, which is basically a force of nature. Instead, he got into some weird, overly lengthy feud with Dolph Ziggler where Dolph didn’t look like a nerd the entire time, and in 2017-2018, that is like, the only point of Dolph Ziggler. He shouldn’t be making Nakamura work from underneath, he should be getting kicked in the face early and often and then going back to changing the designs on his pants a lot or whatever.

Nakamura won the Royal Rumble, though, and WWE has been doing a better job of making him feel important at those major events: the fact he’ll now have a main-event-level match at his first WrestleMania when he challenges for the WWE Championship is further evidence of this. Getting to face Rusev beforehand is a downer only because it means Rusev is bound to lose, but Rusev getting to face the guy about to challenge for the WWE Championship? Oh yeah, that’s more like it for both of these performers.

Rusev has consistently been one of the best characters in WWE, and is one of the reasons to endure SmackDown during a stretch so poor there are rumors floating around that even the people involed in making the show know it’s not good. Nakamura had his first signature WWE moment, and gets to follow that up with a pay-per-view match against someone of Rusev’s caliber and then a Mania main event. This is the good stuff, and let’s hope they give the two time to perform, because, unlike Dolph Ziggler, Rusev is not a nerd who should be kicked quickly and disposed of. I want to see Nakamura earn this W.

I’m also very into Ruby Riott facing off against Charlotte Flair, because Charlotte is a legitimate superstar and face of the women’s division, and Ruby will be right there with her someday. Riott likely has no real chance here, as this is the kind of match where Charlotte gets an opportunity to show how strong of a challenge she’ll be for whoever takes her on at Mania, but, like with Rusev and Nakamura, this is also a spot for the presumed loser to look real, real good in defeat, helping to carve a path out for what they’ll be doing at Mania as well.

The fact this spot is going to Ruby Riott instead of one of the more established SmackDown women like Natalya or Becky Lynch is good news for Ruby, and hopefully, this match is one of the standouts on the card and not in a wishing on a monkey’s paw kind of way either.

I’m just covering my bases.

That just about covers it.

This is a reason to watch, but in the ironically detached way I talked about before. See, it pays to read the intro.

Bobby Roode works best as a heel. He is currently a face. Randy Orton works best as a heel. He is currently growing his hair out, so that’s taking up a lot of his focus. Maybe, just maybe, one of them will shave their head go back to being a full-blown heel during this match, and then the whole feud will improve. Please. Just tell me what I need to do so that at least one of these two works as the best version of themselves. I’m not too proud to beg.

Instead, we’re probably going to continue with this weird thing where neither of them is working their natural alignment to its fullest and this is just setup for something else we’ll have begging feelings about a month from now at Mania.

AJ Styles is WWE Champion and everyone wants to see him face Shinsuke Nakamura at WrestleMania 34, so SmackDown is teasing us with five different outcomes to increase our nervousness: maybe John Cena wins his record 17th WWE Championship, and has the space on the WrestleMania card he so desperately wants. Maybe one of Kevin Owens or Sami Zayn turns on the other in order to become WWE Champ, or fails to do that but tries it, which sets up a whole thing for the two of them at Mania. Maybe Dolph Ziggler wins the WWE Championship? No? Not buying that? It’s okay, I didn’t believe it when I typed it, either.

Baron Corbin is also here, and while I once believed he’d be a WWE Champion and maybe that can still happen, it’s not going to happen now.

Cena winning is unlikely, but believable, and believable is all you need for intrigue sometimes. Zayn and Owens is the real exciting potential sidetrack here, because maybe we end up with a three-way for the WWE strap at Mania to include both of them and Nakamura and their very complicated friendship slash rivalry, or a four-way because Styles would be able to invoke his rematch clause. This is much more unnecessarily complicated than just Styles vs. Nakamura, and therefore it can’t be discounted as a possibility.

This is probably a match that should be very aware of the lack of tension about the wrestler with the best chance to win, as that’s Styles retaining his title despite the fact anyone else could pin Dolph Ziggler at literally any time during the match and become champ instead. To make up for that relative lack of tension and surprise, things should probably go super off the rails, with false finishes and broken set pieces and Baron Corbin throwing someone into the crowd and then using a fan as a weapon or something.

You can’t always rely on “absolutely bonkers” as a match strategy, but in what should be a pretty straightforward pay-per-view in general, ending with chaos while also nailing the expected and correct-est ending is probably the best way to go.