Man, I was so excited about where the Carmelo Hayes/Trick Williams/Ilja Dragunov story was going after last week. If you’re a regular reader of these columns (which, despite the fact that I was asked to use “we” and “us” all the time, have pretty much all been written by me to this point) you know how into that storyline I was going into The Great American Bash. Personally, I like my wrestling best when it’s about feelings and relationships, i.e. when it gives me the romance novel vibes that I enjoyed so much at the time. The fact that we were getting interactions between these three again (with Wes Lee in the bargain) made me so, so happy to see what came next.

As it turned out, what came next in this particular storyline was … not much. And what was there, I wasn’t super into.

The big issue here for me is Carmelo’s attitude this week, where suddenly he’s not sure if he can beat Dragunov. That wasn’t how it felt last week — last week it felt like he thought other people believed he couldn’t beat Dragunov. He thought the stuff that happened with Williams at the end of that match had tainted the win, not that he couldn’t win without Williams. And why would he feel that way? He just won without Williams in that amazing match with Wes Lee! For Hayes to come out of that match, and that Heatwave episode overall, feeling less confident is a huge miss for me.

Meanwhile, you’ve got Williams now saying “I don’t think you can beat him, I know you can,” which is nice, but doesn’t have any of the conflict that was teased last week. And Dragunov has (presumably very briefly) been derailed by Noam Dar. I’m not saying those two in combination wasn’t entertaining, because it was. Like, a lot. But “entertaining” doesn’t slake my thirst for Ilja/Melo content, and while I have no doubt that we’re just doing Dragunov/Dar for a week or three while we set up their respective No Mercy opponents (Hayes and the winner of the Global Heritage Invitational) it’s a bummer that we have to work through this filler content before getting back to the good stuff.