It’s honestly little wonder Rousey wanted out after experiencing a taste of the WWE women’s tag division — or maybe WWE just saw her as too big-time for it and pulled her. Either way, we got another very clear picture this week of how the company views the idea of women’s tag teams, with the #1 contender’s tag team turmoil match. Hope you were ready for another round of “wait, they put who together” because our crop of tag teams this week included the seemingly random pairings of Tegan Nox and Dana Brooke (what?) and Nikki Cross and Emma, alongside the first main roster appearance of Indi Hartwell, teaming up with Candice LeRae. Granted, you would have to be paying attention pretty closely to know all this, since the entrances for the Nox/Brooke team and the Hartwell/LeRae team happened in picture-in-picture. We did get a glimpse of the storyline LeRae and Cross have been trying to tell for months now, even though their segments keep getting cut, which seems to involve Cross being emotionally obsessed with LeRae even though LeRae now has her old tag partner back the form of Hartwell. Nice to at least get the CliffsNotes version of this, we suppose.

Anyway, Hartwell and LeRae are former “NXT” Women’s Tag Team Champions and LeRae is a former “NXT” Women’s Champion, so naturally they get put in the match first and get eliminated after about 90 seconds. Okay then. At least they’re not Nox and Brooke, who got eliminated during a commercial break. You’d think Hartwell and LeRae would have been allowed to get in the ring with Cross and Emma to continue that storyline, but nope, they got eliminated and then Cross and Emma got eliminated when Cross got distracted by a hurt Candice and leaves Emma to fend for herself. I guess that would induce some feelings in me if I had any idea what this story actually was. This was like those little subplots in some Tarantino movies that you catch glimpses of but are never actually explained.

The only tag teams who mattered in this match (according to the people booking it) were Katana Chance and Kayden Carter, who continue to be booked strong right out of the gate, hit an awesome tag team hurricanrana off the top rope during their time, and will probably be tag champs before the end of the year, and Sonya Deville and Chelsea Green, who actually ran the gauntlet and defeated all four other teams. Props to some dominant gauntlet match booking you don’t usually see, but we’re not sure this was done to make Deville and Green look strong; it looked more like it was done because WWE doesn’t think you need to care about the majority of these women. If we’re still going to have a women’s tag team division, can we get some time investment in some of these teams? Maybe have some of them stick around for a while? Maybe? Please?