NXT: Are The Forgotten Sons doomed to be forever forgettable?

Cutting a swathe through NXT’s tag division, The Forgotten Sons might well be the black and yellow brand’s next big thing. So, who are these Forgotten Sons? What do they want? What fresh and interesting skills are they bringing? Why should we be excited about them? Honestly, I have no idea.

The Forgotten Sons seem to have materialised out of thin air sometime in mid 2018. A trio of big, beardy, angry lads, they burst onto the scene with some vague complaints about having been overlooked and have been coasting on those same complaints ever since.

Wesley Blake – formerly of Blake and Murphy fame – joins Steve Cutler and Jaxson Ryker, the latter of whom sports the kind of ridiculous create-a-wrestler moniker NXT has become infamous for. They’ve had a degree of success on the tag scene lately, but it’s difficult to single out any one quality which makes them interesting, unique, or remotely memorable. They’re quite big. They glower a lot. They cut incredibly generic promos about how big and glowering they are. And that’s really about it.

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As it stands, the Forgotten Sons are unfortunately deeply forgettable. There’s always a risk with the ‘pair the spares’ approach to tag team creation that the end result will fail to gel, or take time to bed in. But NXT, historically, have been pretty decent in this regard.

Look to Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel, who exhibit terrific chemistry despite their relatively short tenure as a duo thus far. The seemingly random pairing of Aleister Black and Ricochet was surprisingly compelling. And Oney Lorcan and Danny Burch riff brilliantly off one another.

Creating an authentically interesting tag team from tenuous origins can be a very successful venture, providing you actually put a little thought into them – their personalities, their in-ring chemistry, their motivations. Unfortunately for the Forgiven Sons, it really does feel like they’re a huge afterthought.

And perhaps it wouldn’t be such an issue if The Forget-Me-Nots had something going for them. If one of them were a remarkable talker, for example. Perhaps if they had at least one in-ring standout. Hell, even just a vaguely interesting backstory would do at this point. There’s limited mileage in a gimmick which boils down to ‘nobody wants to sit with us at lunch and we’re cross about it’. The most you can say about them is that Jaxson Pollock is physically intimidating, although the sheer blandness of his ring gear undermines even that small plus point.

And yet despite my misgivings, NXT seem intent on making The Fermented Scones a thing, if this week’s victory against Burch, Lorcan and Humberto Carillo is any indication. If this experiment is to succeed, they’re going to have to make some serious tweaks to the formula, because what they have so far just isn’t working.

Their de-facto leader might be physically imposing, but William Blake and Ivor Cutler are generic to the point of boredom. There’s probably a reason both have been in developmental for a long time – Cutlet has been in NXT since 2014, Bleak since 2013. Meanwhile, Blake’s former tag team partner Buddy Murphy has climbed the ranks to become WWE Cruiserweight Champion, putting on a slew of impressive matches. Something clearly isn’t clicking for Brake and Cuttlefish.

Some in-ring cohesion would go a long way here. Heel tag teams can be a hard sell, but Aichner and Barthel have won the crowd over through sheer ability. Their double-team moves are butter-smooth and make them look like a well-established unit as opposed to a couple of European blokes who’ve been shoved together – which, realistically, is what they are.

Their promo skills seem basic at best, but this could be mitigated somewhat by keen storytelling and clever writing. Roderick Strong felt incredibly generic until NXT aired the ‘Who Is Roderick Strong?‘ series of vignettes, which served to inject a little personality into an otherwise quite bland performer. Admittedly, Strong has knife-sharp ring skills on his side. The Forgotten Passwords, well. They’re adequate, I guess. But they’ve got nothing even comparable to Strong’s arsenal of spine-shattering offense. They’re just…there.

For all my criticism, though, it’s worth noting that the Wayward Sons aren’t a lost cause yet. There’s scope to salvage them, if NXT are willing to put the work in. But there’s a lot of work to be done, and unless they do something memorable – or hell, just plain interesting – sometime soon, the Forgotten Sons are doomed to remain a footnote in NXT history.