The biggest story heading into tonight’s episode of NXT, unfortunately, is not centered around anything that will be happening in the ring in the Performance Center. Instead, the talk the last few days has been focused on the massive roster purge that happened at the end of last week, and all of the NXT stars that were promoted to the Raw and Smackdown rosters. NXT hadn’t even recovered from losing the awesome trifecta of Oba Femi, Trick Williams, and Je’Von Evans earlier this year, and now, ol’ HB-Shizzle will have to pick up the pieces and regroup on a massive scale. Three quarters of the Stand & Deliver main event earlier this month were all promoted, leaving only new NXT Champion Tony D’Angelo in Orlando. On Monday nights, Ethan Page has immediately interjected himself into the Intercontinental Title picture, while Joe Hendry’s concert tour has resumed with the red brand. Ricky Starks, on the other hand, will face Shiloh Hill on NXT tonight before heading to Tulsa, Oklahoma to make his Smackdown debut.

The NXT women’s division has taken a pretty big hit in the last week as well. Before losing a grueling Last Woman Standing match to her best-friend-turned-enemy, Zaria on NXT last week, Sol Ruca made her Raw debut with a great showing against the new World Women’s Champion, Liv Morgan. Then, on Friday, Fatal Influence made a huge splash on Smackdown when Jacy Jayne, Fallon Henley, and Lainey Reid debuted and attacked three future hall-of-famers and one current one during a tag team match. Later in the evening, Jacy shot her shot with the new WWE Women’s Champion, Rhea Ripley, and proved she belongs with a strong showing before her Fatal Influence comrades attacked the champ and got Jayne disqualified. Also on Friday, a new bubble bath vignette aired, promoting Blake Monroe’s arrival on the Smackdown roster.

With these four women moving up, new opportunities are sure to be available for the NXT women’s locker room in the coming weeks. Izzi Dame seems to be the first one up to challenge Lola Vice after attacking her last week. After weeks of turmoil, DarkState seemed to be back on the same page last week for much of Dion Lennox’s North American Title match against Myles Borne. They were playing the numbers game well until the very end of the match when they tried to run a play and Dion ended up getting shoved into Saquon Shugars, who was inexplicably halfway into the ring. Borne hit the Borne Again and retained his championship as the state of DarkState continued to grow darker.