BRM Reviews TNA Total Nonstop Deletion

[Big Red Machine]

Why is Jeff doing the landscaping? Isn’t that Señor Benjamin’s job?

NEWSCAST CRAP- okay. This is all pointless and stupid. Let’s get to the action already!

MATT HARDY’S INTRODUCTORY PROMO- Lots of fun. I love the cult atmosphere. Matt tells us that the seven deities told him that if he and Jeff don’t win, then “the sacred land of deletion will be decimated!” OH NO!

ROCKSTAR SPUD SHOWS UP- he is upset because Maxel is more over than him and gets more TV time. He wants to wrestle Maxel in Maxel’s first match. Matt says that he will let Spud face Maxel instead of the opponent who Matt had lined up. Now I really want to know who Matt booked Maxel against. We know Hunter and Steph won’t let one of their girls do a job, so who else could it be? It’s also not impossible that, as a final act of revenge, Matt kidnapped Edge & Beth Phoenix’s baby to have him or her face Maxel tonight.
I laughed at Spud’s “you can push him to the moon when I’m done with him” line.

NO DISQUALIFICATIONS MATCH: Rockstar Spud vs. King Maxel (w/”Broken Matt Hardy, Brother Nero, & Reby Hardy)- no rating.
I had totally forgotten that Señor Benjamin was there until he tazed Spud. Then I rewound it and it turns out he was standing in the ring the whole time.

It turns out the guy Matt was setting up to do the job to Maxel was Disco Inferno. Now I’m sad that I didn’t get to see Disco get tazed. Also, how hard to you think Disco tried to pitch a Martian invasion to Matt when Matt called him to book him for this?


Apparently Lashley is challenging Eddie Edwards for the TNA World Heavyweight Title tonight. I’m not cool with the World Heavyweight Title being involved in this silliness.
Lashley pulled up in a car. Eddie Edwards was shown arriving simply walking out of the woods in the middle of the day. Oh come on! If you’re going to do this then do it right and have Eddie arrive on wolf-back. And if you don’t have the technology (or trained wolves) to do that, then at least imply it. Maybe have him walk out of the woods at night and shout “thanks for the ride!” and then receive a loud howl as a reply.

MORE NEWS CRAP- they’re telling us that roads into and out have been closed, supposedly with police cordoning them off. Then Greg Helms just drove right through, with only the reporter trying to stop him. The Helms Dynasty was riding on the back of his pick-up truck. There was a pathetic attempt at a Hurricane joke.

THE ROCK N’ ROLL EXPRESS KNOCK ON MATT’S DOOR EARLIER TODAY- Today is the day we see if Ricky Morton can believably sell getting run over by a train.

SIENNA PROMO- she calls out Rosemary, who isn’t here. Sienna claims that this is because she is scared, but JB tells us that it is because Rosemary is permanently banned from the Hardy compound.
Sienna says she is making herself the #1 contender. She challenges “not just anyone in the locker room… anyone in the world!” to face her tonight. Just “anyone in the world,” you say? Well… I guess we know who she is ducking. Listen up Impact Zone-goers. At the next set of tapings I want the stands full of signs saying “Sienna fears Disco’s Martians!” This also explains why she didn’t sign with TNA until after Mike Tenay had left the company.

#1 CONTENDERSHIP MATCH: Sienna vs. Vanguard 1- DUD!
The ref says that he won’t let a drone fight a woman so he throws Vanguard 1 out. Borash then clarified for us that this wasn’t the referee making this rule up. He was simply enforcing the laws of the North Carolina State Athletic Commission. So they won’t let robots fight, but infants are fair game?
This did nothing but made the fans boo harshly.

Sienna revised her challenge, now specifying that it had to be a “person in this world” (again: #SiennaFearsDisco’sMartians). Then we got a clip of ODB coming out of what I thought was a train but was apparently her barbeque sauce truck. I guess you can indulge yourself in frivolous money-losing hobbies when your husband is making that big-league NXT money.

#1 CONTENDERSHIP MATCH: Sienna vs. ODB- DUD! (for real this time)
Even after watching less than ten ODB matches in two and a half years (one of which was actually good), her schtik is still stale and annoying. The match was very poor and I thought the stuff was with Vanguard 1 arguing with the referee was stupid. Actually, even the idea of doing a ref bump was stupid. Sienna is on the roster. ODB is not, and never ever should be again. I don’t care if it’s Total Nonstop Deletion: let Sienna win clean!

MATT & THE HELMS DYNASTY BACKSTAGE- we are promised an “appalling” reincarnation tonight. They make jokes about High Voltage.

HOUSE OF HARDY RULES MATCH: Ichweeed vs. Chet Sterling- DUD!
Ichweeed is apparently the real name for what I have been calling “Fast-Talking Wacky Purple Aviator Jeff Hardy” or some variant thereof. I really HATE this phrasing that Ichweeed is “from the mind of Jeff Hardy” and Borash explaining to us that this is a “character’ from fifteen years ago from the Hardy Show or whatever. It made it feel WAY too much like “here is this old gimmick that Jeff thinks is really cool so we’re going to abuse our creative control to show it to you even though no one other than Jeff has ever liked it” (because if someone did, we would have seen it on TV in WWE or TNA or somewhere that wasn’t booked by the Hardys). We already understand that this is a persona of Jeff’s because we saw Jeff become him after getting water from the Lake or Reincarnation splashed onto him.
This was a fantastic example of the sort of thing that has come out of these “Broken” events that I absolutely hate. Jeff gets to do this stupid, wacky character that he wants to do. He wastes three minutes squashing a dude, doing a comedy spot and then a table spot for absolutely no reason, and with all of these stupid cartoon graphics popping up (which I’m sure Jeff drew, too), annoying the hell out of me. I almost threw something during the stupid weedwhacker spot.

THEY SHOWED THE ZOO VIDEO FROM LAST TIME- BOOOOOOOO!

TNA WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Eddie Edwards(c) vs. Bobby Lashley- 7.75/10
Their ring announcer forgot to say the word “heavyweight” in “TNA World Heavyweight Title.”
If Matt was a good promoter, he would have booked the obvious Eddie vs. EC III rematch after last week’s finish.
Anyway… I thought this match was awesome (aside from the one spot where the fans were interfering on Eddie’s behalf), and I don’t even hate the way it “ended” (for now, I assume), but I wish they had set up for it a bit better announcing from the beginning that in this match “pinfalls count anywhere in space and time” or something like that.

TAG TEAM APOCALYPTO- decent, although kind of disappointing.
It’s a Falls Count Anywhere Elimination match, which is what we all figured it would be. That’s a good thing. I really hope that, every ten minutes or so we see Eddie and Lashley randomly brawling across the screen; sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background, maybe once RIGHT in front of the lens so you’re not even sure it’s them at first, but just every ten minutes or so until about the forty minute mark when we get a finish.
So Rosemary was forever banned for trying to kidnap Maxel but Crazzy Steve & Abyss weren’t?

The first spot we got was the “shoot the Roman candles at fleeing opponents spot. Again. Even worse, this time Abyss actually got hit with one of them… and COMPLETELY NO-SOLD IT. WHAT THE F*CK?!

Matt is fighting the Helms Dynasty on in the pack of the pick-up truck while Helms drives. Jeff gets the referee on top his motorcycle (despite the ref’s protests that they’re not wearing helmets) and they give chase.
There is a gaggle of angry indy wrestlers at the gate. Some of them appear to be wearing what I assume must be the Earth-3 version of masks that heroes wore on Disney’s Might Ducks cartoon. Abyss and Steve opened the gates to let them in.

Hardys and Helms are now fighting on the side of a highway. Meanwhile Abyss is murdering indy wrestlers. I liked that they still insisted on doing a pinfall.

THE BRAVADO BROTHERS ARE HERE!

Okay. No more trying to keep track of everything in writing. I’m just going to write who shows up and comment on things that are cool, stupid, or just randomly pop me.

Is it bad that I’m really disappointed that they couldn’t find a way to FX up someone getting hit by that train (and then pinned to be eliminated, of course).

Okay… Abyss murdering people by smashing their heads in with heavy rocks is too far.

You know… it only now occurred to me that it is a completely real possibility that the Dudleys could show up.


Spud has been building up all night that his tag team partner is going to be a really big guy. Spuds partner turned out to be The Big Deal from CHIKARA (who you all likely know better as Hornswoggle).

Skarsgard making the save for the Hardys annoyed me. It’s just a boat! (And a dilapidated one at that). I did laugh my ass off at the Helms Dynasty attacking it, though.
The promised terrible reincarnation is Helms as part of 3 Count. Lee and Everett stopped fighting to dance with him, then he buried them for not being Moore and Karagias. If you’re going to do the 3 Count thing, what they should have done was had Lee and Everett turn on Helms, then have Moore and Karagias actually show up later with Helms to get revenge on them (leading to Helms getting knocked into the lake again, reemerging as his current self and turning back heel and helping his dynasty eliminate Moore and Karagias).

The RnRs have been standing in the outdoor ring this whole time, waiting for someone to show up to wrestle them. After a brief cut back to the Helms vs. Bravados (in which the Helms Dynasty almost got DQed for locking themselves in Dome of Deletion, which made me laugh) we cut back to the ring where Matt is wrestling Robert while Jeff and Ricky are facing off above the ring in two cranes. Matt trapped Ricky up in his crane.
Jeff Swantoned out of the crane but missed Robert, because Robert Gibson obviously isn’t going to take a move like that. He was then pinned by Matt anyway. Then they left Ricky there, afraid, alone, in the dark, and up in the air. Wow that sounded a lot more poetic than I meant.

Oh yeah, there’s a volcano in the background. I’ll get to why I hate it so much later.

Spud lims the Bravados in the Dome after some chairshots from Swoggle. Spud shoved Swoggle away to that he could steal the pins, so Swoggle turned on him, beat him up and left him for the Helms’ to pin.

That spot with Animal showing up near Ricky and Ricky yelling “THE RIB’S OVER! LET ME DOWN!” should have been the last thing we saw.

Decay have finisher murdering the indy guys and are now confronted by a million guys in DCC masks. Comedy happened. It was decently amusing. But seriously… all of these DCC guys are separate teams of two, right?

Now everyone is in a big brawl by the volcano (including Lashley and Eddie. It erupted, knocking them all down. Hurricane showed up in costume and vowed a reckoning on those who have betrayed him.

STOP WASTING TIME WITH THIS NEWS CRAP! I WANT TO SEE THE WRESTLING!

Decay is beating Jeff up in the ring while the Helms Dynasty attacks Matt in a field of giant goofy Hardy’s symbols. Abyss randomly picks Janice up off the ground. Jeff got a Roman candle but Steve hit him in the nuts. Jeff as about to be murdered but Vanguard 1 made the save via Roman candle missiles. This time Abyss fought back with ammo of his own. This failed to produce any drama because they had already killed the Roman candle gimmick with the earlier no-selling.
The Helms Dynasty was about to kill Matt with shovels but the Hurricane made the save. Matt called over a referee and got the pin. Then he and Hurricane BURIED THE HELMS DYNASTY ALIVE. This was all to set up a gag where Matt said “even the man with three Hs would be proud of the way we buried this young, promising talent.” But they’re totally not bitter. They swear.
And really… it’s 2016 and the man with the three Hs is the one in charge of NXT and the Cruiserweight Classic and everything people love about the company right now. They tried to tell a joke from 2009 in 2016.
Lashley speared random dudes. Then Swoggle tried to spear Lashley and knocked himself out. Wasn’t he already eliminated?
The volcano lights the Hardy signal in gasoline on fire. The Hardys are fighting Decay inside of it. More importantly, there is a Ryback-stylized R in the background. They escape it. Matt avoids a shot with Janice and then hits Abyss in the stomach with it.
Jeff and Spud fought on top of the volcano. Jeff hit Steve with a Twist of Fate and he rolled into the volcano… which then shot him up into the air and he landed in the ring where Matt pinned him. That’s dumb. Shouldn’t he have been incinerated?

Oh. That’s the finish. The Hardys won. Also, Reby is preggers again. Congrats, guys!

Wait! We didn’t get a finish to Eddie vs. Lashley! WHAT THE F*CK?!




As you can probably guess, I had quite a few issues with the presentation of all of this. First things first, I HATED everything having to do with the news show and the whole "the world is going to end" crap. The more elements you ask people to suspend their disbelief on, the less likely they are to do it. This one, to me, just took everything WAY too far. First of all, we all know the world isn't going to end and volcanoes don't spontaneously appear in places that don't have fault lines, etc. etc. so why are you asking us to believe it? What does this story gain from it? Nothing other than a few moments of bad comedy, but it loses something very important: the whole “the world will end if the Hardys don’t retain” completely killed any doubt I could have possibly had that they wouldn’t retain. Normally, no matter how certain you are of a finish, a well-executed nearfall will make you believe it in that moment. This prevented even that.
Everything about the news show was also just too far for me. They're not going to evacuate the city and yet still let them have this stupid wrestling show, and the local news isn't going to cover the wrestling show etc. etc. so why ask us to believe it? Save your suspension of disbelief for the main presentation (for example, I had no problem with Jeff and Ricky going up into the cranes simply for the goal of trying to throw each other off).

The other thing that I thought really didn't work here was the whole "it's a regular Impact, but shot in Crazy Matt Hardy Land" thing. It felt like they were just shooting a regular episode of Impact with the usual stupid sh*t, but for whatever reason this time they were shooting it from Matt Hardy's barn instead of from the Impact Zone. A big part of this was the announcers. Their first mistake was trying to call the absurd with complete seriousness. Borash in particular dragged things down with his reporter voice, speaking normal English and saying things like "the Rock N' Roll Express- or 'the Express That Rocks And Rolls,' as Broken Matt Hardy would say," like he was a normal announcer explaining things to the viewer. It just didn't work in this situation. I think it would have worked a lot better to have "broken" announcers.
Also, I know this will sound nuts coming me, but in a similar vein to my issues with the "over-explanation" of Ichweeed, I thought that Borash pushed the waiver thing WAY too hard, to the point where he started making me ask more questions I normally would, and in a way that made it harder for me to get into the atmosphere of the show. I just don't buy the fact that Broken Matt Hardy would make his most loyal cult followers sign a waiver saying that they won't sue if they get hurt because it goes against the atmosphere they were trying to create. This also seriously exacerbated issues I was having switching from the extreme nonsense of Ichweeed to the extreme seriousness of the world title match (and again, the announcers calling everything straight, as if it was just another episode of Impact but from a different location and with a different boss was a big factor in this).

My other issue with this show (or really just the first half of it) is, more than anything else, that it wasn't what I was expecting. Going off of the previous two Broken specials, I assumed that this was going to be two full hours of this absurdly large tag team Apocalypto, with what felt like millions of teams, someone being seen only for two seconds all just fighting in a big field, with the idea that some of these extras were getting eliminated off screen. I was expecting something that felt insanely large in scale. I wanted to be able to pretend that there were literally hundreds of tag teams fighting all over the Hardy compound. Obviously we'd only focus on a few, and all of the spots involving things like the Lake of Reincarnation would involve teams we were focusing on (Hardys, Helms Dynasty, RnRs, Bravados, Spud-Swoggle), but I wanted to be able to pretend that there was a thousand times more than that going on off-screen. I wanted to be able to pretend that there were hundreds of battles going on at once, not just three. I was also hoping for more outsiders, because of the way they had built it up. And yes, I was secretly hoping to see Moore and Karagias as "2 Count." (BTW, also on my wish-list was Brother Hero, and when he would arrive, Matt would not only do the "Brother Hero... I knew you'd come!" but then ask him if he has brought with him "Brother C-Zero," only for it to be revealed that Brother C-Zero was unavailable, so instead Brother Hero is teaming with... "Brother MERO... I didn't know that you'd come). I was hoping we'd see guys like Disco Inferno or whoever just walk onto the Hardy Compound property to throw a punch but get small-packaged, pinned, and walk away in shame and disappointment.
On one level my head is saying that this is their art and they are allowed to tell the story they want with it and it's not fair of me to have expectations of the direction they want to take it, but on another level it is saying "their goal was to entertain me and I developed these expectations based on what they had previously presented, so it's not unfair of me to be disappointed if they didn't meet those expectations.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this. They were a little less organized than I'd like, but I can't think of a good way to wrap this all up, so I'll just do it clumsily like this.

[cero2k]

There is a gaggle of angry indy wrestlers at the game. Some of them appear to be wearing what I assume must be the Earth-3 version of masks that heroes wore on Disney’s Might Ducks cartoon. Abyss and Steve opened the gates to let them in.

the Ugly Ducklins, legit stable. Colby Corino is part of them
http://www.cagematch.net/?id=29&nr=1942