BRM Reviews the 10/31/2013 Impact (utter sh*t)

[Big Red Machine]

The opening video package asks “how long can the doctors keep the cyborg out of the ring?” as if Kurt still isn’t medically cleared to wrestle. Then the show proper opens up with Tenay hyping up a one-on-one match between Angle and Roode. Either he is cleared to wrestle and you should be hyping up the match, or you shouldn’t be hyping up a match that won’t happen because someone isn’t cleared to wrestle! Either Tenay is wrong because no one told him that Angle isn’t medically cleared (which makes the company look dumb) or they are advertising a match despite someone not being cleared to wrestle, which hurts Tenay’s credibility (whatever is left of it, at least), and makes the company look dumb, careless, or both.

OPENING SEGMENT- Dixie says that AJ is no longer the world champ and says that she doesn’t care that AJ walked out with the title or the car. She “if I had to guess,” AJ is trick-or-treating with the belt. I guess Dixie Carter, the head of a wrestling company, doesn’t pay attention to the news from promotions that her company has working agreements with. It would have made SO much more sense if she had said that AJ’s title doesn’t matter anymore and that the match in AAA doesn’t matter (which will hype up that match, and the angle with it). Part of what makes this angle work is that AJ is defending the belt like a man, not sitting at home, leaving it on his mantle. That needs to be emphasized. The Halloween costume line was good, but there was a better way to get to it.

Dixie announces an eight-man tournament and then brings out seven guys. James Storm, Samoa Joe, Kurt Angle, Jeff Hardy, Austin Aries, Bobby Roode, and Chris Sabin, and we got short video packages for all seven guys. Bully comes out and tires to interrupt Dixie, but she talks right through him, announcing a gauntlet match to fill the final spot. I liked that Dixie talked right through his attempts to interrupt her. It is the first time she has actually looked like a strong authority figure.
Bully demands to be in the tournament, but Dixie blames this whole mess on Bully’s inability to beat AJ not once, but twice. Great stuff. Bully blames the first loss on Hebner and the second loss on Anderson. This brings Anderson out and he and Bully start to brawl… and now that the action has started, Total Non-stop Action goes to commercial.

When we get back from commercial, we get some clips of the brawl (it’s nothing exciting- just standard stuff), while Tenay, in voice-over calmly explains to us that before the break, we saw “Mr. Anderson and Bully Ray in an all-out wild brawl that shows the hatred that these two have for each other. Mr. Anderson; he is on a mission to destroy Aces & Eights and Bully Ray” in the most uninterested tone possible. It felt like he was reading right off of a script, which, given the fact that he put over the angle exactly as someone would write it down if they were summarizing it as notes to be given out to someone, he probably was. At least when Gabe would do this sort of thing, he would sound excited and interested. Tenay NEEDS to go.
Apparently it only takes two security guards to subdue Ken Anderson, making him the lamest wrestler in the world. Apparently the security guards also only subdued Anderson but not Bully, and did not stop subdue Bully’s girlfriend in any way, despite the fact that she started getting in Anderson’s face. Bully runs up from behind and attack Underwon with a chain. He then yells at the security guards to “get out of here… and for some inexplicable reason, they listen to him instead of doing their f*cking jobs! We had damn well better get a segment with those two morons getting fired. Bully whips Anderson with his chain a bunch of times, and Anderson at least sold it well.

THE CAMERA GUY TRIES TO INTERVIEW GARRETT BISCHOFF ABOUT THE WHOLE THING- He says it is “club business… but then starts to share his feelings anyway until he is interrupted by Knux, who takes him off somewhere to talk about it. It seemed a bit ridiculous to have this segment right after beating happened, they probably should have waited until after the tag team title match.
What’s that, you say? You didn’t know that there was going to be a tag team title match on this show? Well neither did I. Perhaps they should have hyped it up some? A single mention on last week’s show is not enough! Maybe instead of that BS “when will Angle be medically cleared to wrestle?” thing in the opening video package, they could have hyped this match up?

TNA WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Bro-Mans(c) vs. James Storm & Gunner- DUD!
Bro-Mans’ new valet, Mr. Olympia, is nowhere to be found. The heels win dirty in a match that was just way too short for what put Storm down to put him down. A chairshot or something would have been better.

STING & DIXIE BACKSTAGE- BAD!
Dixie says that she is willing to wave the stips of the Slammiversary Title match and allow Sting to be in the gauntlet to determine the eighth participant in the title tournament, on account of everything he has done for TNA. She says that if he does it, she will enter him into the gauntlet first, to prove to everyone that he “still has it.” Sting gets angry and says that unlike Dixie, he doesn’t have a “sense of entitlement” and walks off, leaving both Dixie and the viewers very confused because his comments here make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE!
Dixie isn’t offering to wave the stips just because she wants to do something nice for Sting. She offered to do it because of everything he has accomplished in his career. That is the definition of earning something! Furthermore, she offers to really make him earn his spot in the tournament by giving him the toughest spot in the gauntlet. For him to then criticize her for thinking he has a “sense of entitlement” makes absolutely no sense. You want a good reason for Sting to reject this offer? How about because he is a good babyface and will abide by the stipulations of him match from Slammiversary? You know… like the stipulations actually MEAN SOMETHING… although no one is actually sure if he did reject the offer because he didn’t really actually answer the question.

VIDEO PACKAGE RECAPPING THE ABYSS-RELATED EVENTS OF BOUND FOR GLORY- fine for what it was, but it made last week’s entire segment even more pointless than it already was. If you didn’t want last week’s segment to matter to this angle, DON’T DO THE SEGMENT AT ALL! If a segment won’t mean anything, DON’T DO IT and save the time for matches that need it. This is simple, obvious sh*t!

BAD INFLUENCE PROMO- they are dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and say that they will solve “the case of the on-again, off-again monster.” That made me laugh. They also bring up the fact that the TV Title seems to have disappeared with him. Rather than reacting with disdain at their goofiness, Tenay reacts to this segment with genuine surprise.

ETHAN CARTER III vs. NORV FURNAM- DUD!
So they are showing the same squash match that they showed at BFG for free on TV a few weeks later. And on this show of all shows? Why not have Dixie give him the last spot in the gauntlet? It still gets over the nepotism, but does it in a way we haven’t seen twice in the past eleven days.

BOBBY ROODE & A DOCTOR BACKSTAGE- Bobby is trying to find out if Kurt is medically cleared to wrestle. Tenay hyped a match between him and Kurt for later tonight? Has TNA seriously not told him about his match yet, one third of the way into the show where that match is supposed to take place?

ODB PROMO- She is still calling it the “Knocked up Title.” It was funny the first time, when she was supposed to be a crazy comedy character.” When she is the number one contender and wants to get her title back, it just shows that she doesn’t care enough about the title to call it by its real name (well… either that or that she can’t read).
Kaz and Daniels show up and make fun of her for having large, fake boobs. She makes fun of them in response for losing to comedy chumps at BFG. EY shows up and threatens them, and Kaz and Daniels back away scared from the comedy jobber.
EY says that Joseph can’t be here tonight (no reason given), but that “Halloween is a monster’s favorite holiday,” teasing that Abyss will be here, and building a segment for later tonight. The segment worked, but it would have been a lot better without ODB screwing up the name of the title (and come on! EY can’t think of a hilarious reason for Park to not be here tonight? BOOO!)

GAUNTLET BATTLE ROYALE FOR THE FINAL SPOT IN THE TITLE TOURNAMENT- 3/10
Apparently Sting took the spot in the tournament after all! Then why did he get so pissy about Dixie offering it to him? To make matters worse, Tenay claims that Dixie called offering Sting the spot in this tournament “charity” (and just so no one can argue that I am misquoting or misinterpreting Tenay, his exact words were “TNA President Dixie Carter offering up what she calls ‘charity’ to the Icon, Sting).
Yeah… I went back and rewatched the Sting-Dixie segment, and not only does she never once utter the word “charity,” but she never even says “handout” or “gift to the needy” or anything remotely resembling the word. So not only is the babyface announcer LYING about what the President of the company said ON THE AIR (so all of us fans know that he is a liar, too), but having Sting accept this supposed “charity” of Dixie’s completely ruins whatever it is that they seem to be trying to do with this whole thing!
Tenay tries to put this over as Dixie being insincere about wanting Sting to be in the tournament because she is making him the first entrant… but if Dixie didn’t want Sting in the tournament, all she had to do would be to enforce the stipulations of the match at Slammiversary (which Sting himself seemed to have accepted as the new reality based on one of his promos from after Slammiversary) and not let him in the tournament at all!
Tenay REALLY pissed me off here. He was complaining that Dixie was being unfair to Sting by making him be the first man in, and criticized Taz for complaining about the same thing with Kazarian. Tenay at no time mentioned that Sting wouldn’t have been allowed in this spot in the first place if not for Dixie’s kindness except when Taz brought it up, and Tenay’s comment about it was that “popular demand” forced Dixie to do it, as if the correct thing to do is always to bow to “popular demand,” no matter what effect it would have on business (like killing stips) or morality (if “popular demand” is that there is a mob outside saying that they want to murder someone, I guess Tenay feels that the correct choice of action would be do would just be to let the crowd murder them?).
To make matters worse, we never ever saw this “popular demand” that Sting be allowed back into the title picture. There was no fan petition, no article on the website, no promos, not even a passing mention of it!
So what we have here is Tenay blatantly ignoring the fair and correct stipulations of a past match except to claim some non-existent fan desire to see the outcome that he himself wants, and criticizing another announcer for pointing out that another wrestler has to face the exact same odds as his man, except that this wrestler didn’t need a hand-out from the authority figure to get into the match in the first place! That is EXACTLY what a heel announcer would do! Mike Tenay needs to be kicked out of the announce booth, for the good of the product.
KNUX is the third man into this gauntlet match. Not only has he only won just ONE singles match in his entire TNA career )and that was by DQ!), but more importantly, if the storyline is that Dixie has to make a new TNA World Heavyweight Title because AJ wasn’t under contract and ran off with the last one, why would Dixie let Knux into this tournament when HE ISN’T UNDER CONTRACT?!

So Magnus wins by eliminating Sting and Kaz at the same time by coming up from behind Sting while Sting was trying to eliminate Kaz and flipping them both over the top rope. Tenay tried to play this off as is this was somehow heelish, but that doesn’t make any sense because he would have had to eliminate Sting at some point anyway.

Overall, the match was very lame, even as far as battle royales go. The fact that almost all of the big names were already in the tournament didn’t help either, because it took away from the potential starpower. They did a good job of finding the top guys that they could who were left, but trying and failing still means that you failed.
Another thing that really hurt this match was that it wasn’t the main event. That would have made it feel a bit more important, but getting second billing to an afterthought like the Knockouts Title didn’t help (Roode vs. Angle was the main event, but that should have been the top-of the-hour semi-main, IMO, just to make this feel more important). I assume that they put this here because they want to do something later on in the show, but that probably could have been planned out better.

KURT ANGLE PROMO- great!
He says that the doctor has cleared him to wrestle but has advised him not to… but he wants revenge on Roode, so he will wrestle against the doctor’s advice. In other words, Kurt wants to get his hands on Roode so badly that he will put himself at a disadvantage and risk further injury to do so. Simple and effective. A great promo.

DIXIE CARTER BACKSTAGE PROMO- Dixie hints that the barackets will be determined in something called a “wheel of Dixie.” This made me shudder.

TNA KNOCKOUTS TITLE MATCH: Gail Kim(c) (w/Lei’D Tapa) vs. ODB- 2.5/10
WAY too much shine, and even worse, Tapa’s interference was limited to just distracting the ref while ODB had a visual pin on Gail. Tapa is supposed to be a f*cking MONSTER! She needs to be HURTING PEOPLE!
Tenay, being a babyface announcer, is not outraged by this cheating at all. He just says “you’ve got to tip your hat to the difference maker, Lei’D Tapa.”
Then he says the line that sums up the big problem here: “Who is going to be able to beat Gail Kim with Lei’D Tapa?”
This is the angle. For Tapa to be important, she has to matter in a way that complements her size and build-up. She can’t be doing the same sh*t Madison Rayne did to help Gail keep the title, or else we already know the answer to Tenay’s question.

BAD INFLUENCE BACKSTAGE- DUD!
They say they have solved the mystery of Abyss. Apparently they had time to both solve this mystery in the past forty minutes, despite the fact that they were wrestling for a good chunk of it. Then they say they will put on their official detective gear… which they had already been wearing earlier.

BAD INFLUENCE, EY, & ABYSS SEGMENT- A GIANT F*CKING DUD!
Bad Influence claim that Abyss lives under the ring. They then bring out a pumpkin (for some reason there were a bunch of pumpkins under the ring). Apparently, they were just rolling us, though, and they say insult the fans and the knockouts.
EY comes out dressed as Joseph Park for Halloween. He starts to punch Bad Influence but gets beaten down until Abyss comes out and makes the save, in basically THE SAME EXACT SEGMENT WE GOT AT BOUND FOR GLORY!

WHAT IS THE DIXIE WHEEL?- It’s f*cking RAW ROULETTE! If people are already crapping on you for copying WWE with this angle, why would you copy one of the dumbest, most obnoxious gimmicks they have ever come up with?!
The answer, of course, is to make these tournament matches gimmick matches… because TNA has always needed a reason to book random gimmick matches for no reason.
So Sabin and Hardy will face off next week in a Full Metal Mayhem match. No mention is made of the fact that a latter was used in the finish of their match at BFG, because that might actually be a REAL reason to do this match (or at least a ladder match, which let’s face it, is the same damn thing), and God knows we can’t have that. A f*cking random spin of the wheel is much better!

KURT ANGLE vs. BOBBY ROODE- 7/10
Tenay makes certain to tell us that Roode was able to pin Kurt at Bound For Glory after “Kurt Angle was knocked unconscious with an Angle Slam.” He doesn’t try to spin it at all and say that Roode and Kurt fought so hard that Kurt was so exhausted that he couldn’t fight anymore, which would put over Kurt’s “never give up” attitude and make Roode look tough for outlasting Kurt. Instead he says it in a way which craps on both guys! Kurt looks like an idiot for knocking himself out with his own move, and Roode looks like he didn’t really win because he only got the pin because Kurt knocked himself out.

Roode has Angle in the crossface, and Tenay talks about how the hold works over Kurt’s “head…” then a few seconds later talks about Kurt’s history of neck problems. So why didn’t you mention how the crossface works over Kurt’s neck?!

This was pretty much the last ten minutes of an awesome match… you know… like their Bound For Glory match. Roode even pulled out that Funky DVD into a neckbreaker from BFG. They even had the finish be Kurt hit some sort of Superplex and then have Roode make it back to his feet but the ref call for a ref stoppage because Kurt was unconscious (a variation on the same finish). This was a great match, but I would have rated it a lot higher if it didn’t feel like they were just having an abbreviated version of a much better match that I saw them have just eleven days ago.

Today was Thursday October 31st, meaning that tomorrow, the first Friday of the month, which is when the new One Night Only PPV debuts. There were no commercials for it at all. It wasn’t even mentioned.

Yet another terrible episode of Impact. They basically took segment of BFG and aired them for free on TV.

[cero2k]

OPENING SEGMENT- Dixie says that AJ is no longer the world champ and says that she doesn’t care that AJ walked out with the title or the car. She “if I had to guess,” AJ is trick-or-treating with the belt. I guess Dixie Carter, the head of a wrestling company, doesn’t pay attention to the news from promotions that her company has working agreements with. It would have made SO much more sense if she had said that AJ’s title doesn’t matter anymore and that the match in AAA doesn’t matter (which will hype up that match, and the angle with it). Part of what makes this angle work is that AJ is defending the belt like a man, not sitting at home, leaving it on his mantle. That needs to be emphasized. The Halloween costume line was good, but there was a better way to get to it.

she did acknowledge the AAA thing in one of the 24/7 videos they have started to roll out.

[Big Red Machine]

OPENING SEGMENT- Dixie says that AJ is no longer the world champ and says that she doesn’t care that AJ walked out with the title or the car. She “if I had to guess,” AJ is trick-or-treating with the belt. I guess Dixie Carter, the head of a wrestling company, doesn’t pay attention to the news from promotions that her company has working agreements with. It would have made SO much more sense if she had said that AJ’s title doesn’t matter anymore and that the match in AAA doesn’t matter (which will hype up that match, and the angle with it). Part of what makes this angle work is that AJ is defending the belt like a man, not sitting at home, leaving it on his mantle. That needs to be emphasized. The Halloween costume line was good, but there was a better way to get to it.

she did acknowledge the AAA thing in one of the 24/7 videos they have started to roll out.

Yeah, but not every fan is going to care enough to check the internet (like me, for instance), if this is your big angle, it needs to be talked up on TV.