I suppose it’s possible that Jeff just started feeling funny now, but still… why not talk to Matt backstage?
Jeff’s ambiguous fears are assuaged by Matt assuring Jeff that he thinks he is going to win tonight. Knowing what was going to happen later and figuring out how the Jeff vs. Tyrus match figured into things, I understand why they did this and will even go so far as to say that they put the pieces together extremely well here, but it still felt a little goofy for Jeff’s concerns to simply be assuaged by Matt essentially saying “don’t worry about it, man.” Still… it was a minor problem in a well-done segment.
Tyrus came out and cut a REALLY good promo on Jeff, which led to…
JEFF HARDY vs. TYRUS- no rating.
It accomplished its goal very well, but having Jeff make his own comeback seems a lot worse than having Jeff get stretchered off or something.
FEAST OR FIRED IS BACK- I usually don’t enjoy the match because it’s pretty boring, but this is the sort of gimmick that you can use as a booker to essentially “force” yourself to plan things out in a well-structured way, using the three title-shot cash-ins as markers to figure out how much time you have to set everything up the way you need it to be for each cash-in (and its aftermath) to tell the story that you want it to tell… but, of course, that assumes that you aren’t the sort of incompetent idiot who would just let the tag title briefcase languish with no plans for it whatsoever until you need to do some emergency silliness to have it cashed in TWO YEARS IN A ROW!
Also, it really kills the “fired” part of the gimmick when the person who got the pink slip in LAST YEAR’S match is already back with the company, and has been for over half a year.
On the bright side, maybe Grado will get fired.
WOLVES PROMO- Davey was very good. Eddie was not.
OH NO! JOKER STING IS BACK IN TNA!
Wait, no, it’s just a more evil-looking Crazzy Steve. He created an annoying distraction so that Abyss could attack the Wolves from behind. They went down WAY too easily.
TNA KNOCKOUTS TITLE MATCH: Gail Kim(c) vs. Awesome Kong (w/the Dollhouse)- 3.25/10
They did stuff. Some of it looked very good, other parts of it looked pretty bad. Madison and Velvet come out and brawl away with Rebel and Marti, leaving Gail to face a two-on-one situation against Kong and Jade, but Gail overcame the odds and won the match so… feud over, I guess.
BEER MONEY CALLS OUT EY & BRAM- not that this doesn’t make sense or anything like that, but I just saw this a week and a half ago on PPV and it wasn’t very good.
Instead, Jesse Godderz and Eli Drake came out and Drake cut a great promo. Then Jesse took the mic and was okay. Storm cut a good promo in response, so we got…
BEER MONEY vs. JESSE GODDERZ & ELI DRAKE- 1/10
Basically an extended squash.
MATT & REBY CHECK ON JEFF- they insist that he take his injured knee to the hospital. They could have saved themselves some time by just doing what I suggested earlier
Hidden text.
KURT ANGLE PROMO- he’s not having a good day with his math, as he said he has been wrestling professionally for almost 20 years when it’s really close to 15, and he said that his match with Drew last week as a five star match when it was really only four stars.He is going to pick his next opponent for his farewell tour, but before he can say anything, Lashley shows up and says he wants the match. I get that they were trying to make this feel big, but it really just felt like it was eating up time. It’s the Kurt Angle farewell tour. All you need are some graphics and some video packages.
Kurt closed his promo with his “it’s gonna be real, it’s gonna be damn real!” catchphrase and all of a sudden I am hoping they just go out there and shoot grapple with each other for a while.
LASHLEY HAS A RUN-IN WITH THE PURPLE-HAIRED WOMAN FROM LAST WEEK’S VIDEO PACKAGE- she spoke some Portuguese, then told Lashley “your pain is my pleasure” and now I’m really scared they’re going to give me bullsh*t overbooking in the Kurt Angle farewell tour.
PEPPER PARKS vs. MIKE BENNETT (w/Maria Kanellis)- extended squash.
This was fine for what it was.
I just don’t understand why neither ROH nor TNA has told Pepper to change his name before sticking him on their TV.
MIKE BENNETT PROMO- same thing he said on the PPV.
EC III PROMO- fine.
Like the opening segment, this did a good job of subtly setting up where they are going after the thing that happened in the main event.
Also, what the hell is up with this camera angle?
LAST MAN STANDING TITLE VS. CAREER MATCH FOR THE TNA WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE: Ethan Carter III(c) vs. Matt Hardy- 7.75/10
The story they told was one of Matt slowly becoming more and more heelish, while they both used the various stipulations of the match to disguise this fact and also had the announcers call it out. Those two things might seem contradictory, but it actually worked pretty well.
It started with Matt jumping Ethan before the bell (but not from behind) then he used a low blow, then Reby gave him a hammer to use as a weapon, and then, finally, Tyrus interfered, attacking Ethan for the double-turn. Ethan made that brief improbable comeback that it seemed like Rock was going to make but never did in Rock vs. Austin at WrestleMania X-7(which this match seems to have been inspired by) but was put down for good by shot with the title belt from Matt.
MATT HARDY PROMO- he announces that he is now a heel who does things for himself instead of for the fans. You’ve all heard this promo a million times before, but Matt was actually a big better than usual. He claimed to have ended Ethan’s streak, which isn’t true because he didn’t pin him or make him submit.
Matt then gave Ethan a con-chair-to. Josh tried to tell us how disappointed the fans were, and yet at least half of the fans at ringside, including a school-age child in the front row were cheering for Matt and wanted to celebrate with him. Then they cut to another group of fans, all of whom looked BORED OUT OF THEIR MINDS.
As for my thoughts on what all of this means for TNA:
TNA is like a mouse in a laboratory. The scientists have put the mouse in a maze, and it will run around trying to get out, but eventually it will make a wrong turn and hit a wall. But rather than start to backtrack to find where it went wrong, the mouse decides to see if it can try to break through the wall by doing the same thing that got it to this wall, but just harder and more forcefully. So it runs at the wall again and again, harder and harder each time, making no progress and only managing to hurt itself, until finally it decides to do the more sensible thing and retrace its steps and try to find the correct path out of the maze.
And it will keep going through the maze and making progress, but eventually it will come to another dead end, but rather than learn from what happened last time, the mouse will figure that maybe the wall is weaker here and once again try to see if it can break the wall down by force. Again the mouse charges at the wall, with more and more force each time, always failing to make any progress, and getting more and more bumps and bruises each time until it finally decides to go back to the “retrace my steps and look for a new way out” plan.
So the mouse goes back to where it started from and takes a slightly different route this time and once again it runs into a wall… and once again it first decides to see if it can break the wall down instead of just doubling back and looking for an unobstructed path… and once again the mouse tries and fails to break the wall many times, accumulating more bumps and bruises before it decides to just double back and look for a different path out.
And this happens over and over again, and it’s clear that the mouse is a slow learner but G-d damn it that mouse is a determined little f*cker and you start to root for him and no matter how many times he just runs himself into a wall, you still keep watching because you want to be there for his big moment of glory when he finally finds his way out of the maze.
And then, one day, it looks like he’s finally going to do it. He’s on the straight-away to the door and there are no more turns left and all he has to do is keep going straight and he’ll be out of there… and when he gets to about a foot away from the door, he just turns himself ninety degrees and just starts running into the f*cking wall OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN and he just won’t stop… and you realize that this stupid mouse has run himself headfirst into the walls SO MANY TIMES trying that same, clearly futile strategy of trying to break the walls down that it has suffered so many self-inflicted concussions and so much brain trauma and killed so many of its own brain cells that it has completely forgotten how to do anything other than run its own head into walls and as a result IT WILL NEVER EVER EVER SUCCEED. It will be stuck in the maze forever, running its own head into the wall until it dies!
It took them a whole three weeks this time, but TNA went right back to being TNA. After spending most of last year moving in the right direction and building things up like EC III vs. Angle and moving away from the bullsh*t overbooking and doing this whole big World Title Series all focused on wins and losses mattering, and putting some effort into making things like Kurt’s farewell matches seem big… then they go and do this.
A double-turn swerve giving us a heel faction controlling the world title, and one that turns a very popular babyface into a heel despite the fact that he has never ever succeeded as a heel anywhere other than the ultra-smarky ROH crowd who didn’t want to see him in the promotion from the moment it was announced he was coming in.
It’s like they’re addicted to swerves. It wasn’t just Russo. It was also Bischoff and Dixie and Gaburik and anyone in charge in that company, to the point where it’s all they do, no matter how many times it has failed for them before. They have a serious addiction, and it’s killing their company and no matter how many people try to throw them an intervention, they just keep on denying that they have this problem and just keep doing the same exact thing that has gotten them into this situation in the first place.
My thoughts about this angle aside, there is no denying that this show did everything it set out to accomplish, so I'll say it was good, even if I didn't like the big swerve or the Gail vs. Kong finish.
STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Josh Mathews said that Madison and Velvet running in “evened up the numbers advantage” that the Dollhouse had.
So there’s four members of the Dollhouse, and the babyfaces are 1) Gail, 2) Madison, 3) Velvet, and 4)… umm…. Josh is an idiot.
