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| Where have you gone, Mike Quackenbush? Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
In the face of Armageddon, the first victim is normalcy, familiarity. It never comes out of nowhere. There are always tells, signs of the oncoming cataclysm. Seismographs pick up instability around volcanoes. Temperatures in the ocean are abnormally warm before a strong hurricane season. The economy in the lead up to a coup or sham "election" fails and people get restless for change and order. Masked heroes end up dead in a time when the people need a security blanket. There are always signs.
It's unclear where the first tells in Chikara came up. Were the timeline abnormalities recent, or did they start as far back as Shayne Storm selling out the counter to the Chikara Special to Chris Hero? Sometimes, changes are normal. One could argue that events like Storm's betrayal or Worker Ant's "demise" or the corruption of Claudio Castagnoli or even the ejection of Gran Akuma from Team FIST were all normal shifts in the everyday life-cycle of a healthy wrestling promotion.
But as recently as High Noon, when Tim Donst abandoned the BDK and Ophidian spat in the face of friendship, rifts in the timeline started growing more and more erratic. Sugar Dunkerton left Chikara, only to find his place in the Throwbacks was usurped. Invader ants intermingled within the Colony, rending it asunder. Jigsaw was seduced by his mirror. Icarus flirted with nobility, while Johnny Gargano, along with den father Mike Quackenbush, found themselves off the roster page altogether. Donst himself grew warped and twisted after his hair was shorn, collecting a flock of the unlikeliest birds. If there ever was a landscape that was rife for a nuclear blast, it's Chikara's.
But while the signs in other apocalypses are clear pointers to their ends, I honestly don't know where this is going. Much in the same way that I couldn't really figure out that Ozymandias, the seemingly noble super-genius, was orchestrating an end to a hostile Cold War with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Watchmen, I don't know who is the real cause of these timeline rifts. Who is Ozymandias? Who is orchestrating this fiasco? Maybe it's not a person. Maybe it's a thing. Maybe it's accidental. There are so many theories that it is nearly impossible to pinpoint a payoff.
There are obvious candidates. Archibald Peck's dalliances in time seem to be high tentpoles. Wink Vavasseur's behavior grew from well-meaning but a bit short-sighted to COMPLETELY incompetent. The Eye of Tyr still lingers in the air. Delirious' war against the Spectral Envoy may be a false flag operation to distract from his real machinations. Then what of Gekido? Sidney Bakabella? Eddie Kingston? Quackenbush? Icarus? Maybe UltraMantis Black has been fooling us this entire time, and is more an evil insectoid dictator in wait than the cult hero he's grown to become since opposing the BDK.
Or maybe the Watchmen motif is in and of itself is a misdirection. Maybe the whole theme of timelines shifting points to another huge influence on Quack's work. LOST, in its later seasons, dealt a lot with time travel, rifts in the continuum, and whether one can change his or her fate. The season four finale dealt with Benjamin Linus turning a frozen donkey wheel and making The Island disappear in time. Will someone turn a wheel and set Chikara into a far more disorderly state than it is in now? The more I think about it, the more I fear that Aniversario will be less about resolution and more about time, space, and the cast and crew of Chikara Pro Wrestling being thrown into its climactic state of entropy.
It's unclear where the first tells in Chikara came up. Were the timeline abnormalities recent, or did they start as far back as Shayne Storm selling out the counter to the Chikara Special to Chris Hero? Sometimes, changes are normal. One could argue that events like Storm's betrayal or Worker Ant's "demise" or the corruption of Claudio Castagnoli or even the ejection of Gran Akuma from Team FIST were all normal shifts in the everyday life-cycle of a healthy wrestling promotion.
But as recently as High Noon, when Tim Donst abandoned the BDK and Ophidian spat in the face of friendship, rifts in the timeline started growing more and more erratic. Sugar Dunkerton left Chikara, only to find his place in the Throwbacks was usurped. Invader ants intermingled within the Colony, rending it asunder. Jigsaw was seduced by his mirror. Icarus flirted with nobility, while Johnny Gargano, along with den father Mike Quackenbush, found themselves off the roster page altogether. Donst himself grew warped and twisted after his hair was shorn, collecting a flock of the unlikeliest birds. If there ever was a landscape that was rife for a nuclear blast, it's Chikara's.
But while the signs in other apocalypses are clear pointers to their ends, I honestly don't know where this is going. Much in the same way that I couldn't really figure out that Ozymandias, the seemingly noble super-genius, was orchestrating an end to a hostile Cold War with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Watchmen, I don't know who is the real cause of these timeline rifts. Who is Ozymandias? Who is orchestrating this fiasco? Maybe it's not a person. Maybe it's a thing. Maybe it's accidental. There are so many theories that it is nearly impossible to pinpoint a payoff.
There are obvious candidates. Archibald Peck's dalliances in time seem to be high tentpoles. Wink Vavasseur's behavior grew from well-meaning but a bit short-sighted to COMPLETELY incompetent. The Eye of Tyr still lingers in the air. Delirious' war against the Spectral Envoy may be a false flag operation to distract from his real machinations. Then what of Gekido? Sidney Bakabella? Eddie Kingston? Quackenbush? Icarus? Maybe UltraMantis Black has been fooling us this entire time, and is more an evil insectoid dictator in wait than the cult hero he's grown to become since opposing the BDK.
Or maybe the Watchmen motif is in and of itself is a misdirection. Maybe the whole theme of timelines shifting points to another huge influence on Quack's work. LOST, in its later seasons, dealt a lot with time travel, rifts in the continuum, and whether one can change his or her fate. The season four finale dealt with Benjamin Linus turning a frozen donkey wheel and making The Island disappear in time. Will someone turn a wheel and set Chikara into a far more disorderly state than it is in now? The more I think about it, the more I fear that Aniversario will be less about resolution and more about time, space, and the cast and crew of Chikara Pro Wrestling being thrown into its climactic state of entropy.