So, the final frame of Impact showed Kurt Angle getting accosted by the rest of Aces and Eights after he saw the face of the last remaining masked member of the group. I feel like this should have been more of a holy shit moment, but last week was the first time since Bound for Glory when the stable actually had some juice. Basically, Aces and Eights has been about as impotent as a guy right before picking up his Viagra prescription for the first time. Maybe I'd want to know who the leader of the group is if they didn't need to haul ass when Hulk Hogan waddled down to the ring to make a save for Bully Ray despite having numbers. There's also the morbid curiosity of seeing who is going to be under the mask. Is it D'Lo Brown? Or is it Jeff Jarrett? Or someone actually surprising? Maybe it's just the schadenfreude talking, but I really wanna see how they're going to muck this up.
Ah, I'm sorry. I just watched the show tonight in a really ornery mood, and honestly, the show wasn't nearly as sleepy as it was during its stay in England. If you put this show in front of one of those crowds in the last month, maybe they'd have been onto something. The Gut Check match was really spiffy. I kinda figured Ivelisse Velez would have held up her end of the bargain given the amount of hype behind her, but I was also impressed by Lei'd Tapa. She certainly didn't get her wrestling ability from her uncle, that's for sure. Austin Aries and Hernandez had themselves a nice little tete-a-tete as well.
The main event was nice too, but we're 10 days out from Lockdown, right? The main event title match has barely any juice to it, and Bully Ray admitted as such in the opening segment. Impact has reduced its major, live pay-per-view count to four, so the main events should matter, right? It would be one thing if Bully vs. Aces and Eights were in the main event slot with Jeff Hardy's title defense being a second stage match. That's fine. However, the new era of TNA PPVs starting off with a match where not only the title is the secondary focus but the actual Champion is too? This is vanity booking distilled from the worst of WCW's most garish stories.
My guess is they're going either to throw some halfhearted attempt at building heat between Champion and challenger next week, or they're going to use the PPV to set up a SWERVE for television, which again, with 4 PPVs is the most bass-ackward way of thinking. I dunno, but when you've got a company whose announcers seem to be more enamored with MMA more than wrestling, when you have a company that seems to be more desirous of you tweeting the goddamn figurehead owner than paying attention to stories, when you have a company that insists on inserting people with zero range of acting ability in front of the camera to try and instill gravitas like they did with AJ Styles' wife, then maybe we just shouldn't be surprised at how they go about doing some things.
Ah, I'm sorry. I just watched the show tonight in a really ornery mood, and honestly, the show wasn't nearly as sleepy as it was during its stay in England. If you put this show in front of one of those crowds in the last month, maybe they'd have been onto something. The Gut Check match was really spiffy. I kinda figured Ivelisse Velez would have held up her end of the bargain given the amount of hype behind her, but I was also impressed by Lei'd Tapa. She certainly didn't get her wrestling ability from her uncle, that's for sure. Austin Aries and Hernandez had themselves a nice little tete-a-tete as well.
The main event was nice too, but we're 10 days out from Lockdown, right? The main event title match has barely any juice to it, and Bully Ray admitted as such in the opening segment. Impact has reduced its major, live pay-per-view count to four, so the main events should matter, right? It would be one thing if Bully vs. Aces and Eights were in the main event slot with Jeff Hardy's title defense being a second stage match. That's fine. However, the new era of TNA PPVs starting off with a match where not only the title is the secondary focus but the actual Champion is too? This is vanity booking distilled from the worst of WCW's most garish stories.
My guess is they're going either to throw some halfhearted attempt at building heat between Champion and challenger next week, or they're going to use the PPV to set up a SWERVE for television, which again, with 4 PPVs is the most bass-ackward way of thinking. I dunno, but when you've got a company whose announcers seem to be more enamored with MMA more than wrestling, when you have a company that seems to be more desirous of you tweeting the goddamn figurehead owner than paying attention to stories, when you have a company that insists on inserting people with zero range of acting ability in front of the camera to try and instill gravitas like they did with AJ Styles' wife, then maybe we just shouldn't be surprised at how they go about doing some things.