The Impact Crater 12.27.07

Welcome, one and all, to the Impact Crater. Before we get rolling with our breakdown of this week’s show, I have a couple of announcements to make. First of all, I will unfortunately be missing out on the first Impact of 2008. I will be out of town and unable to watch the show next week, though I’m leaving the Crater in the capable hands of Steve Cook. However, when I do return on January 10, I will have extra-special year in review material for 2007. In addition to the usual Impact review, I’ll run down what I consider to be the five best and worst Impact episodes of the, the best and worst angles, and the “most valuable” and “least valuable” players on the TNA roster. Be sure not to miss that column, as it should be a fun time.

Quick & Dirty Results

Segment #1: Ricky Banderas def. Low Ki
Segment #2: Christian/Kurt Angle/AJ Styles Interview Segment
Segment #3: The Murder City Machine Guns def. AJ Styles & Travis Tomko in a non-title match
Segment #4: Gail Kim, Talia Madison, & Angel Williams def. Jackie Moore, Roxxi LaVeaux, & ODB
Segment #5: Elix Skipper def. Samoa Joe by DQ
Segment #6: Frankie Kazarian/Dustin Rhodes Interview Segment
Segment #7: Christian & Booker T. def. Bobby Roode & Kurt Angle

The Main Stuff

Angle Numero Uno: AJ is the New Dominic Mysterio

I’ve actually seen a lot of praise out there for the feud that’s been brewing between Kurt Angle and Christian Cage. Frankly, I don’t understand all of the love, particularly after tonight’s episode.

My biggest problem with the angle is that, as I’ve noted in the past, it lacks a clearly defined face and a clearly defined heel. Though periodically there has been a face versus face match which has done well on pay per view, I have yet to see or read about a heel vs. heel rivalry that has done anything other than tanked business-wise. Unfortunately, a heel vs. heel feud is something that TNA has decided to do in this particular situation. The fact that the heel/heel structure isn’t the worst part of this situation, though. The worst thing is that, despite the fact that both men are clearly labeled as heels in the infamous leaked Impact script, neither of them will consistently play that role. Last week, Cage looked like a full-on face when he popped out of a comically oversized present to save Santa Claus form an Angle beating. This week, however, we had the Instant Classic running down AJ Styles with a promo that was tailor made for a promotion’s top heel, taking credit for things that AJ achieved even before he aligned himself with Cage. Heel versus heel is a terrible idea, but, if you’re going to do it you may as well commit to it instead of having your characters waver in a manner disturbingly similar to the participants in this year’s horrendous Samoa Joe vs. Kurt Angle feud.

Though Angle and Cage may be the men wrestling each other at the pay per view, they were not the primary focus of the show. Instead, the primary focus was AJ Styles and which side he would choose in the Angle/Christian war. What I’m having a hard time figuring out about this storyline is why Angle and Cage actually want Styles to be on their side. The guy is a goofball. The guy is a moron. The guy is basically a glorified clone of Eric Young. If I were assembling a stable with the goal of dominating a professional wrestling promotion, my top priority would not be aligning myself with a man who is so stupid that a few weeks ago he was unable to realize that he was pinning one of his opponents. Why aren’t these men more concerned with wooing somebody like Scott Steiner, who is both a fine wrestler and not a mental midget? Hell, even Travis Tomko is not getting as much attention as Styles, and he’s clearly portrayed as the more effective half of their tag team.

Besides, what about Kurt Angle and Christian vying for AJ Styles’ affections is supposed to make people want to watch them wrestle on pay per view? Is AJ going to be up for grabs in the match? Is he going to be stuck up on a pole with the first man who can retrieve him being declared the winner? Though I wouldn’t put this past some of the men who currently book TNA, my gut tells me that it won’t be happening. If AJ isn’t going to factor in to the pay per view match in any meaningful way, he shouldn’t be such a huge focus of the build to the match. What should be a major focus is the build up to the contest? How about the World Title! That will be on the line when they wrestle, after all. The funny thing is that at least somebody in the company realizes this, as when you watch the Final Resolution commercials that air during the Impact broadcast, they talk almost exclusively about Angle and Christian’s history in the TNA World Title scene with not a single mention of AJ Styles or Travis Tomko. This is the second time that something like this happened, as the commercials for Bound for Glory told a far better story for the show’s Sting vs. Kurt Angle main event than anything on Impact did. Maybe we should move the production team member responsible for these commercials over to creative.

Angle Numero Dos: Joe’s a Shooter, Man, Like the Dan Gable. You Don’t Know About Dan Gable? YOU ASK KURT ANGLE ABOUT MR. DAN GABLE!

So, almost one full month after Samoa Joe cut his infamous worked shoot promo on Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, TNA has finally gone out of their way to continue the angle. (Before I get any angry e-mails, yes I did see Joe bitching about his contract for the last two weeks. However, this was the first week in which they actively portrayed the company as having a problem with what Joe was saying instead of Joe’s whining being a one-way street.)

I’m of two minds on this angle as it continues to progress. On one hand, I enjoy what Joe did in the ring with Elix Skipper, as Joe has dropped far too many falls over the course of the last six months and needs to be rebuilt as a credible threat in the ring if the company truly does want to eventually make him in to a World Champion. A pinfall win over Skipper probably would have been better than the disqualification that we got here, but that’s a small point. Yet, no matter how good Joe’s portrayal in-ring was, I hate the malcontent gimmick. Compare this, for example, to the “rebel” character that Steve Austin successfully did several years ago. Austin was unhappy with his position in the World Wrestling Federation. In response, he kicked a bunch of ass, took names, and used force to get exactly what he wanted. Fans went wild for it, in large part because Austin was in a situation that they could relate to (a conflict with an employer), though he actually had the ability to use extreme measures to resolve the problem . . . measures that the fans themselves wished that they could use. That’s not what we have with Samoa Joe. Instead of proactively dealing with his problems like Austin did, Joe’s character just sits on his ample posterior and moans about how much he hates life. People won’t get in to this nearly as much as they did Austin, because the fantasy element is gone. Joe isn’t doing anything that fans who are frustrated with their jobs can’t do, and that is where this angle falls on its face.

And the Rest . . .

~ It’s certainly odd to see Low Ki getting more screen time after his release than he got while he was still with the company. On some level, I understand the idea of using him to put people over on his way out, but is he really valuable in that role when he’d been a persona non grata for the last several months?

~ So Petey Williams and Scott Steiner are now feuding over those insufferable Feast or Fired briefcases. If you’re Petey, wouldn’t you be doing everything in your power to get your World Title shot so that you don’t face the possibility of losing it to Steiner?

~ Dustin Rhodes is now claiming that he doesn’t know why Frankie Kazarian attacked him last week. Apparently Dustin Rhodes has no friends, because if he did somebody would have already answered this question for him by playing a tape of the rat-bagging that he and Johnny Stamboli busted out on Frankie a few weeks back.

~ Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve had some readers yell at me because they don’t understand what I mean when I ask what the reason for a gimmick match is. As I tried to explain last week, there has historically been a kayfabe reason for a particular gimmick being selected for a contest. Recently, TNA hasn’t bothered with that sort of thing. They’ve just slapped gimmicks on to matches with no rhyme or reason, seemingly at random. Well, if you still don’t understand what I mean about there being a REASON for a specific gimmick being used in a match, we got the perfect example of it this week. The Amazing Kong and Gail Kim were booked in a no disqualification match for the next pay per view. I immediately knew that this was because their last match had ended in a disqualification. It’s not a no disqualification match simply because the two women are rivals. That is the kind of logical, old school booking that makes the women’s division the highlight of this show every week.

~ One of these days, Abyss needs to come out on an episode of Impact and read a blow-by-blow list of everything that’s ever happened in his life. That’s probably the only way to eliminate all of these “secrets” that Jim Mitchell keeps holding over his head.

Overall

I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’m just numb to TNA. I watched this week’s show, and, though I disliked all of the things that I noted above, I just don’t care. Perhaps the fact that I’m not walking away from this episode angry means that it’s not quite as bad as the episodes that infuriated me. Or maybe it means that I’m tired of critiquing a show that repeatedly has the exact same problems and a staff that is obviously unwilling to deal with those problems. Simply put, Impact is in need of a major overhaul, and hopefully we’ll see the beginnings of that in 2008.

Reader Feedback

We’ll kick things off with Dan H., who wants to talk about last week’s Christmas show:

Christ has to be rolling over in his grave, wherever that is. I have the perfect name for this episode of ‘Impact!’: “Night of 1000 Gimmicks”. Although they do want to be the alternative to the WWE, I guess an entire episode of gimmick matches works, so long as they don’t have 86 ‘Last Man Standing’ matches a year they should be fine. To my surprise Ryan, you were actually a lot more forgiving on this episode than I thought you would be. YOU’RE BECOMING SOFT! I kid, I kid. It’s the holidays.

Lastly, (I swear that cannot be a real word) when Angle was on the mic and Cage came out to beat his ass, it looked as if the booking actually figured out how to build a feud, guess they took the reigns away from Mantel, and gave them to someone else. Yeah, I decided to cut Russo some slack for the holidays, but once January 2nd rolls around Russo hating begins anew.

I wouldn’t be so sure about TNA having the “how to build a feud” thing figured out. Though I obviously haven’t seen next week’s show, I have read the infamous leaked script which lays out the January 3 episode. According to that document, Christian Cage is still a heel. The most basic building block of the typical wrestling rivalry is to make sure that you have one good guy and one bad guy. Apparently some people behind the scenes in TNA still don’t understand the fact that there has never been a successful heel versus heel rivalry at the top of a card in a major wrestling promotion.

As far as the women’s division is concerned, I’ve been saying for a while that it’s consistently the most entertaining part of TNA programming, and it’s also obviously light years ahead of what WWE has been producing with its women. It’s not just a bunch of goofs on the internet who have that opinion either, as there have now been several weeks in which the segment involving the women has drawn TNA’s highest quarter hour rating.

And don’t you remember the LAX/Scott Steiner alliance? Steiner did once cut a promo about loving “the Puerto Rican people” because they saved his life. Of course, TNA failed to put two and two together on this issue during the Steiner/LAX/Booker match, but that’s hardly their greatest sin of all time.

Chris has an issue with the commentary:

I think I figured out one of the major problems with the show: Don West. It’s not only the talking over interviews, the screaming or the talking like he’s running out of breath. No, it is the fact that he hardly ever uses the names for moves. Every thing is “a shot to the blahblahblah” or “what a move as he drops him on his yaddayadda”. It is even rubbing off on Tenay!

My least favorite West-ism is “He just creamed him!” which sounds semi-pornographic. Please find a new verb, Don.

From 411’s Andy “DivasRGr8” Critchell, who agrees with Dan’s assessment that I’m going soft:

Byers, You are much kinder to Impact this week than I expected. If anything, it shows that you are not biased against TNA as you are often accused. Anyway, I thought last night’s episode was freaking terrible. The ONLY good thing was the AJ/Kaz match and that’s only because both guys are awesome. The woman’s match was tolerable (Love & Sky looked really hot) but the Team 3-D match was utter crap, the cage match was way too short with that many people, and the hardcore match was completely offensive. As for the Christmas skits, I am just curious as to who exactly thought that stuff was funny because I certainly didn’t. If this was the best Impact in months then once again I’m glad that I often forget that Impact is even on Thursday nights.

Last week was definitely odd, as I watched Impact, wrote my fairly complimentary Crater, and then almost immediately went to bed. When I woke up, I learned that I was for once perhaps Impact’s least harsh critic. The hardcore bout in particular got a much worse treatment from most ‘ net writers than what I gave it, though in all honesty I’ve seen many recent Dustin Rhodes matches that were far worse. Some of the concepts within the match were definitely stupid (e.g. opening the “presents” in the ring when you have got a massive barbed wire tree ready to use), I thought that the actual athletic portions of the match were much better than the usual Abyss/Black Reign fare. If anything, I suppose that’s a condemnation of just how bad that feud has been in the ring.

And that does it for this week. I’ll see you all in fourteen days. Until then, check out my MySpace, where you can add me as a friend to receive a bulletin notification every time I add new content to 411.