By John Moore
TNA Impact Wrestling Hits
The Broken Hardys: It’s great that Matt Hardy and crew are going back to the Broken Universe and are now taking the Universe “on tour” with their quest for worldwide tag gold. Even though Matt cut the same promo in the ring that he has every single week this year, the return of Vanguard 1 and his new teleportation powers were a welcome addition to the show. Some people may not like the in-ring teleportation, but as I’ve said a lot of times with Broken Matt, it just works in their isolated universe (plus, I’ve seen worse teleportation effects live at Lucha Underground). Their walkthrough in Tijuana also made the Hardys seem like a worldwide phenomenon which is much better than the past few weeks of wheel spinning. On a relevant side tangent regarding this, I hope TNA tries to form a relationship with Konnan’s CLASH promotion, especially since they have Lucha Underground’s A-Team wrestlers now away from AAA/LU in super stars like Pentagon Jr, Fenix, and Sexy Star. I would also bring Konnan into the creative team if I were TNA since I truly believe that he was a pivotal part of Lucha Underground’s initial success and his departure caused that show to spiral downward.
Drew Galloway vs. Mahabali Shera: This might have been the second time I gave a Shera match a Hit and it might be Shera’s second best match in his entire TNA tenure (his best match was against Lashley at the World Title Series, his few good matches stand out because he usually sucks or faces bad wrestlers like the Tribunal). Galloway did a good job here in hiding Shera’s limitations because where most wrestlers walk into Shera’s telegraphed body slams, Galloway created a lot of movement to cover it up. Shera also kept up a good pace for once. The two downsides are that this match did more to get Galloway as a babyface because he’s doing such a good and unintentional job at getting the crowd behind him. The other downside is this Grand Championship nonsense. For good reason, Josh Mathews has to point out the flaws with the judging system (which seems to expose that they are “booking” matches which is counter-intuitive to how this was supposed to make wrestling seem more “realistic”).
The Helms Dynasty Split: One Hit goes to Impact giving Trevor Lee and Andrew Everett mic time with Lee not sounding like an idiot. Another Hit goes to the Helms and Lee beatdown on Everett to produce an intriguing matchup for the new X Division Champion. And the last Hit goes to this segment not being a six-plus person ladder match for the X Division Title, which we usually get every week if they have the time to squeeze one in.
Allie and Braxton Sutter: TNA did invest a decent amount of time on this show and I was about to hate it due to this story in a similar wheel-spinning mode as the Hardys have been in. Braxton Sutter’s bad acting actually made these segments fun. What keeps it a Hit is everyone around him are playing their roles very well with Maria, Allie, Mike Bennett, and Laurel doing a good job of keeping the story alive, which keeps Allie adorable due to her adorableness, and Sutter becomes “adorkable” due to his bad acting.
TNA Impact Wrestling Misses
Bobby Lashley vs. Eddie Edwards: From the match perspective, it was good, albeit nothing that much different from the many times we’ve gotten this match in the past. If I were to give TNA credit for something regarding this, they did a good job building the match throughout the show. The Miss comes from the ending sequence with Eddie pulling the ref’s leg and the extended period of everyone yelling “what are you doing?” That just lasted a bit too long and why couldn’t the ref have just rolled back in the ring after saying “what are you doing?” for over ten times. Richards also gave Eddie the weakest belt shot in the world by barely hitting him with the leather part. I’ve just seen so many botched moments involving the wolves, even though they have A-plus matches. You had to know Davey was turning heel the moment they had Angelina Love on TV. What I’m also not a fan of is we’re getting yet another on air couple feud? They did this with Mike Bennett and Cody Rhodes. Now the Wolves feud is going to be built around couples bickering?
Brandi Rhodes: Speaking of Brandi, she still hasn’t proven that she deserves the TV time she is given other than the fact that she’s married to Cody. She’s a pretty good talker, but there are just so many other women who could utilize that spot better such as Jade, Sienna, or even Brooke. This also halts Rosemary from having good matches because Brandi can’t wrestle yet. Where Brandi can be best utilized is maybe she can take on the Veda Scott role for Moose because Moose is in dire need of a mouthpiece.
Aron Rex vs. Robbie E: The match was fine in-ring, but everything around it just isn’t clicking. This is almost TNA admitting defeat in the Aron Rex babyface run by pairing him up with the former BroMan. They are still trying to draw heat before the match, but it’s drawing apathy. Is TNA trying to draw homophobic heat from the audience in 2017? The biggest negative is Rex has regressed to a level before he was Damien Mizdow. He’s back to Damien Magneto levels from when he was on WWE Main Event doing impersonations of people. If TNA wanted an impersonator they could have hired Charlie freakin’ Haas out of retirement.
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