By John Moore, ProWrestling.net Staffer (@liljohnm)
Impact Wrestling Hits
The Motor City Machine Guns vs. Chris Bey and Jay White: Great match as you would expect from a Guns vs. Bullet Club match. The Guns need to teach classes on tag team wrestling because they are really good at building up a match from slow to intense over the span of a match. Bey and White have held their end of good tag team wrestling too even though they’ve been put together recently. I liked the ending sequence where White’s goal was to make sure what happened last time didn’t happen again. In fact, he used that to block a visual pinfall by Sabin. The Bullet Club guys heeling it up by the end gives the Guns a good excuse for a rematch. Can’t argue against that because that match should be stellar.
Josh Alexander vs. Madman Fulton: Good, simple, and effective stuff. Impact used to fall into the folly of every match having to be “competitive” to fill in TV time. I’m glad they’re regularly going with squash matches every once in a while to build up-and-coming stars. Good storytelling with Alexander being furious over his wife getting tackled by Moose. I wonder if they’ll also go with a Fulton and Austin breakup soon with Austin leaving Fulton high and dry.
Jonathan Gresham vs. Kenny King: A good match with Gresham able to showcase his unique technical style in a regular wrestling match (as opposed to Pure Rules). King’s a damn good wrestler himself. Too bad he never really clicked in terms of being higher than mid-card because he’s a good wrestler and good talker as showcased in the pre match promo he performed. I’m still a bit weary of Honor No More taking so many losses. They’re supposed to be the badass invading faction and the only one of them actually getting clean wins is Impact Wrestling regular Eddie Edwards. Can we give Matt Taven a win and give Mike Bennett a mic, please?
Kaleb Konley and the IInspiration: Despite the match being pretty missable, I continue to think they’ve done a fine job telling the goofy Kaleb Konley and Influence storyline where they’re questioning his allegiance. This is comedy done well with a bit of an intriguing story as opposed to Impact’s usual method of running a bad joke into the ground.
Impact Wrestling Misses
“Good Brothers” Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson vs. Zicky Dice and Johnny Swinger: Soooo, are the Good Brothers babyfaces? I don’t think so? White and Bey are feuding with the Guns and Guerrillas of Destiny, so I assume Bullet Club are heels right? On top of that, The Good Brothers have been stuck in stooge-heel mode ever since becoming Kenny Omega’s stooges when Impact and AEW had the crossover. The match itself was fine and I’ve been hoping we’d see the throwback Swinger and Dice tag team since Dice was signed to Impact. The confusion over the Good Brothers alignment, combined with the Good Brothers being uninteresting for a good while made this segment feel a bit mute.
Knockouts Battle Royal: Despite there being a lot of talented wrestlers in the ring, the battle royal was a bit dull, clunky, and put-together. I wonder if they should have waited until the PPV for the Chelsea Green turn so they could have Mickie as Tasha’s challenger leading up to it? (At the same time, maybe they only have access to Nick Aldis for the Multiverse show?). I do like Rosemary as a good first challenger. She’s immensely popular, and at the same time she’s not someone Impact is necessarily going to put the title on. I wouldn’t mind Tasha beating her clean just to put some heat behind Tasha?
Bhupinder Gujjar vs. Aiden Prince: Impact continues to give Bhupinder Gujjar an obligatory 10 minutes or so on a weekly basis. Again, no knock against the guy. He looks like he could be a big start two years from now if trained right. For now he’s just very generic and bland. Not to mention, his finisher looks very dull. It looks like he’s just falling from the second rope. The positive highlight of this segment is Brian Myers at his personal announce table and subsequent running away from W Morrissey.
Next Week’s Impact: Ugh. They actually announced that next week’s Impact show is going to be one of those episodes where they take a comedy skit (WWE’s Southpaw Regional Wrestling in this case) and try to stretch out a potentially unfunny joke for two hours. Impact has been doing so good too with minimizing their esoteric jokes in favor of good wrestling and good jokes (jokes in short spurts). I feel like advertising Throwback Throwdown is just anti-hype. If I knew that the Thanksgiving episode was going to be two hours of Wrestle House and had I not been reviewing the show, I would have avoided it completely.
Be the first to comment