By John Moore
TNA Impact Hits
Opening Segment: Drew Galloway probably should have turned up the ham levels as he is totally capable of, but he was fine in this first segment as TNA Champion. The star of the opening segment is the same star of the past few months on Pop TV and that’s Matt Hardy, who was great here as the whining former champ and didn’t miss a beat even after dropping the title. Jeff Hardy kept it short and sweet on his end and he added to the segment. The was to set up a target on the new World champ and they did a good job at that.
Eddie Edwards vs. Crazzy Steve: Eddie Edwards gets a chance to shine as a singles star and he did a good job here. Crazzy Steve also gets a chance to show his new attitude after we saw him as a comedy clown all of the past few years. Steve can absorb a few losses due to inflicting pain seeming more important to him than a win, but hopefully losing matches isn’t the norm for him. Eddie gained here for escaping this match with the numbers game against him which definitely gives him credibility.
Bobby Lashley: Lashley is continuing his streak of good single promo segments. He’s coming off as intimidating and as a bully. Lashley is setting himself up as a dominating force like he was at the end of 2014, and this time he’s doing a good job building up the character himself. It also looks like they are dropping the idea of putting Gabi from Tough Enough with him, which I’m totally happy with because strangely enough, she was looking like a worse in-ring promo than Lashley.
No. 1 contender gauntlet match: While the TNA version of the Royal Rumble was a bit quick, TNA can sometimes do a better job than WWE in getting stories out of the match. In this match, we got the shift of Mike Bennett to Ethan Carter III to keep those two occupied. We got EC3 continuing to fight the odds against Spud and Tyrus. We saw seeds planted for a potential Bram and EY breakup. We got Lashley and D’Angelo Dinero progression, and ultimately we got Jeff Hardy available to set up a showdown match with Drew Galloway. This was an efficient use of time to forward many singles stories in the TNA roster.
TNA Impact Misses
Drew Galloway and EC3: I’m going to group these two as disappointing in their follow-up from last week. Galloway should have had a babyface celebration with the fans as is his character. What landed him in this Miss spot was him actually making it look like he’s some sort of savior to TNA, to make TNA better again. He did it later on in the night when he pointed out the excess of talking segments in Impact. EC3 is disappointing so far in that he’s coming off as a cheesy action hero with his ability to give great promos marred by this character. He’s starting to show signs of the babyface Derrick Bateman character and I hope he doesn’t go full-on Derrick Bateman.
Beer Money Inc vs. BroMans: This match was marred in disappointment. The match quality was okay, but it’s easy to expect more out of a legacy open challenge. Another disappointment comes in the reunion of BroMans. BroMans were nauseating to watch in early 2015. At least they don’t have their DJ as of now. I wonder if this was a one-off, but BroMans might stick around after the next tapings due to the curse of the tag team titles guaranteed to continue to decimate the tag division with the certain departure of Bobby Roode.
Jade vs. Marti Bell vs. Rebel: The good news is they might be ending Dollhouse, which has had some bad luck with their leader situation. The bad news was we got this really terrible match to watch. Imagine what a Kelly Kelly vs. Eva Marie match would look like and this is what you get. In fact, the match was so bad that the Impact cameras decided to spend more camera time on the broadcast team, which was actually more entertaining than the match. The positive highlight was Pope giving this hilarious grin at Maria every time the camera panned to him.
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