The Impact Crater 09.28.06

The show opens with the Angle video package from the pay per view. I’d give my opinion on his signing, but everything that could be said on that subject has been said by this point. I’m sure my sarcastic comments over the next several weeks will accurately depict my opinion anyway.

We go to Don and Mike, who show brief clips from the pay per view. The Ultimate X Match and Joe’s petty larceny of the title belt are put over, as is the new time slot that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. Then there’s a bit of hype for the main event of the next pay per view, and we’re quickly rushed off to the ring.

Match Numero Uno: Jeff Jarrett vs. Lance Hoyt

Double J jumps Lance as he comes out of the fallopian tube and sends him hard in to the barricade. JJ is in street clothes, but Tenay is putting this over like a scheduled match. He’s got a leather strap and puts it to use before taking a chair to the Big Texan’s gut. Now it’s time for crowd brawling, and Jarrett’s tighty whities make another appearance on television. Somebody buy this man a better belt. Hoyt gets sent in to the plywood wall that gets broken every other week, and he’s whipped at ringside. Jarrett then starts choking him on the apron, and the referee finally calls for the bell. Unfortunately he’s throwing the match out instead of starting it. I’ve always loved the old heel tactic in which you assault somebody before the match and then pin him thee seconds after the opening bell. Oh well, we can’t always get what we want. Jeff gets the mic, and he shows off the marks on his back from the Fans’ Revenge Match. Tenay claims that the marks are from “four days ago” when this was really taped the night after. Jarrett threatens Jim Cornette, stating that Corny needs to get him his belt back, otherwise Samoa Joe will be left laying in a pool of his own blood. I don’t know why Cornette is actually supposed to care about Joe’s well being or believe that he can’t handle himself against Jarrett.

Oh yeah, and the “match” took thirty seconds, so I’m not going to worry about providing any analysis.

Now we’ve got a press conference for Bound for Glory. Lex Luger and Buff Bagwell are in attendance, and they do a good job of pretending that they actually give a shit. I would too if this was the only television exposure I could get in wrestling. Jim Cornette is presiding over the conference, and he announces a few matches. Samoa Joe will take on Raven, Spike Dudley, and Abyss in a Monster’s Ball Match. Low Ki will defend the X Title against Chris Sabin. And, of course, Sting will face Jeff Jarrett in a title versus career match.

After a commercial, Austin Aries makes a brief appearance, letting us know that we will be “Starr Struck” at Bound for Glory.

Match Numero Dos: Samoa Joe vs. Raven

It’s a stare down to start, as though this match actually means anything in 2006. The two men trade forearms and then chops. Guess who wins that battle. Raven responds by taking Joe off his feet with a clothesline, but the Samoan fires off a series of knees and an enzuguri that somehow results in Raven hanging upside down in the ropes. Joe kicks him out of the ring and goes for a suicide dive, but Raven blocks the move with a chair. Then Spike Dudley hits the ring and lays out Raven with a chain-assisted neckbreaker, which the referee missed because he was tending to Joe. That allows the Submission Machine to lock in the Kokina Clutch, and Raven taps out. After the bell, Spike gets in Joe’s face only to be demolished with the hundred hand slap and press slammed out of the ring and on to Raven. Abyss confronts Joe at this point, and the monster actually gets the advantage for a second until the Samoan rallies and sends him out of the ring with a HUGE Yakuza kick. Then, as the other three men brawl, Joe decides that he’s going to leave. As he walks out, Cornette asks to get the belt back, but the uncrowned champ refuses.

Match Thoughts: Another thirty second special. I don’t know who this referee was, but he had to be the most visually impaired zebra in wrestling, as he missed both a run-in that happened three inches away from him and a chairshot that happened directly in his field of vision. DUD

Upon coming back from the break, we’re treated to a video recap of the Christian vs. Rhino feud, focusing on the War Machine’s “serious head injury.” So, when is Sting going to get his revenge on Christian for turning on him? Just asking. We also get footage of Rhino from the press conference that occurred earlier, as he challenges Cage to an “Eight Mile Streetfight” at the pay per view. I would’ve gone with the “Mom’s Spaghetti on a Poll Match,” but that’s just me.

Match Numero Tres: The Dudley Boys vs. Brandon Thomaselli & Vaughn Doring

The jobbers are ambushed before the bell, and Scott is tossed from the ring quickly. A side slam/legdrop hits from the Duds, and a D-Von avalanche connects amid “welcome back” chants. Doring manages to get in to the match but is shoulderblocked down to set up the tag to Bubba. He hits a flapjack and a German suplex before kicking Thomaselli off of the apron. There’s the 3D, there’s the pin, and that’s all she wrote. Now it’s promo time from Bubba, and he claims that they’re going to be working their way up the ladder to a Tag Team Title shot, starting at the bottom of the ladder. Didn’t we just see this angle with the Naturals, and didn’t it take them all of two matches to actually get back to “the top?” If the Dudleys can’t make it up the rankings quicker than the friggin’ Naturals did, they’re going to look like tremendous losers.

Match Thoughts: Well, it was thirty seconds again . . . but at least it didn’t feature a referee who should’ve had a dog and a cane in the ring with him. 1/4*, though I’ll give their next match a DUD if Bubba doesn’t find a tanning bed between now and then.

Now it’s Lex Luger footage from the press conference, and he looks like he’s pushing sixty. Bagwell is still managing to look decent, though. They both claim that Sting will be victorious at the pay per view.

After that it’s backstage fun with Jeff Jarrett and Eric Young. JJ tries to give Eric the job of getting his belt back from Samoa Joe, but Young actually stands up to Jarrett and says that he’s not going to do it. Hm, interesting to see where that one will go.

Match Numero Cuatro: Low Ki, Johnny Devine, & Alex Shelley vs. Jay Lethal, Sonjay Dutt, & Chris Sabin

Fortunately TNA shows a little bit of restraint and refrains from showing replays of any of the ridiculous Jackass stunts from the faces’ last several matches. Christian joins Tenay and West on commentary during the opening sequence of the match, distracting me from Alex Shelley and Jay Lethal’s armbars. They do a double kip up amid dueling “Shelley” and “Lethal” chants. Now we’ve got tags to Ki and Dutt, and the cameras still keep cutting back to Christian every ten seconds. To make things even worse, Rhino runs out from the back but gets held off by security. Now we’ve got a commercial break. Jesus, this is a mess. I expected everything to be cleared up when we came back from break, but it actually gets WORSE as Rhino and Cage start brawling. All of this is intercut with footage from the match. When the WWE castoffs finally get herded to the back, Johnny Devine hits an edge-o-matic on Sonjay to set up Shelley’s double kneelift in the corner. Dutt makes a comeback by avoiding a charge and hitting a missile dropkick, which gives us a hot tag to Sabin. He dispatches both Paparazzi, including an enzuguri on Shelley and a fireman’s carry DDT on Devine. Ki breaks up a pinfall and beats the hell out of Lethal but gets dispatched by Dutt. Shelley cuts off his momentum with a dropkick, and now it’s Ki and Sabin. Chris gets a kick to the gut, and a briefcase is thrown in to the ring. It results in mass confusion, and Devine is rolled up for the pinfall. What does a briefcase have to do with Jackass anyway? And since when are babyfaces such big fans of using foreign objects?

Word from the tapings was that the crowd began chanting “No More Jackass” at this point, though it doesn’t make the air. The audio definitely sounded edited.

Match Thoughts: I can’t provide an honest rating for this one because of all the extracurricular activities that were going on during the first half of the match. I don’t know what purpose of having that go on during a match was. You could’ve just as easily done that segment in two minutes, done the match in two minutes, and not overlapped them at all. The way they did it, neither event was actually the focus of the segment, and both of them seemed less important as a result. The half of the match that we did get to see was your standard X Division “men hitting moves on each other in rapid succession” match, and it could have been good. Unfortunately, I would’ve needed to see the first half the match to determine that, because so much of this stuff is nothing without the buildup.

Contrasting with that crap is an EXCELLENT video package on the tag team Ultimate X Match from the pay per view. It makes it look like the most spectacular encounter in months. We go to some press conference footage as well, and Cornette lets us know that we’ll be seeing yet another rematch between the two teams at Bound for Glory. This time it’s in a cage. After the video package they just showed, these guys could feud for the rest of eternity and I would be perfectly fine with it.

Upon the completion of our final commercial break, the Bound for Glory press conference has spilled out to the ring. Cornette is there with “wrestling legends” Lex Luger and Buff Bagwell, who have apparently been training with Sting. Seeing Cornette putting these guys over after hearing some of the shoot comments he’s made about them is surreal. Jimmy briefly talks about the BFG title match, but the topic quickly shifts to Kurt Angle. Our Olympic Hero will be appearing at the pay per view as a “special ringside enforcer” for the Jeff Jarrett versus Sting matchup. That prompts a run-in by Double J, and I’ve really seen enough of him for one show. He confronts Cornette about the belt situation. Corny says that the easy solution to Jarrett’s problem is taking the belt back himself, and insults are traded. Bagwell and Luger get involved, but Jarrett takes both of them out. That’s the closes that I’ve seen either of them come to putting somebody over in about fifteen years. Finally Joe runs out to avenge Totally Buff, and he and Jarrett trade punches for two seconds before the show goes off the air.

Overall

About 50% of this episode was a big step in the right direction, and about 50% of this episode was a major step backwards for the promotion. On one hand, after several months of treating him as second rate, the company has firmly gotten behind Joe again and is taking affirmative steps towards making him look like a main event star. He was the focus of the show and essentially got put over Abyss, Spike, and Raven in sixty seconds, though it was done in such a way that it doesn’t completely destroy interest in their pay per view match. In addition to that, the company did a fine job of laying the groundwork for the next pay per view. Some of the less important matches were just announced in a sentence or two, while the top bouts actually got prolonged periods of attention.

However, on the other side of things, the pacing of this show still needs some serious work. There was just too much going on, and it was never more apparent than it was in the final match of the evening. Had the company just trimmed one angle from the show, they would have freed up so much time that could have resulted in fewer segments being overbooked. For example, was the Jeff Jarrett/Lance Hoyt “match” really all that necessary? Jarrett could have said everything he did after that beating in thirty seconds at the top of the hour, and then several minutes would have been open to give Christian/Rhino their own segment instead of having them fight over a perfectly servicable X Division match. With so many things happening at once, Impact feels like it’s being booked for five year old boys with ADHD, and it’s starting to give me a headache.

So, though TNA is showing flashes of greatness and has over the last several weeks, it seems like they can never get everything right at once. There’s always several great things on the show that are bogged down by several horrible things on the show. The primary flaw always seems to be that the pace is too fast. Who knows, maybe two hours will actually help them eliminate that one . . . and we’ll have a test run of that theory come November.