Impact Wrestling Final Thoughts
May 25, 2016
By: Josh Boutwell of Wrestleview.com
After a couple of weeks of really average shows, in my opinion, Impact bounced back this week with a really fun show. It was balanced pretty well with promos and vignettes in the first hour and a lot more action in the second hour.
The opening segment with Matt Hardy was really weird as hell. I don’t mind the new look, like last week I like that Matt can continuously change his persona, but the accent has GOT to go. It is really weird, I mean what happened during that last match with Jeff? Did Jeff beat his ass all the way back to 1920 or something? The accent is just weird. I know the persona is supposed to be a nutjob but when you make yourself sound silly it is hard for anyone to take it serious. We get yet another unannounced gimmick match this week, straight out of the Vince Russo playbook, with a Ladder Match. It was even more stupid considering the show already had an Ultimate X Match on the card. The Ladder Match itself was short but perfectly fine for what it was designed for. Jeff could take a couple of decent bumps (he didn’t go overboard), they break the affiliation of Matt and the rest of #MattHardyBrand, and set up the Slammiversary match. It is going to be interesting to see where they go with Tyrus and Spud now. They could form a pretty entertaining tag team or Spud could try to be a bully type heel in the X-Division which is amusing to think about considering that he is small even for the X-Division.
The promo between Maria and Gail was okay though that type of stuff isn’t Gail’s strong suit while Maria excels at it. That’s kind of what makes this feud interesting. Maria is terrific with her promos but not very good in the ring while Gail is excellent in the ring and just okay at promos. Sienna is a different type of “monster” heel in the Knockouts. Havok and Awesome Kong were much more lumbering monsters that just kind of did power moves and stomped on their opponent (though early Kong could break out some pretty athletic spots at times) while Sienna is over six foot but much lighter than the other two and in turn able to add a lot more to the power moves. It looked like she might have tweaked her knee in the match so hopefully it wasn’t anything serious.
The stuff with Bro-Mans was really entertaining and Raquel looked hot as hell. It is so dumb that they completely dropped the stuff between her and Lashley with no explanation (that irritates me to no end) but at least they found a spot for her. She probably fits a lot better with the Bro Mans than she did with Lashley too.
The promo between Lashley and Galloway was excellent, I absolutely love shit talking Bobby Lashley. The way he messed with Galloway and kind of goaded him into coming to fight him by just simply calling him a “little bitch” for walking away was masterful. The brawl after the promo was great too and their match at Slammiversary is probably going to be epic. They have built this feud better than most main event feuds in TNA in the past five years.
Grado and Snow had an okay match with some entertaining spots but the big point of the match was the debut of the Tribunal. TNA really needs some more tag teams so it’s nice to see some fresh faces. The truth is I haven’t seen much of either of these guys in NXT, though I did see some of LaFort on Lance Storm’s Reality of Wrestling show a few years ago, so I’m not sure how good or bad they are. We’ll just have to wait and see.
The Ultimate X was a highlight reel, nonstop action match from the minute it started. That was the plus of it but the negative was that it was once again less than ten minutes. Why is it so hard for them to give these guys more than ten minutes every week? Not to mention that the Ultimate X is supposed to be an epic match in the X-Division and when they just throw out these random ones with no time to really build up to anything it just lessens the experience. They had to go out there and just hit spot after spot after spot because they had no time to build to the spots. It’s hard for anything to have an impact on the viewer because none of these big high spots are able to settle with the viewer before they are going right to the next spot. They could have crammed everything they did in this match, and probably a bit more, but it would have meant more with another ten minutes because they would have been able to build the excitement up to each big spot. Zema is really excelling right now in his role and I hope they continue to let him shine. I know I sound like a broken record every week but for some reason I think that if enough people complain about the lack of focus and time being given to the X-Division it might change (yes I know that is a pipe dream). There is just so much amazing, untapped potential here if they would just invest in it.
– Promo/Segment of the Night: Lashley-Drew
– Match of the Night: Ultimate X (**1/2)
– Overall Grade: B