1. TNA’s idea with the new set seems to be “if one screen looks cool in WWE, many screens will look really cool!” I don’t know. It looks nice and everything, but it almost seems like they’re trying too hard to look like a big time company. Of course, I’m trying too hard to find fault with them when I’m critiquing the damn set, so I guess we’re even. But it does set off my “they’re really trying to be another WWE brand” sense. Yes, that’s an actual sense I have.
2. I sort of like that they’ve turned the Machine Guns in to compulsive douche bags. I don’t know, it amuses me that they’ll just act like jerks for no reason. It was really nice to see them have a big presence in the first hour of the show. I do have to imagine that any viewers that TNA might have attracted by accident in the last month or two would be wondering why these jobbers were so important to Joe and AJ’s war, though.
3. They kept talking about the Main Event Mafia’s 75 years of experience during the show. That doesn’t make them sound like legends, it makes them sound decrepit. I don’t know, maybe it would cause less of a snarky knee jerk reaction in me if Kevin Nash didn’t look like the world’s tallest senior citizen with his gray hair.
4. Christy Hemme is not the person to work with the Beautiful People and make them look like decent workers, so that made the Knockouts Tag not good. I did like her freaking out on Kip James, though. That was pretty funny.
5. So, now we’ve got serious Eric Young. They did a really good job establishing that, from his not acting goofy with JB backstage, to not being afraid of his own pyro, to his actually wrestling better/less goofily. So, that could be interesting.
6. Business Jackie Moore is pretty hot. Yeah, I felt like that deserved its own thought.
7. The Guns vs. Volador and Tanahashi was a very fun, fast paced match. It reminded me a lot of a random WCW Cruiserweight match, so it’s nice to see TNA fill that void again. It would be better if they did it every week again, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
8. Abyss vs. Angle was pretty much their usual match at half speed. I like their usual match enough that it still worked for me well enough, though. Kurt scratching his back, despite the psychology and everything, looked pretty stupid, though. So, that’s what bugged me, not the slow match.
9. I can see why it’s not supposed to look the young guys look bad, because they were jumped from behind and he had a weapon and everything, but still; the faces look really weak when Scott Steiner and his lead pipe can take all of them out by himself. Although it also makes the Main Event Mafia look superflous. I mean, what does he need the other guys for if he and his pipe can take everyone under 45 on the roster down?
10. They are doing a good job of making Sting seem conflicted; he feels what he’s doing what he has to do, but he hasn’t become a total heel like the other guys. So, that’s great character work, but it’s sort of lost in how much the angle seems to be making the young guys look like idiots and jobbers in attempt to stack the deck against them.
One of my problems with TNA is that while I often like the ideas for their big storylines, the actual execution never really works. The idea of a fight between two different generations of wrestlers really intersts me, even if they did do it before in WCW (and apparently in Japan). Mainly ecause it happened before in WCW and didn’t work that well. Of course, I’m the idiot who thought “Hey, TNA (with Vince Russo writing) can do a storyline that WCW (with Vince Russo writing) didn’t get right the first time better!”
I dunno, maybe I’m just jerking my knee too much and not letting the thing play out well enough before burying it, but to be fair, TNA has a pretty consistent track record of utter failure.
