1. The Briscoes talking about having to pick up dead chickens and what not farming? Yeah. Give me more of that. Every time they mention a “day in the life” of the Briscoes in an interview it makes me wish they actually filmed an actual day in the life segment.
2. The music for the All Night Express opens with Al Pacino starting his inches speech from Any Given Sunday before their music hits. Awesome. Need the rest.
2a. Inch by inch, play by play. Until we’re finished. We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell… one inch at a time. Now I can’t do it for ya, I’m too old. I look around, I see these young faces and I think, I mean, I’ve made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I, uh, I’ve pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror. You know, when you get old, in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that’s… that’s… that’s a part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losin’ stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying! I’ll tell you this, in any fight it’s the guy whose willing to die whose gonna win that inch. And I know, if I’m gonna have any life anymore it’s because I’m still willing to fight and die for that inch, because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face. Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now I think ya going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. Your gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it your gonna do the same for him. That’s a team, gentlemen, and either, we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That’s football guys, that’s all it is. Now, what are you gonna do?
2b. Told ya’ll I needed the rest! Hope you’re still with me after dropping a 400 word movie quote in this joint. I had considered hacking it up so it didn’t take as much space, but, decided better of it.
3. The Briscoes and All Night Express match opens the show. We get a 10 minute sprint attempt. Not terrible, and the type of thing they should definitely go for rather than 20 minute epic attempts. I don’t think it was all that spectacular in execution. It wasn’t bad, it just seemed a bit disjointed in a lot of moments. Fairly paint by numbers tag other than that. Nothing real creative around the hot tag and nothing really stepping it up to look past that. There were times where this clicked and it was absolutely stylistically the match ROH should shoot for with their tag team scene. At other points it just didn’t seem to know where it was going.
4. Match wise, I didn’t mind the finish and didn’t think it took away from the quality of the match. If you’re going to do marquee matchups on TV instead of strong against weak, you need finishes like this. It wasn’t terribly creative, but, it wasn’t terrible. Kevin Kelly and Nigel McGuinness were a bit of a distraction in it, however. Kelly whining about how dude might fall on the announce table and what not.
5. Charlie Haas says they were bred to wrestle. They certainly weren’t bred to sit there and talk to me about themselves in a manner that makes me give a shit, that’s for sure. They talk about their amateur wrestling backgrozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
6. Cornette in the house. Standing in the ring aisle instead of the ring. Such a change! Cornette says the Briscoes are the winners, but, neither team is the number one contenders because of the low-blow finish. He was quick in the announcement, too, because we need more commercials, baby!
7. Truth Martini actually speaks this episode. Completely unnecessary. Fuck that dude. Terribleness. Truth looks like he’d be more comfortable slamming red bulls and trying to hack the hell out of some mainframes than kickin’ it ringside. They try to blend a couple segments into one here. First, Truth and Michael Elgin and then Eddie and Davey about their rematch. This whole thing was kind of weird and hopefully not foreshadowing Eddie joining the House of Truth.
8. Eddie has Rocky Balboa before his music. Good effort, but, really, you’re gonna drop some Rocky from the 2006 movie? You’re not gonna go with anything from the original classics? Well, at least it wasn’t the Tommy Gunn “You don’t own me! You don’t own me! Nobody does! I want my respect” line from Rocky V. Actually, that would be kind of funny…
8a. Kind of wish instead of just having balding as a defining feature they trotted Elgin out like ECW did back in the day with the Extreme Shah Hack Meyers.
9. Michael Elgin and Eddie Edwards is the Main Event. This is decent in points. The point where Eddie Edwards’ Die Hard nickname is explained was a bit lame because…
a. Eddie doesn’t wrestle barefoot and bloody.
b. Eddie doesn’t show a proficiency at spotting fake IDs that would prompt Kevin Kelly to say on the broadcast, “”could be a fucking bartender for all we know.”
c. Eddie at no point uses his lit cigarette to ignite a trail of leaking fuel, that then heads up to the plane, which then blows that shit up.
9a. There are some promising moments in this one, but, they mostly get traded for nonsense down the stretch. Elgin does a decent job targeting the back. There wasn’t much transition to it and they went to commercial, but, surprisingly Elgin was still working the back when they came back. Eddie works a bit more imperiled than Davey did a week prior, but, he Daveys-up and that doesn’t last long. I did like the moment where Elgin just runs through two chops from Eddie after they spent the prior part of the match praising how strong those chops from Eddie are.
10. So, at a point when Eddie might have injured his elbow, Kevin Kelly mentions this possible injury. Of course there’s no follow up to it for the last couple minutes of the match. That’d be CRAZY! Roderick Strong hits the ring after. Apparently he wants to stare down Eddie Edwards, because a staredown might get him a Title shot at Davey quicker than losing a non-title match with Davey would. Makes sense. But, we end with Nigel McGuinness hopping into the ring, so, that could be interesting down the line.
Would it kill them to have three 10-12 minute matches and cut some of the bland talking out, though? Let the matches create the characters. That was something ROH used to know how to do.
