BRM Reviews the 10/29/2021 Rampage (great... until the main event)

[Big Red Machine]

AEW WORLD TITLE ELIMINATOR SEMINFINAL MATCH: Bryan Danielson vs. Eddie Kingston- 8.5/10
The announcers (Excalibur, Starks, Taz, and Jericho) were quite irritating here. It was a bunch of different things, but it was all the kind of stuff that shows that they only did some very preliminary homework and didn’t actually think about anything. For example, the idea that there is “twenty years’ worth of history” between these two is false, because Dragon was in WWE for ten eleven years, not interacting with Kingston in the ring at all. Or Taz ascribing Kingston’s knowledge of Danielson’s neck issues to “their history” together, as if the neck issues were some long-time nagging thing that you’d have to be a long-time follower of indy wrestling to know about, rather than something that pretty much anyone who has been a wrestling fan over the past seven years knows about, because it caused him to miss several years of time and even officially retire, and all started when he was the world champion in the biggest wrestling company on the planet.
As you might imagine from what I said above, Kingston worked over Dragon’s neck. Dragon, for his part, worked over Kingston’s head with various strikes and suplexes. These two just beat the sh*t out of each other for over fifteen minutes and both just kept coming back because there was no way in hell they were going to let the other put them down. Dragon finally won by referee stoppage via elbows to the head in a triangle choke.
When we got back from a commercial, they showed us footage from during the commercial break of Dragon offering Eddie a handshake but Eddie refusing it.

TONY SCHIAVONE’S INTERVIEW WITH CM PUNK IS INTERRUPTED BY EDDIE KINGSTON RANTING NEARBY- decent
Kingston is angry that the ref stopped the match even though he didn’t give up. He thinks Punk is smirking at him so he gets in Punk’s face and slaps the mic out of Schiavone’s hand, but a bunch of people showed up to keep them apart. Punk shouted “I’m disappointed in you. It’s unprofessional” at Kingston after Kingston was led away, which felt like something Punk was only doing to troll Kingston, which is not a good look for Punk.

MATT SYDAL vs. DANTE MARTIN (w/Lio Rush)- 7/10
Lots of cool athletic stuff in here, including Dante flipping out of the Lighting Spiral, which is what Sydal used to beat him in their previous two matches. Dante won with the Double-Jump Moonsault Bodypress. The announcers kept going after Lio Rush on commentary, but we haven’t seen him do anything to indicate that he has anything other than Dante’s best interests in mind. Those interests will happen to coincide with his own if Dante officially takes him on as a manager, but the announcers’ hostility towards him seems to stem from the archetype that we know he is in a meta sense, rather than anything bad he has actually done.
Also, does anyone remember when they did this same thing with Matt Hardy and Private Party, and then just dropped the idea that Matt was screwing them out of their money? If anything, the announcers should be giving Lio the benefit of the doubt.

MARK HENRY’S INTERVIEWS BEFORE THE MAIN EVENT- dumb
Abadon is a dumb character who shouldn’t be anywhere near TV.

NO DISQUALIFICATIONS MATCH IN WHICH IF ABADON WINS, SHE EARNS A SHOT AT THE AEW WORLD WOMEN’S TITLE: Abadon vs. Dr. Britt Baker, DMD (w/Jamie Hayter & Rebel)- 3.5/10
I’m not even going to dignify their exceedingly stupid name with even a mention. I’s rare that you can be so incompetent as to make the name of a match make no sense, but here we are.
Oh. Apparently Abadon is on a 16-match winning streak that hasn’t been mentioned on TV at all. Can you imagine if a UFC fighter was on a sixteen-match winning streak and the company never talked about it? And this here Abadon has won SIXTEEN STRAIGHT SINGLES MATCHES, including a count-out win over the champions… and that’s not enough to just be given a title shot?
And to put the cherry on top of our weekly “These Records and Rankings Just Make Everything Look Ridiculous so Give Them Up Already, Tony” sundae, despite having won SIXTEEN SINGLES MATCHES IN A ROW, Abadon is not even in the top five rankings. Yes, really.

Jericho tries to tell us that “this is not a gimmick for Abadon” because she walked around the Jericho Cruise doing her zombie thing, but the fact that he has to add “for Abadon” betrays that it is a gimmick, as she is just a person and not whatever scary horror trope she’s cosplaying as.
They did a few weapons spot, pretty much all of which we’ve seen a million times by now, so they don’t have much real effect if there is no emotional story building up to them making us want to see one of the competitors get hit with the weapons. The only new-ish spot they did was a spot where Brit put thumbtacks in Abadon’s mouth and was going to use the Lockjaw, but Abadon countered by biting Brit’s gloved hand… which should have hurt Abadon a lot more than Brit because of the thumbtacks, but somehow it didn’t.
The story here was that Abadon would get hit with stuff and then get up because she’s does a horror movie gimmick and that’s what happens in horror movies. Rebel caused a distraction, allowing Brit roll Abadon up into the thumbtacks. It must have been an extremely strong roll-up, as I’d think thumbtacks poking into you back would be making you jerk your back up involuntarily, never mind if you’re also purposely trying to kick out of a pin.
Now that the holiday that corresponds to her fake gimmick is over, I’m sure we won’t see Abadon on TV again for another year.

This was a good episode of Rampage. It would have been great, but then the main event brought it down.