BRM Reviews the 12/17/2021 Rampage (Good Action, frustrating Booking)

[Big Red Machine]

BOBBY FISH & THE ELITE (Adam Cole & the Young Bucks) (w/Brandon Cutler) vs. CHAOS (Rocky Romero, Orange Cassidy, & Best Friends) (w/Wheeler YUTA)- 7.25/10
Lots of good action here. Fish got pinned by Trent. Hopefully this is a step in the Bucks telling Cole he has to ditch Fish, because otherwise this feud feels like it’s not going anywhere.


DAN LAMBERT’S PROMO IS INTERRUPTED BY CODY- meh
So this is Cody’s latest scheme to get cheered. Lambert accused Tony Khan of being a con artist and turning AEW into late-90s WCW. He accused Cody of being a backstage politician, getting Tony to skip over Scorpio Sky and give him a TNT Title shot instead. This brought Cody out. They snatched the mic back and forth a bunch until Cody attacks Ethan Page to start a fight. The dumbass got what he deserved for starting a fight in this situation, and got the sh*t kicked out of him in the corner. Big brother Dustin came out to make the save but started to get overwhelmed. Sammy Guevara came out to make the save for Dustin.

TBS TITLE FINAL FOUR VIDEO PACKAGE- excellent

SUBMISSION MATCH: Tay Conti (w/Anna Jay) vs. Penelope Ford (w/The Bunny)- 6.75/10
Conti won clean… and once again in this feud one of the babyfaces gets attacked after the match and knocked out with the brass knuckles. Anna Jay then chased the heels off with a chair. This feud is going nowhere.

MARK HENRY INTERVIEWS THE PEOPLE IN THE MAIN EVENT- fine

DANIEL GARCIA, 2.0, & THE ACCLAIMED vs. EDDIE KINGSTON, LAX, & THE LUCHA BROS. (w/Alex Abrahantes)- 6.75/10
Lots of food action. Garcia pinned Kingston with a roll-up that was VERY close. That felt like a big deal (although it certainly felt less important than it would have if he hadn’t used the trunks, but it’s possible that this is a step in the story).

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- not good
The heels all beat Eddie up for not reason. His friends seem to have disappeared. Fortunately, Jurassic Express came out to make the save… although they apparently knew this was going to happen so they were lying in wait in the crowd, and had someone in the truck play their music to distract the heels so they could attack from behind.
JUST HAVE THE BABYFACES RUN DOWN THE F*CKING RAMP! IT’S NOT THAT HARD! If you want to have them get the best of the heels when they are outnumbered, just have them bring weapons!
The Lucha Bros. have reappeared, and Jungle Boy picks up their AEW World Tag Team Titles and hands them back to them as he and Luchasaurus have a stare-down with them.
This was one of those segments where AEW’s way of booking drives me nuts. As I noted when this match was announced on Rampage, booking a ten-man tag here makes absolutely no sense. You’ve got two groups of three (LAX & Kingston and 2.0 & Garcia) in a feud… so instead of booking a six-man tag you book a ten-man tag also including the Lucha Bros. and then tell the heels they have to find two other people?
Having seen the match, the reason becomes obvious: It had to be a ten-man tag so that the Lucha Bros. could be out there when Jurassic Express made the save so that we could have this stare-down to build to the tag title match. The reason for the post-match attack on Kingson even though Garcia got the big win he wanted is similar: We needed a post-match attack so that Jurassic Express had a reason to come out and it wouldn’t feel douchy.
The problem is that “because the plot needed X to happen” is not an acceptable explanation for the motivations of the characters.
Think of it like a magic show where instead of a fancy painted prop, the magician wheels out this big clear box. And when the assistant gets into the box, you can clearly see that there is a compartment below the one she is sitting in. You’d see this and think “why is there a second compartment beneath her?”
Then, when the magician grabs the big thing of spikes and announces that he is going to impale his lovely assistant, and he heads towards the box with the big thing of spikes and she quickly moves down into the lower compartment where the spikes won’t touch her, and you say “ah. That’s why those are there.” After seeing the trick, you might be impressed by the assistant’s ability to squeeze into the tiny space, or the magician’s patter, or how well the two of them have their timing down, but at the end of the trick, there won’t be the sense of wonderment that is the goal of the trick.
Storytelling is similar. A good storyteller (in this case, the booker) needs to do everything possible to avoid the audience asking questions you don’t want them to ask, and the way you do that is by ensuring that actions of all of the characters feel logical, or at least natural to the characters and the situations. This even applies to background or even off-screen characters like Tony Khan as the guy who is trying to make money booking a professional wrestling promotion. Otherwise, the characters come off not as a real and relatable people, but as just characters they are playing; pieces on the chessboard that some grand manipulator moves into the positions that he/she/they need those pieces in.
For another example of this, look at Bryan Danielson’s “turn” for this Adam Page feud. All of a sudden, Dragon just decided to be a dick. You want to say he was trying to “motivate” Page like he did with Kingston? Fine. But that doesn’t explain him doing things like insulting fans and flipping them off. Bryan’s behavior came pretty much out of nowhere and he switched from nice to mean the moment he switched from being matched up against bad-guy Miro to being matched up against good-guy Adam Page. This “turn” feels like something that happened because the booker wanted Dragon to turn, not because of anything in Dragon’s character, and as a result, people have not really been booing him that much, have they?

Anyway, this was a good episode of Rampage. I just wish Tony would pay more attention to the details in his booking.