Spoiler alert?
Last week’s Lucha Underground ended with a character being murdered on-screen, and we praised it for being on-brand with the show’s exaggerated pulp vibe. Characters turn into dragons and fly away on Lucha Underground, so you can kill a guy and make it work. On Impact Wrestling, though? Not so much.
If you missed the episode (and we’re sure you didn’t), Mickie James got murdered at a train station. Like, actually murdered. There’s a chance they’ll have her show up next week in a neck brace and act like she’s fine, but for all intents and purposes we saw James Storm shove her to her death in the middle of Impact.
Here’s the scene. If the first half of the video reminds you of casting couch porn, that’s normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r8fKdwyuKA
You saw that too, right? I’m not hallucinating?
So much of this doesn’t make sense. They’re walking past a parked train, Storm mentions that a train’s pulled up and Mickie goes, “what train? The train??” Look slightly to your left at any point, Mickie. They stop at the end of the platform and have a weird conversation about cell phones before Storm gets in too close and butt-bumps her to her death. So many questions. Why’d he do it like that? Couldn’t he just stick his arm out and shove her off at any point? He squatted there monologuing to nobody about how she’s dead, he’s clearly not trying to make it look like an accident. The screen’s so washed out we can’t really tell what kind of train station they’re at, but if a train’s parked right there, how far down could it be? It’s like getting knocked off the curb. Is the payoff that Mickie fell six inches to the ground and was sitting there angrily glaring at him the whole time, and his thing about it’s “a looooong waaaaay down” was just a joke? When Billy Corgan said he wanted to use wrestling to explore social issues, did he mean “use it to re-enact scenes from House of Cards?”
Bonus question, why is Impact uploading videos of a guy murdering one of their wrestlers with a sassy title?
I hope next week’s Impact begins with Mickie climbing back up onto that curb out of breath, covered in garbage. Or we begin with a funeral, Mickie James is dead in this universe and James Storm goes to jail forever? It’s about context, people.
To give you a break from the facepalming for five seconds, here’s Ethan Carter III getting a barbershop quartet intro. It’s not all bad, I guess!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64QBJ_ELTwo
