9 Exact Moments TNA Booking Stopped Making Sense
Abandoned pushes, out-of-nowhere heel turns and airing dirty laundry on TV? TNA! TNA! TNA!
The episode of Impact where Bully Ray reveals, piece by piece, why and how his grand Aces & Eights plan came together is either one of the more rewarding moments in TNA history or one of the stupider ones, and there are reasonable arguments supporting both sides.
Charting the plot through a series of vignettes following the dramatic reveal that he founded and fuelled the group's reign of terror over the company in order to become TNA World Heavyweight Champion, Bully explained - with clips - how ever segment came together, including making sense of the times he had to fight against or get beaten down by the biker bang.
He brushed it aside as taking his licks for the good of the cause, which was cheesy but effective enough thanks to how satisfying the grand payoff had been. Crucially, it helped steer the conversation away from the presumably retconned outcome and instead towards how the shock was worth a couple of illogical turns along the way. It was also the beginning of the end for the group.
With the primary objective achieved and no way to really reheat the sense of suspense following the grand payoff, the stable petered out and the former Team 3D man set about making a go of being the company's top singles star. They'd made sense of the slightly nonsensical, unlike...
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9. AJ Styles Wrestles His Way Out Of Trouble
There are certain storylines so awful that they are given a label that survives as shorthand for creative rock bottom. "Claire Lynch" will forever be a TNA Hall-Of-Fame-sized stinker, not least because it features three surefire actual TNA Hall-Of-Famers.
Back in 2012, Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian decided to torture rival AJ Styles by threatening to reveal what appeared to be an illicit affair between 'The Phenomenal One' and TNA boss Dixie Carter. This subsequently moved the pair to explain that their secret liaisons were because they were helping their mutual friend Claire through a drug addiction.
If that already feels like a kayfabe bridge too far, it'd sit alongside the sporting build to AEW's first pay-per-view main event between Kenny Omega and Chris Jericho compared to where it ended up.
Romance in wrestling often provides an entertaining payoff or shocking twist, but what followed missed both marks. The heels brought Lynch into their fold, revealing to the world that AJ had fathered her unborn child, using photos of the pair seemingly in bed together as proof. Styles - the babyface - denied parentage or ever sleeping with Claire, and it was at this point she was also turned full cartoon heel that may or may not have been blackmailed with drugs by Daniels and Kazarian in order to screw with Styles further. AJ, laughably, agreed to wrestle a match where it was stipulated that he'd be free from any responsibility if he won, and when he did, all of the nonsense completely ran out of road.
In both work and shoot, the whole sorry episode was doomed when the Universal Studios actress they'd found to play Claire Lynch (the late Julia Reilly, who was Olive Oyl in the theme park where Impact was filmed) quit in-part order to stop receiving hate messages from buffoon wrestling fans and presumably to salvage her own credibility. Gimmick lawyer Grace Stein was inserted into the story to reveal on behalf of Lynch that Bad Influence paid her to make it all up as a way to bin the whole deal off.