Will any story conclude at TNA Lockdown 2012?

I’ve been writing this feature for WWE ppvs since Night of Champions last year, but I’ve never tried it on a TNA ppv. It’s not that I didn’t want to, but every single ppv since October of last year has felt like a chapter in a longer story. That’s great, I think anyway, but it doesn’t lend to this kind of article. I’m interested in finding story conclusions, and there haven’t been any since Bound for Glory. The only titles that have changed hands since then are the tertiary ones — the TV title, the knockouts tag titles, and the men’s tag titles — that TNA doesn’t really write major stories around. But even those titles have been part of stories going back to autumn of last year.

If you pay attention to TNA, though, you’ll notice that they’ve treated Lockdown as a climatic point in their calendar, often moreso than any other event. Slammiversary used to be the place to get a cool and shocking major title change, and Bound for Glory used to be the place to watch Sting in a major match, but Lockdown is still the show where the regular wrestlers on staff who hate each other finally battle it out. But will these climatic battles actually lead to satisfying conclusions? That’s what we’re here to speculate.

Matt Morgan vs Crimson

This is it for these two. The story is that they were a tag team that began to lose a lot, and each guy blamed the other. Crimson is also undefeated, but nobody cares. Whoever wins will go on to do something slightly different, but not really. Maybe they’ll fight Devon.

Robbie E vs Devon, TV Title

Devon won the TV title in a really feel-good moment a month ago, and this should be a fun defence with a satisfying end to this thing the two of them have had going, mostly on xplosion. If this were Wrestlemania, they’d get shoved to the dark match, but it isn’t, so it’ll probably go on third and get 12 minutes.

Velvet Sky vs Gail Kim, Knockouts Title

I’m sorry to say I don’t really know much about this story. It does reach back to Bound for Glory, where Velvet finally won the Knockouts title, only to quickly lose it a week or two later to a returning Gail Kim. In what’s been an impressive six-month reign, Velvet has never received a proper one-on-one rematch. What’s interesting about this is it’s almost exactly the same build as the main event, except without the backstory.

Besides the long wait for Velvet, though, Gail has been doing other things the whole time, which means this is likely match 1 of a few between them. Expect this to keep going.

Motor City Machine Guns vs Magnus & Samoa Joe, Tag Team Championships

This story is the only really fresh one on the card, beginning a few weeks ago when the MCMG’s returned and promptly demanded a title match. That’s the entire story, basically, so I can’t assume this is the only chapter. Expect one team to grow some bad-guy balls and cheat to win, continuing this feud for at least another month.

Jeff Hardy vs Kurt Angle

As much as I hate to think it, they’re likely maneuvering Hardy back into the title picture in the spring. I don’t have a clue what they’re doing with Angle, but I’d guess roughly the same thing (almost all the PPVs between Lockdown and Bound for Glory have historically been multi-man, so it’s easy to factor them in). This is the last one-on-one match between these two, and probably the last time they ‘feud’ for a while. But they’re likely going to keep wrestling, looking for different things.

Lethal Lockdown: Team Eric Bischoff (Daniels, Kazarian, Bully Ray, Gunner, & Eric Bischoff) vs Team Garett Bischoff (Austin Aries, AJ Styles, Ken Kennedy, Rob Van Dam, & Garrett Bischoff), loser loses the rights to the Bischoff name.

If there’s one thing that Garett needs to do in order to be a professional wrestler in the world of professional wrestling, it’s lose the Bischoff name. That telegraphs the ending, but it should be a fun, bloody brawl anyway. I’m not expecting it to be as satisfying as Immortal vs Fortune was last year, even if all the same people are basically involved. Considering that this story has been going since Bound for Glory, expect this to be the conclusion.

Bobby Roode vs James Storm for the cursed TNA World Heavyweight Title

I can’t help but praise TNA here. They began this story last spring, revolving the Bound for Glory series around elevating these two guys to main event status. A few great scenes in October involving two title changes (one shocking, one nefarious) set it all in motion. This story has all the trappings of a classic wrestling feud: a focused, chasing hero against a ducking, dastardly villain. The feud has been personal, obvious, and generally very satisfying.

The only things that keep it from being a truly excellent feud is at part TNA’s fault, and partly the audience. Almost 4 months of the six-month feud has been spent with the two of them fighting other people in tangential stories. They’ve always been connected, but it sometimes felt too obvious they were going for a slow burn. The second problem is that TNA has never given us any reason to trust that they could pull this off. Their history is plagued with great beginnings ruined by changing things around halfway through. That they stuck to their guns here is commendable.

But is it the end for these two? Yes, I’d say so. I don’t see them elevating their feud another minute after this match. Much like Hardy and Angle, it’s possible they wrestle again, but the stakes won’t be as high (a four-way between them seems both likely and very missable). TNA has done their best making this match seem climatic, and however it goes down, Lockdown is going to be it. Six months and a cage match is plenty for the modern wrestling fan. That’s half the length of Cena vs Rock, mind you, but with full-time wrestlers. You can’t really ask for more than that.