James Caldwell, Torch Assistant Editor (5.5)

Slightly above-average episode of ECW TV thanks to some new intensity from Tommy Dreamer. I still don't know what he was doing at the beginning of the show with the Flair, Rude, and Arnold poses, but that added some life to the opening segment.

This whole episode felt like Saved By the Bell, though. Or some 1990s high school drama equivalent. Principal Tiffany played her role fine. Troublemakers Christian and Dreamer had at it in the locker room in a juvenile segment, but poor P.E. coach Finlay got it in the eye and was scratched from the show's final "life lessons learned" segment with the wise-guy bullies picking on Dreamer and Christian to teach them tough love.

I think Vince McMahon's maturity just stopped sophomore year in high school. Like, it just completely stopped and everything he writes for TV or approves by his writers for TV must fit sophomore year in high school. Ya know, not quite picked on as much as freshman year, think you're too cool for school as a soph, but in reality, you're still a punk kid underclassmen who thinks it's cool to pick on the freshmen now. Freshmen being midgets (Hornswoggle), stutterers (Matt Morgan), mentally challenged (Festus and Eugene), kids with weird names (E. Stan Kroenke), and anyone else with a potential deficiency not their fault worth picking on.

Kozlov needs to take care of business or get off the pot. The squash match formula to rebuild him is five weeks old and getting staler as the weeks go on. Find him a program or keep him off TV. ... Evan Bourne had a less-than-ideal match-up for his TV return. Mark Henry slowed him down and Bourne tried to work a compelling match, but it was a tough sell to the audience. At least he won, though.

Dominick Mayer, PWTorch.com Contributor (6.5)

Solid show with a disappointing ending. But first: How much longer are the Kozlov squashes going to continue? I ask because yeah, Survivor Series was bad. Abysmally so. That having been said, though, he's done nothing but squash jobbers for nearly two months now, and hasn't even moved up to those second-tier squashes on known WWE jobbers. I'm all for rebuilding, and he's entertained me more on ECW than he ever did on Smackdown, but this is starting to get ridiculous.

Anyway, the opening promo got a little silly with Dreamer's dancing, but overall was a good way to set up the Extreme Rules three-way. I'm just happy that at least one match on that PPV isn't a direct repackaging of Judgment Day. The Bourne-Henry match worked for me, and I really think Henry works better with smaller men than other big men, because not only does he look like a monster by comparison, but somebody who can move makes Henry look less lumbering by comparison.

My only observation with the main event is that they seem to be working to put long main events on ECW shows recently, which is awesome, but the trouble is that they're putting really laborious ones in. Last week it was the never-ending Finlay match, this week it was the handicap match, which worked to get the Harts wrestling right away and hyped the title match at the PPV, but ended up being kind of a slog throughout. There's just something about these main events that doesn't have the pop of, for instance, the Morrison-Bourne undercard match from almost a month ago. This having been said, ECW has a lot more pure wrestling than Raw right now without the marquee names, which I'm all for.

Greg Parks, PWTorch.com Contributor (6.0)

Not a strong thumbs-up for this show, but the main event was good enough to propel it to a thumbs-up level. What turned out to be a handicap match was pretty decent and had a fine storyline in play to back it up. I'm really looking forward to Kidd and Smith on ECW going forward. Kozlov is up to beating two jobbers at a time now, which means it must be getting close to him facing guys of the Jimmy Wang Yang level next.

The opening segment set the stage nicely for the rest of the show, but seeing Tommy Dreamer strutting and gyrating was just bizarre. I groaned when I saw that Mark Henry would be Evan Bourne's opponent, but I guess he's going to have to learn to work with guys who are much more grounded than him. The match was entertaining for what it was.

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