By Curtis Shanks, PWTorch specialist

Welcome to the TNA Impact edition of Under the Microscope. We're here to review all those little observations and tidbits you may have missed. This is not a detailed recap of the show, but a review for those of you that saw the show but didn't actually "watch" it.

After last week we know that Rhino is no longer one-dimensional in his promos, the Knockouts displayed the Christmas spirit, and Mick Foley feels the wrestling itch again. But what else is there to notice? Let's see what we can spot. Cue the opening pyro.

It looks as though there will be a little bit to work with tonight despite a show of replayed PPV matches. With Jarrett vs. Angle to start the show we get videos and soundbites playing over the match with the participants discussing the match. This is a nice approach to keep viewers tuned in. To many people who don't watch the PPVs, the matches are new, but there is still a bit of interest for people who have seen the match before like myself. Hopefully we get audio quips for all the matches tonight as I'm now more intrigued for the replay matches than I was to start the show.

The Gail Kim-Awesome Kong match makes me reminisce of times when the Knockouts Division was really great. Gail Kim wasn't solely responsible for how good it was, but when she left TNA the whole division just seemed to fall apart. Now we see more time devoted to the Beautiful People than champion Awesome Kong, which is not a recipe for success. The Knockouts need a makeover to return to where they were earlier this year when they were drawing the highest segment ratings and Kim and Kong were main eventing Impacts. There are plenty of talented females out there on the indy scene like Sara Del Rey, Daizee Haze, and MsChif who could add a lot to TNA and make the females a prominent part of their shows again.

Kong and Kim had a great series of matches against each other in TNA, but from a business standpoint this was the correct choice for which one to air. With Kim now gone from TNA, the best option is to pick the match which makes Kong look the strongest. We don't get audio comments from the competitors in this match, but other Knockouts instead. Kim is currently signed with the competition (WWE), so there's no chance she could add her insight to the match. As of yet, Kong has not spoken in TNA, as she relies on Raisha Saeed to relay her message. If we heard Saeed's horrible accent over the top of this match, I might have turned the channel.

There was an obvious re-dub during the Kim vs. Kong match. Mike Tenay puts over the Knockouts division by going over the roster of competitors. One name he mentions is Taylor Wilde, describing her as the surprise Knockout that came out of the crowd to face Kong. The match shown tonight was from the January 10 edition of Impact, but Wilde did not make her TNA debut until the May 29 episode.

I'm not a huge fan of MMA, but the Samoa Joe-Kurt Angle MMA match was well done. The only problem I have with this type of match is the logic associated with it. MMA is real and professional wresting is fake, so what are you telling the fans when two competitors have an MMA-style match on a wrestling show? This is basically acknowledging that the normal TNA style is "fake." A wrestling match is supposed to be two competitors trying to better each other at all costs, not just in one certain style. If the MMA style works so well, what's to stop Joe or Angle from using those types of moves in a standard wrestling match?

TNA has given the MMA style a shot on a few occasions. Aside from his match vs. Joe, Kurt Angle has wrestled the MMA style in TNA before. Earlier this year Angle obliterated four different jobbers on a sparring session on Impact. A couple months later, A.J. Styles and Tomko took turns against Angle in an MMA-themed match as well. You could also throw in the Styles vs. Frank Trigg MMA match from No Surrender this past September.

The closest WWE has come to trying their hand at the MMA style was the failed Sylvester Terkay experiment last year.

The Styles-Joe match was for the TNA World Heavyweight Title, a title Angle has held twice and with Joe enjoying one reign during this past summer. TNA has been around for six-and-a-half years now, with a ton of former WWE wrestlers competing in TNA during that time. Despite this, Kurt Angle is still the only wrestler to hold the World Hvt. Title in both TNA and WWE.

A.J. Styles had a few chances for the heavyweight title this year, coming up short in all of them, including his match vs. Sting that we saw tonight. Styles has held the title three times in TNA, but his last reign ended way back in the summer of 2005. Styles deserves to be one of the few big stars in TNA, but has not been treated as such at times. After his stint as Christian Cage's lackey it seemed he found his footing with the Front Line, but for the past month he and Samoa Joe have taken a backseat to Rhino. Styles is the poster boy for TNA and it is a shame he has not been in the title hunt more often.

Hopefully when the MEM vs. Front Line storyline concludes, A.J. Styles and Samoa Joe look like mega-stars and solidify their place as the future of TNA. You can't make the MEM look weak (Lord knows they sure haven't), but the best outcome of this storyline is for the youngsters to come out strong. Along with Styles and Joe, guys like Consequences Creed, Eric Young, Jay Lethal, and the MCMG could get a huge rub out of working with guys like Angle, Nash, Booker, Steiner, and Sting.

With LAX facing Beer Money for the tag titles tonight, we get a recap video proclaiming that those two teams dominated the division throughout 2008. That statement isn't far from the truth even though TNA has a glut of tag teams. There were only two tag team title changes in TNA last year. A.J. Styles and Tomko began the year as champs, but the titles were declared vacant in April after a match vs. Super Eric and Kaz (EY and Kaz were never officially recognized as champs). LAX won the Deuces Wild tournament the following month and held the titles until current champs Beer Money defeated them in August.

TNA did a nice job with their year-end recap tonight in the sense that they kept viewers tuned in. By showing the tag team title match and past PPV matches (which many people haven't seen at all) the show still had some originality to it. The overlapping audio clips was a fantastic addition to the matches. They were very well done and flowed very nicely with the pace of the match. The content was not all filler, as there were some interesting sound bytes throughout the night. Nothing beats an original show, but if TNA airs another best-of show next year, I won't be quite as apathetic heading into the show like I was two hours ago.

In years past when WWE would air a best-of for Raw and Smackdown, there was no reason to tune in, as the entire show consisted of recap videos. I did tune into the ECW recap last week, but only to hear what gems Matt Striker would offer up in his introductions. The matches TNA presented tonight were much better than the ECW fare - Cryme Tyme vs. Miz & Morrison and part of Matt Hardy vs. Evan Bourne.

Numbers crunched harder than an unprotected chair shot to the head: the past two weeks we've looked at some numbers about what we've seen on Impact throughout 2008. With the first show of 2009 being a recap show, we'll finish off our number crunching for the Impacts that aired in 2008.

Looking specifically at the main event match for each Impact, TNA spread the love around in 2008 as over 2/3 of the roster participated in at least one main event match. The problem with looking at main event matches is that not every main event match is actually the main event. Many times a storyline non-match segment closed the show, which meant the sometimes meaningless match from quarter-hour seven ended up as the main event match.

Out of the 52 Impacts last year, only 36 closed with an actual match. There were 16 shows (almost one every three weeks) that ended in a non-match segment. But we'll still look at the results anyways.

Out of your 52 main event Impact matches, Kurt Angle led the way, competing in 19 of them. A.J. Styles is close behind with 18, with Christian's 12, and Samoa Joe and Booker T's 11 rounding out the top five. Eight main event matches involved some of the TNA Knockouts, although a few of those were only precursors to a show-ending in-ring segment.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the squash match. Of all the Impact matches during 2008, thirteen were a squash against a no-name jobber. Eight of them belonged to Awesome Kong, with many of them occurring in the $25,000 weekly challenge. Matt Morgan inflated his won-lost record with squashes as well, as he was fed three no-namers to tear apart during the year. If you feel for those jobbers, FIP veteran Kory Chavis should get the most sympathy, as he was on the losing end of three different squash matches in TNA last year.

Curtis Shanks is a self-described wrestling nerd. Who else understands what Matt Striker is talking about all the time. Feedback is welcome, as comments, suggestions, questions and spam can be sent to Curtis at curtisshanks.torch@gmail.com.

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