A Wrestling PPV by Terminus

After selling out the last Terminus event back in January, there was a lot of buzz to see what exactly Jonathan Gresham and Baron Black would do in their second outing. With an interesting set of rules, and a VERY diverse roster, Terminus is a company to keep your eyes on in 2022. At the end of the first show, Santana from AEW’s Proud and Powerful came out and seemingly challenged for the ROH Heavyweight Championship, and I’m all for it! Sadly, just prior to this show was announced, Lio Rush suffered an injury that will likely put him on the shelf for quite a few months. I’m always excited to see him wrestle, so that made me pretty sad to be quite honest.

For anyone wanting to watch this, I would recommend Fite.TV. you can get some FITE credits (10 dollars I believe) with the following code: “6m6lyyn”. I’m sure there are other ways to watch it, but FITE has a solid interface and has been worth it so far.

The Card:

• Invictus Khash def. Adam Priest in a Singles Match.
• Chris Sabin def. Tre Lamar, Leon Ruff and Kenny Alfonso in a Terminal Eliminator Match.
• Queen Aminata def. Killa Kate in a Singles Match.
• Joe Keys and Dante Caballero def. Daniel Garcia and Kevin Blackwood in a Tag Team Match.
• Serena Deeb def. Liiza Hall in a Singles Match.
• Sw3rve The Realest (Shane “Swerve” Strickland) def. Davey Richards in a Singles Match.
• Jay Lethal def. Baron Black in a Singles Match.
• Jonathan Gresham (c) def. Santana in a Pure Rules Match to retain his original ROH World Title.

My Thoughts:

As I’ve stated before, my methodology for this is to avoid giving arbitrary star ratings or anything resembling the typical ratings people give in wrestling reviews. I stopped awarding “grades” to things long ago, after my gig at a videogame site slid into them manipulating scores. I usually go through the show and pull a half-dozen or so things that I thought were significant or that I liked. You might think some of my choices are dumb and that’s okay – we all like different things!

Interesting Match Types:

In my last Terminus review, I went over the rules related to this federation – I won’t re-write the whole thing, but the general gist of it is that it’s vaguely similar to ROH pure rules with a bigger emphasis on being vaguely sport-like. This brings some interesting situations like this three rounds match between Invictus Khash and Adam Priest. Impact Wrestling did something like this about a decade ago when Billy Corgan was the head booker, and it was cool to see then. It’s weird to see a wrestling match treated like a boxing match, but Terminus is always trying to do new things and I’m all for it.

The Professor:

Liiza Hall was one of the many talents that missed Terminus 1 due to weather issues (freak blizzard in Georgia), so seeing her get her match on Terminus 2 was cool. The only probablem is that she was put in a match with one of the best female professional wrestlers out there today in Serena Deeb. Often overlooked during her time in WWE, Deeb has made a name for herself as one of the premiere technical wrestlers working today, and I’m super glad of that fact. It was a hard fought match (even with an overtime!), but “The Professor” shows once again that nobody has anything on her.

Whose House?!

Sw3rve’s House! This was recorded a ways before his eventual AEW debut, but I am glad to see Swerve Strickland popping up everywhere post-WWE. He was always one of my favorite guys on Lucha Underground, and was great in both MLW and NXT, so I had no doubt this match would be great. Having him face off against Davey Richards could be considered a dream match, considering nobody was sure Richards would even consider coming back to wresting after his long hiatus. Great Match all around!

Lethal Injection:

Maaaaan, I want Baron Black to win a match soon! Here everybody was assuming he’d be winning since he’s the one booking the show, boy were we all wrong! All jokes aside, both of these men are solid professional wrestlers, and this was a solid match. I hope Black gets more of a spotlight in AEW at some point, and I want Lethal to be one of the main guys in the new version of ROH, whenever that gets off the ground. Until then, it’s awesome to see them both get a time to shine here, ad with Lethal’s past accomplishments, Black got a mighty rub from this match.

The Main Event:

At the end of Terminus 1, Santana came out as a surprise guest and challenge Jonathan Gresham to his original ROH Heavyweight Championship. I was almost certain we’d have a unification match for the belts between Gresham and Bandido, but I’m glad I was wrong. Nobody really gets to see Santana do his own thing, as he has been tagging with Ortiz for nearly a decade now. Gresham put him to the test, and they both had an awesome match worthy of a world championship attempt. It was interesting to see Santana fight against the rules the whole match, as he is not used to it and wanted to do some underhanded stuff that may be frowned upon. Some of the humor came from Gresham occasionally saying things like “see I knew you could actually wrestle”, which got a chuckle from the crowd. The match ended somewhat poorly, and I’m wondering if the way Gresham jokingly suggested “the ref should be fired” along with a promise of a rematch means they botched the ending? Who knows!?

Conclusion:

All around great show from Terminus yet again. This show had less technical issues, and ran smoother than the first outing. Commentary was smoother due to not having to constantly explain rules and being used to some of the workers. For the future I am wondering if Terminus will eventually get their own belts in the works, or if they will stay some kind of renegade show with random guys coming in from all over. The only downside was the ending of the show, otherwise it delivered and shows that there is room for a sports-like wrestling show out there. There were no big surprise appearances this time, so it will interesting to see what the card is like in the next show!

The preshow is free on YouTube, check it out!