On AEW Dynamite last week, Toni Storm made her unexpected return to All Elite Wrestling. Or was it her debut?
Toni came out, overwhelmed by the cheers of the crowd, interrupting AEW Women’s World Champion Mariah May. May took that championship from Storm at All In: London earlier in the year, the fruits of labour from an eight month plan to debut in the company, burrow herself in Toni’s good graces, and break her mentally to take her championship.
Mariah’s plan worked. Too well maybe.
Storm didn’t come out looking for violent revenge. She just came out in her old rocker gear and… teared up.
It was announced her first match back would be on AEW Rampage. A lot of people were mad they were wasting her first match back on one of the least watched shows in AEW’s program schedule. This was just another moment of AEW devaluing the power of their stars. People talked about how several were against the choice and expressed it to AEW President Tony Khan but he still went on with it.
Storm would defeat Harley Cameron on Rampage and Shazza McKenzie on Collision, in what presented Toni Storm not as a returning Women’s World Champion but a brand new debut. Storm confirmed this after the McKenzie match, taking the microphone to proclaim that Toni Storm is All Elite.
Toni Storm in AEW has held the AEW Women’s World Championship three times and on every loss it has broken her mentally and spiritually. Jamie Hayter defeating Toni at Full Gear 2022 led to Storm helping form The Outcasts and turning heel. She rejected AEW and their fans after that loss because they cheered for Jamie Hayter more than her.
Her second loss was to Hikaru Shida in 2023 on the 200th Dynamite, a loss that soon led to the creation of the Timeless Toni Storm character, inspired by starlets of Hollywood’s golden age and particularly the films All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. It was this mental breakdown of her imagining herself as something of a relic from the past that ended up leading her to her third championship run.
Now the Timeless Toni Storm character has lost to a woman created by her own obsession with herself, a muse of sorts who usurped her for the championship. Another championship loss? Another complete breakdown leading to a confusion of existence and identity. In the match against Cameron, Toni even almost went into one of her Timeless poses, only to catch herself and throw out the devil horns instead.
I’ve heard people talk about how unrealistic this is and how bad it is for Tony to be letting this happen, but let me hit pause for a second and ask, do you fuckers even watch pro wrestling? We get people attempting to murder each other. Literal attempted murder. Destruction of property. Assault with deadly weapons. Vehicular manslaughter. Attacking officials. We get all of that and your issue, your luchanarrative dissonance, comes from Tony Khan letting Toni wrestle in a broken mental state? Really? As if it has never ever happened before?
Oh, it’s not realistic for a wrestling promoter to see that one of his wrestlers thinks she’s a rookie again and not take advantage of the situation by paying her like a rookie and making her work her way back up the card? Please. That’s one of the most realistic things AEW has done this year. Settle down.
You can argue the merits of doing this storyline, how it hurts the overall star power of someone to essentially reset themselves, but AEW Rampage did a better number than the last four weeks on average as per Wrestlenomics. People watched the show for Toni Storm’s return/redebut.
People are into the Toni Storm story, even if it’s an unconventional way to put over one of your stars. For a lot of older wrestling fans they are worried this likely crosses into the Cactus Jack memory loss story in WCW “Lost in Cleveland” which was supposed to lead to a Cactus Jack babyface run against Vader but ended up backfiring because writers hired by WCW tried to do an amnesia/homeless story and with 12 weeks tried to fill it with both comedy and drama. It’s best known for the fact they hired an actress to play Mick Foley’s wife since Dusty Rhodes felt Mick’s actual wife was too attractive to play the wife of Cactus Jack.
The difference between those two stories is that the Cactus Jack story played out in vignettes filmed for the audience. Nobody was actually getting to enjoy Cactus Jack wrestle during it (he was off TV for injuries) and instead was just watching him be an idiot in short segments for three months. Here, the fans get to enjoy Toni Storm on TV wrestling while pushing the idea she doesn’t remember who she was. It’s not just about her getting her memory then coming back, but remembering why she returned to confront Mariah May.
There’s plenty of amnesia movies from the Hollywood golden age they could be taking this from, and my mind wonders if it’s about Random Harvest. In Random Harvest, a man lost his memory due to the war. He starts a new life with someone, but then a new accident causes his old memories to return. He goes back to his old life, with the story wondering if at some point he remembers the woman he loved after losing his memory the first time.
Here, Toni lost her mind to become Timeless Toni Storm, and in her mind loss she befriended Mariah May, who stabbed her in the back and took her championship. That trauma caused her to go right back to AEW rookie Toni Storm, just happy to be there, not angry or vengeful against anyone. Now it’s a question of whether or not she can remember who she was when she last lost her mind as Timeless Toni.
I expect this to culminate at Grand Slam: Australia, as Toni Storm getting her memories of hatred towards Mariah May just in time to face her in (possibly) the main event in her home country of Australia would be a great way to end the angle and allow both women to move to new storylines. It’s just about getting the fans to believe that Toni currently forgets Mariah and nothing is going to jog her memory until it needs to be jogged.
(And do we get a return of Luther the Butler? Important questions.)
I understand some people might not want a story like this due to how realistic it is or isn’t, or they just think if an angle bombs 30 years ago you can never try it again ever, or maybe they are just tired of the Women’s World Championship revolving around Mariah and Toni only. I get it. But I think this story, if it continues in this direction, will keep the fans interested and keep people watching every week to see if this will be the week Toni Storm remembers who she used to be, and how Mariah May tries to manipulate Toni while her memory is gone.
The Toni/Mariah story along with Hangman/Swerve have been my favourite storylines in AEW and I feel just as Hangman/Swerve got to have their main event All Out moment? Toni and Mariah deserve theirs in the main event of Grand Slam: Australia.
So while you may not like seeing these Rampage and Collision matches with Toni Storm acting like she’s never wrestled in AEW before and she isn’t a three time AEW Women’s World Champion, you have to understand that in time she is going to remember who she used to be. She’s going to remember who took everything away from her.
Little by little, match by match, she’s letting herself once again become… Timeless Toni Storm.
