It was a homecoming for All Elite Wrestling in Jacksonville, Florida for AEW Collision, their first event in Daily’s Place since April 24, 2024. It also ended up the homecoming for Timeless Toni Storm.
With her match against Mariah May already set at Grand Slam: Australia on February 15, 2025 at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, just three Saturday’s away, it made sense for the angle to happen on a Collision. While Collision doesn’t have the ratings or “A Show” status of Dynamite, it is a Saturday show. Grand Slam will also be a Saturday show, so doing this on Saturday is to consciously prepare you for this match on the same day.
When Storm made her return to All Elite Wrestling after losing the AEW Women’s World Championship to Mariah May, she returned not as the Timeless persona but as her original 80s rocker Toni. I speculated at the time that this was another mental breakdown for Toni just as her other two women’s championship losses were.
It felt as though much like the first loss led to Outcast Toni and the second led to Timeless Toni, this third breakdown was now amnesia, her forgetting who she was. People said Timeless Toni was Storm forgetting who she was to become a Hollywood starlet of the Golden Age of Cinema, and this was now her forgetting not only Timeless, but her entire career.
It only took me a week to realize no, this wasn’t someone suffering amnesia needing to remember who she was. This was Toni playing a role. Mariah May had manipulated Toni into believing she was just a fan, just a young wrestler wanting to learn from the champion. Mariah even dressed like 80s rocker Toni and came out to her theme. It was this deception that helped May become AEW Women’s World Champion.
Toni pretending to be a rookie again was her essentially pretending to be Mariah May by pretending to be herself. As Toni would say later say, the hardest role you’ll ever play is playing yourself. Storm embraced the role of a rookie on the upswing, full of emotion and not knowing when danger is confronting her. Toni played up her vulnerability no different to Mariah, complete with doe eyes and infectious adoration.
For Mariah, it’s not really about fooling her. It’s about letting her guard down. She knows it’s still Toni Storm, but she was convinced she broke her. She knew she’d be back one day for the championship, but she believed that the Timeless Toni Storm who was once AEW Women’s Champion was no more.
Mariah, thinking this was a ploy, tried to emotionally damage Toni with insults about never caring about her. “You were just the easiest, dumbest pawn” Mariah May said to Toni’s face, trying to read her real feelings of the matter. Toni responded by playing up the rookie happy to be there again, never giving Mariah the reality she wanted.
So Mariah May decided to whip it out of her. Using the AEW Women’s Championship she won from Toni, May smashed the belt in Storm’s face before whipping her repeatedly with the leather. Toni Storm, much like when Mariah May turned on her, did not fight back. It was a sequel to the original turn, only without a shoe and Luther.
However, that turn was something Toni Storm wasn’t prepared for. She was prepared for this. In a way, it’s like she knew Mariah May would play this part. She wouldn’t be smart about it and force Toni to continue to pretend to be the rookie. She knew Mariah would want to do to her what she did back at the Owen Hart Tournament. This time, it was Mariah being played like a fiddle.
“What makes you think that I’ve forgotten?”
Toni never forgot.
“What makes you think our dance is done?”
Toni didn’t go crazy.
“Each scar. Every drop of blood. I will feel forever. But now? It’s my moment in the sun.”
Toni produced this from the moment she returned.
“They say the hardest role you will ever play is yourself. But what you just witnessed is the performance of a lifetime!”
That line, especially, hit me. This was Toni Storm’s lifetime performance.
It’s not that she was just playing herself as a rookie. Like I said earlier, she was playing Mariah May’s deceitful debut up but in the clothes of Toni Storm.
It was also a culmination of sorts to the story of Toni Storm’s career. Like I said on social media, this was Toni Storm peeling the layers off and revealing her true persona. Timeless Toni Storm may be a character, a gimmick, a performance, but it’s true to her soul as a wrestling performer.
Toni Storm once lost her love for the wrestling business and quit WWE. Prior to quitting, she got a shot at Charlotte Flair’s championship, and in the process they wanted to do an angle where they ripped her clothes off to humiliate her. After a protest, it was instead decided she’d just get a cream pie thrown in her face. They knew what they were doing. WWE loves to dehumanize their wrestlers.
Now, here’s Toni Storm, number one contender to Mariah May, and she’s taking her clothes off on TV. Not to be humiliated, but to be reborn. It isn’t for the male gaze but for the purpose of the story. We’re not focused on the act itself. We’re focused on the performance.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that’s how I felt at the time. Storm was becoming Timeless again, and re-imagining what these storyline beats can mean in pro wrestling.
Now that Timeless Toni Storm has returned, AEW now has a few weeks to build this match up as the main event of Grand Slam: Australia. It’s a show that AEW hasn’t built up much if at all, favouring to use World’s End to instead focus on Revolution. Even during the angle, the graphic being displayed was for Revolution and not Grand Slam on the video screens behind Mariah May.
And yes, I said this should be the main event. It may not be a pay per view, and it looks like they downsized from a stadium to an arena due to the lack of ticket sales, but that doesn’t mean this can’t become a major moment for the company. That means making it about these two women and the AEW Women’s World Championship. If you want to do a rematch at Revolution you can, before finally moving these two into new stories.
May’s Championship reign has struggled at times because she was new to the company, and they had trouble creating new rivals for Mariah since everyone knew this would eventually end in Toni Storm’s return to take the title back. AEW needs to build up heels to go after Timeless Toni Storm once the story with May is over, and they also need to find a way to keep Mariah May’s development on TV and not have her forgotten weeks after.
But that’s all for the future. This angle played out beautifully, and was easily my favourite thing to happen in All Elite Wrestling in 2025. The fact it happened on Collision will only strengthen Collision going down the road, and I hope they don’t lose the fire they’ve created from the return of Timeless Toni Storm.
For those who criticized it saying it made no sense she had amnesia? You now know she never did. The purpose wasn’t really to fool Mariah May into thinking she was about to fight a rookie. It was to prove to Mariah May she isn’t holding some psychological traumatic victory over Storm anymore. She broke her once, but she isn’t breaking her again. She’s facing a 100% focused Timeless Toni Storm this time, and not the broken woman she defeated at All In: London 2024.
When I thought it was an amnesia story, I compared it to the film Random Harvest, about a man who lost his memory, started a new life, but a new accident causes him to get his memories back so he returns to his old life and loses memory of the new life he was working towards.
I think that’s what Toni was basically playing as well. We thought she lost her mind as Timeless Toni Storm, but instead it’s just her way of playing out who she truly is. We thought this was amnesia, but it was Toni playing the role, playing the crazy person we thought she was. Timeless Toni Storm wasn’t the role. “Toni Time” was the role. Mariah May thought she broke Toni, but she instead gave her every bit of spotlight she needed to play out her performance.
I once compared it to Fight Club, but I should have went with a different Edward Norton role. She wasn’t Tyler Durden with two personalities. She was Edward Norton in Primal Fear, playing the role of someone with two personalities when in actuality there’s only one. In Primal Fear, the real person played a fool to get away with murder. At Grand Slam: Australia, Toni played the fool for a chance to kill the woman who thought killed her.
Welcome back Timeless.
