How Impact Wrestling Has Absolutely Nailed Allie’s Undead Storyline

Impact Wrestling began Allie’s journey with the Undead after Su Yung threw Allie’s friend Rosemary into a coffin. Almost six months later, it’s become so much more than that.

It was a series of events you would have never wished on the babyface Knockouts Champion Allie, what, running around in her pink ring gear with an infectiously positive attitude and odd friendship with her polar opposite, Rosemary.

However, now that we’re about six-months deep into the Impact Wrestling storyline where Allie’s sanity and soul have quickly dissipated due her dealings in the “Undead Realm” of Su Yung, Allie is finally finding out exactly what the extent of the damage is.

Rewind to Bound For Glory where Allie took it upon herself to return to the Undead Realm to rescue her friend Kiera Hogan, who’d been slammed into a coffin by Su and thus trapped in the Undead Realm.

Allie and Kiera made it out (with the help of Rosemary), but Allie proved the following Thursday on an episode of Impact Wrestling that she did not return the same, if she even returned at all.

During her match with Alisha Edwards, Allie spent an uncomfortable amount of time licking her fingertips and slapping herself in the face, which goes to show that Allie’s journey has gone from a little bit dark to full-blown possession.

This story, the time Impact has taken to build it up slowly yet powerfully, and the journey we’ve seen Allie go on these passed six months has easily been one of the most compelling aspects of Impact programming this year.

I’ve seen and heard people call it “weird”, and of course the circumstances are a little bit untraditional for a wrestling promotion. That’s a massive part of why this story just works for Impact right now.

The way the Allie story has been presented to us makes it feel like almost a “break”; many of the big developments have been done in vignette form outside of what happens in the ring.

It hasn’t been rehashed over and over with the same the same matches week after week (outside of pre-BFG episodes), which would have probably made us as viewers more resentful of the story line and written it off as “repetitive”.

Instead, Impact has made Allie’s storyline a narrative, and it’s built upon; it has chapters, recurring characters, it even has themes for god sake. This has taken us far beyond the point of wrestling-story-telling and ventured in the territory of just plain ole’ great story-telling.

I mean, yes, of course you could argue that this is a wrestling show, and wrestling is supposed to be the meat of the program, but why shouldn’t you amplify the intensity and the emotional weight of your matches by giving them the most compelling and intricate storylines you possibly good to keep the audience invested?

The other aspect is that the pacing of this story has been phenomenal. Part of what personally annoys me about the way some stories in wrestling are told is that everything happens too quickly. The formula is often to simple: we have an altercation, here’s a match, let’s drop it quickly.

This story, firstly, has involved so many key players that it shouldn’t technically be considered just Allie’s. It’s a Rosemary story, it’s a Su Yung story, it was a Madison Rayne story for a while leading into Slammiversary. After Thursday, it will obviously become much more of a Kiera Hogan story than it had been before.

The intricacy of who the players are has been a vital piece in making this story successful – because so many people are jumping in and out, so many elements are added to give the story depth and push the story forward.

Secondly, as I’ve said, this story has been six months in the making, and it certainly hasn’t ended yet. Impact should quite frankly be celebrated for seeing that they had a complicated, compelling story to tell and decidedly roping off a significant amount of their year into developing it.

Had they not, then we would have absolutely found ourselves in that “weird” category, because rushing through a story as multi-faceted as this or leaving parts unexplored would have absolutely made it a story we remember in a few years as, “hey, remember when Impact did that weird demon Allie story? What the heck was that?”

Like I said, this story isn’t even over yet! Now that Allie is showing signs of possession, I think anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie ever knows what the next logical step in the story is.

That’s right – ultimately, we’re going to have to get the demon out of Allie, and if this next chapter of this story is anything like the earlier ones, it surely will not come easy.

Looking towards the future, the next logical step seems to be a feud for former friends Allie and Kiera Hogan. You could see in Kiera’s face for almost the entirety of Allie’s match against Alisha Edwards the look of “what is even going on right now.”

Kiera is the closest person to Allie at this point, so it’s natural that she’ll be the first person to notice the extent of Allie’s behavioral change, and she’ll be the first to try to snap her friend out of it.

Will she be able to help Allie? Probably not. I see this feud being just being a means to end for this story as a whole.

What I really believe Impact will do is bring us into a huge final battle between Allie and the one person who warned her to never let the darkness consume her – Rosemary.

If you ever thought you’d live is a world where we’d see an Allie vs. Rosemary feud, and Allie would be the demonic, possessed heel and Rosemary would be the concerned friend fighting to save Allie from the depths of despair, I hope you played the Mega Millions last night.

Yet, that’s where I see this feud going, and maybe even culminating. Who else cares about Allie that much and is powerful enough to attempt to perform wrestling’s version of an exorcism?

That ending would possibly make this feud one of the most poetic I’ve ever seen played out in front of me in a wrestling ring. All the voodoo and the effects, the makeup, the fire, the drama, ultimately ending in a story about helping the people you care about most through the darkest times in their live.

Call it “weird” and “creepy” all you want. In my opinion, the weird and creepy parts are proof that Impact Wrestling has the tools to give you interesting and compelling drama that only serves to amplify what you see in the ring. This is more than a match, or a feud, or a pay-per-view match.

This is a good story.