Talk about it here.

Chris Jericho dispatches a cameraman to follow him to a room where he has Chyna tied to a chair. He does his first serious promo (his first serious promo ever?) by yelling at Chyna. This was pitched by Jericho as a way to start making his character more serious. He wants Chyna to say he was the better person and she refuses so Jericho smashes her thumb multiple times with a hammer! Pretty wild angle.

Chyna's selling of the hammer shot is something else. The makeup job is pretty extreme and Jericho comes off like a madman.

Watching this segment at the time, it felt really creepy in a bad way. Of course all wrestling is fundamentally based in violence; but having a man tie up a woman and then torture her with tools... that's a whole different level of violent shit. Jericho was acting like a 70s-rape-movie villain, not a wrestling heel. And I damn near stopped watching the show when somehow this turned Chris BABYFACE for their next match.

A torture porn segment where Jericho ties up Chyna and attacks her thumb with a hammer. Yeah this is the sort of thing you should be showing to kids. The Attitude Era continues to plumb the depths of bad taste.

What's amazing is that this is sort of what turned Jericho babyface.

Jericho was on his way to turning babyface already, and this feels like a pretty desperate way to undo that. I would say that they should have done something like this in the ring to have more effect, but that would probably just get the crowd on Jericho's side even more.

I did not think it was a very convincing performance by Jericho. He should sounded more like a lunatic. He was too coherent. Chyna actually did a great job. Pointing out she would just be lying and she did a great job selling the hammer shot. Pretty big misfire here. Jericho has the guts to try crazy things so I give him props for that.