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| The future of AEW right here Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
Last week on All Elite Wrestling Dynamite, Chris Jericho revealed a name for his stable, Darby Allin won a shot at Le Champion and then assailed him with his skateboard, Riho and Britt Baker roughhoused their way to a tag win in preparation for their match this week, and Jon Moxley not only confronted Kenny Omega again, but showed his disdain for PAC attacking his target before he could. Episode three emanated from the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, PA this week, and it was a show built on title bouts and tag matches.
Lucha Sneak Attack! - Dynamite opened this week with Feníx and Pentagón, Jr. waylaying Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian of SCU in advance of their first-round tag tournament match with the Best Friends. It was a vicious beatdown, the kind that really gets the blood pumping, and it ended with Penta spiking Daniels on the ramp with a package piledriver and Scorpio Sky making the save before Feníx did the same to Kazarian. The good news is that the Lucha Bros. get to be the BAMFs that they need to be in order to get the most out of them. The bad news is that SCU was positioned as a sympathetic babyface team when, uh, they come out and say every town they're in is the worst town they ever have been in. Again, it feels like AEW is either playing with shades of gray or they really don't care about keeping alignments consistent, which I get it, everyone in the company is over at this point. Somewhere down the line, I wonder if it'll be an issue.
Anyway, the match itself continued the streak of Dynamite opening with a main-event quality bout. Outside of Sky interrupting a hug between Trent? and Chuck Taylor (Sky has a history with homophobia, and even if the Best Friends aren't a gay gimmick, well it doesn't stop homophobes from trying to frame platonic acts of friendship as gay), it was a solid opener that hit some high notes and got the story it was supposed to tell over. Sky wrestling with only one shoe was also more impressive than one might think. I can't even walk if I only have one shoe on without being a topsy-turvy mess. I guess even bigots can be athletically inclined, who knew?
Also, points to Taylor for pandering to Philly fans with the Ben Simmons jersey. There is absolutely nothing a Philly fan loves more than being pandered to. I know, because I am a Philly fan who loves being pandered to, and lo and behold, Chuckie T is one of my favorite wrestlers.
Beaver Boys on TV - So LAX or EYFBO or whatever Santana and Ortiz are calling themselves nowadays got themselves a match with enhancement talent. Of course, being who runs AEW, that enhancement talent was none other than John Silver and Alex Reynolds, the Beaver Boys. As far as squash matches go, it was entertaining inasmuch as a match where one competitor or team of competitors had no chance. Silver got to flex his muscles while preening at one point, so not all was lost for the TV jobbers who both have good spots on the indies (tune into Beyond Wrestling Uncharted Territory tonight live on Independent Wrestling TV!). The interesting, for bad reasons, thing that happened during this segment was the post-match promo, where Jericho appeared on the Tron and started putting over his henchmen. The problem was he veered into racist territory calling them "thugs" and "pit bulls." Of course, earlier in the day, he did a spon-con tweet to pub Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, where he plays a KKK Grand Wizard, by hashtagging the letters KKK. All in all, not a good day for Chris Jericho and race relations. Good on LAX for just yelling over it though. They can talk; let them. They're quite good at it too.
Where Are the Promos? - A long pre-taped vignette hyping up Cody aired next. It was well-shot, well-produced, and really got over the fact that Cody needs to beat Jericho at Full Gear in order to be complete. It was the only real part of the show dedicated to promotional ventures outside of the short promo that preceded it from Jericho and a short pre-tape from Jon Moxley before his match. I feel like a dweeb and a hypocrite for saying this, because the wrestling on the show has, by and large, been dope these first three episodes. That being said, there are guys on the show whose intentions I want to hear about from a crew other than the commentary team, especially when the commentary team contains Jim Ross yammering on about the legal man or doing his best to humanize LAX when they're the characters on the show in least need of warm anecdotes.
My biggest complaint about AEW so far is definitely how character motivations are laid out and fleshed out. I know the Lucha Bros. don't like SCU, but why? Even if it's just that the Luchas think SCU are the top dogs and they want to punch them in the mouth, how about letting Feníx say it? Wrestling and subtlety don't get along all that well because you're asking big humans whose job it is to land on their heads for a living to emmote like Daniel Day Lewis. Anyone who says otherwise is acting on headcanon, which is fine, but not relevant to an accessible and widespread conversation. As much as I want wrestling to get at that level of thespian fidelity, I'm not sure that's a reasonable short-term goal. It's great that Cody got this big vignette to explain the torture he has inside, but he's not the only person who needs some exposition time. For example, the Dark Order hasn't been seen or even mentioned since they won the bye in the Tag Tournament at All Out. Don't you think they need some sort of hype?
It's only three weeks, and very few wrestling companies really have fully formed stories in that time. WWE going to Monday Night RAW wasn't a fledgling company; it had eight years of direction from Vincent Kennedy McMahon and several decades of history from Vincent James McMahon. AEW has what, a YouTube series that only a fraction of the audience watches? I don't want to have to watch YouTube to get the whole picture. What makes Dark so great, for example, is that you don't have to watch it to get the story of what's happening on Dynamite. It's good to supplement with online, but the gist of what you're saying needs to happen on television if you're a television-first promotion. If not, then what am I wasting my time on Wednesdays for?
Teeth. Teeth! TEETH! - Britt Baker and Riho squared off for the Women's Championship, and I think it's time to start a dialogue about the dentist-wrestler. Hey, did you know Baker is a dentist? Anyway, I still think Riho is the best wrestler in that company, and I also hate using the term "carry job" for matches. However, I don't think this match was good, and I think it was watchable because Riho busted her ass, but Baker had no idea how to handle a wrestler that size. At least that's the best case scenario. At several times, it looked like Baker didn't rotate enough or get low enough for her moves to look good. The match happened on an episode of Dynamite, not a pay-per-view, so it's possible that she's not at the top of the division right now. That being said, who else does AEW have on its bench? Bea Priestley and Nyla Rose are good options, sure. I'm not sure how many episodes of Dynamite they can count Emi Sakura in for. Kylie Rae left, and I don't think Sadie Gibbs has wrestled a match yet. Aja Kong and Yuka Sakazawa are still in Japan. Allie/Cherry Bomb hasn't made it off Dark. AEW has a good women's roster, sure, but is it robust?
Friend of the blog Elle Collins asks where the third women's match during the taping session is. For that matter, where's the second match during Dynamite? AEW crows about its inclusion, but the female roster feels paltry if talented. I don't want Dynamite to become like NXT in that you kinda have to hope and pray that a non-title women's match gets added to the PPV. Even then, Takeover only has five matches, and NXT found a way to get Io Shirai vs. Candice LeRae on the last one. Full Gear will have eight matches. Again, they still are finding their feet, but there are certain things that you would like to see addressed earlier rather than later.
Shut Up About Marko, Nerds - So, awful news dropped last night as Luchasaurus tore his hamstring pretty badly preparing for the Jurassic Express/Lucha Bros. match. Marko Stunt replaced him, making Jungle Boy the surprising heavy for the match. The bout went as one might expect, with the diminutive Jurassic Express getting in their shots using leverage and strikes with the pointy parts of their bodies while the Luchas played the roles of sledgehammers. It was a fine match, possibly better than the opener, and I thought it did a good job establishing all four guys as discrete characters on a show where people need those to hang their hats on.
Of course, it's not surprising that a certain segment of mouthy, reactionary wrestling fans took umbrage that someone bigger than a toddler sold for Stunt. If you're small, apparently you don't hurt. Those people have never interacted with toddlers before I can tell you that. If you've ever had a 30-lb. four year-old girl jump on your stomach and didn't feel the need to recoil in reaction, you're lying or you're Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. Even if the agents laid the match out to have Stunt doing Last Rides to Penta, the overarching thing is that it's wrestling. Unrealistic shit happens all the time. Undertaker once ended a Batista/Rey Mysterio match by shooting lightning from backstage. People accept that but they can't accept the Luchas selling because Marko Stunt jabbed an elbow into their soft tissue at high speed. Honestly, I should stop recognizing them, and really, so should you.
Bring Me Deathmatch Kenny - PAC and Moxley vs. Hangman Page and Kenny Omega was what you'd expect from those four at this point in the year. It hit hard. It had great counters. PAC chewed scenery while working over the babyface. Mox brought the manic energy. It also furthered tensions between Moxley and PAC, showing that just because they're both heeling doesn't mean they're aligned. I like that demarcation in Mox's character, that he wouldn't pick the bones off PAC's kill of Omega last week and thus got angry that PAC would snipe his kill this week. It's a simple character stroke that I'm used to not seeing because WWE builds monoliths.
The most exciting thing about that match was Omega continuing to tease becoming as much of a deathmatch wrestler as AEW's sponsors will let him. I know it's corny as hell, but the barbed wire-wrapped broom is just inherently satisfactory. If the Mox/Joey Janela match from Fyter Fest is any indication, an AEW deathmatch, or more accurately a hardcore match, will probably get to about half as violent as something that might happen in Game Changer Wrestling, and maybe Omega and/or Moxley will bleed a little bit. After seeing years of hardcore matches in WWE with no blood or plunder greater than a chair and a table, I'm ready to see how AEW will explore the studio space while seeing how they self-regulate.
Darby Allin, Made Man - You know a match is gonna be lit when Jericho comes to the ring with the Kefka facepaint on. I'd say he pulled his weight, but man, the star of this match was Darby Allin, who continues to both be a revelation and also prove that Gabe Sapolsky was a goddamn fool for not putting a title on him and letting him ride. He's got such an uncanny knack for the moment. Every time he went in with strikes on Jericho, you could see the palpable desperation-backed intensity in each one thrown. When he bumped, it showed how much of an uphill battle he had to climb. It was the kind of fight you'd want not only your babyface underdog to show, but the protagonist in your action movie.
The little things in presentation made for an enhanced experience too. More often than not, you have no-disqualification matches in WWE where the referee enforces rope breaks even though there's no reason why anyone would let them go if they couldn't get DQ'd for it. Mentioning that you couldn't win the match if a rope break was being made gave some sense into why Aubrey Edwards was enforcing them and why either one of the competitors complied. It's not about being mechanical about the rules or making sure you're enforcing them by the letter, but about them providing some sense into what's going on.
Of course, the ending couldn't be Allin winning when Cody chasing Jericho was the story (although having Cody wrestle the kid he couldn't put away at Fyter Fest would've been an intriguing story as well), and it would've been foolish to have had Allin taking a clean-for-a-street-fight pinfall. Having Jake Hager emerge to cost him the win was the right call, especially given how the crowd has been reacting to him all three weeks. Allin may not be in the plans now, but after last night, I can't see how the folks in the creative room aren't already thinking about when they can tell the story that puts the title on him in a pinnacle moment. It's hard for me to watch AEW and Allin in particular and not think he's a made man after this, even with the heels in the ring celebrating with A LITTLE BIT OF THE BUBBLAY at show's close.
Lucha Sneak Attack! - Dynamite opened this week with Feníx and Pentagón, Jr. waylaying Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian of SCU in advance of their first-round tag tournament match with the Best Friends. It was a vicious beatdown, the kind that really gets the blood pumping, and it ended with Penta spiking Daniels on the ramp with a package piledriver and Scorpio Sky making the save before Feníx did the same to Kazarian. The good news is that the Lucha Bros. get to be the BAMFs that they need to be in order to get the most out of them. The bad news is that SCU was positioned as a sympathetic babyface team when, uh, they come out and say every town they're in is the worst town they ever have been in. Again, it feels like AEW is either playing with shades of gray or they really don't care about keeping alignments consistent, which I get it, everyone in the company is over at this point. Somewhere down the line, I wonder if it'll be an issue.
Anyway, the match itself continued the streak of Dynamite opening with a main-event quality bout. Outside of Sky interrupting a hug between Trent? and Chuck Taylor (Sky has a history with homophobia, and even if the Best Friends aren't a gay gimmick, well it doesn't stop homophobes from trying to frame platonic acts of friendship as gay), it was a solid opener that hit some high notes and got the story it was supposed to tell over. Sky wrestling with only one shoe was also more impressive than one might think. I can't even walk if I only have one shoe on without being a topsy-turvy mess. I guess even bigots can be athletically inclined, who knew?
Also, points to Taylor for pandering to Philly fans with the Ben Simmons jersey. There is absolutely nothing a Philly fan loves more than being pandered to. I know, because I am a Philly fan who loves being pandered to, and lo and behold, Chuckie T is one of my favorite wrestlers.
Beaver Boys on TV - So LAX or EYFBO or whatever Santana and Ortiz are calling themselves nowadays got themselves a match with enhancement talent. Of course, being who runs AEW, that enhancement talent was none other than John Silver and Alex Reynolds, the Beaver Boys. As far as squash matches go, it was entertaining inasmuch as a match where one competitor or team of competitors had no chance. Silver got to flex his muscles while preening at one point, so not all was lost for the TV jobbers who both have good spots on the indies (tune into Beyond Wrestling Uncharted Territory tonight live on Independent Wrestling TV!). The interesting, for bad reasons, thing that happened during this segment was the post-match promo, where Jericho appeared on the Tron and started putting over his henchmen. The problem was he veered into racist territory calling them "thugs" and "pit bulls." Of course, earlier in the day, he did a spon-con tweet to pub Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, where he plays a KKK Grand Wizard, by hashtagging the letters KKK. All in all, not a good day for Chris Jericho and race relations. Good on LAX for just yelling over it though. They can talk; let them. They're quite good at it too.
Where Are the Promos? - A long pre-taped vignette hyping up Cody aired next. It was well-shot, well-produced, and really got over the fact that Cody needs to beat Jericho at Full Gear in order to be complete. It was the only real part of the show dedicated to promotional ventures outside of the short promo that preceded it from Jericho and a short pre-tape from Jon Moxley before his match. I feel like a dweeb and a hypocrite for saying this, because the wrestling on the show has, by and large, been dope these first three episodes. That being said, there are guys on the show whose intentions I want to hear about from a crew other than the commentary team, especially when the commentary team contains Jim Ross yammering on about the legal man or doing his best to humanize LAX when they're the characters on the show in least need of warm anecdotes.
My biggest complaint about AEW so far is definitely how character motivations are laid out and fleshed out. I know the Lucha Bros. don't like SCU, but why? Even if it's just that the Luchas think SCU are the top dogs and they want to punch them in the mouth, how about letting Feníx say it? Wrestling and subtlety don't get along all that well because you're asking big humans whose job it is to land on their heads for a living to emmote like Daniel Day Lewis. Anyone who says otherwise is acting on headcanon, which is fine, but not relevant to an accessible and widespread conversation. As much as I want wrestling to get at that level of thespian fidelity, I'm not sure that's a reasonable short-term goal. It's great that Cody got this big vignette to explain the torture he has inside, but he's not the only person who needs some exposition time. For example, the Dark Order hasn't been seen or even mentioned since they won the bye in the Tag Tournament at All Out. Don't you think they need some sort of hype?
It's only three weeks, and very few wrestling companies really have fully formed stories in that time. WWE going to Monday Night RAW wasn't a fledgling company; it had eight years of direction from Vincent Kennedy McMahon and several decades of history from Vincent James McMahon. AEW has what, a YouTube series that only a fraction of the audience watches? I don't want to have to watch YouTube to get the whole picture. What makes Dark so great, for example, is that you don't have to watch it to get the story of what's happening on Dynamite. It's good to supplement with online, but the gist of what you're saying needs to happen on television if you're a television-first promotion. If not, then what am I wasting my time on Wednesdays for?
Teeth. Teeth! TEETH! - Britt Baker and Riho squared off for the Women's Championship, and I think it's time to start a dialogue about the dentist-wrestler. Hey, did you know Baker is a dentist? Anyway, I still think Riho is the best wrestler in that company, and I also hate using the term "carry job" for matches. However, I don't think this match was good, and I think it was watchable because Riho busted her ass, but Baker had no idea how to handle a wrestler that size. At least that's the best case scenario. At several times, it looked like Baker didn't rotate enough or get low enough for her moves to look good. The match happened on an episode of Dynamite, not a pay-per-view, so it's possible that she's not at the top of the division right now. That being said, who else does AEW have on its bench? Bea Priestley and Nyla Rose are good options, sure. I'm not sure how many episodes of Dynamite they can count Emi Sakura in for. Kylie Rae left, and I don't think Sadie Gibbs has wrestled a match yet. Aja Kong and Yuka Sakazawa are still in Japan. Allie/Cherry Bomb hasn't made it off Dark. AEW has a good women's roster, sure, but is it robust?
Friend of the blog Elle Collins asks where the third women's match during the taping session is. For that matter, where's the second match during Dynamite? AEW crows about its inclusion, but the female roster feels paltry if talented. I don't want Dynamite to become like NXT in that you kinda have to hope and pray that a non-title women's match gets added to the PPV. Even then, Takeover only has five matches, and NXT found a way to get Io Shirai vs. Candice LeRae on the last one. Full Gear will have eight matches. Again, they still are finding their feet, but there are certain things that you would like to see addressed earlier rather than later.
Shut Up About Marko, Nerds - So, awful news dropped last night as Luchasaurus tore his hamstring pretty badly preparing for the Jurassic Express/Lucha Bros. match. Marko Stunt replaced him, making Jungle Boy the surprising heavy for the match. The bout went as one might expect, with the diminutive Jurassic Express getting in their shots using leverage and strikes with the pointy parts of their bodies while the Luchas played the roles of sledgehammers. It was a fine match, possibly better than the opener, and I thought it did a good job establishing all four guys as discrete characters on a show where people need those to hang their hats on.
Of course, it's not surprising that a certain segment of mouthy, reactionary wrestling fans took umbrage that someone bigger than a toddler sold for Stunt. If you're small, apparently you don't hurt. Those people have never interacted with toddlers before I can tell you that. If you've ever had a 30-lb. four year-old girl jump on your stomach and didn't feel the need to recoil in reaction, you're lying or you're Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. Even if the agents laid the match out to have Stunt doing Last Rides to Penta, the overarching thing is that it's wrestling. Unrealistic shit happens all the time. Undertaker once ended a Batista/Rey Mysterio match by shooting lightning from backstage. People accept that but they can't accept the Luchas selling because Marko Stunt jabbed an elbow into their soft tissue at high speed. Honestly, I should stop recognizing them, and really, so should you.
Bring Me Deathmatch Kenny - PAC and Moxley vs. Hangman Page and Kenny Omega was what you'd expect from those four at this point in the year. It hit hard. It had great counters. PAC chewed scenery while working over the babyface. Mox brought the manic energy. It also furthered tensions between Moxley and PAC, showing that just because they're both heeling doesn't mean they're aligned. I like that demarcation in Mox's character, that he wouldn't pick the bones off PAC's kill of Omega last week and thus got angry that PAC would snipe his kill this week. It's a simple character stroke that I'm used to not seeing because WWE builds monoliths.
The most exciting thing about that match was Omega continuing to tease becoming as much of a deathmatch wrestler as AEW's sponsors will let him. I know it's corny as hell, but the barbed wire-wrapped broom is just inherently satisfactory. If the Mox/Joey Janela match from Fyter Fest is any indication, an AEW deathmatch, or more accurately a hardcore match, will probably get to about half as violent as something that might happen in Game Changer Wrestling, and maybe Omega and/or Moxley will bleed a little bit. After seeing years of hardcore matches in WWE with no blood or plunder greater than a chair and a table, I'm ready to see how AEW will explore the studio space while seeing how they self-regulate.
Darby Allin, Made Man - You know a match is gonna be lit when Jericho comes to the ring with the Kefka facepaint on. I'd say he pulled his weight, but man, the star of this match was Darby Allin, who continues to both be a revelation and also prove that Gabe Sapolsky was a goddamn fool for not putting a title on him and letting him ride. He's got such an uncanny knack for the moment. Every time he went in with strikes on Jericho, you could see the palpable desperation-backed intensity in each one thrown. When he bumped, it showed how much of an uphill battle he had to climb. It was the kind of fight you'd want not only your babyface underdog to show, but the protagonist in your action movie.
The little things in presentation made for an enhanced experience too. More often than not, you have no-disqualification matches in WWE where the referee enforces rope breaks even though there's no reason why anyone would let them go if they couldn't get DQ'd for it. Mentioning that you couldn't win the match if a rope break was being made gave some sense into why Aubrey Edwards was enforcing them and why either one of the competitors complied. It's not about being mechanical about the rules or making sure you're enforcing them by the letter, but about them providing some sense into what's going on.
Of course, the ending couldn't be Allin winning when Cody chasing Jericho was the story (although having Cody wrestle the kid he couldn't put away at Fyter Fest would've been an intriguing story as well), and it would've been foolish to have had Allin taking a clean-for-a-street-fight pinfall. Having Jake Hager emerge to cost him the win was the right call, especially given how the crowd has been reacting to him all three weeks. Allin may not be in the plans now, but after last night, I can't see how the folks in the creative room aren't already thinking about when they can tell the story that puts the title on him in a pinnacle moment. It's hard for me to watch AEW and Allin in particular and not think he's a made man after this, even with the heels in the ring celebrating with A LITTLE BIT OF THE BUBBLAY at show's close.
