Where's My Earth-Shattering Kaboom?

The pyro riggers and Khan did Mox dirty
Photo Credit: Lee South

Honestly, I feel bad for the entire All Elite Wrestling roster. They went out and killed it from the Buy-In through the finish of the main event, even further past that with Eddie Kingston running in to save his friend, Jon Moxley, from an earth-shattering explosion that should've burnt both men to a crisp. You weren't getting anything close to what would have believably been a flesh-immolating explosion, but that's okay. The fireworks that subbed for real C4 in the match itself did the trick. No one, not even Atsushi Onita, expected them to use real explosives because not even deathmatch guys use real explosives. However, there's a difference between "looks fake but I can buy it" and "two guys having to sell that they're dead because some sparklers went off diagonally from them."

All anyone talked about after Revolution ended was the underwhelming, to say the least, explosion that was supposed to write Moxley off the program for a few months so he could go be a father and make Kingston the biggest sympathetic babyface in the company for laying down his life to save his friend's. They may try to sell that Wednesday night, and it might work too given how relatively new AEW is even now in its second-going-on-third year of existence. It's still a company that has a lot of hardcore fans, and hardcore fans are far more pliable to forgive errors, especially concerning wrestlers with which a majority of the people have attachments to. That being said, hardcore fans ALSO are far more discerning and will not let a company forget it when they make a mistake. It's a real double-edged sword AEW is swinging right now, and all they had to do, all Tony Khan had to do, was make sure there was an earth-shattering kaboom when he needed to have one.

This fiasco of an "explosion," the thing that was supposed to make sure both men in the ring were supposed to feel the effects of the match whether or not they manually triggered any of the bombs, taints an otherwise fantastic match and incredible story. It's also the first time that AEW seemed like it was run by a billionaire and not a wrestling fan. The attention to detail in the company so far has been stellar, right down to all the big set pieces that they set up and knocked down during the Chris Jericho vs. Orange Cassidy feud. They seemed not to spare a single expense until they went and tried to do a match where they absolutely had to make sure it was as gory and fantastical as possible so as not to become fodder for Botchamania. They didn't, and a half-hour's worth of work from Moxley and Kenny Omega went down the proverbial drain.

The biggest disappointment here is that it seemingly invalidates the hard work of the entire roster for a pay-per-view event that was closer to last year's Revolution than the disastrous All Out '20 that serves as perhaps the only real misstep for the company on a pay-per-play basis. Forget the Omega/Moxley match. The cinematic street fight came a few Home Alone 2 tribute spots short of fully using the studio space allotted to it. The Miro and Kip Sabian vs. Orange Cassidy and Chuck Taylor tag match was a furious and violent sprint that served as a capstone for a worthwhile television feud and a stepping stone for Miro to do bigger things. The Women's Championship match, though a little long, was still excellently executed and emotional as it should've been. Christian Cage as the big free agent signing will be a boon to the company going forward. This was a show that had a lot of highs that will go unremembered, at least in the short term, because they went cheap on the grand finale.

The saving grace is that hardcore wrestling fans, the ones who generally decide what it is that gets rehabbed and what stays in the memory hole, are some of the most forgiving people on earth as I mentioned above. WWE has mostly sucked major shit since the moment the McMahon family realized they could make the show about them and not the labor (for the record, that moment was when they decided to make the main event of WrestleMania 2000 a four-corner match with a McMahon in every corner), and yet the critical rehabilitation that every inch of that company's programming has received in the last two decades and counting has been stunning. Basically, everyone is willing to forgive every era except the objectively most successful one, mainly because the most objectively successful one was a glass house built on sand and held up on the shoulders of giants who attracted fans through sheer cult of personality alone. I think AEW will be fine, then again, a lot of wrestling fans are also highly territorial and will lash out at anything that isn't WWE that starts getting critical mass. It's a hard situation to read.

That's why Khan could have avoided it all if he had an earth-shattering kaboom to close his show with and make the attention that the medics gave to Moxley and Kingston mean something other than fodder for a joke that will recur and recur until the next time either major American wrestling company has a big accident of embarrassment. Khan already started to dig his way out in the post-show press conference by saying "Omega built a dud." Kingston is one of the best talkers in wrestling history, so having him be the mouthpiece to dig AEW out of it might be the best idea and happiest accident moving forward. Still, for a company that was riding so high after last Wednesday's Dynamite and most of this show, ending on that note is equivalent to ripping a fart in the middle of class. It's the only thing anyone's going to talk about, and it's not fair to the wrestlers who did their best to try and make it happen.