OPENING BIT- fine
I will give them a pass on MJF and Jericho pulling up in almost identical cards at the exact same time from opposite directions right behind Tony because this was clearly a staged segment. I was less fond of the split-screen at the end of them each saying “what a loser!” as they walked away, but that’s more because it really should lead to them feuding, as there are both arrogant jerks with very think skin, and these two feuding is not what AEW needs right now.


JURASSIC EXPRESS (w/Marko Stunt) vs. LUCHA BROS (w/Eddie Kington, The Butcher, & The Blade)-
Pentagon Jr. is now Penta el 0M in AEW, too. I hate that name so much, as it comes off like a really bad “someone else has my trademark” name. I realize that that’s exactly what it is. What I’m saying is to get a name that doesn’t sound like that.
Penta shoving Marko off the top rope into a superkick by Fenix was really cool. The match was mostly spots, culminating a in a spot where Penta managed to accidentally hit his partner with a Canadian Destroyer. I’m sorry, but that’s just goofy and stupid. I get that you’re doing a thing where these guys already screw up, but find another way to do it.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- bad
Fenix is angry at Penta are angry. The Butcher & The Blade break them up on Kingston’s orders. Kingston then starts to cut a promo and it’s shooting time, brother! He asks them “where’s your little British friend?” the, for no reason other than to provoke the man, asks The Blade “where’s your wife?” What wife? This is the first that we’re hearing in AEW that this man is married. And no, you can’t all of a sudden have him and Allie be married because 1) why wasn’t it ever brought up before, and 2) that would mean that Q.T. has been dating another man’s wife for MONTHS and no one has said a word about it. Also, that seems like the kind of thing that would lead to a feud between Butcher & Blade and Natural Nightmares, but so far it appears that it hasn’t.
Kingston demands that they shake hands but Penta refuses. The fans are not taking this seriously one bit, doing the “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…” thing that they’ll do when someone is winding up a punch as they wait for Penta to finally accept the handshake.
Penta finally accepts the handshake, as we all knew he would, while Kingston is rambling on the whole f*cking time.
Kingston then reminds us all that he wasn’t eliminated from the Battle Royale. If you’re going to do this angle at all- and especially with a guy like Eddie Kingston, you need to make it clear that he’s been complaining about this since the moment it happened. All it takes is one comment by the announcers that Kingston is in Tony Khan’s office complaining about this during the PPV… but you have to do that! You can’t have him wait four days and then start to complain.
This whole faction is a perfect example of something that doesn’t need to be happening. Let Lucha Bros be Lucha Bros, let Butcher & Blade be undercard dorks. This is the sort of thing that should be cut in favor of building up an undercard in the women’s division.

JAKE ROBERTS & LANCE ARCHER PROMO- Jake was AWESOME, Archer was very bad

MATT HARDY PROMO- TREMENDOUS!
He spun this in the most positive way possible, and told us that he’s going to transition into something else (chasing a title).

ORANGE CASSIDY vs. ANGELICO (w/Jack Evans)- 4/10
Unmasked Fire Ant defeated Angelico in a short but solid match, doing nothing stupid or Orange Cassidy-like. The announcers are telling us that Jericho has lit a fire under OC and now he’s taking things more seriously, and that’s a fine story (other than that it buries the Pac feud as pointless)… so long as you don’t go back to him being a goofball.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- good
LAX come out the crowd and jump OC from behind. Best Friends run them off, even though the heels are armed and the babyfaces are not. These guys should not be cowards. Other than that, this was good. Best Friends challenged LAX to meet them in the parking lot next week for a fight.

THE YOUNG BUCKS SUPERKICK ALEX MARVEZ FOR THE CRIME OF TRYING TO INTERVIEW THEM- Okay, so now they’re heels, too. Is anyone even close to the top of the card a babyface. I can’t even call Moxley one after forcing a civilian to fight him and probably crippling the guy last week. Ross doesn’t seem to give a sh*t about this, saying “Oh. He was at the superkick party and didn’t know he was invited.” Thankfully we have Excalibur to actually do a good job on commentary and be very distressed by this and tell the Bucks off for assaulting a staff-member.

WHO WILL BE KIP SABIAN’S BEST MAN?-
They have him shoo Schiavone off just for heat, but I will admit that when I saw Schiavone out here, my first thought was “why can’t they just let the man talk?
Some fat goof comes out who subscribed to Sabian’s Twitch (which I guess they’re going to keep plugging just to spite WWE, but, of course, as we’ve seen with SCU, AEW’s fanbase will turn him plugging his Twitch into a babyface catchphrase and kill Sabian’s ability to get any heat, so why are they doing this?). Why was this guy backstage at all? This is the sort of sh*t that AEW needs to not to. Just because you can make a joke, doesn’t mean that you should.
Also, why didn’t the REAL best man come out when Kip announced him?
Kip calls the best man out… and it’s Brian Pillman Jr. Wait… no… another goof gag. Now they’ve taken Brian Pillman Jr., who is regarded as one of the top prospects in the business… and they’ve defined him as a goof. Way to go, AEW.
Kip calls out the best man against… and it’s F*CKING RUSEV! The single person I have most been waiting to see in AEW!
That being said… I’m sorry, but I don’t buy this. When have these two even had the opportunity to cross paths and be friends?
Also, the f*cking fans are chanting “MIRO DAY,” because… well… I guess they’re the same as the WWE goofs who liked chanting the stupid catchphrase rather than the thing they’re supposed to like, which is the wrestler himself/herself.
He cuts the glass ceiling/imaginary brass ring promo that you’d expect… and it actually doesn’t bother me here because he’s not a goof in a group of goofs, breaking kayfabe and yelling about being kept down by TV executives. Rusev is awesome. It’s going to be hard to start saying “Miro.” Also, he needs a last name.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS ADAM PAGE- fine
Tony is having quite the busy day, isn’t he?
I’m going to blame this one on AEW production: If Page is talking about having “bruised ribs” in the interview and doesn’t mention his neck at all, maybe show stills of his ribs getting worked over, not him taking a spike piledriver? Also, this way, if someone orders the replay, you’re not giving away the exact finish.
Page is contemplative. This is the sort thing I would have been higher on several months ago, but this storyline has worn me out and everything else we’ve seen from AEW since then kills my optimism, as they have gone from what seem like skilled artists to more like skilled mimics who can copy the elements they’ve seen other places but can’t put them together in a coherent or effective way.

NO DISQUALIFCATIONS AND NO COUNT-OUTS MATCH: Chris Jericho & Jake Hager vs. Joey Janela & Sonny Kiss- 6.5/10
So these guys have one incident and they get a weapons match booked next week, but it took months of attacks for LAX and Best Friends to get one? This was a fine undercard weapons match.
Joey Janela swings a chair from up to do, and Jim Ross is talking about how Janela has a great baseball swing, so I guess we can conclude that Jim Ross as never see someone swing a baseball bat outside of a wrestling match.

JERICHO PROMO- good
He and Hager are going to be a tag team now and go for the tag titles.
A note to the production guy: If a heel tells the fans to “bow down to me!” or something like that, DON’T CUT TO FANS DOING THE THING THE HEEL WANTS!

MJF PROMO- He yells at this people and fired them. Do we really need MJF yelling at people every week? He’s an asshole to his servants. We got that message a month and a half ago.
He threatens to make Wardlow and his family destitute and put them “on the street.” I really can’t get into this program. Yes, MJF is a total dick, but Wardlow is a heel, too, having gone along with all of MJF’s cheating so he’s not very likable, and MJF isn’t wrong that Wardlow has f*cked up multiple times now. In the real world, he would be fired.

JON MOXLEY PROMO- awesome!

FTR’S TAG TEAM CELEBRATION-
The rest of the division is forced to surround the ring so FTR can insult them. FTR now say that they are “locker room leaders.” Uch. And now we’ve got Dax Harwood telling Jungle Express that a “comedy gimmick” will never “run” the division. Only Jungle Express are outraged enough at these insults to stand up to FTR. They say more mean things and avoid getting beaten up in the ring, but get cornered by the rest of the division. They start examining each other’s hands for no reason. This allowed for them to be distracted so that Marko stunt can dump the beer cooler onto them.
1. There were beer cans in that thing. If those weren’t empty, that wasn’t safe.
2. Yes, someone got something dumped on them in AEW yet again.
3. If Jungle Boy did this then that’s one thing, but Marko is so annoying and didn’t do anything during the actual fight, so this is more of him being an annoying little twerp whose bigger friends do the hard work for him, and that’s a heel characteristic and just gets me annoyed at him for getting involved rather than feeling like FTR got some kind of due comeuppance.
4. I’ll bet you anything the AEW people think this was really clever because no one got a cake in the face by the end of the segment, not realizing that they’re created their won goofy trope of people getting things dumped on them.

TAZ AND CREW REPEAT THE “RICKY STARKS DRESSED UP AS DARBY ALLIN” SCHTICK- meh
Both Schiavone and Taz are back on commentary now. Taz just told everyone that this was Ricky Starks before Schiavone could open his mouth, but I’d like to believe that Schiavone was once again fooled and the reason we didn’t hear him say “IT’S DARBY ALLIN!” when Starks came out is because Ross figured out what was going to happen and ripped Tony’s headset off of his head and put his hand over his mouth so that he wouldn’t embarrass himself yet again. How often do you think Tony gets fooled by fans showing up to his house in a Sting mask?
Starks cut a good promo, but I was immediately turned off by the repetitiveness of dressing up like Darby again.

TAY CONTI vs. NYLA ROSE (w/Vickie Guerrero)- 4.75/10
Jim Ross said that Conti was just signed “earlier today,” which makes it kind of weird that the Dark Order signed her while she wasn’t even under contract to AEW. Boy would they sure have felt dumb if AEW didn’t wind up signing her.
Nyla was billed as “Vicious Vixens Nyla Rose,” which is weird because vixens in plural, but there is only one Nyla Rose. And there no apostrophe anywhere in sight, either, so “Vicious Vixens” is neither a group she is a part of nor a nickname for Vickie. Vickie’s shirt seems to imply that it’s a team name for her and Nyla, which is weird because Vickie is a manager and not a wrestler. (And if AEW is bringing Vickie in to wrestle, then they’re stupid. And if they’re doing some sort of thing where Vickie thinks they’re a tag team and not a wrestler-manager paring then that’s dumb, too, because all they’ve done is added another goof to the show.) And the fact that I, who have watched every episode of Dynamite, don’t know what’s going on with this, is a very bad thing.
They did a goofy cut to their ceiling-cam for Nyla’s entrance, which did nothing but look goofy.
Conti put up a good fight but lost clean.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- not good
Vickie is just being WWE Vickie Guerrero, screaming everything in that annoying cadence. Nyla went to beat Conti down more but Shida backed her down with a Kendo stick. I don’t have any interest in seeing these two feud again. That being said, Nyla probably is the woman with the most credibility to face Shida right now, so it’s hard for me to fault them for going in this direction.

Jim Ross tells us that “the AEW executives” have met to discuss the “Young Bucks situation.” These people have names and we know who they are (Cody, Brandi, Kenny, Tony Khan, Adam Page… and the Bucks themselves), so maybe we could name them. And some of them aren’t there (like Kenny, because he quit, or Cody because he’s still not recovered enough from his beating to do so), maybe you could share that info with us to give us a little update on those storylines, instead of doing what WWE does, which is to pretend that the company is run by a nameless, faceless group of people whenever it’s inconvenient for them to acknowledge that other known characters are the ones who are in charge of the company.
Anyway, the Bucks have been fined $5,000 each. Well… that was quick. Maybe we could get around to punishing Lance Archer for his “senseless assaults” on innocent people every week? Including both Alex Marvez and a random dude on the side of the road? Or is attack Marvez only a punishable offense when the storyline calls for it to be?

JIM ROSS INTERVIEWS KENNY OMEGA- decent
This is happening in a locker room, so I assume that means that Kenny is in the building, so I guess he’s already back at work?
Kenny has no interest in teaming with Page anymore and says he is going to be the singles star that everyone expected him to be when AEW started.

RUNDOWN OF NEXT WEEK’S CARD- Either the announcers went out of order or the graphics people did.

AEW TNT TITLE MATCH: Brodie Lee (w/John Silver) vs. Dustin Rhodes- 5.75/10
Dustin jumped Brodie from behind during his entrance. That’s not every sporting or babyface like. If he’s going to jump Brodie, he should have done it during Brodie’s entrance. Make it something that feels spontaneous, not like a premeditated plan to do something shady.
Brodie won a match that wasn’t very exciting.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- snore
The Dark Order brought out a downed Q.T. Marshall. Brodie pushed Cabana and ordered him to leave. Evil Uno brought Cabana to the back. Brodie kicked Dustin in the nuts as revenge for Dustin doing the same to him earlier. This seemed like it served no purpose.

BREAKING NEWS FROM CODY- HORRENDOUS!
Of course Cody gets to be the real main event spot. And for THIS?!
Silly me for thinking this was going to be about wrestling. No. Instead we got Cody happily introducing a commercial for yet another “LOOK AT OUR BIG TALENT SHOW!” show, where Cody will be a judge. Basically, he’s doing what Miz is doing for USA’s Summer Splashdown or whatever.
So yeah, this was horribly off tone, and I felt taken advantage of for being made to think that this was going to be important. Also, it basically rubs in that Cody’s injury was a work so that he could team with Terry Gordy on a tour of Japan film this new thing for TBS. If they had just aired this as a commercial I would have been fine with it, but to advertise it as part of the show as this big “announcement” or “update” (both words were used) from Cody as part of the show makes it feel like part of the show, and thus it hurts the show.


This was mostly a bad episode of Dynamite, but it didn’t make me as angry as many others do, so I guess that’s a small victory. Next week’s show looks pretty good. Hopefully they don’t f*ck it up.