BRM Reviews the 2/9/2022 Dynamite (A Microcosm of AEW)
Posted: Feb 10th, '22, 19:49
OPENING SEGMENT- good promos, bad everything else
Wardlow has been ordered to carry cardboard cut-outs of MJF beating CM Punk to the ring. Also, everyone else in the group gets an entrance, but Wardlow doesn’t get an entrance. Because now that they want to do an angle where he will turn on MJF, MJF has suddenly lost all diplomatic skill. Explain to me how this is “good storytelling.”
The announcers, of course, are so outraged about Wardlow’s mistreatment… and as a result, are completely ignoring the fact that Wardlow fully went along with MJF’s plan last week and helped him cheat to screw CM Punk out of the match.
MJF got an elaborate ring introduction which Justin Roberts was ordered to give, and was carried to the ring on a throne. There were women to make out with him. Then he and his pals did a big end-zone dance together, to which Wardlow was either not invited (because MJF has magically lost his previously-shown diplomatic skill) or because he was feeling guilty over screwing CM Punk out of a match, even though he has no attachment to the guy. “SToRyteLLiNg.”
MJF gives a big speech in which he builds it up as if he’s going to thank Wardlow and credit him with the win, but then he swerves the viewers (by which I mean everyone but Wardlow himself and the announcers) by giving credit to Spears instead for warming him up.
MJF and Spears go on for a while until Punk interrupts them. He says he has learned from his mistakes and has now gotten himself some friends in the form of Darby Allin and Sting, armed with baseball bats. Punk says he wants a rematch. MJF says “no,” but Punk clarifies that he was talking to Wardlow, who he claims no one in the Pinnacle would have won a match in the past six months without. He also tells Wardlow that he can get the beating that the rest of the Pinnacle are about to receive, or he can “grow some balls and leave these jerks.”
I’m sorry, but Wardlow is way too far on the heel side of the line for me to be okay with Punk letting him off the hook the way he seems to be. The dude is a heel. This whole “babyface push” of his started with him winning matches via what was pretty much excessive punishment, and at every single turn, he has down the wrong thing morally.
We’ve now shifted from Punk wanting a match with Wardlow to Punk wanting a match with MJF to Punk being happy with another Punk, Sting, & Darby vs. MJF & FTR six-man tag. What’s to stop MJF from just running away again?
MJF counters with the following: FTR vs. Punk and any partner of his choosing other than Darby or Sting tonight, and if Punk’s team wins, Punk gets MJF, anywhere, anytime, in any match of his choosing. I’m ALMOST okay with this as something that Punk would accept instead of just delivering the promised beating to the Pinnacle, except for this one problem: WHY DOESN’T TONY KHAN JUST BOOK PUNK VS. MJF?!
MJF was willing to offer this because he doesn’t think Punk will be able to find a partner because “good luck finding someone in the back who doesn’t hate your guts.” Do people hate Punk? I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of this other than the non-injured Eddie Kingston. Either this isn’t true, so MJF is an idiot, or it is true, and Punk is being foolish by agreeing to this instead of just going nuts with the baseball bats.
Also, props to Dax Hardwood for admitting that he looked pretty terrible in that suit, and even more props to him for turning it into a big positive for his character.
TONY SCHIAVONE IS BACKSTAGE WITH STING, DARBY ALLIN, & ANDRADE EL IDOLO (& JOSE THE ASSISTANT) FACE TO FACE (TO FACE TO FACE, I GUESS)- good performances, but I just don’t get why any of this is happening.
Sting and Darby reiterate that Darby is not Sting’s servant. Darby says he has better things to do than work for Andrade, such as regain the TNT Title. Andrade says that Darby “wants” the title, but he himself will be the next champion. So does Andrade want to hire Darby to remove him as competition for the title?
THE BLADE vs. WARDLOW (w/Shawn Spears)- 4/10
The Blade is in a stable of about twelve people, and no one came out to ringside with him. Not even his manager who is also his wife. He has also apparently won six of his last eight singles matches. Have we even seen him wrestle a singles match since whenever his brass knuckles blow-off with Orange Cassidy was (last summer, maybe)? According to Jim Ross, he has also been winning with the Doctor Bomb, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use.
We were told that Wardlow “signed up for this match” with “short notice,” and Excalibur pointed out that he didn’t even “have time to tape up.” Well that’s his own fault for taking a match on short notice, then, isn’t it?
The Blade jumped the bell on Wardlow, taking his knee out from behind. Is The Blade cheating? Sure. But I’d have a lot more sympathy for Wardlow if he didn’t help MJF cheat just last week. Wardlow overcame both being jumped and not having time to tape up, and won anyway, so who cares?
After the match, Shawn Spears got in the ring and hit The Blade with a chair, which we were told made Wardlow angry for the nonsensically nebulous reason that it was “stealing the spotlight.” See my review of the 12/29/2021 Dynamite for why that doesn’t hold water.
And, of course, in hindsight we can see that reason that The Blade was not accompanied to ringside by either of his two usual managers is because if one of them had come out with him, there would have been someone there to stop the chairshot… but the storyline needed the chairshot to happen, and so they are both mysteriously absent, for no discernable reason other than to progress the storyline. And when your characters’ actions feel driven by the needs of the story you want to tell rather than any established motivation of their own, that’s a failure of storytelling.
PENTA VIDEO- AWESOME!
“When Malakai Black spit into his face, he spit into his soul!” He went to a graveyard and dug up one of his old masks. “Why is the mask a grave?” is the sort of question that doesn’t bother me in a situation like this, because this is clearly a post-produced video package with the kayfabe intention of intimidating Penta’s opponents (and Malakai Black in particular), so I’m fine with the idea that he buried it there himself to make this look cooler and make himself look crazier.
Excalibur framed Malakai’s black mist as “having lasting effects and bringing out a different side of this victims,” but I don’t think that’s true at all. Pac felt like the same old Pac (he had done a “look at me, I’m so crazy” video before returning from the pandemic, and I think during the Omega feud as well), and Julia Hart has been a little different, but it didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary for someone who was just angry, and we really hadn’t seen Julia angry before.
INNER CIRCLE “TEAM MEETING”- Once again: EXCELLENT performances, but the story just doesn’t work!
Chris Jericho, Jake Hager, and Sammy Guevara all came out to Jericho’s music. LAX didn’t come out with them. Jericho started to tell us that they haven’t seen LAX all day… and LAX chose that point to come out (to their own music) purposely interrupting Jericho. Jericho, Sammy, and Hager were all wearing their Inner Circle vests, LAX were not.
Jericho lectures them for not tagging him in against 2.0 a few weeks ago, claiming that they “robbed our fans who came to see Chris Jericho wrestle.”
Santana gave a big speech in which he made the following accusations: Any time they had to shift their focus to something, it has only benefited one person: Chris Jericho. And that any time they have gathered momentum, it has been thrown to the side so that they could come to Jericho’s rescue. Jericho, Satana alleges, has been purposely holding them down.
Jericho says that he is the “influencer” here and asks them what Kingston has ever done for them. Jericho points out that they actually HAD their chance to become the tag champs (he even gave us the freakin’ date: 2/17/2021) and they lost. That’s not his fault.
Jericho says that he brought them in to the Inner Circle and he can take them out. He suggests that he brought in “the wrong two members of LAX,” and asks Hager if he still has Homicide and Hernandez’s phone numbers. I would LOVE to see those two in the Inner Circle (although I’m not sure why Jericho thinks that they would be on his side, considering that the only time we have seen Homicide in AEW, he was helping Eddie Kingston).
Santana went after Jericho, and Sammy had to pull them apart. Sammy was all “we’re a family!” but Jericho told him to shut up. Jericho tried to talk but Sammy interrupted him. He said that his goal was to be the greatest champion ever, and this bickering wasn’t going to help it, so he threatened to quit. He said “I’ve quit this group before,” which seems to ignore the fact that his previous quitting was designed as a ruse to fool MJF. It also makes Sammy look kind of crappy to threaten to quit the group out of fear that their drama would hamper his career five seconds after he called them a “family” and said he loved all of them.
Ortiz picked up Sammy’s mic and blamed Sammy’s potential quitting on Jericho. He then went to set Jericho straight on the influence that Eddie Kingston has had on their careers… although, again, he didn’t actually provide any details. Ortiz said that where they come from, they settle things with fists instead of words, so he challenged Jericho and Hager to a match next week where I just the idea is that they will work out their frustrations physically and then be friends again. Jericho says that he didn’t want it to come to this, but then accepts.
Okay, let’s get the easy thing out of the way first: Sammy. In addition to what I mentioned above about him calling them a family and then saying he would leave them because he thought their drama would hurt his professional aspirations, there is the simple fact that Sammy regained his TNT Title while Jericho and LAX have been bickering, so it really doesn’t seem to have hurt him yet at all.
Now the big thing, which is what kills this story for me. While it is absolutely indisputable that Jericho has been a tremendous dick for the past month, LAX’s accusations don’t ring true in any way. Even with the ability to look back at everything through the lens of these accusations, at no point does it seem like LAX had momentum, then all of a sudden had to shift directions and fight some fight Jericho had started instead of pursuing the tag titles. The only feuds I can remember Jericho arguably starting were the Orange Cassidy feud (during which time LAX lost several #1 contendership matches cleanly), and the Dan Lambert feud, where they dropped out of the Top Five, but they were only ranked about four or five at that point, and since that feud ended, they got right back to four or five, and haven’t gone any higher since, and they’re hardly the only team at that ranking (or better) that has had trouble getting a title shot.
AEW prides itself on “long-term storytelling” (or at the very least, its fans defend it as doing so), but time and again they fail to tell these stories well.
FULL DISCLAIMER: I’m about to toot my own horn here by using my fantasy booking as an example. I do this not for the purpose of tooting my own horn, but because it is the example of this with which I am most intimately familiar, and this review will already be long enough as it is, so I don’t want to spend time having to re-watch a bunch of video packages for Hogan vs. Savage. And yes, I am familiar with the limitations of fantasy booking, but for a scenario where everyone stayed healthy and there were no other unexpected situations that made someone unavailable, I think it’s fine to purely compare the storytelling between a fantasy angle and one that actually happened (especially when you take into consideration that this wasn’t a one-off angle, but rather was something I did in the midst of full-on booking an entire promotion for a years-long run.
Also, for the first time, I’m actually going to spoil something I have upcoming (and I’m sure I’ll get around to writing eventually) in by big “BRM Books Raw 1,000 and Beyond” fantasy booking thread. To review (because I’m sure not everyone remembers things from a twenty-page thread that I haven’t posted in for almost four years now):
For years, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose have been enemies and friends and then enemies again and then friends again, with every time they were enemies, it being because Ambrose “snapped” and/or was taken in by cult leader Bray Wyatt, with Rollins taking it upon himself to either help Ambrose control the “hardcore monster” that dwelt within him (brought out by that rumored WrestleMania match against Mick Foley that Ambrose and Foley were building to on Twitter for a minute or two back in the 2012), or trying to free him from the manipulations of Bray Wyatt, who had promised Ambrose that same thing.
At this point they were friends, and Rollins had earned a title shot at the February PPV, but was taken out by the League of Nations to protect their leader, Wade Barrett. Ambrose held Money in the Bank at the time, and vowed to use it to get revenge for Rollins and take Barrett’s title at the PPV. On the day of the PPV, it turned out that Rollins was cleared early and was inserted as a last-minute replacement into the pre-show match, and was able to be at ringside as his friend Dean won the title, and as Dean was celebrating being lifted up onto the shoulders of the other babyfaces, Rollins (who had been taken out during the match, trying to stop Sylvester Lefort from interfering) leapt into the ring with a springboard knee, knocking Dean down and going after him, causing the locker room to break it up and the show to end with Michael Cole shouting “WHAT HAS GOTTEN INTO SETH ROLLINS!?”
What I never got around to writing was Rollins big explanation segment. In this segment Rollins would explain that this was not just mere “jealousy” as I would have had the announced speculate, but rather Rollins was infuriated that Dean had achieved what Rollins had been unable to achieve so many times, and always because of Dean.
Rollins would then point to about ten to fifteen different incidents that I had peppered out across the two and a half years since Rollins had initially gone to try to help Ambrose with his problem where Rollins could claim that his association with Ambrose had cost him an opportunity. These would range from the fair and obvious- having the Wyatt Family cause him to lose the title shot he won by winning the Royal Rumble to Cesaro because Rollins had been trying to steer Ambrose away from Bray, or Rollins going into a WWE Title match against Cesaro with an injured back because the Wyatts had powerbombed him through a table the previous night, or losing an IC Title match because, during their initial enemies phrase, he had come out to protect someone from Ambrose earlier- to the unfortunate (Dean’s heading towards the ring to cheer Seth on while holding his MITB briefcase making the referee go over to Dean and ask him if he wanted to cash it in right now, causing the referee to not see Rollins pinning John Cena in a WWE Title match)- to choices Seth himself made that he now regrets (like spending so much time working with Dean that he wasn’t able to prepare for a title shot well enough and thus lost- to the downright petty (Ambrose volunteering them to defend their tag titles against the Dudleys at the Royal Rumble when Rollins had been planning on entering the Rumble instead).
Did I have all of these incidents (and more) mapped out before I put the first hint of the storyline on TV? Of course not. I had the visual of the turn at the end, and I had the first few months mapped out with them ending that part of it as enemies because I knew that to be effective it had to be a multi-year thing, with various ups and down in the relationship. But I always knew what the reason for the turn was going to be, and thus, at every opportunity where I could make it feel natural (and especially in that final year when they were babyface best friends), I purposely peppered in situations where the link between him and Dean could somehow result in Seth getting screwed.
And in my notes, I kept a list, because I knew that in order to make Seth not just feel like your run-of-the-mill heel who gets jealous and turns, I had to have Seth explain himself, with evidence to point to.
LAX didn’t have that here… and they’re the ones who we’re supposed to side with! I was just doing it to make my heel feel less generic!
But did you notice who did have evidence? Chris Jericho. He pointed to a specific date where LAX had their shot at lost. Actually, Jericho was even a little diplomatic here. I looked back at my review for that match, and it turned out that the reason that LAX lost that match was because “Ortiz was an idiot and shouted about how they were the best for a long time before getting back into the ring after powerbombing Matt into the crowd, so when he got back into the ring, Nick rolled him up for the win, making him look like an idiot,” so the loss was LAX’s own fault. And, for the record, the Inner Circle were at ringside with LAX.
So while Jericho is a dick and I would be fine with LAX leaving for that reason, that isn’t their stated reason for leaving, and thus I can’t get behind them. And this is far from the first time that AEW has had problems with this sort of thing. Adam Page’s supposed “confidence issues” and being afraid of losing to Omega,
TONY SCHIAVONE’S INTERVIEW WITH ROPPONGI VICE IS INTERRUPTED BY THE YOUNG BUCKS- meh
They (and Cole) jump Roppongi Vice. This would have worked a lot better for me if Roppongi Vice and the Bucks hadn’t come off so goofy, and if the BTE-Trigger that the Bucks gave Rocky hadn’t looked so bad.
Jay White showed up, so they gave him the honor of being the one to throw Trent into the production truck. Introducing Jay White like this took the focus off of the Bucks vs. Roppongi Vice match on Rampage.
Excalibur shouted about how “JAY WHITE HAS WALKED THROUGH THE FORBIDDEN DOOR!” Is it really a “forbidden” door at this point? He’s like the seventh guy from New Japan to show up. I’m also just not excited about Jay White in AEW because there’s no room for him.
FACE OF THE REVOLUTION LADDER MATCH QUALIFYING MATCH: Isiah Kassdy (w/Matt Hardy & Marq Quen) vs. Keith Lee- mostly an awesome squash, except for the part that ruined it.
See… this is exactly the problem. Keith Lee needs the time and attention right now, and any time and attention spent on Jay White is time that can’t be spent on Keith Lee.
Excalibur claimed that this was the “first-ever Face of the Revolution Ladder match qualifier,” which is certainly is not, as they did some qualifiers last year.
J.R. said that Keith Lee “looks like a young Mark Henry.” I think their body-types are different enough that I certainly wouldn’t have said that (Mark is not a regularly-proportioned human. Keith Lee looks like a regularly proportioned human who got bombarded with gamma rays, and is now just bigger and stronger, but his body’s proportions are still normal). What I will say here is that I was glad that the “younger” part looked like it applied. Here was a while in NXT where Lee had quite a bit of gray showing, but he appears to have dyed it out of his beard, so that was good.
Anyway, the match started out as the PERFECT Keith Lee debut match, showing off his power, agility, and attitude. Matt Hardy was so disgusted that he walked out on Private Party.
And then someone had to ruin it by deciding that Isiah Kassidy needed to get offense in on Keith Lee in Keith Lee’s debut. And in a match where they were having Matt walk out on Private Party because of their inability to win! Having Kassidy get offense in on Lee is counter-productive to everything they tried to do!
POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Marq Quen attacked Henry after the match… and someone decided that Quen needed to be able to look effective, too. I know that it all lead to Keith Lee doing col sh*t, but he would have looked even better if he had just destroyed Quen. If you want to show off that cool sh*t, you can just book Keith Lee vs, Marq Quen for next week and do the big spot where Lee catches his dive next week (even better, start the match off like that; with Quen trying to jump the gun on Lee with a dive but Lee catching him).
THUNDER ROSA VS. MERCEDES MARTINEZ/BRITT BAKER VIDEO PACKAGE- great, although I’d have liked Thunder Rosa to maybe be out a little longer after that crazy pipe shot to the head. Next week’s match will be no DQs.
SAMMY GUEVARA CUE-CARD PROMO- terrible
He cannot be talking about serious issues in this inherently comedic format.
IF CM PUNK’S TEAM WINS, HE GETS A MATCH AGAINST MJF ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, AND WITH ANY STIPULATONS THAT HE WANTS: CM Punk & Jon Moxley vs. FTR (w/Tully Blanchard)- 8.5/10
Punk’s knee got worked over early, but Moxley was the babyface who got isolated. That spot where Dax drew Punk away from the corner so Moxley couldn’t tag him in, and then Cash stopped Punk from getting back for the tag with the shoulder block off the apron as Punk was heading back reminded me of why I love FTR so much. It’s little things like that that make a match memorable for me.
They actually got me to bite on pretty much all of their false finishes here (and some credit there is due to Adam Page and the Dark Order losing that big elimination match last summer to teach us that in AEW, the person in the position of “beat my cronies and you get what you want” doesn’t always win). The only real misstep here was the Tully spot. Why did Tully think it was going to be more effective to spend time taking his jacket off so that he could hit Punk in the face with the soft jacket instead of just running over and kicking him?
This match was a much-needed reminder of how awesome FTR are, and so much of what I loved about this match was highlighted for me by the discussion in the other thread. Let’s hope that they are given a lot more chances to do this sort of thing again in 2022 than they were in 2021.
AEW TBS TITLE MATCH: Jade Cargill(c) (w/Mark Sterling) vs. A.Q.A.- 4.75/10
A.Q.A. cut an inset promo that was good, but I can’t help but ask why the hell this debuting nobody is getting a title shot when we have an official list of ranked contenders. It’s even more ridiculous in light of what the next match would be. Tony Khan needed matches for Cargill and Deeb, and instead of booking them against each other in a title match, he books them both against nobodies and lets Deeb do a gimmick where the match has a five-minute time limit? What a moron!
That being said, this was a good little power vs. speed match. A.Q.A. was a very good babyface. Like with the men, I’m not sure that there is room for her in the division, but I’d definitely take her over Red Velvet, Kiera Hogan, Julia Hart, and even over Jamie Hayter and Riho, just for the purposes of being able to connect with the audience (Riho hasn’t) (and that’s ignoring people who are under contract but we haven’t seen wrestle in forever like Leva Bates, and Brandi. And, of course, I’d take her over Abadon). A.Q.A. really feels like she fills a niche (high-flying underdog female babyface) that AEW doesn’t have filled yet.
ADAM COLE & THE YOUNG BUCKS PROMO- meh
The Bucks were too over the top in their promo on Roppongi Vice. Adam Cole assigned them Jay White as back-up for their match. The Bucks didn’t know about Jay White being around, and they point out that Jay White and Kenny Omega were “arch-enemies” at one point. That would have been a better point if the Bucks (and Kenny, for that matter) hadn’t turned on Cole in ROH and everyone is just ignoring that.
Cole says he has a statement to make, and leaves.
Then the Bucks asked Bradon Cutler if he knew Jay White would be there tonight, and Cutler replies “I may have read something about it on reddit.” Obviously this was intended as a laugh-line, but it really opens a big can of worms. Do the wrestlers not keep themselves abreast of industry news? They start to look silly when the internet knows who is going to debut but the wrestlers don’t, and this just brought that into kayfabe.
Also, theoretically Tony Khan new that Jay White would be here, right? Doesn’t he keep the other EVPs informed of these things? And if Tony didn’t know, why is everyone okay with White being here and coming back for Rampage, when he just attacked somebody. That kind of question really extended to Mercedes Martinez, too, now that we know that Britt Baker is the one who brought her in. And ditto for reDRagon, who Cole brought in. I would like answers to these questions, and the only reason I’m asking them is because AEW has gone out of their way to tell us that these people did not come in through the usual means.
SERENA DEEB PROMO- bad
I’m sorry, but this Serena Deeb comes off as someone playing a tough-gal and playing a heel rather than someone who actually is tough and mean. She’s talking about ending this poor jobber’s life, and I don’t buy for a second that the job is in actual mortal danger (compare to, say, Moxley or Lance Archer, or even Britt Baker, who I would believe would go to whatever lengths she deemed necessary to win, up to and including crippling someone for life).
THE PROFESSOR’S FIVE-MINUTE ROOKIE CHALLENGE: Serena Deeb vs. Katie Arquette- squash
They accidentally started their count-down clock at 4:52, then had to change it. Oops.
JURASSIC EXPRESS VS. GUNN CLUB VIDEO PACKAGE- great!
Gunn Club were tremendous! Jungle Boy’s delivery was fine, but this idea that Gunn Club feel “entitled” to a title shot and thus I’m not supposed to like them completely fails for me because they really do deserve a title shot. They’ve been a highly-ranked team for a long time.
TEXAS DEATHMATCH FOR THE AEW WORLD TITLE: Adam Page(c) vs. Lance Archer- 8.25/10
Apparently in a Texas Deathmatch in AEW “the only way to win is by knockout or submission.” That’s not the rules they used in Moxley vs. Archer.
They bled A LOT. I don’t know if it was more than the Tay-Jay vs. Bunnelope match, but I really hope that Mercedes and Thunder Rosa don’t take this as a challenge and try to out-do them next week.
They started the match brawling out through the tunnel. That felt corny to me. Page immediately threw Archer through a pain of glass on this unexplained structure on the stage. Even worse, they went full WWE and apparently had a camera inside this structure, just in case someone happened to throw someone else through it.
They did good spots. Archer cut Page off. At that point Dan Lambert came down and started taking the ring apart. If he wants to help Archer win, why not just go stomp on Page? J.R. suggested that the plan was to take the ropes away so that Page couldn’t use the Buckshot Lariat. I guess that makes sense, but it’s still a little silly to think that Page would need the Buckshot Lariat to win a match where he can beat Archer in the head with a brick for ten straight minutes of he wants. That did actually come into play later, and I thought that Page looked kind of stupid, not knowing what to do now that he couldn’t hit the Buckshot Lariat.
Jake Roberts attacked Page. He was going to go for the DDT…and the crowd all popped, because they wanted to see the legendary Jake Roberts hit his famous finishing move… on our heroic babyface champion here in this world title match. Why are some fans so dumb?
Also dumb is Lance Archer, who yelled at Jake and stopped him from hitting the DDT on Page. He started arguing with Jake, resulting in Page being a to recover and hit the DDT on Archer.
They had an awesomely violent match. I usually don’t this stipulation that much (they were treating it as Last Man Standing, with the “knockout” Excalibur had mentioned before being a technical knockout), and I thought this rocked, simply because of the level of violence.
And then the f*cking finish happened, and I took off an entire .25 just for the idiocy of the finish. Archer won on the apron, with two tables set up on the floor behind him. Page was holding a strand of barbed wire. He tossed it down onto the mat, and here in this no DQs match in a ring littered with weapons, referee Paul Turner saw it and decided that he needed to bend down and pick it up. He bent at his waist instead of at his knees like you would expect. This all happened so that Page could run and do a roll off his back to substitute for the flipping motion to make what would otherwise have been a regular running lariat into a Buckshot Lariat, sending Archer off the apron and through the tables for the finish (Page went down, too, but he got up in time). The problem with this is that the whole point of the Buckshot Lariat is that you are using the kinetic energy of the ropes to throw yourself with more force at the opponent. All the flip does is let you get into the ring without getting slowed down by hitting the ropes! What Page did here actually SLOWED HIM DOWN, so he hit Archer with less force than he would have if he had just done a regular f*cking running lariat.
This show was AEW in a nutshell. There can be some great wrestling, but the matches often take turns into the absurd, and storylines- no matter how good the wrestlers’ deliveries of the promos are- almost all suffer from fatal plot-holes.
STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Tony Schiavone referred to the Inner Circle as “the founding faction in AEW.”
How the hell are these guys, who weren’t even together until they had TV, the “founding faction” when they are pre-dated by several other groups, such as SCU and THE GUYS WHO WERE INVOLVED SO EARLY ON THAT THEIR NAME IS IN THE F*CKING NAME OF THE COMPANY?!
Wardlow has been ordered to carry cardboard cut-outs of MJF beating CM Punk to the ring. Also, everyone else in the group gets an entrance, but Wardlow doesn’t get an entrance. Because now that they want to do an angle where he will turn on MJF, MJF has suddenly lost all diplomatic skill. Explain to me how this is “good storytelling.”
The announcers, of course, are so outraged about Wardlow’s mistreatment… and as a result, are completely ignoring the fact that Wardlow fully went along with MJF’s plan last week and helped him cheat to screw CM Punk out of the match.
MJF got an elaborate ring introduction which Justin Roberts was ordered to give, and was carried to the ring on a throne. There were women to make out with him. Then he and his pals did a big end-zone dance together, to which Wardlow was either not invited (because MJF has magically lost his previously-shown diplomatic skill) or because he was feeling guilty over screwing CM Punk out of a match, even though he has no attachment to the guy. “SToRyteLLiNg.”
MJF gives a big speech in which he builds it up as if he’s going to thank Wardlow and credit him with the win, but then he swerves the viewers (by which I mean everyone but Wardlow himself and the announcers) by giving credit to Spears instead for warming him up.
MJF and Spears go on for a while until Punk interrupts them. He says he has learned from his mistakes and has now gotten himself some friends in the form of Darby Allin and Sting, armed with baseball bats. Punk says he wants a rematch. MJF says “no,” but Punk clarifies that he was talking to Wardlow, who he claims no one in the Pinnacle would have won a match in the past six months without. He also tells Wardlow that he can get the beating that the rest of the Pinnacle are about to receive, or he can “grow some balls and leave these jerks.”
I’m sorry, but Wardlow is way too far on the heel side of the line for me to be okay with Punk letting him off the hook the way he seems to be. The dude is a heel. This whole “babyface push” of his started with him winning matches via what was pretty much excessive punishment, and at every single turn, he has down the wrong thing morally.
We’ve now shifted from Punk wanting a match with Wardlow to Punk wanting a match with MJF to Punk being happy with another Punk, Sting, & Darby vs. MJF & FTR six-man tag. What’s to stop MJF from just running away again?
MJF counters with the following: FTR vs. Punk and any partner of his choosing other than Darby or Sting tonight, and if Punk’s team wins, Punk gets MJF, anywhere, anytime, in any match of his choosing. I’m ALMOST okay with this as something that Punk would accept instead of just delivering the promised beating to the Pinnacle, except for this one problem: WHY DOESN’T TONY KHAN JUST BOOK PUNK VS. MJF?!
MJF was willing to offer this because he doesn’t think Punk will be able to find a partner because “good luck finding someone in the back who doesn’t hate your guts.” Do people hate Punk? I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of this other than the non-injured Eddie Kingston. Either this isn’t true, so MJF is an idiot, or it is true, and Punk is being foolish by agreeing to this instead of just going nuts with the baseball bats.
Also, props to Dax Hardwood for admitting that he looked pretty terrible in that suit, and even more props to him for turning it into a big positive for his character.
TONY SCHIAVONE IS BACKSTAGE WITH STING, DARBY ALLIN, & ANDRADE EL IDOLO (& JOSE THE ASSISTANT) FACE TO FACE (TO FACE TO FACE, I GUESS)- good performances, but I just don’t get why any of this is happening.
Sting and Darby reiterate that Darby is not Sting’s servant. Darby says he has better things to do than work for Andrade, such as regain the TNT Title. Andrade says that Darby “wants” the title, but he himself will be the next champion. So does Andrade want to hire Darby to remove him as competition for the title?
THE BLADE vs. WARDLOW (w/Shawn Spears)- 4/10
The Blade is in a stable of about twelve people, and no one came out to ringside with him. Not even his manager who is also his wife. He has also apparently won six of his last eight singles matches. Have we even seen him wrestle a singles match since whenever his brass knuckles blow-off with Orange Cassidy was (last summer, maybe)? According to Jim Ross, he has also been winning with the Doctor Bomb, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use.
We were told that Wardlow “signed up for this match” with “short notice,” and Excalibur pointed out that he didn’t even “have time to tape up.” Well that’s his own fault for taking a match on short notice, then, isn’t it?
The Blade jumped the bell on Wardlow, taking his knee out from behind. Is The Blade cheating? Sure. But I’d have a lot more sympathy for Wardlow if he didn’t help MJF cheat just last week. Wardlow overcame both being jumped and not having time to tape up, and won anyway, so who cares?
After the match, Shawn Spears got in the ring and hit The Blade with a chair, which we were told made Wardlow angry for the nonsensically nebulous reason that it was “stealing the spotlight.” See my review of the 12/29/2021 Dynamite for why that doesn’t hold water.
And, of course, in hindsight we can see that reason that The Blade was not accompanied to ringside by either of his two usual managers is because if one of them had come out with him, there would have been someone there to stop the chairshot… but the storyline needed the chairshot to happen, and so they are both mysteriously absent, for no discernable reason other than to progress the storyline. And when your characters’ actions feel driven by the needs of the story you want to tell rather than any established motivation of their own, that’s a failure of storytelling.
PENTA VIDEO- AWESOME!
“When Malakai Black spit into his face, he spit into his soul!” He went to a graveyard and dug up one of his old masks. “Why is the mask a grave?” is the sort of question that doesn’t bother me in a situation like this, because this is clearly a post-produced video package with the kayfabe intention of intimidating Penta’s opponents (and Malakai Black in particular), so I’m fine with the idea that he buried it there himself to make this look cooler and make himself look crazier.
Excalibur framed Malakai’s black mist as “having lasting effects and bringing out a different side of this victims,” but I don’t think that’s true at all. Pac felt like the same old Pac (he had done a “look at me, I’m so crazy” video before returning from the pandemic, and I think during the Omega feud as well), and Julia Hart has been a little different, but it didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary for someone who was just angry, and we really hadn’t seen Julia angry before.
INNER CIRCLE “TEAM MEETING”- Once again: EXCELLENT performances, but the story just doesn’t work!
Chris Jericho, Jake Hager, and Sammy Guevara all came out to Jericho’s music. LAX didn’t come out with them. Jericho started to tell us that they haven’t seen LAX all day… and LAX chose that point to come out (to their own music) purposely interrupting Jericho. Jericho, Sammy, and Hager were all wearing their Inner Circle vests, LAX were not.
Jericho lectures them for not tagging him in against 2.0 a few weeks ago, claiming that they “robbed our fans who came to see Chris Jericho wrestle.”
Santana gave a big speech in which he made the following accusations: Any time they had to shift their focus to something, it has only benefited one person: Chris Jericho. And that any time they have gathered momentum, it has been thrown to the side so that they could come to Jericho’s rescue. Jericho, Satana alleges, has been purposely holding them down.
Jericho says that he is the “influencer” here and asks them what Kingston has ever done for them. Jericho points out that they actually HAD their chance to become the tag champs (he even gave us the freakin’ date: 2/17/2021) and they lost. That’s not his fault.
Jericho says that he brought them in to the Inner Circle and he can take them out. He suggests that he brought in “the wrong two members of LAX,” and asks Hager if he still has Homicide and Hernandez’s phone numbers. I would LOVE to see those two in the Inner Circle (although I’m not sure why Jericho thinks that they would be on his side, considering that the only time we have seen Homicide in AEW, he was helping Eddie Kingston).
Santana went after Jericho, and Sammy had to pull them apart. Sammy was all “we’re a family!” but Jericho told him to shut up. Jericho tried to talk but Sammy interrupted him. He said that his goal was to be the greatest champion ever, and this bickering wasn’t going to help it, so he threatened to quit. He said “I’ve quit this group before,” which seems to ignore the fact that his previous quitting was designed as a ruse to fool MJF. It also makes Sammy look kind of crappy to threaten to quit the group out of fear that their drama would hamper his career five seconds after he called them a “family” and said he loved all of them.
Ortiz picked up Sammy’s mic and blamed Sammy’s potential quitting on Jericho. He then went to set Jericho straight on the influence that Eddie Kingston has had on their careers… although, again, he didn’t actually provide any details. Ortiz said that where they come from, they settle things with fists instead of words, so he challenged Jericho and Hager to a match next week where I just the idea is that they will work out their frustrations physically and then be friends again. Jericho says that he didn’t want it to come to this, but then accepts.
Okay, let’s get the easy thing out of the way first: Sammy. In addition to what I mentioned above about him calling them a family and then saying he would leave them because he thought their drama would hurt his professional aspirations, there is the simple fact that Sammy regained his TNT Title while Jericho and LAX have been bickering, so it really doesn’t seem to have hurt him yet at all.
Now the big thing, which is what kills this story for me. While it is absolutely indisputable that Jericho has been a tremendous dick for the past month, LAX’s accusations don’t ring true in any way. Even with the ability to look back at everything through the lens of these accusations, at no point does it seem like LAX had momentum, then all of a sudden had to shift directions and fight some fight Jericho had started instead of pursuing the tag titles. The only feuds I can remember Jericho arguably starting were the Orange Cassidy feud (during which time LAX lost several #1 contendership matches cleanly), and the Dan Lambert feud, where they dropped out of the Top Five, but they were only ranked about four or five at that point, and since that feud ended, they got right back to four or five, and haven’t gone any higher since, and they’re hardly the only team at that ranking (or better) that has had trouble getting a title shot.
AEW prides itself on “long-term storytelling” (or at the very least, its fans defend it as doing so), but time and again they fail to tell these stories well.
FULL DISCLAIMER: I’m about to toot my own horn here by using my fantasy booking as an example. I do this not for the purpose of tooting my own horn, but because it is the example of this with which I am most intimately familiar, and this review will already be long enough as it is, so I don’t want to spend time having to re-watch a bunch of video packages for Hogan vs. Savage. And yes, I am familiar with the limitations of fantasy booking, but for a scenario where everyone stayed healthy and there were no other unexpected situations that made someone unavailable, I think it’s fine to purely compare the storytelling between a fantasy angle and one that actually happened (especially when you take into consideration that this wasn’t a one-off angle, but rather was something I did in the midst of full-on booking an entire promotion for a years-long run.
Also, for the first time, I’m actually going to spoil something I have upcoming (and I’m sure I’ll get around to writing eventually) in by big “BRM Books Raw 1,000 and Beyond” fantasy booking thread. To review (because I’m sure not everyone remembers things from a twenty-page thread that I haven’t posted in for almost four years now):
For years, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose have been enemies and friends and then enemies again and then friends again, with every time they were enemies, it being because Ambrose “snapped” and/or was taken in by cult leader Bray Wyatt, with Rollins taking it upon himself to either help Ambrose control the “hardcore monster” that dwelt within him (brought out by that rumored WrestleMania match against Mick Foley that Ambrose and Foley were building to on Twitter for a minute or two back in the 2012), or trying to free him from the manipulations of Bray Wyatt, who had promised Ambrose that same thing.
At this point they were friends, and Rollins had earned a title shot at the February PPV, but was taken out by the League of Nations to protect their leader, Wade Barrett. Ambrose held Money in the Bank at the time, and vowed to use it to get revenge for Rollins and take Barrett’s title at the PPV. On the day of the PPV, it turned out that Rollins was cleared early and was inserted as a last-minute replacement into the pre-show match, and was able to be at ringside as his friend Dean won the title, and as Dean was celebrating being lifted up onto the shoulders of the other babyfaces, Rollins (who had been taken out during the match, trying to stop Sylvester Lefort from interfering) leapt into the ring with a springboard knee, knocking Dean down and going after him, causing the locker room to break it up and the show to end with Michael Cole shouting “WHAT HAS GOTTEN INTO SETH ROLLINS!?”
What I never got around to writing was Rollins big explanation segment. In this segment Rollins would explain that this was not just mere “jealousy” as I would have had the announced speculate, but rather Rollins was infuriated that Dean had achieved what Rollins had been unable to achieve so many times, and always because of Dean.
Rollins would then point to about ten to fifteen different incidents that I had peppered out across the two and a half years since Rollins had initially gone to try to help Ambrose with his problem where Rollins could claim that his association with Ambrose had cost him an opportunity. These would range from the fair and obvious- having the Wyatt Family cause him to lose the title shot he won by winning the Royal Rumble to Cesaro because Rollins had been trying to steer Ambrose away from Bray, or Rollins going into a WWE Title match against Cesaro with an injured back because the Wyatts had powerbombed him through a table the previous night, or losing an IC Title match because, during their initial enemies phrase, he had come out to protect someone from Ambrose earlier- to the unfortunate (Dean’s heading towards the ring to cheer Seth on while holding his MITB briefcase making the referee go over to Dean and ask him if he wanted to cash it in right now, causing the referee to not see Rollins pinning John Cena in a WWE Title match)- to choices Seth himself made that he now regrets (like spending so much time working with Dean that he wasn’t able to prepare for a title shot well enough and thus lost- to the downright petty (Ambrose volunteering them to defend their tag titles against the Dudleys at the Royal Rumble when Rollins had been planning on entering the Rumble instead).
Did I have all of these incidents (and more) mapped out before I put the first hint of the storyline on TV? Of course not. I had the visual of the turn at the end, and I had the first few months mapped out with them ending that part of it as enemies because I knew that to be effective it had to be a multi-year thing, with various ups and down in the relationship. But I always knew what the reason for the turn was going to be, and thus, at every opportunity where I could make it feel natural (and especially in that final year when they were babyface best friends), I purposely peppered in situations where the link between him and Dean could somehow result in Seth getting screwed.
And in my notes, I kept a list, because I knew that in order to make Seth not just feel like your run-of-the-mill heel who gets jealous and turns, I had to have Seth explain himself, with evidence to point to.
LAX didn’t have that here… and they’re the ones who we’re supposed to side with! I was just doing it to make my heel feel less generic!
But did you notice who did have evidence? Chris Jericho. He pointed to a specific date where LAX had their shot at lost. Actually, Jericho was even a little diplomatic here. I looked back at my review for that match, and it turned out that the reason that LAX lost that match was because “Ortiz was an idiot and shouted about how they were the best for a long time before getting back into the ring after powerbombing Matt into the crowd, so when he got back into the ring, Nick rolled him up for the win, making him look like an idiot,” so the loss was LAX’s own fault. And, for the record, the Inner Circle were at ringside with LAX.
So while Jericho is a dick and I would be fine with LAX leaving for that reason, that isn’t their stated reason for leaving, and thus I can’t get behind them. And this is far from the first time that AEW has had problems with this sort of thing. Adam Page’s supposed “confidence issues” and being afraid of losing to Omega,
TONY SCHIAVONE’S INTERVIEW WITH ROPPONGI VICE IS INTERRUPTED BY THE YOUNG BUCKS- meh
They (and Cole) jump Roppongi Vice. This would have worked a lot better for me if Roppongi Vice and the Bucks hadn’t come off so goofy, and if the BTE-Trigger that the Bucks gave Rocky hadn’t looked so bad.
Jay White showed up, so they gave him the honor of being the one to throw Trent into the production truck. Introducing Jay White like this took the focus off of the Bucks vs. Roppongi Vice match on Rampage.
Excalibur shouted about how “JAY WHITE HAS WALKED THROUGH THE FORBIDDEN DOOR!” Is it really a “forbidden” door at this point? He’s like the seventh guy from New Japan to show up. I’m also just not excited about Jay White in AEW because there’s no room for him.
FACE OF THE REVOLUTION LADDER MATCH QUALIFYING MATCH: Isiah Kassdy (w/Matt Hardy & Marq Quen) vs. Keith Lee- mostly an awesome squash, except for the part that ruined it.
See… this is exactly the problem. Keith Lee needs the time and attention right now, and any time and attention spent on Jay White is time that can’t be spent on Keith Lee.
Excalibur claimed that this was the “first-ever Face of the Revolution Ladder match qualifier,” which is certainly is not, as they did some qualifiers last year.
J.R. said that Keith Lee “looks like a young Mark Henry.” I think their body-types are different enough that I certainly wouldn’t have said that (Mark is not a regularly-proportioned human. Keith Lee looks like a regularly proportioned human who got bombarded with gamma rays, and is now just bigger and stronger, but his body’s proportions are still normal). What I will say here is that I was glad that the “younger” part looked like it applied. Here was a while in NXT where Lee had quite a bit of gray showing, but he appears to have dyed it out of his beard, so that was good.
Anyway, the match started out as the PERFECT Keith Lee debut match, showing off his power, agility, and attitude. Matt Hardy was so disgusted that he walked out on Private Party.
And then someone had to ruin it by deciding that Isiah Kassidy needed to get offense in on Keith Lee in Keith Lee’s debut. And in a match where they were having Matt walk out on Private Party because of their inability to win! Having Kassidy get offense in on Lee is counter-productive to everything they tried to do!
POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Marq Quen attacked Henry after the match… and someone decided that Quen needed to be able to look effective, too. I know that it all lead to Keith Lee doing col sh*t, but he would have looked even better if he had just destroyed Quen. If you want to show off that cool sh*t, you can just book Keith Lee vs, Marq Quen for next week and do the big spot where Lee catches his dive next week (even better, start the match off like that; with Quen trying to jump the gun on Lee with a dive but Lee catching him).
THUNDER ROSA VS. MERCEDES MARTINEZ/BRITT BAKER VIDEO PACKAGE- great, although I’d have liked Thunder Rosa to maybe be out a little longer after that crazy pipe shot to the head. Next week’s match will be no DQs.
SAMMY GUEVARA CUE-CARD PROMO- terrible
He cannot be talking about serious issues in this inherently comedic format.
IF CM PUNK’S TEAM WINS, HE GETS A MATCH AGAINST MJF ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, AND WITH ANY STIPULATONS THAT HE WANTS: CM Punk & Jon Moxley vs. FTR (w/Tully Blanchard)- 8.5/10
Punk’s knee got worked over early, but Moxley was the babyface who got isolated. That spot where Dax drew Punk away from the corner so Moxley couldn’t tag him in, and then Cash stopped Punk from getting back for the tag with the shoulder block off the apron as Punk was heading back reminded me of why I love FTR so much. It’s little things like that that make a match memorable for me.
They actually got me to bite on pretty much all of their false finishes here (and some credit there is due to Adam Page and the Dark Order losing that big elimination match last summer to teach us that in AEW, the person in the position of “beat my cronies and you get what you want” doesn’t always win). The only real misstep here was the Tully spot. Why did Tully think it was going to be more effective to spend time taking his jacket off so that he could hit Punk in the face with the soft jacket instead of just running over and kicking him?
This match was a much-needed reminder of how awesome FTR are, and so much of what I loved about this match was highlighted for me by the discussion in the other thread. Let’s hope that they are given a lot more chances to do this sort of thing again in 2022 than they were in 2021.
AEW TBS TITLE MATCH: Jade Cargill(c) (w/Mark Sterling) vs. A.Q.A.- 4.75/10
A.Q.A. cut an inset promo that was good, but I can’t help but ask why the hell this debuting nobody is getting a title shot when we have an official list of ranked contenders. It’s even more ridiculous in light of what the next match would be. Tony Khan needed matches for Cargill and Deeb, and instead of booking them against each other in a title match, he books them both against nobodies and lets Deeb do a gimmick where the match has a five-minute time limit? What a moron!
That being said, this was a good little power vs. speed match. A.Q.A. was a very good babyface. Like with the men, I’m not sure that there is room for her in the division, but I’d definitely take her over Red Velvet, Kiera Hogan, Julia Hart, and even over Jamie Hayter and Riho, just for the purposes of being able to connect with the audience (Riho hasn’t) (and that’s ignoring people who are under contract but we haven’t seen wrestle in forever like Leva Bates, and Brandi. And, of course, I’d take her over Abadon). A.Q.A. really feels like she fills a niche (high-flying underdog female babyface) that AEW doesn’t have filled yet.
ADAM COLE & THE YOUNG BUCKS PROMO- meh
The Bucks were too over the top in their promo on Roppongi Vice. Adam Cole assigned them Jay White as back-up for their match. The Bucks didn’t know about Jay White being around, and they point out that Jay White and Kenny Omega were “arch-enemies” at one point. That would have been a better point if the Bucks (and Kenny, for that matter) hadn’t turned on Cole in ROH and everyone is just ignoring that.
Cole says he has a statement to make, and leaves.
Then the Bucks asked Bradon Cutler if he knew Jay White would be there tonight, and Cutler replies “I may have read something about it on reddit.” Obviously this was intended as a laugh-line, but it really opens a big can of worms. Do the wrestlers not keep themselves abreast of industry news? They start to look silly when the internet knows who is going to debut but the wrestlers don’t, and this just brought that into kayfabe.
Also, theoretically Tony Khan new that Jay White would be here, right? Doesn’t he keep the other EVPs informed of these things? And if Tony didn’t know, why is everyone okay with White being here and coming back for Rampage, when he just attacked somebody. That kind of question really extended to Mercedes Martinez, too, now that we know that Britt Baker is the one who brought her in. And ditto for reDRagon, who Cole brought in. I would like answers to these questions, and the only reason I’m asking them is because AEW has gone out of their way to tell us that these people did not come in through the usual means.
SERENA DEEB PROMO- bad
I’m sorry, but this Serena Deeb comes off as someone playing a tough-gal and playing a heel rather than someone who actually is tough and mean. She’s talking about ending this poor jobber’s life, and I don’t buy for a second that the job is in actual mortal danger (compare to, say, Moxley or Lance Archer, or even Britt Baker, who I would believe would go to whatever lengths she deemed necessary to win, up to and including crippling someone for life).
THE PROFESSOR’S FIVE-MINUTE ROOKIE CHALLENGE: Serena Deeb vs. Katie Arquette- squash
They accidentally started their count-down clock at 4:52, then had to change it. Oops.
JURASSIC EXPRESS VS. GUNN CLUB VIDEO PACKAGE- great!
Gunn Club were tremendous! Jungle Boy’s delivery was fine, but this idea that Gunn Club feel “entitled” to a title shot and thus I’m not supposed to like them completely fails for me because they really do deserve a title shot. They’ve been a highly-ranked team for a long time.
TEXAS DEATHMATCH FOR THE AEW WORLD TITLE: Adam Page(c) vs. Lance Archer- 8.25/10
Apparently in a Texas Deathmatch in AEW “the only way to win is by knockout or submission.” That’s not the rules they used in Moxley vs. Archer.
They bled A LOT. I don’t know if it was more than the Tay-Jay vs. Bunnelope match, but I really hope that Mercedes and Thunder Rosa don’t take this as a challenge and try to out-do them next week.
They started the match brawling out through the tunnel. That felt corny to me. Page immediately threw Archer through a pain of glass on this unexplained structure on the stage. Even worse, they went full WWE and apparently had a camera inside this structure, just in case someone happened to throw someone else through it.
They did good spots. Archer cut Page off. At that point Dan Lambert came down and started taking the ring apart. If he wants to help Archer win, why not just go stomp on Page? J.R. suggested that the plan was to take the ropes away so that Page couldn’t use the Buckshot Lariat. I guess that makes sense, but it’s still a little silly to think that Page would need the Buckshot Lariat to win a match where he can beat Archer in the head with a brick for ten straight minutes of he wants. That did actually come into play later, and I thought that Page looked kind of stupid, not knowing what to do now that he couldn’t hit the Buckshot Lariat.
Jake Roberts attacked Page. He was going to go for the DDT…and the crowd all popped, because they wanted to see the legendary Jake Roberts hit his famous finishing move… on our heroic babyface champion here in this world title match. Why are some fans so dumb?
Also dumb is Lance Archer, who yelled at Jake and stopped him from hitting the DDT on Page. He started arguing with Jake, resulting in Page being a to recover and hit the DDT on Archer.
They had an awesomely violent match. I usually don’t this stipulation that much (they were treating it as Last Man Standing, with the “knockout” Excalibur had mentioned before being a technical knockout), and I thought this rocked, simply because of the level of violence.
And then the f*cking finish happened, and I took off an entire .25 just for the idiocy of the finish. Archer won on the apron, with two tables set up on the floor behind him. Page was holding a strand of barbed wire. He tossed it down onto the mat, and here in this no DQs match in a ring littered with weapons, referee Paul Turner saw it and decided that he needed to bend down and pick it up. He bent at his waist instead of at his knees like you would expect. This all happened so that Page could run and do a roll off his back to substitute for the flipping motion to make what would otherwise have been a regular running lariat into a Buckshot Lariat, sending Archer off the apron and through the tables for the finish (Page went down, too, but he got up in time). The problem with this is that the whole point of the Buckshot Lariat is that you are using the kinetic energy of the ropes to throw yourself with more force at the opponent. All the flip does is let you get into the ring without getting slowed down by hitting the ropes! What Page did here actually SLOWED HIM DOWN, so he hit Archer with less force than he would have if he had just done a regular f*cking running lariat.
This show was AEW in a nutshell. There can be some great wrestling, but the matches often take turns into the absurd, and storylines- no matter how good the wrestlers’ deliveries of the promos are- almost all suffer from fatal plot-holes.
STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Tony Schiavone referred to the Inner Circle as “the founding faction in AEW.”
How the hell are these guys, who weren’t even together until they had TV, the “founding faction” when they are pre-dated by several other groups, such as SCU and THE GUYS WHO WERE INVOLVED SO EARLY ON THAT THEIR NAME IS IN THE F*CKING NAME OF THE COMPANY?!