AEW Full Gear 2024
Everything I have learned about The CostCo Guys has been against my will. I don’t understand where they came from, what they actually do, or why they hang out with a strange and apparently unrelated child. TikTok is a foreign country - they do things differently there.
Wrestling has always played with celebrity, from George Hackenschmidt making films with Harry Houdini, to Andy Kaufman wrestling Jerry Lawler in Memphis, Bad Bunny wrestling for WWE, Takeshi Kitano’s ill-fated involvement with NJPW, and the regrettable involvement of Jimmy Savile in British wrestling - a story I keep putting off writing about, for obvious reasons.
Televised wrestling, for the better part of forty years, has largely been an all-American affair, and there’s always been something uncanny about watching it from afar. There are men and women in England who owe all they know of American geography to hearing the repetition of wrestler’s hometowns, and of the locations from whence Monday Night RAW emanated. We watched bemused as sports star and local TV celebrities were trotted out for the cameras, and over here on the other side of the Atlantic we had no idea who these people were. So I’m no stranger to being bemused by a “famous” face completely unknown to me showing up on wrestling television, though in the case of Big Boom AJ, I seemed to be in the minority. Social media has brought our cultures closer together. I saw people whose opinions I respect celebrating someone who, as far as I can tell, really likes a particular supermarket, and is very loud. I don’t have a TikTok account - I have spoken to best-selling authors whose publishing contracts require that they have one, so there’s been many a sleepless night and idle thought when the old book sales or podcast listens are a little slower than I’d like that I’ve contemplated signing up, but so far I have managed to resist temptation. I am almost forty, TikTok is not for the likes of me.
I don’t know what The Rizzler is. A child who pulls a face. Like an old variety turn, whose entire act was a single gag; just as once, we were happy to get our entertainment from a man singing a song while hitting himself with a tin tray, today, audiences wait in fevered expectation for The Child To Do A Face. Luckily, the child does nothing else. The moment the camera is on him, he does a face. In the rapid-fire TikTok world of The Rizzler, there is no suspense, no anticipation, no delayed gratification. Just The Rizz Face. We’ve never had it so good.
The Rizzler was at AEW Full Gear’s Zero Hour pre-show, of course, as the special guest timekeeper for a match featuring his friend (?) Big Boom AJ, and AJ’s son Big Justice. Does the J in AJ also stand for Justice? It might be impossible to ever know for sure. It’s certainly impossible to care.
AJ was slightly more than the usual celebrity cameo match, and that helped elevate this from a cringeworthy cash-in of a flash-in-the-pan meme that will age horribly, or the 2024 equivalent of Jimmy Hart wrestling radio personality Mancow in WCW, and into a passable wrestling angle. Because prior to his TikTok fame, Big Boom AJ had wrestled on the New Jersey independent scene in the early 2000s, under the name The American Powerchild Eric Justice, which is an exceptionally New Jersey independent scene in the early 2000s name. As a result, he’s capable of a shouty style of wrestling promo that you might see in an episode of a Disney Channel series where one of the characters unwittingly finds themselves booked to compete in a wrestling match, and of working a style of match that, on this side of the pond, I would happily describe as “Holiday Camp” (complimentary).
His opponent was another New Jersey stalwart, Q.T. Marshall, largely absent from AEW television for months, but the brains behind this whole operation. During his absence from AEW, he’s been playing the evil American in AAA, and a stooge in MLP, and he’s rather good at it - wrestling has few proper heels these days, and needs the bad guys who are unafraid to look like clowns, to be made a fool of, and to take a beating. It made QT a perfect foil for an old-school babyface performance from AJ, who threw better punches than most of the AEW or WWE roster could muster. I would have preferred to see the match more overbooked and full of nonsense, leaning into the absurdity of the whole situation, but a closing stretch involving QT bumping for a Spear from young Big Justice was the perfect closer to the whole affair, and if I didn’t find The Rizzler profoundly unsettling, I might have found him being brought into the ring and celebrating with his business partners (?) charming. He Did The Face.
In the irony-poisoned world of social media, the match has been celebrated as something far greater than the functional good guy vs. bad guy fun-time bout than it was, but that does tell us something of what wrestling has lost - big daft characters, slapstick bumps, mouthy villains getting their comeuppance at the hands of a likeable (and loud) babyface. That’s the DNA of the business, and too many of us have been overthinking it for too long. Sometimes you just need a man who shouts about cookies to punch a man who doesn’t like New Jersey very much, and to send everybody home happy.
Now let’s hope I never have to think about these people ever again.
The Rest Of Zero Hour
Other stuff happened on the pre-show when we weren’t just waiting for the CostCo Guys. AEW must have realised that they had managed to book a nine match card with only a single women’s match on the bill, and threw one together unadvertised here between Anna Jay and Deonna Purrazzo; it was fine, a perfectly functional match, but one can’t help but wonder why a promotion with two women’s titles and a deep roster can’t put more of an effort into actually booking women’s matches. It’s not for a lack of stories; in the weeks leading up to this show, Britt Baker has been antagonised by Serena Deeb, Thunder Rosa has been feuding with Harley Cameron, and hints have been dropped that Jamie Hayter will be wrestling Julia Hart on her return. That Jamie Hayter, since returning on the pre-show for All In back in the summer has still yet to wrestle on pay-per-view is preposterous, and risks actively diminishing her considerable star power. AEW needs to do better.
There was also a promo featuring four women who will be competing on ROH to enter a four-way match at the NJPW/AEW co-promoted event Wrestle Dynasty, and I’m mentioning it here because of the wrestling TV tropes I detest. What began as a Billie Starks promo was gradually interrupted by Red Velvet, Leyla Hirsch, and Athena, each stepping from just slightly off camera to say their piece. Were all of these women simply waiting just out of shot? Do the interviewer, interviewee, and the crew lack the peripheral vision to see someone standing barely a foot away from them? It’s a dire production choice that has marred WWE television for thirty years, and that I hate to see seeping into AEW - that because this is a TV show, only what you can see on TV is really happening, anything beyond the frame does not exist. It means wrestlers are oblivious to a full-sized human being standing directly in front of them until they enter the shot, and that nothing exists unless it’s on camera. It’s artificial, it’s hokey, it makes for bad television. Wrestling, even wrestling specifically recorded for consumption on-screen, should be presented as a live event first and foremost - I want to believe that these are real people making a TV show, whose lives continue beyond the confines of that show, not that they cease to exist the moment the red light is off.
Also on Zero Hour was a four-way match between Buddy Matthews, The Beast Mortos, Kommander, and Dante Martin. It was, as expected, a constant barrage of high spots, jaw-dropping dives, and fast-paced wrestling, and that’s a great way to kick off a show, but not a lot of it landed for me. Especially in the early going, too much of the match felt just a moment or two out of step, and when so much of the match is a matter of cuing up the next spot and waiting for your turn to hit your mark, that moment or two becomes very apparent.
It’s also a match that allows to make my current recurring pet criticism of AEW - I wish this company would remember that it has a Trios division. The Trios Titles lean into the kind of multi-man constant movement and chaos that AEW do better than anyone ever has on mainstream American wrestling TV, and yet they’re at best an afterthought. There are feuds between Trios that have been and gone, Trios formed and broken up, without once even nodding in the direction of the championships. There are long-established factions in AEW who have never expressed the slightest interest in wrestling for Trios gold. In this match alone, every wrestler bar Kommander is part of a Trio - and Kommander was teaming with Private Party before they abruptly stopped feuding with the Death Riders and shifted focus to Tag Team Title contention instead. I would have liked to have seen Kommander win, if only because he’s theoretically the only dedicated singles wrestler in the match, and it could have served as an impetus for the remaining three to focus on their respective Trios. Instead, the win went to Buddy Matthews, and it’s difficult to argue that it mattered - the following day, the brackets for the upcoming Continental Classic tournament were announced, and our winner Buddy didn’t make the grade, while Beast Mortos is in, as is Buddy’s Trios partner Brody King who (spoiler alert) also didn’t win his match at the pay-per-view. So why did any of this matter? Like so many of AEW’s faults, these are problems of their own making, and would be so simple to fix.
Tag Team Titles
On to the pay-per-view proper, the opening contest was a four-way for the Tag Team Titles - new champions Private Party defending against The Kings Of The Black Throne, The Acclaimed, and The Outrunners.
I didn’t particularly care for this match. Private Party’s route to the championship was unsteady, and rather abrupt - one week they were feuding with the Death Riders over Trios gold, the next they were squaring up to the Young Bucks. It felt less like a team with renewed focus, and more one that realised they didn’t stand a chance against Moxley and company, and turned their attentions elsewhere. There were teases of a break-up, of Stokely Hathaway scouting one or both members of the team, and none that amounted to anything. They defeated The Young Bucks, in a story that had more to do with writing the Bucks off television than with elevating Private Party, and we were told that it was a culmination of a five year story - beginning with Private Party’s first upset win over the Young Bucks, and ending with their win all this time later. But a “five year story” suggests incremental movement in the narrative across that time, not just picking up a story years later and pretending you had this planned all along. Similarly, we are now told that Private Party’s rivalry with the Death Riders is what gave them the new edge and the motivation to succeed, to win the titles they couldn’t previously manage to win - a story we have been very much told, not shown. By reverting to an older version of their entrance music and presentation for this match, I get the feeling that the story is less that Private Party have evolved, and more that AEW are admitting that they probably should have got behind them the first time around, and are trying to press the reset button. That doesn’t work for me.
Elsewhere, the Kings of the Black Throne are another example of a reminder that this company has a Trios division they’re not using, and The Acclaimed were the focus of practically all of the actual storytelling in this match, often to its detriment - a moment in which both members of the team managed to become legal, and attempted to pin each other to win the match, was idiotic beyond belief. I know it’s been done before in WWE, but it was stupid then; “what if the tag team pin each other to win?” is the work of Vince Russo or, worse, of the child fan who wonders at every stupid possibility - it’s the kid in the playground who thinks it would be cool if, in the Royal Rumble, numbers 28 and 29 eliminated each other, so when number 30 entered, he merely had to step into an empty ring to be declared the winner. It’s the questioning “What If?” or “Why Not?”, without considering that the answer to “Why Not?” is because “it’s a stupid idea, and an unfulfilling end to a narrative”. If nothing else, it makes the company as a whole look stupid for having drafted the rules for a multi-team tag team match without ever considering whether two wrestlers of the same team being legal at once was possible. It undermines the presentation of wrestling as a sport, in the name of “wouldn’t it be funny if?”. No, it wouldn’t.
As early as we are into Private Party’s title reign, I feel that the correct result here would have been the Outrunners going over. They are the hot act du jour, and probably won’t stay that way for long - best to capitalise while they have the momentum and, with the company in the doldrums in many ways and needing to win back some audience goodwill, they can do a lot worse than putting the belts on a team who got over more or less organically, and who the audience are genuinely rooting for. Instead, Private Party retained, and most of the match was built around the drama of Max Caster’s eventual inevitable heel turn and the break-up of The Acclaimed, rather than on the winning team.
The Never-Ending Story
I find MJF a very difficult wrestler to get my head around - at times, I have felt that he has hoodwinked a generation used to stulted and scripted promos into thinking that anyone who can speak confidently and off the cuff is a master of the microphone, while at others I’ve found him capable of genuine greatness. The measure of the man seems to be in his opponent - paired with a CM Punk or a Bryan Danielson, he has produced greatness. Left to his own devices, he makes me want to change the channel - and in the last few weeks, it’s that version of MJF I’ve been subjected to.
His match with Roderick Strong was an especially confusing one. Roddy has been a bit player in this story from the beginning; Adam Cole returned to confront MJF, reigniting a much-maligned feud that most of us felt had been truly dead and buried when MJF returned as a babyface and hit the then-injured Cole with a Brainbuster, consigning months of Devil-masked overbooked nonsense to the dustbin of history. But now, with MJF back in the familiar role of heel, Adam Cole has been tasked with rewriting history and re-framing their entire feud with Cole as the good guy, preemptively taking out MJF rather than allowing Max the opportunity to do the same to him. Adam Cole is a good talker, but not good enough to make sense of that - it was Adam Cole who donned a devil mask and assaulted not only MJF but multiple members of the AEW locker room for weeks. Why aren’t The Acclaimed, The Bang Bang Gang, or any other of The Devil’s past victims stepping up to say, “hang on, you threw me through a window, what does that have to do with MJF?”. Why does none of that matter any more?
In the midst of this, and with no explanation as to how he has the authority to do so, MJF set both Adam Cole and his friend Roderick Strong a gauntlet - if either one could win three consecutive matches, they would earn a match with MJF at Full Gear. Thanks to shenanigans on the part of MJF, Adam Cole didn’t make the cut, but Roderick Strong did - giving us a match that hadn’t really been satisfactorily built to, and which we’d never been given a reason to care about. Even the pre-match video package focused so much on Adam Cole that I was left wondering why Roderick Strong had been equally keen to get a match with Max in the first place.
On the go-home show, Strong was tasked with an uncharacteristic fiery babyface promo about his difficult upbringing, contrasting MJF’s cheap heat targeting of him for the same reason, and it all felt so desperate. And the same here, with MJF pulling every edgelord cliché and shortcut he could out of the bag in a mid-match promo - while MJF’s backstory seems to change from promo to promo anyway, it was particularly egregious for him to try and get heat on AEW itself, calling it a “dogshit company”, despite not having meaningfully progressed as a character in that regard since he was bragging about signing a shiny new contract and getting the company’s initials tattooed on his leg - but for once it’s hard to blame him; with no reason to care about the match, and with Roderick Strong having been a heel for his entire AEW run, only becoming de facto babyface through association with Adam Cole, anything to make us care about this match was welcome.
The ensuing match was mechanically sound, but never enough to get over that initial hurdle of making me wonder why it was happening in the first place.
The aftermath was, if anything, more exhausting than the story that got us here, with The Undisputed Kingdom and Kyle O’Reilly coming to the aid of Roderick Strong after a post-match Pillmanizing. In a storyline containing Adam Cole and MJF, it’s perplexing that twice in one week they’ve expected Kyle O’Reilly to be the one to carry the talking and the emotional weight of the angle. But more than that, it’s a return to a story that has been done to death not only in AEW but everywhere else. Some variation of inter- and intra-factional bickering between Adam Cole, Kyle O’Reilly and Roderick Strong has been going on in AEW, in ROH, in NXT, and probably elsewhere besides, for a decade. I am past caring about whether these three men are friends or enemies, whether they are going to team together or fight. And they should all be beyond this. It’s one of two stories that’s dragging Adam Cole to the point of turning a once loyal fanbase against him, it’s resulted in Roderick Strong being hopelessly miscast as the underdog babyface, and it’s taking Kyle O’Reilly away from what had been a genuinely enjoyable goofball partnership with Orange Cassidy and Mark Briscoe before The Conglomeration got bogged down into the Jericho Vortex, and dragging him back into a story we have seen a thousand times, and cross-pollinating that story with one we once thought we had finally seen the back off.
Other Stuff Happened
Mercedes Moné vs. Kris Statlander was a pleasant surprise, born in part of the frustration of its build. Moné has largely been a damp squib on television, not living up to her potential, and mired in dreadful backstage angles, pointless bickering with Kamille, and robotic and unappealing promos. Kris Statlander, meanwhile, was abruptly and without explanation separated from an entertaining partnership with Stokely Hathaway and turned babyface, because Moné needed an opponent and seemingly nobody could be bothered doing the work to get us there.
But once the bell rung this was fantastic. Not on the level of Moné’s match with Willow Nightingale, perhaps, but still her best in some time, and the first time in a long while that she’s felt worth AEW’s sizable investment in her. The power and sturdy base of Statlander allowed for many of Moné’s more ambitious lucha-tinged spots to really sizzle, and the match was given enough time, and both women enough creative freedom, for this to really deliver, free from all the trappings that bog Moné down on weekly TV. The gulf between the PPV and TV product is remarkable, and the extent to which Moné looked like a megastar here compared to her usual presentation should be required viewing for everyone involved in producing and formatting AEW’s television output.
Jay White vs. Hangman Page is a feud that hasn’t quite worked for me, coming as it did off the back of the intensity of the Page/Strickland rivalry - almost anything would be a point of deescalation from there. That said, the two have exceptional chemistry together and are a joy to watch wrestle, and I like that the direction of Hangman’s character is that, essentially, he has learned nothing from becoming the monster required to beat Swerve Strickland; he hasn’t indulged in any self-examination, he hasn’t taken a step back, because he won and he did it by pursuing revenge at all costs, so has now seen fit to do the same when it comes to every petty grievance in his career. A wrestler who once needed his friends to give him the confidence and the reason to care enough, now is all alone, with nobody to tell him when he’s caring too much.
It was a strange choice in promos building up to this match for both White and Page to refer to making the other tap out; neither man is particularly known for submission wrestling, and that hasn’t been a significant part of their feud. It began to make sense to a point as the match wore on, with both wrestlers targeting the legs of their opponent - with some inventive and particularly vicious focusing on the ankle from Hangman - but given that the ankle and knee injuries that prompted that focus were largely incidental within the match, the prior mention of submissions still felt misplaced. The submission work was born of opportunism, not forethought.
But this is nitpicking of what was otherwise a fantastic match to my tastes; believably violent, sadistic and vindictive, but in an entirely different way to the deathmatch flavours of Hangman’s matches with Swerve. This was a more mechanical picking apart of his opponent, not the blind rage that motivated him against Strickland. Jay White going over was an interesting choice, and one that I think I agree with - I’m a sucker for a long-running story where one wrestler simply has the other’s number, having been schooled on wrestling storytelling by the year 2000 IWC’s admiration of the long-running Tommy Dreamer/Raven feud in ECW. And if there’s any wrestler who can not only weather the storm of a loss, but actually turn that into greater motivation and character-building, it’s Adam Page.
Will Ospreay vs. Kyle Fletcher was magnificent. These are two wrestlers I first saw early in their careers - Ospreay in the opening tag match on a RevPro card, and Kyle Fletcher since his very first match on British soil, and as a regular for Fight Club Pro. At the risk of downplaying any credibility I may have as an eye for talent, I remember my first impressions being that the Swords Of Essex had potential to carve out a nice little niche for themselves as an old-fashioned smiley babyface team in matching gear, and that Kyle Fletcher was “pretty good for his age”. You can’t get them all right.
Ospreay is, at this point in his career, firing on all cylinders. I’m not sure he’s capable of having a bad match, I honestly don’t think he knows how. His style might not be to everybody’s tastes, and his matches with Ricochet represented something of a regression to a kind of wrestling I think he’s largely moved away from, but he’s the perfect representation of a theory I have about many wrestling fans and more than a few wrestling promoters - we’re often not talking about any given wrestler as a reality, but rather the version of that wrestler that exists in our heads. That version is coloured by our own interactions with them, by stories we’ve heard from others, by reviews or criticisms from wrestling’s taste-makers, but often more than anything it’s coloured by a time lag between when we first saw them and how far they have subsequently developed. When news broke that AEW had signed Shelton Benjamin, I saw someone Tweet a highlight package, saying, “this is what WWE have missed out on” - but the video featured clips of Shelton wrestling Eddie Guerrero, a man who has been dead for nineteen years, as if AEW had signed the Shelton Benjamin of 2003, not 2024. Will Ospreay suffers perhaps more than most from the same lag between perception and reality; still routinely criticised as a spot monkey, a gymnast, an acrobat that’s all flips and no substance, when for all his impressive athleticism that simply isn’t the wrestler he is today. Those are criticisms that may have been true of the Will Ospreay of 2014, but not the Will Ospreay of 2024.
Where Will excels, and what a lot of his imitators and detractors both miss, is that everything he does now has a real sense of urgency and purpose to it; even when his movements are flashy, they are considered, they are impactful, they look like they hurt, and it looks like he’s using them to try and win a wrestling match. It’s a balance that few high-flyers manage to master these days, as the pressure is to become more jaw-dropping and athletically impressive at the expense of credibility - in AEW, perhaps PAC is the only wrestler you can point to as being ahead of Ospreay in his ability to make the most head-spinning of acrobatic displays still look designed to hurt you.
In fact, my criticism of Will’s wrestling is largely the polar opposite of the dated “all flips and moves with no substance or story” criticism that you’re likely to hear from the usual quarters - I think his weakest instincts are in the heavy-handed grasping for Moments and images in his matches, the melodrama he attaches to a meaningful pause, and the narrative weight he has placed on the Tiger Driver ‘91 (made worse by one of his other moves, the Stormbreaker, having a near-identical set-up). This match, which could so easily have fallen into the trap set by all of those tropes, largely steered clear of them - Kyle and Will’s shattered friendship not being depicted through knowing looks and hammy over-acting but through violent intent, and the kind of sequences of counters to counters to counters that only make sense with an opponent you know as well as you know yourself. That the finishing stretch seemed to build and build to an inevitable babyface comeback, only for it to never come, instead just resulting in Ospreay being mechanically and purposefully picked apart until there was nothing left, was something that the Will Ospreay of his critics’ imaginations would not be capable of.
This should be, by all rights, Kyle Fletcher’s coming out party. It was, I think it’s fair to say, his best match yet, but in many ways you could argue for it being Will’s best match too, certainly his most mature and considered. I worry about the follow-up - I get flashbacks to Konosuke Takeshita defeating Kenny Omega, and nothing being done to capitalise on that win for months. I can only hope that Fletcher’s ascent is easier.
The “Champagne Celebration” for Mariah May and Mina Shirakawa was, aside from one impressively aimed kick by Mina (in heels and a dress!), the sort of thing you’d be embarrassed to have your Mum walk in and catch you wrestling. You can say it’s knowing, with a nod and a wink and a touch of irony, but so much of Mariah May’s heel work and her relationship with Mina is the kind of lazy, unreconstructed titillation that held women back in wrestling for years, and her promo work is mechanical and unimaginative. To go from the whirlwind of character that was Timeless Toni Storm to writing her off TV and expecting Mariah to be the one to carry the promo and personality end of any feud was a colossal mistake - I assumed this segment would lead to the return of Toni Storm, and I was disappointed that it didn’t. She is sorely missed, and needed - I assume she’s back by February for Grand Slam in Australia, and I’ll be counting down the days.
Jack Perry is a frustrating wrestler, isn’t he? The story for Perry and Daniel Garcia should be so simple, and instead it’s mired in some of the worst booking in the company. Babyface Daniel Garcia kidnapped heel Jack Perry and tortured him two-on-one with Daddy Magic, for reasons still utterly alien to me - the feud up to this point hadn’t earned that level of intensity, and I think the match had already been announced, so it’s not like Danny needed to go that far to wrangle a title shot out of Jack. That they showed the footage of that torture on an episode of Dynamite that featured Daddy Magic on commentary made it all the more absurd, showing that nobody involved had been punished or held responsible for their actions, or making it seem like anyone particularly cared.
The Scapegoat doesn’t work. The gimmick makes no sense for who Jack Perry is. It should be so simple. He was brought back to AEW and protected by the Young Bucks, effectively given free reign to get away with anything. The character to come out of that should be a gobby little shit, a wind-up merchant who knows how to push people’s buttons, but can hide behind his powerful friends if anyone tries to push back, knowing that they will protect him from the consequences of his actions. We’ve all had school bullies, or worked with the boss’ kids, or encountered shithouses in pubs, who behave like that - it’s a character that, on some level, we would all recognise, and all want to see get their comeuppance. Instead, Jack Perry carries himself as a mysterious loner, rather than as a member of The Elite, and as an unfazed bad-ass, rather than a petulant nepo baby. Rather than running crying to his protectors, The Scapegoat is a wrestler who - as a heel - was unafraid of the risk of being set on fire by babyface Darby Allin inside the Blood & Guts cage. It’s all wrong. Daniel Garcia, meanwhile, is the young up-and-coming wrestler who did everything right - he made some mistakes along the way, fell in with a bad crowd from time to time, but he’s been putting his head down and going to work, learning from every defeat and every setback, fighting for his spot while Jack Perry is handed his. How much more sense does the story make when it’s the mouthy prick version of Jack Perry against Daniel Garcia, not the E-Fed Raven cosplay of The Scapegoat?
The match was good, but the inconsistent character work dragged it down a notch. Nothing illustrates it all more than Perry adopting Raven’s crucifix pose, seemingly “sacrificing himself” to Garcia, opening himself up and not fighting back, allowing Garcia to hit him with a piledriver to finish him off. Except, immediately afterwards, as Garcia locked Perry in his version of the Sharpshooter, the Scapegoat tried to fight out of it. So what was the sacrifice? What was any of this for? At least we have a deserving winner in Daniel Garcia, though by immediately entering into the Continental Classic, we yet again have a situation in AEW where a current champion would rather set their sights on someone else’s gold than defend their own. For Jack Perry, hopefully he takes this opportunity to take a step back and reconsider who and what Jack Perry is. There’s promise, there’s something there, but this isn’t it.
A note here, also, on AEW’s issues with agenting. There is such a thing as too much creative freedom, and there does need to be some guidance to stop repetition and better format a card - this show featured back-to-back matches focused on working over a neck injury, immediately following two back-to-back matches built around a focus on legwork, while two matches featured an already overdone AEW spot of a wrestler breaking a referee’s count-out with a mad dash back into the ring on the count of nine. These things matter more when done in moderation; if something happens once on a show, it is an organic part of the story of that match. If it happens two or three times, it is a trope, a building block in the construct of the story, and you want the audience to be looking at the whole, not the individual pieces.
Konosuke Takeshita is on an exceptional run of form right now, but unfortunately Ricochet is not, and the result was one of Takeshita’s weakest matches in a while. AEW was Ricochet’s opportunity to step up and show that he has more to offer than the role WWE had pigeon-holed in him, and so far he doesn’t seem to have pulled it off. Top spots are at a premium in AEW, and he’s not looking likely to fill one any time soon - while I’m not sure an alliance with The Hurt Syndicate would be the best way to get there, MVP offering Ricochet a business card some weeks ago on Dynamite does make me think that perhaps seeing what Ricochet’s capable of a heel might be the best route for him towards reinvention and reappraisal.
Speaking of The Hurt Syndicate, I wasn’t optimistic for Bobby Lashley vs. Swerve Strickland after a fairly lacklustre performance from Lashley in a handicap match on Dynamite - I found it bizarre how many people on social media jumped on the booking of Cheeseburger as one of Big Bob’s opponents, as if that somehow impacted his credibility. I love Cheeseburger, but for the purposes of this match, he was an outmatched jobber, and having a comedy name against the seriousness of Lashley only served to reinforce that, not somehow undermine Lashley. If it had been a competitive match, they might have a point, but it wasn’t - Lashley squashed the heck out of him. The weaknesses in that match were that Lashley’s offence lacked impact, it felt like he was moving through molasses, and working a house show match, rather than a showcase of brutality. The idea that if Cheeseburger had been called John Smith instead we’d be talking about the match any differently is a nonsense - if that match was bad, it was bad because of Bobby Lashley. I’m reminded of the great referee Tommy Young responding to criticisms that he drew attention away from the wrestlers - “if you’d rather be watching the referee, how bad is the wrestling?”. If you’re watching Cheeseburger, then Bobby Lashley hasn’t done his job.
Thankfully, Lashley was a lot better here, far more impactful and aggressive, and Swerve Strickland made him look like an absolute beast. Too much so, in my opinion. I don’t think Swerve overly loses much in defeat - I said when people used to criticise him as World Champion for having competitive matches with people far lower on the pecking order that he was never a wrestler who became Champion through displays of dominance, but through ingenuity and perseverance, and finding a way to win - but I like to think of every wrestling match as having, at its heart, a question. The question of this match was whether Swerve Strickland’s ingenuity was a match for Bobby Lashley’s power. With Lashley winning this match clean, after Swerve had survived the initial onslaught and come up with some creative offence to combat him, that question was answered loud and clear - so what’s next? This show was thankfully lacking in dirty or screwy finishes, and I think this is one match that, because of that, could have afforded a bit more shenanigans to better protect Swerve Strickland in defeat.
The Main Event, And The Afters
On then, to the main event. For the AEW World Championship (though you’d be forgiven for not knowing that - more on that in a moment), and for the heart and soul of AEW. Jon Moxley vs. Orange Cassidy.
AEW love a bit of temporal symmetry, and I have to admit that I’m a sucker for it myself, so for Orange Cassidy - one of the few men in AEW to hold a victory over Jon Moxley - was set up as the first challenger for Mox’s World Title, to do so one year on from Full Gear 2023, where Cassidy had previously defeated Moxley in a championship match (for the International Championship that time around) was a great extra wrinkle for a match that's really about one of my other favourite wrestling tropes - a battle of conflicting ideologies, of stark differences in what wrestling could or should be. On one hand, the ultra-serious violent fighter in Moxley, on the other, the feel-good light-hearted babyface, the wrestler that a thousand crotchety podcasters have tarred as a joke and a novelty act after seeing a few ten second GIFs of his work.
But let’s not get too carried away, because I have some complaints. Chiefly about the Death Riders, and the overall direction of that story. Since turning on Bryan Danielson and attempting to suffocate him with a plastic bag, Moxley and his cronies have been presented as a uniquely dangerous threat to the very soul of AEW - nobody is safe, and there is no line they are not prepared to cross. The week after Bryan Danielson was retired at the hands of Jon Moxley, the babyface ranks of the roster stood united against the former Blackpool Combat Club, awaiting their arrival in the parking lot. And in the weeks since? Most of them seem to have forgotten and moved on. Far from taking over the show, the Death Riders show up for their allotted segment, do their bit, and leave, just like any other heel faction - the only difference is that they enter through the crowd rather than down the ramp.
While Moxley’s motivations have been pretty well laid out, in terms of trying to force the AEW roster to up their game and get serious, there are still questions that remain unanswered, and likely always will. The Death Riders carry the AEW World Championship belt around with them in a locked briefcase. Or maybe they don’t, because we don’t know that the title belt is in there. We just know that they do have a briefcase, and that Jon Moxley doesn’t wear or carry the World Title, and nor do PAC, Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta wear their Trios Titles. That last point might just be unrelated - they could be forgiven for forgetting that they are the Trios Champions, because the promotion they work for doesn’t seem to remember half the time.
But hiding away the World Title without explanation infuriates me. If nothing else, I could gladly never see another briefcase in professional wrestling - it’s bad enough that Money In The Bank has been done to death in WWE, but practically every other promotion in the world has ripped it off at some point, AEW included. A wrestler carrying a briefcase gives me bad flashbacks, and not just to Irwin R. Schyster. I also don’t know why a rule-breaking, vaguely Nazi-coded violent gang want to be lugging a briefcase around with them in the first place.
Where’s my briefcase?
More importantly, though, this all renders the World Title, the most important prize in the company, invisible. We went through something not unlike this around last year’s Full Gear, during a feud between MJF and Jay White, when White, the challenger, had stolen the AEW World Title and wore it around constantly. Neither MJF nor any on-screen representation of AEW’s authority made any real effort to get the title off Jay, so the champion was routinely featured on television with no visual representation of his title, and the challenger walked around with unearned gold. The commentators were tasked with regularly reminding us that Jay White might be carrying the title, but he isn’t the champion. The map is not the territory. But this is a visual medium, and a title belt means “champion”. To mess unduly with that formula is madness.
This time around, they’ve gone one step further, and not only is the champion not visibly holding their title, nobody else is either. So we have a video package building to a World Title match, in which the World Title belt itself is never featured. No sizzle reel of Moxley holding the belt aloft over vanquished opponents, or of Orange Cassidy looking longingly in its direction. It’s simply not there. For the entire build to a World Title match, during the introductions of a World Title match, and for the duration of a World Title match, we never once saw the World Title. It’s a baffling choice.
Put yourself in the position of a conversation with a lapsed fan. Your mate, who maybe came with you to Wembley last year, but fell out of the habit of watching Dynamite, so he’s not really sure what’s happening any more, but you’re having a pint, and he’s interested in case there’s anything good that he’s missed. Maybe he’ll ask you, or maybe he’ll stick an episode on ITV X and see what’s been going on. His first question, almost certainly, will be, “who’s the champion now?”. From watching the TV show, he could be forgiven for not figuring that out. And, honestly, I fairly routinely have to remind myself who it is, because the TV show isn’t telling us. I don’t see Jon Moxley carrying the title. So I don’t see Jon Moxley as World Champion, any more than I see the rest of the Death Riders as Trios Champions given they never carry, wear, or defend those belts either. And, unless it’s been buried in a promo on Rampage, we’ve never been given a kayfabe justification why. I would make an educated guess that the not too subtle imagery of the title belt inside a locked case, handcuffed to one of the Death Riders, is supposed to represent the manner in which they have held AEW to ransom - but that doesn’t work when the rest of the show simply continues as normal. And wouldn’t it be a better, and much clearer, visual cue that the Death Riders are running roughshod over AEW to show them carrying a sizable amount of championship gold? I hate it, ‘nuff said.
But let’s not complain too much, because this match was - mostly - delightful. Something that modern wrestling struggles with, and that Moxley has been guilty of in the past, is that everything is so clean and polished that nobody knows how to escalate a sense of violence or danger without the introduction of weapons and dangerous spots; of spectacle over emotion. What Moxley has locked into during this current run is the ability to project violent intent without ever resorting to deathmatch tricks and stunts. And that is a perfect complement to Orange Cassidy, whose years spent wrestling under a mask have given him an ability to sell pain, exhaustion, and emotion with his entire body in a way that so few American wrestlers ever manage to get right - the old Vince McMahon edict is that the money in wrestling comes from facial expressions, that your facials are the heart of selling, and how you really hook the audience into your emotion. But - in the only Friends reference I’m likely to ever make in a show review - Orange Cassidy is like Joey, able to project emotion even if you’re looking at the back of his head. Smile! Frown! Smile! Frown!
Unfortunately, I felt that what had been a perfectly paced match was dragged down by the eventual involvement of the other Death Riders, and of The Conglomeration - though I’ll admit I was less bothered by it on second viewing. I have a theory that AEW’s overarching meta-narrative is about friendship and teamwork - if you take Hangman Page, his initial story arc saw him unsure of himself and plagued with self-doubt, and it took believing in himself as much as others believed in him, and accepting the support of his friends, whether that was Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks or Dark Order, to push him to be the best version of himself. Now, he’s out on his own, with no friends to caution him, and he has become the worst version of himself. When he eventually returns from the cold, it will be through contrition over what he has become, and through an acceptance of support and friendship, whoever those friends may be (though personally I’m still putting money on a Hangman & Omega vs. Young Bucks rematch at Revolution next year). And that’s where Orange Cassidy was doomed to fail against Jon Moxley - by insisting that he got it alone, without the support of The Conglomeration. His teammates coming to his aid regardless could drag that idea down but, crucially, they never helped him fight Moxley, only to even the odds by taking out Moxley’s lackeys. Though I couldn’t help but notice the absence of Mark Briscoe from the scene, and wondered whether that would cause a rift in the group - though as of this week’s Dynamite, it’s gone unmentioned.
And then, of course, it was over. Jon Moxley won, as he was always going to - though the match was well worked enough to make you bite on a few of the near-falls, and think they might go the other way. I went into this match, and this show, anticipating a major post-match angle here…and that’s not really what we got.
The afters, then. Chaos.
Attempting to top the visceral ugliness of suffocating Bryan Danielson with a plastic bag, the Death Riders attacked Orange Cassidy and poured bleach (or a non-specific “chemical mixture”, per Excalibur) down his throat. Pretty grim stuff.
And then, a parade of run-ins. Hangman Page took out Wheeler Yuta and faced off with Jon Moxley - something I feel has happened a little early; I want to shy away from criticising AEW for not booking the version of the story that only exists in my head, but I made a case in my last review for Hangman to be the ultimate saviour of the promotion from the Death Riders only when he’s convinced by others that he needs to fight for something bigger than himself, and it’s a shame to see him prepared to stand up to Jon Moxley without hitting that emotional beat. In this instance, it all turned out to be a set-up for Christian Cage to attack Mox, only to be thwarted in cashing in his (sigh) Money In The Bank rip-off “title shot anywhere” contract when Jay White attacked him. The Death Riders made a run for it, escaping backstage, where Darby Allin crashed a car into their truck, and they were left to steal a car to make their escape.
It was a mess. Nothing gives me worse flashbacks to late stage WCW or the worst excesses of the Attitude Era than wrestling angles built around vehicular crime. But beyond that, it was a poorly structured mess - a succession of outside interference and unexpected appearances should have a rhythm to it, it needs to escalate either in shock value or in the name value of the wrestlers involved. Ideally, both. With all due respect to the wrestlers involved, Hangman Page squaring off with Moxley was the emotional high point, and Christian Cage and Jay White getting involved added confusion, rather than anticipation. The final piece of the puzzle being Darby Allin was no surprise, as he’s been actively feuding with the Death Riders for months, so it added nothing new to the mix. Even an actual car crash wasn’t the big highlight reel shock moment they were aiming for, as in typical AEW fashion, it’s a button that Tony Khan has pressed too many times already - it’s not even the first car crash angle we’ve seen Darby Allin involved in this year!
While, presumably, the intention was to show that AEW was in chaos, and that finally the bigger names in the company were turning their attentions toward Jon Moxley, in reality, it was an unfocused mess, where each individual piece detracted from those that came before it, rather than adding to them. Most egregiously of all, it meant that by the end of the show, nobody was talking about Orange Cassidy. The babyface attempting to fight for the future of the company had been the victim of an attempted murder at the hands of the World Champion, and you’d be forgiven for having forgotten all about it.
Dynamite
It took me long enough to write this bloody thing that I’ve also watched this week’s episode of Dynamite now - and don’t worry, I’m not going to be recapping everything that happened there, but it does add some further context.
It’s not something I’ve particularly thought to put into words as a booking philosophy before this morning, but it occurred to me while watching Dynamite that so many of my criticisms of AEW come down to one idea - a wrestler should be singular in their focus. Allow me to (try and) explain:
In Nevil Maskelyne’s On The Performance Of Magic, the master magician gives a piece of advice to aspiring conjurors - “Never produce two simultaneous effects, and let no effect be obscured by any subsidiary distraction”. Since first reading Maskelyne’s book, I’ve been struck by how much of his guidance on crowd work for conjurors can be equally useful for professional wrestlers, and it was this piece of advice that most stood out to me. Every action in a wrestling match should be done for a reason, it should have purpose. But it should have singular purpose. If the intent behind a spot is to elicit comedy, don’t aim for sympathy within that same movement. If your intent is to wow the audience with a jaw-dropping stunt, ensure that their attention is solely on the stunt, not drawn elsewhere.
I feel similarly about booking - a show, and a longer story arc, should ultimately follow the same narrative beats as a match, after all; if your intention is to build up a wrestler as a future champion, then working towards that goal should be the singular focus of that wrestler’s booking. The waters shouldn’t be muddied by a simultaneous effect, or obscured by any subsidiary distraction.
And that’s where I get to Dynamite.
This episode saw the start of the Continental Classic, which should give us a plethora of incredible wrestling matches, and should enforce a reasonable amount of simple, sports-based storytelling structured around the importance of wins and losses. All of that is very welcome news. But, for some participants, it comes at the expense of existing storytelling.
Darby Allin’s singular focus - an obsession so great that it led him to intentionally total his own car - should be on getting revenge on Jon Moxley and the Death Riders, at the expense of everything else. Instead, he’s entered in to the Continental Classic, a lengthy tournament that all but guarantees that he won’t be wrestling Jon Moxley any time soon (though will put him on a path for a rematch with Claudio Castagnoli), and that, best case scenario, earns him a separate championship. That’s a step away from his singular focus - it’s introducing a simultaneous effect.
Similarly, Daniel Garcia, the day after the triumphant coming out party of winning the TNT Title, is added to the mix for the Continental Classic. It was last year’s Continental Classic that put him on the path to singles success and championship gold, but this time, it’s both producing a simultaneous effect and creating a subsidiary distraction. Because Daniel Garcia has not been allowed the time to celebrate becoming TNT Champion, and we as an audience have been given neither the time or the space to consider what a TNT Title reign for Daniel Garcia might look like, because instead of cementing what being TNT Champion means to him, or defending that title, he is immediately pivoted to competing in a tournament for a separate title. Champions prioritising fighting for other belts rather than defending their own is a recurring issue of mine with AEW, because it robs individual titles of identity and value, and I realise now that, underpinning all of that, is once again this loss of singular focus. On top of that, I now heavily suspect that Daniel Garcia won’t be winning the Continental Classic, because if he were, AEW would have presented that as his arrival as a singles star, rather than winning a separate title at the previous show. Another distraction.
But Dynamite wasn’t all about the Continental Classic, there was also some follow-up on the post-show chaos from Hangman Page and Jay White - Christian Cage was nowhere to be seen (and who remembers when he was feuding with Hook? Anyone?). That set the stage for future chaos, maybe even an uneasy alliance between Hangman and White - I assume World’s End is headlined either by a four-way title defence by Moxley, or a 4 vs 4 or 3 vs 3 match (depending on where Claudio and Darby land in the Continental Classic) pitting the Death Riders against an uneasy alliance of potential title contenders in Jay White, Hangman Page, Christian Cage, and potentially Darby Allin.
Absent from all this, though, is Orange Cassidy. We got the briefest of updates to say that he was recovering in hospital. But are his friends in the Conglomeration not concerned for him? Amid all the violent brawling with the Death Riders, nobody was fighting for revenge on behalf of Orange Cassidy; he didn’t even get a mention. Mark Briscoe was battling in the Continental Classic, Tomohiro Ishii was facing Chris Jericho for the Ring of Honor World Title, and Kyle O’Reilly was sticking his nose in Adam Cole’s business to further the storyline that will never, ever end. Willow Nightingale, who made her triumphant return at Full Gear, never even appeared on Dynamite, her name went unmentioned.
Just like the end of Full Gear, the fate of Orange Cassidy was lost amid all the noise and the chaos. Another victim of too many subsidiary distractions.
The Marketing Bit
Thank you for reading, I hope that you find my scattered thoughts and critiques of professional wrestling interesting - whether you agree or disagree, I hope they encourage you to perhaps think about wrestling in a different light, or to apply analogies about your own favourite forgotten variety acts, ‘90s sitcoms and early 1900s books about conjuring to a fake sport we watch on TV. It’s probably just me that does that, though, isn’t it? You’ve got to have a USP.
This is the bit where I do the plugs, so if you like my writing and want to read more of it, I wrote a book all about the history of professional wrestling, and it comes very well regarded and recommended, apart from the one guy who gave it a one-star review because I “virtue signal” too much and that it was written without chapters (reader, it has chapters). It’s called Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, and you can buy it on Amazon right now. If it’s not for you, or if you’ve already read it, Christmas is just around the corner, and it might make a good present for some other wrestling history nerd in your life.
I also have a podcast that just wrapped up its first series, Bunkum & Ballyhoo, that’s all about liars, con artists, showmen, hustlers, hoaxers, and bullshit in general. Unsurprisingly, that does mean that wrestling comes up from time to time, though mostly in stories you’re not likely to hear on other wrestling podcasts - series one is all about lies related to World War 2, and covers a South African wrestler who led a pro-Nazi terrorist group, a Norwich wrestler who joined the SS, and, away from the wrestling ring, there are episodes about a master magician who claimed to have turned the tide of the war, about the faked Hitler diaries, about Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds, and about two surrealist queer icons who fought against Nazi oppression on the island of Jersey. It’s a good time, and the next series will be starting in the New Year, looking at some slightly less heavy topics than all that!
Finally, if you want to financially support my work, you can do so on Patreon. That gets you early access to new episodes of Bunkum & Ballyhoo, plus Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes. Research materials and subscriptions don’t come cheap, so I’m always extremely grateful for your support.
Thanks all! x
