AEW Wrestledream 2024 Thoughts
It would be remiss to start a recap of Wrestledream without acknowledging the peculiar position that AEW finds itself in - a run of high profile, critically acclaimed pay-per-views sit uncomfortably amid inconsistent weekly television, dwindling ratings, and an overarching sense of chaos behind the scenes. While the departure of Jimmy Jacobs from AEW’s behind-the-scenes staff and creative team was met by many with relief, the former “Zombie Princess” widely seen as being responsible for a shift towards more WWE-style angles and presentation, it’s rarely a positive sign when a key part of the creative team departs a company of the day of a heavily promoted pay-per-view.
That said, I don’t like to get bogged down in talk about ratings, attendance, or buyrates - this stuff is available everywhere, and I find it no more fulfilling to write about it than I do to read about it; my interest generally lies in the on-screen product, and whether it satisfies me as a viewer, albeit a viewer saturated in decades of watching, working in, and obsessively analysing professional wrestling. The business of ratings only matters to me as a viewer in how it translates to the TV show I’m watching, attendance only matters when the size of a crowd begins to impact the quality of a show. Aside from wanting a promotion I generally enjoy watching to continue to exist, and to continue to employ wrestlers I enjoy watching and a few friends of mine, whether AEW is making money or not is of very little interest to me - I’m not Tony Khan’s accountant. So, breathe a sigh of relief, you’ll get no more of that from me.
It feels like I’m doing this show a disservice, considering that pretty much everything on the card delivered, if not over-delivered, to refer to it as a “One Match Show”. It wasn’t quite that, though there’s only one match that people have broadly come away talking about, and that match will likely the form the bulk of this review. If I give some of the undercard short shrift here, it’s because there is a lot to say elsewhere, and I tend to bang on enough in these things as it is.
The Pre-Show
I have a real soft spot for the AEW pre-show panel team, given that it consists of the best wrestling interviewer and anchorperson of her generation in Renee Paquette, one of wrestling’s funniest and most charming hosts in RJ City (I know you’re reading this, RJ), and the ever-present muscular arm of one Jeff Jarrett. Gut I instinctively balk at any shift in presentation that makes me feel like somebody has got a bit of their WWE in my AEW.
In that respect, the shift to a pre-show panel seated behind a desk was at best a lateral move, and at worst put me in mind of interminable WWE pre-shows. If you wrestling show is making me think about Sam Roberts and Pete Rosenburg even when they’re not involved, you’re off to a bad start. AEW is at its best in all respects when not mimicking WWE, and that goes tenfold for its visual language.
As for the matches on the pre-show - there’s little to say, really.
Anna Jay vs. Harley Cameron was a well-worked wrestling match that didn’t do much to make me care about it. One of AEW’s biggest female stars, Jamie Hayter, returned after a length absence almost two months ago, but has yet to grace a PPV card - she made her comeback on the pre-show of All In, a fact I was only aware of because I was in the queue for the gents’ at Wembley Stadium, and would have missed the entire thing had someone ahead of me not had the wisdom to watch the YouTube feed on their phone. Since then, Jamie Hayter has feuded with Harley Cameron’s associate Saraya - advertised as in Cameron’s corner for this match but nowhere to be seen - and has yet to make a PPV card, and only rarely graced Dynamite. It’s a recurring failing of AEW that wrestlers without a clear plan behind them tend to tread water for weeks or months at a time until the appropriate slot opens up for them, but in Jamie’s case it runs a serious risk of losing any momentum behind her return, if that hasn’t happened already, and rendering her looking not nearly as special as he is. While a pre-show match wouldn’t have been the best solution to that problem, could Jamie not have been her to make short work of Harley Cameron instead, or even to get involved in an angle to explain why Saraya was absent?
Closing out the pre-show was probably the most frustrating match pairing of this portion of the night; the Conglomeration pairing of Orange Cassidy and Kyle O’Reilly teaming with The Outrunners against The Dark Order & The Premier Athletes; the heel team being almost exclusively pre-show fodder made this a predictable affair, albeit one nicely punctuated with fun Orange Cassidy spots and the feel-good ‘80s tag team nostalgia schtick of the Outrunners. Nothing to complain about there.
No, the reason why this match was particularly frustrating was the follow-up - as the night went on, Kyle O’Reilly was set up as the next challenger to Kazuchika Okada’s Continental Title, while Orange Cassidy was given a pep talk by Jerry Lynn and involvement in the show closing angle that both seem to point towards him stepping up into a far more substantial role in the near future, most likely contesting for the AEW World Title for what I believe would be the first time. If that’s the future plan for these two, would they not have been better served getting some more substantial and meaningful wins than a token victory over the designated enhancement talent or, in Orange’s case, perhaps a significant loss to justify Jerry Lynn trying to talk some ambition in to him? Given that their Conglomeration stablemate Mark Briscoe was defending his ROH World Title against Chris Jericho later in the night, could Cassidy and O’Reilly (as opposed to former TNA Hotshot, Cassidy O’Reilly) not have tagged against Jericho’s Learning Tree lackeys Big Bill and Bryan Keith, in a match with a little more weight behind it?
As an aside, and in general frustration around the booking of The Conglomeration and The Learning Tree - the Conglomeration in multi-man tags have become one of the most reliably enjoyable parts of AEW TV, and fast-paced, feel-good six and eight man tag matches are something AEW does that nobody else does, the exact opposite of the following of WWE’s lead that I complained about earlier, it could be argued that they are low-key (as opposed to former TNA Senshi, Low Ki) AEW’s signature match. As a company, AEW struggle with a lack of distinct identity for each of their many championship belts, and yet the Trios Titles could easily become the centrepiece of this big daft tag matches. Instead, the Learning Tree have never challenged for the Trios belts, nor have any configuration of The Conglomeration, nor did the Learning Tree’s previous and rivals and former feel-good babyface trio du jour, Hook, Samoa Joe and Katsuyori Shibata. It feels like an easy and obvious way to add weight to matches and feuds that AEW are booking either way, and it’s a constant annoyance to me that the Trios Titles aren’t used to their strengths when there exists such a simple solution.
Undercard Thoughts
As far as opening matches go, you could do a lot worse (and not much better) than Jay White vs. Hangman Page. White’s time in AEW has been always entertaining, but a little stop-start and skittish in terms of credibility - as a former NJPW Grand Slam Champion and a hotly sought after free agent, it was expected that he would slot almost immediately into AEW’s main event scene, but instead, outside of a confused feud with MJF that got bogged down in a mess of stolen title belts and Devil mask nonsense, has instead largely settled into a comfortable upper midcard role as the leader of the Bang Bang Gang.
White returning and setting his sights on Hangman Page made sense - White’s stablemates have most recently borne the brunt of Hangman’s increasingly unfocused rage and violence, and Page was given kayfabe credit for taking out Jay White in the first place. That the two turned out to have incredible chemistry was an excellent bonus, and I loved this match for it - it was heated, creative, and exceptionally well-worked, with one of the smoothest finishing sequences I’ve seen in a long time; the kind of thing that wrestlers in every company are constantly trying to choreograph, but which rarely looks as organic and as well-timed as this one did.
Before the show, I argued that this was an interesting pairing as both wrestlers really needed a win, but neither could really afford to lose - always a conundrum for a booker - but I was pleasantly surprised by a clean win on Jay White’s part, and it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was. Hangman Page has a rare ability to take at least as much from a loss as he does from a win, and if the plan isn’t currently for him to mix it up in the World Title picture any time soon, then his character can more than just weather the storm of a few high profile losses, he may even come out of them better.
I have little to say about Mariah May vs. Willow Nightingale; it’s been clear in the absence of Toni Storm that Mariah is a damp squib as champion, and that when it comes to character work and mic time, Toni was putting a significant shift in to make audiences care about her opponent as much as about her, and that’s evident from the diminishing reactions to Mariah’s music, to her lacklustre rote heel promos, and to the lack of any meaningful evolution of her character while Toni Storm continues to be delightfully unhinged in promos for CMLL and Stardom. Willow Nightingale, meanwhile, deserves better than to be a last-minute replacement challenger in a match she was never going to win. In a company that (spoiler alert) no longer features Bryan Danielson, Willow Nightingale is the most genuine and likeable babyface they have, and should be the centrepiece of the women’s division or damn close to it. The sooner AEW recognises that, the better.
Jack Perry is an odd one.
I don’t buy the Scapegoat gimmick. He’s a wrestler that is clearly putting in the work to get better at every aspect of his game, but when he walks out to the ring in a leather jacket with a dead stare, and flips off fans who try and get under his skin, I just don’t believe him. That’s especially egregious on this show, where Hangman Page did all of those things more believably. There’s not enough room for two unhinged, long-haired handsome boys in leather on this show.
And besides, why is he a “Scapegoat”? That nickname, born of the backstage brouhaha between him and CM Punk, made sense when he was an outcast, banished from AEW TV and developing his character in NJPW. But since his return to AEW television, he’s the protected pet project of the Young Bucks, the company’s EVPs, he has been all but handed his own championship, and allow to go unpunished for his many transgressions. He’s no longer a scapegoat for anything; if anything, he’s the opposite of a scapegoat, given that he is directly responsible for a run of villainous actions and is sufficiently well-protected by his friends in high places to avoid any punishment for them.
Katsuyori Shibata was a fine challenger for Perry’s TNT Title but, in a problem that recurred across this show, not the most credible - nobody came into this show expecting that they would see Shibata with his hand raised in victory. Instead, I assume this was an exercise in proving Jack Perry’s toughness by having him hold his own against one of wrestling’s hard men and hardest hitters, but in that respect Shibata is in a similar position to occasional AEW guest Minoru Suzuki, in that he simply doesn’t win often enough for that reputation to carry over on to the opponent who defeats him. The alternative is that Tony Khan, or somebody in creative, remembered a week before the show that Wrestledream is supposed to be an Antonio Inoki tribute show, and rushed to book one of his protégés in a significant match.
The match was perfectly fine, particularly given Shibata’s limitations, but the aftermath was the talking point - Daniel Garcia coming to the aid of Shibata, only to be attacked by the returning MJF, who was in turn interrupted by the returning Adam Cole. AEW does this style of succession of surprises very well when the opportunity is presented to them, and it was an enjoyable segment, but one that fills me with a small amount of dread for the future of all the wrestlers involved.
A straightforward feud between Garcia and Perry over the TNT Title would make sense, and Garcia could benefit from winning that belt, but adding MJF to the mix suggests a return to a storyline that bogged Garcia down as a supporting player in somebody else’s story, and was largely defined by MJF regressing into the most tedious edgelord version of his persona. MJF is an immensely frustrating wrestler to watch perform, because when he has something meaningful to get his teeth into, and a veteran to work opposite and to shave off some of his worst instincts, he’s as good as anyone, but when he’s in control of a story, it’s all cheap heat, burying his opponents, and trying to get a dozen catchphrases over. Promos like his used to be a dime a dozen, but twenty years of scripted promos on TV and weird Vince McMahon verbal diktats imposed on the WWE roster mean that anybody who can speak confidently off the cuff comes across as a master of the microphone in comparison, and MJF, for a time, benefited from that more than anyone, but these days is more often treading water, and the sight of him with a microphone in his hand almost instinctively makes my finger hover over the fast-forward button.
That this was followed by the return of Adam Cole only brought back more bad memories, once the initial hype had worn down, of some of the most counter-productive wrestling television in years, and a storyline that I hold, at least in part, directly responsible for AEW’s downturn in fortunes in the last year or so. After a run as a tag team of super-friends, and a World Title feud built around friendship rather than competition (your mileage may vary on the results - I found it more enjoyable than some), Adam Cole’s return under the Devil mask took MJF off television for months, creating a stable of wrestlers largely only defined by their relationship to MJF, rendering the Undisputed Kingdom utterly pointless in Max’s absence. Seemingly recognising that the whole affair was best forgotten, MJF returned and made short work of the injured Adam Cole, immediately putting the feud behind him and moving on to new things. Except now Cole has returned to face off against a heel MJF, and where the Undisputed Kingdom fit in all this remains to be seen - so not only are we staring down the barrel of revisiting the MJF/Cole feud, but there’s also the potential of intra-faction strife between Adam Cole and other members of the Undisputed Kingdom; a story that I’ve watched play out countless times across three different promotions, and could gladly never watch again. Flashbacks to the Devil storyline is bad enough, making me think about the worst excesses of NXT Black & Gold is unforgivable.
The Three-Way match for the AEW International Title between Will Ospreay, Ricochet, and Konosuke Takeshita was incredible athletic nonsense. It wasn’t always to my tastes, but it was inarguably the best example of the kind of wrestling that these three excel at.
Early on, it risked making some of the mistakes I dreaded for this match - Ricochet is an interesting signing to AEW, because of how and when his career diverged from Will Ospreay’s. In the aftermath of their most famous - call it controversial or influential, too - match in NJPW, Ricochet’s rise took him to WWE, while Ospreay took the road less travelled and ascended to the top of NJPW, and then to AEW, and has become one of the most consistent wrestlers in the world. Whatever you think of him, he is almost pathologically incapable of having a bad match, and has in short order become a core part of AEW and an unlikely effective TV promo guy and company cheerleader.
Ricochet, I think it’s fair to say, flounder in comparison in WWE. When he came to AEW, it was with a cautious amount of hype - this could be his opportunity to show what he’s capable of with the training wheels taken off, but “could” is the operative word; in the more controlled environment of WWE, Ricochet had little opportunity to show that he had grown or evolved as a wrestler the way that Will Ospreay had. Not only had Ospreay improved, but so had the entire landscape of professional wrestling outside of WWE, particularly in relation to the high-flying style these two specialise in; in the years since Ricochet had last competed outside of WWE, we’d seen the likes of the Young Bucks vs. The Lucha Bros, we’d seen the rise of El Hijo del Vikingo and, the week that Ricochet and Ospreay had that heavily anticipated rematch on AEW Dynamite, a GIF from CMLL was going around social media depicting Mascara Dorada performing a dive more jaw-dropping and creative than anything Ospreay or Ricochet pulled off in their match. Put simply, there was a risk that Ricochet had been left behind, and he needed to show that he had something more to offer.
This match began with Ricochet and Ospreay revisiting the “mirror match” spots that they once went viral for, and which I think Ospreay should long since have outgrown, and Ricochet could do with starting to move away from too. Fair enough that they were largely the innovators, a 2010s answer to Rob Van Dam and Jerry Lynn inadvertently cursing a generation of professional wrestling with the Indie Stand-Off Spot, but when it’s been done to death by countless lesser imitators, it doesn’t matter if you did it first, it’s worth putting the entire idea to bed. But then, I say that as someone who would gladly go ten years without ever seeing another springboard cutter or handspring anything again.
Thankfully, Konosuke Takeshita was on hand to play spoiler and break up the flippy exhibition by just hitting both opponents in the head, a role he would excel in for the rest of the match. That Takeshita was, for my money, the unquestioned highlight of this match speaks volumes to how good he is, considering who he was in there with.
That Konosuke Takeshita ultimately won was a welcome surprise, as giving him a championship is long overdue, both for himself, and to bring some credibility to the Don Callis Family. That the finish came with a Kyle Fletcher heel turn, I’m less enthused about.
Partly because it’s not really a heel turn - Kyle was already a heel through his association with Don Callis, and it’s only when working with Ospreay that he’s been more on the babyface side of the bracket, but audiences desperately want to cheer him. He is a born babyface. My preference for some time now has been for Kyle Fletcher to break away from the Don Callis Family along with his Aussie Open teammate Mark Davis when he’s fit to return, and to form a Trio with Ospreay in opposition to Callis.
Presumably, it’s an effort to keep Will Ospreay busy with Kyle Fletcher rather than have him immediately seek a rematch with Takeshita, allowing Takeshita to pick up some matches against a wider array of opponents - the suggestion made by Don Callis at the post-show press conference that they’re eager to live up to the “International” name of the title gives me hope that Takeshita will take the title to NJPW, CMLL, and perhaps to DDT; I’m always a sucker for AEW at its most “revolving door” in terms of surprise guest appearances, so I could also get behind Takeshita defending against opponents of different nationalities on AEW TV, allowing for a few guest names to pop up, while also creating a sorely needed point of distinction to make the International Title substantially different from the TNT or Continental Titles.
The downside to that idea is that AEW are due to make their debut in Australia in February, and, assuming that either this story or at least Kyle Fletcher’s heel run, is still ongoing by the time they get there, it seems a very strange move to head into that show with the company’s most prominent Australian wrestler playing the villain, when the alternative could have been - fingers crossed for Mark Davis’ recovery - a babyface Aussie Open standing tall as tag team champions, or as Trios Champions alongside Will Ospreay.
On top of that, one of the odd features of Will Ospreay’s run in AEW has been his recurring association with Don Callis, dating back to him first being brought in while under NJPW contract as a hired gun in Callis’ war with Kenny Omega. Despite being a babyface, Ospreay remained under Callis’ management, and even after leaving the Don Callis Family, still routinely teamed with Fletcher and associated with Callis regardless. Everyone knew that Callis & Co turning on Ospreay was coming sooner or later, but the impact of that turn was diminished by the fact that during Ospreay’s time in the Callis Family, he was routinely booked to wrestle against other Callis Family members. So Ospreay being formally rejected by Callis, and attacked by both Takeshita and Fletcher, doesn’t do what a heel turn ordinarily would, it doesn’t open the door to a new array of matches to match the new allegiance - we’ve already seen Will Ospreay wrestle (and beat) Konosuke Takeshita and Kyle Fletcher in singles matches.
Next up was the welcome return of Swerve Strickland and, happily, it didn’t result in the separation from Prince Nana that I had feared. They are too good a double act to break up, and it was interesting to see Swerve Strickland in full babyface mode here in front of his hometown crowd, something we’re not used to seeing from a wrestler who usually reserves a little bit more of an edge than was on display in this segment.
MVP and Swerve did a fantastic job at filling in the blanks of their personal history, and why Swerve would deliberate in choosing between MVP and Nana, while Swerve did everything he could on the microphone to put over MVP and Shelton Benjamin as historically significant figures not only in his own career, but for wrestling in general. The pointedness at which he emphasised Shelton’s importance to black wrestlers was something that I am glad Swerve has the freedom to commit to; it would be difficult to picture in certain other wrestling promotions.
While the segment came to something of an inconsequential end - I assume most viewers were, like me, anticipating the debut of Bobby Lashley - I can appreciate the slow burn behind this one; Lashley debuting to attack Swerve would have been a very “because wrestling” moment, where you forgive the lack of logic because you understand how wrestling angles normally play out. But, in kayfabe, MVP entered this segment fully confident that he would be leaving with the services of Swerve Strickland secured, so why would he have arranged for Bobby Lashley to be there to attack Strickland? That’s the call MVP makes when things get serious - as they now have - and it keeps us guessing as to when the inevitable will happen. That works just fine for me.
Let me shock you - I love The Beast Mortos. I’ve been a huge fan for a long time, since his previous incarnation as Taurus carved out a spot for him in AAA as the best base in Lucha Libre, the guy to make the high-flyers look like a million bucks. Hologram, too, may not have ticked all my boxes quite like Mortos/Taurus does, but he was a joy to watch as Aramis in AAA and elsewhere, and has taken to the slightly hokey Hologram gimmick enough to make it his own.
First, the problems with all that. One is that being the utility player who can make everyone else look good is a nice way to keep yourself in employment as a wrestler, but it’s rarely a recipe for a sustained push, and Mortos’ win/loss record unfortunately reflects that - being there to prop up the other guys necessarily means that you take a few more losses than you perhaps should. People love Mortos, and AEW should be striking while the iron’s hot and letting him get some wins under his belt but, as has followed him throughout his career, they see more value in using him to give a boost to other wrestlers. That’s not to say that Hologram doesn’t deserve the win, but he’s a wrestler with a little drawback of his own; he’s currently undefeated in AEW, with 15 wins under his belt, but exists in his own little self-contained universe. Hologram’s singles matches have all been against fellow luchadores, or wrestlers like Angelico and Gringo Loco who are well versed in lucha libre, and there’s no sign of him mixing it up with the wider roster any time soon or, despite his winning record, of him challenging for any title belts.
The solution, I suppose, would be for Hologram to win a title belt but have it chiefly defended against other luchadores, else the risk is that he inhabits his own world at arm’s length from AEW proper. One of the problems constantly reiterated about AEW is that they have too many title belts, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, so much as there is too little distinction between those belts - that’s something I’ve already talked about here. It doesn’t need to be a formal division, but why not allow one of AEW’s titles to become, for a time, the de facto Lucha Libre Title? If Hologram were to win, say, the TNT Title, but defend it primarily against the likes of Mortos and Komander, who he’s going to be wrestling anyway? It wouldn’t be the worst idea, would it?
As for the match itself, it ruled. Of course it did. I’m not sure it required the 2 Out Of 3 Falls stipulation, but the luchadores worked well with it, allowing Mortos the first pinfall over Hologram if not the first victory, and reusing the finishes from the first two falls as near-falls for the third is the kind of thing that rewards the viewer for paying attention. I’m sure there are spots in this match that will have the usual fun-hating grumps who don’t understand Lucha Libre complaining about the lack of “psychology” - rather than recognising the distinction between the psychology of Lucha and the psychology of American TV wrestling, but I digress - but don’t listen to them, and just enjoy the bloody thing. It was great.
Darby Allin vs. Brody King was a clash of two wrestlers who deserve better - Brody King in general, and Darby Allin for this show in particular. King is a phenomenal big man, and an extremely engaging presence that crowds always respond to, but gets too few opportunities to showcase that, particularly in singles matches, while Darby Allin was robbed of a World Title match on this show, and I feel needed a more significant and substantial win as a make-good for that fact.
The story to get us here was slapshot and rushed. Darby Allin, having been manipulated into putting his title shot on the line against Jon Moxley at Grand Slam and losing, issued an open challenge for this PPV, which was shortly thereafter answered by Brody King. A muddled promo segment, in which Darby Allin came across far more as the villain and the aggressor than the much larger Brody King, filled in the blanks about how these two have fought numerous times across multiple promotions before now, with Brody King generally having Darby Allin’s number. It was a good effort to add some context, but it’s not much of a story in its own right. Like I said about Orange Cassidy back on the pre-show, if Darby Allin is to be involved in the main event and the World Title picture moving forward, he should have had a more meaningful match to help get him there on this show, rather than a win over Brody.
That’s not to say the match was bad - far from it. The two wrestlers are clearly familiar with each other and work well together, allowing for - as you’d expect from a Darby Allin match - some stomach-turning bumps from even the most mundane of moves, the way only Darby Allin can. It was as good as it could have been, but for a hometown boy who at one point was due to main event this show, I’d have rather Darby Allin had something higher profile with more than a week and a half’s build.
I popped big time for an unexpected Amazing Red appearance in the pre-match intro for Private Party, but that’s about the high point of the Tag Team Title match for me.
As was something of a trend with this show, it was enjoyable and very well worked, but despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the result never felt in doubt. The Young Bucks did everything in their power to make Private Party look like a threat to their title reign, and the framing of the match tried to do in a few minutes what all the TV build never substantially tried to do, and present this match as a big deal. It largely failed.
The problem is that the story for this match largely came out of nowhere. Private Party had shifted from a pretty moribund tag team run into forming a trio with Komander, to then have a mini-feud with the Blackpool Combat Club. When, after one loss to the BCC, Private Party won a tag team match on Dynamite and issued a challenge to the Young Bucks, it felt completely out of nowhere. This didn’t look like a team trying to get focused and repeat an upset win from five years earlier, it looked like a team who were afraid of the team they had been feuding with, so decided to change tact and take aim elsewhere. That, or like a booking team who realised that their tag team division is dead in the water despite being populated by several of the best teams in the world, and hastily cobbling together a title match for the pay-per-view.
I have very little to say about Chris Jericho vs. Mark Briscoe for the ROH Title.
This match and the rushed and perfunctory feud building to it, was seemingly designed to allow Briscoe to get a satisfying measure of revenge over Jericho for invoking the name of Mark’s late brother Jay, thus allowing a redemptive and cathartic moment of babyface victory ahead of the downer ending to come in the main event. Personally, I’d think a better feelgood moment would be to not invoke the untimely death of a young father, the 27 year old driver of the other vehicle, or serious injuries to Jay’s daughters in the first place. In fact, I like it when my wrestling doesn’t remind me of tragic injuries to pre-teens at all.
Jon Moxley vs. Bryan Danielson
Here it is. The big one.
I wrote in my tribute to Terry Funk last year, and in my review of Ric Flair’s last match before that, about how I don’t like to deal in the absolutes of “greatest of all time”. I won’t belabour the point, but it’s an exercise in privileging certain styles and approaches to wrestling over others, when wrestling is a broad church with an ensemble cast, and to carve out the “Mount Rushmore of Wrestling” that Twitter engagement farmers so often ask for is an impossible task. Everybody’s metrics are different; you can’t meaningfully compare the ability or the impact of a Greco-Roman wrestler from 1898 with a popular luchadore of the 2000s, or a great comedy performer with an elite shooter, and Big Daddy should be in the WON Hall of Fame (fight me IRL).
But there are some qualifiers that surely count - longevity, adaptability, diversity of opponents and locations wrestled in, influence, time spent as a significant main event level act (if, indeed, that’s what the wrestler in question set out to be - one could just as easily make the argument that the best wrestlers of all time are those who most instinctively understood their role, in which case, I’ll be expecting essays on my desk tomorrow morning about how Spike Dudley is the best wrestler in WWE history), tangible connections with their audience, the work they put in to uplift wrestling as a whole and leave it better than they found it, and how good they were at raising their opponent’s game. If I’m pressed to answer the question, one name only, “who is the best wrestler of all time?”, with all of those qualifiers and categories in mind, my answer has long been Terry Funk. But if you answered Bryan Danielson, based on all the same factors, I’d find it impossible to argue with you.
This year’s All In at Wembley Stadium was the first time I got to see Bryan Danielson perform live, having watched him wrestle on footage of increasingly high definition, from third-generation VHS copies to grainy handicam footage to full HD on pay-per-view, for the last twenty or so years. His match with Swerve Strickland on that show solidified for me what I had long known, that he is truly an all-time great - he has a way of incorporating every bump, bruise and injury he sustains throughout a match, and some that he’s been carrying before the bell, into the story behind every single movement, everything he does within a match is informed by the journey he has taken prior to that moment. Too much of modern wrestling, following WWE’s lead, tends to rely on, at best, a token nod to the idea of “working a body part”, but only comes alive in the main event - audiences have been taught that only the finish really matters. But Bryan Danielson makes everything count. Every move - and every movement - is intimately tied to every other. There’s no waiting around for the good stuff, no twiddling your thumbs and checking your phone until he starts doing the flashy signature moves that actually matter, because everything matters.
On top of that, he has a connection with his fanbase that is second to none. I found much of the hype around the “Yes! Movement” leading into Wrestlemania 30 fairly unbearable by the time the show actually came around - that’s another story for another time - but it’s impossible to deny that Danielson made that moment come alive in a way that nobody else could. One of the lasting visuals of that show was of the end of The Undertaker’s Wrestlemania winning streak, with a crowd stunned into silence, confusion, and disappointment. It speaks volumes to Bryan Danielson’s ability to elicit the love of his audience that he was entrusted with not only following that match, but winning the crowd back around and ending that show on a high. At All In, he proved himself capable of all of that again. What makes Bryan Danielson a solid argument for the greatest of all time cannot be quantified in championships won, opponents beaten, or miles traveled, he’s the best because he makes people care.
Some of it is born of one of wrestling’s greatest efforts of making lemonade from life’s lemons; Danielson had been forced into early retirement before his time. Every match since he returned, particularly since coming to AEW and spending much of his run there using it as his personal playground, exploring approaches to wrestling that were locked away from him during his WWE run, and being indulged in a litany of his personal dream matches, has felt like a gift. That someone as great as him was able to come back and have an incredible final run is one of those stories that makes wrestling special. But the flip-side of that lemons-to-lemonade equation is that to watch Bryan Danielson always carries an air of dread - peering through your fingers at every head drop and nasty bump, cursing that the long, long list of injuries and ailments he’s suffered has taught him how to convincingly sell head trauma and spinal injuries in a way no one else can, or how the broken arm suffered against Kazuchika Okada gave him a new string to his selling bow, the arm held limp and close to his chest as he performs his signature “Yes!” chant with the other, good, arm. It’s all part and parcel of being the kind of wrestler who absorbs every influence and interaction and channels it into the physicality of their work.
With all of that in mind, this last run could never really have ended any other way, particularly after the shocking turn of Danielson’s former Blackpool Combat Club running buddy Jon Moxley. In the months preceding this match, we were told that Danielson was on borrowed time, that this was his “Final Countdown”, and that when he finally lost the title, he would retire as a full-time wrestler; with Wrestledream emanating from his home state, most of us went into this show fully expecting that, at least for a while, it would be the last we saw of Bryan Danielson. But still he could make us care, he could make us hope, and he could make us forget, and we wanted to see him win, to get revenge on Jon Moxley for attempting to suffocate him with a plastic bag over the head - because what kind of story ends with the villain triumphant, and the hero never permitted even a measure of revenge?
Bryan Danielson’s story, that’s what. And it couldn’t have ended any other way. Once again, everything we knew or thought we knew about Danielson, every prior injury, played into this match. In the week leading up to Wrestledream, we heard stories of how Danielson’s nagging pains were worse than we’d feared, that during his match with Kazuchika Okada he began to lose feeling in his legs. This was it. It had to be it.
After a brutal match full of Moxley viciously targeting the head and neck of Danielson, the finish was the only thing it ever could have been. Bryan Danielson passed out in the Sleeper Hold of Jon Moxley. He wasn’t pinned, he didn’t submit, his body simply gave out on him. As he had been telling us it would, for months. It was never going to go any other way.
Not to keep bringing up the competition, but there’s a mentality drilled into the heads of too many people in wrestling by WWE that a referee must disappear into the background, that “you shouldn’t notice them until you need to”. This, taken to extremes, is taken to mean that referees should be interchangeable NPCs, with no individual character or quirks of personality. Anything a referee does to show even a glimmer of a personality is anathema, and is evidence of them being unprofessional and wanting to steal attention away from the wrestlers - to that I say, to quote the great Tommy Young, “if you’re watching the ref, how bad is the wrestling?”. This mentality is usually defended as being in pursuit of realism, but it’s anything but. In real sports, you know the quirks and foibles of individual referees, you know who might be more lenient and who might have a particular bee in the bonnet about one rule in particular. Some of them even have personalities.
There’s a reason I bring all this up now. Referee Bryce Remsburg - the best in the business for my money - sold the finality of this match beautifully. He did his job, and called for the bell, but once that bell rung, he was momentarily shocked into inaction, frozen in despair - he had done the right thing, but in doing so, had called time on the career of his hero, the man who inspired him to take up a career in professional wrestling. If Bryce had done anything else, if he had simply, robotically, handed the title belt over to Jon Moxley and raised his arm with a blank expression on his face, it would have been a disservice to this match, this story, and his part in it. Allowing referees to be individuals, and to be humans, affords us these moments that reinforce the story the wrestlers are telling, it doesn’t detract.
The aftermath of the match was the real story - a repeat of the plastic bag attack by Moxley, the intrigue of PAC and Claudio Castagnoli spiriting the title belt away into a duffle bag, and the conflicted Wheeler Yuta turning on Darby Allin and siding with his former mentors/tormentors in the Blackpool Combat Club, and the final, emphatic punctuation mark of Claudio Castagnoli stomping a steel chair around the fragile neck of Bryan Danielson. Bryan could never have gone out any other way. He has told us for months and months that he will not go gently into that good night, and so the only way he could be truly finished off was to leave him lying, left for dead, as AEW’s amassed babyfaces watched on in useless, impotent horror.
I can’t say that I liked the Wheeler Yuta turn. Like Kyle Fletcher earlier, it feels like a lateral move - Yuta had shifted away from the Blackpool Combat Club, began to elicit some sympathetic response from a crowd that wants to rally behind him, and instead has been shunted back into a supporting role with a cast of villains that don’t need him. My hope was that he would turn his back on both the BCC and Bryan, and strike out as his own man. Perhaps there is still time for that. He still seems conflicted, and is still one third of the Trios Champions with Claudio and PAC. It’s a story that could still have legs, but I don’t think it needed to play out the way it did here.
Everything else, though? Magnificent. In Jon Moxley, AEW have created the strongest heel they have perhaps ever had, or at least since Kenny Omega’s villainous run, and they have cemented that by putting the final nail in the coffin of the career of Bryan Danielson, perhaps the most beloved man in the company. The specific wording of this being Danielson’s last match as a full-time wrestler, and his talk for years of how he would never truly stop wrestling, had convinced many of us that he would still be a fairly regular visitor to the ring, popping up multiple times a year for exhibition matches or whenever he got the itch. This ending made it clear that we shouldn’t be expecting to see that happen any time soon, and that the self-imposed “last match” stipulation wasn’t enough for the Blackpool Combat Club - they took it upon themselves to make sure that Danielson wasn’t coming back. It could have played out as an exercise in killing hope, but the beauty of how Bryan Danielson has planted the seeds for this since at least his match with Will Ospreay back in April, is that, deep down, we’ve all known this was coming, Jon Moxley just made it crystal clear.
What Next?
All of that is not to say that I’m universally feeling positive or optimistic about this storyline moving forwards. This is a story beat that is all about the follow-up - what comes next will make or break this story, and could make or break months of AEW television to come. Unfortunately, follow-up isn’t often one of AEW’s strengths.
The closing moments of Wrestledream laid the table for a few clear future directions - Orange Cassidy, talked into stepping up by Jerry Lynn, was on the front-lines to come to Jon Moxley’s aid, as was Darby Allin, the man Moxley beat to steal his title shot in the first place. Jeff Jarrett took a beating from the Blackpool Combat Club in attempting to come to Bryan’s aid. There’s a few future opponents, challengers for Moxley’s crown, there.
There’s also the question of exactly what the Blackpool Combat Club are up to - what’s with the duffel bag, why are they hiding the World Title away, if that’s what they wanted to get their hands on so badly? I’m willing to eat my hat if I’m wrong about this one - a baffling number of people online got it into their heads that this entire angle is somehow a vehicle to introduce Shane McMahon to AEW, that Jon Moxley is working on behalf of an unseen “higher power”. There’s nothing in the text to support that - it seems born of Moxley telling Tony Schiavone (or Tony Khan via Schiavone’s earpiece), in a moment inspired by Romper Stomper, “this isn’t your company any more”, and by Excalibur asking on commentary at one point, “who is forcing Jon Moxley to do this?”. The latter was, quite obviously, a rhetorical question, Excalibur expressing his disdain for the idea, expressed by Mox, that this feud was about something “bigger” than Moxley or Bryan. To read it as anything other is bizarre to me.
Jon Moxley’s motivation seems clear. He has long been the heart and soul of AEW; the one to pick up the bag when someone else drops it, to rally the troops and play cheerleader when times are hard, the one called upon for a quick fix when, just for example, one of your top stars gets themselves suspended for getting into a fist fight with management. But now he looks at AEW, and he sees that his efforts to build it in his image have failed. Bryan Danielson, as World Champion, has to bear the brunt of that, even if they are friends. Cut off the head to kill the snake. “It’s not your company any more”. Moxley is sick of waiting around for everyone else to up their game, so he’s taking control. Except, of course, he’s a heel. A villain, a liar. None of that is true. It’s just what he tells us, and what he tells himself. What became clear from his challenge to Darby Allin is that underneath all the rhetoric, he’s a selfish, entitled egotist, who sees himself as the deserving World Champion, and will stop at nothing to make that reality. Everything else is his twisted retroactive justification. That’s the story.
So what next? Orange Cassidy is perhaps the only wrestler able to give Jon Moxley a run for his money for that “heart and soul of AEW” title, the other wrestler reliably sent out to “restore the feeling”, remind us what’s great about this company, and to get things back on track, the other wrestler called upon to come and win a title belt to fix someone else’s fuck-up. He’s also one of the few wrestlers in AEW with an unlikely win over Moxley - they’re one win apiece, and we’re still waiting on a rubber match. He makes perfect sense as a future contender to Mox’s Championship. And so does Darby Allin - the man Mox screwed over to get there, one of the few wrestlers as unhinged and fearless as Moxley himself, and a man who bleeds AEW.
But now? I can see Darby Allin being the one to take Jon Moxley’s title, but not yet. And Orange Cassidy isn’t the guy to win, he’s the guy to take a heartbreaking defeat. So who’s left? Who could possibly fill the shoes of Bryan Danielson?
The risk is that this is AEW’s Wrestlemania 2001 moment - where Stone Cold Steve Austin turned heel, aligning himself with Vince McMahon and Triple H, at the expense of The Rock, writing Rocky off for Hollywood. It was a bold move, and it backfired - with Austin now a villain and The Rock absent, the WWF had created one new heel at the expense of two top babyfaces, and there was no one in a position to step up. The super-team of Triple H and Steve Austin were reduced to feuding with The Undertaker and Kane, The Hardy Boyz, and Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit; not the stars, just the guys who are there to make the stars look good. It’s often said that every hero needs a dragon to vanquish, but what of a dragon with no hero worth the name?
There’s a few approaches to main event level wrestling, as far as the balance of goodies and baddies go. The WWE is historically a babyface territory, with one heroic champion on top defending against a revolving door of threats - Bruno, Hogan, Austin, Cena. The NWA often took the opposite approach of a heel champion touring multiple territories, uplifting local babyfaces by letting them take him to the limit - the latter is harder to pull off on TV with a finite roster, but for many babyfaces, the chase is better than the catch when it comes to title contention.
AEW has never really settled into either camp, taking more of what I think of as a matrix approach, similar to the WWF for much of 1997; absent one top babyface star or dominant heel champion, the main event relies on a reliable group of wrestlers who can be slotted in against each other in an array of different combinations, ably supported by a few wrestlers just on the fringes of the main event who might not be winning the title any time soon, but make for convincing challengers. It can make for good wrestling and compelling interlocking stories, and reduces the key man risk of relying too much on one top star, but it also means there’s no one iconic face of the promotion, and that might be what they need right now. They’ve created a monster, but they don’t have the hero to defeat it.
It’s a matter of timing - AEW’s PPV schedule is denser that it’s ever been, and Full Gear is coming up next month. With a little more leeway, this story could have more time to breathe before you’d have to worry about such things. As it stands, AEW’s babyfaces are busy - Daniel Garcia and Adam Cole with MJF, Swerve Strickland with MVP and the Hurt Syndicate, Will Ospreay with the Don Callis Family. But every single championship in AEW is held by a heel, and that limits what you’re able to book - when you only have two title belts, it’s sensible to have one held by a heel and one held by a face to distinguish how you book them, but when you have eight and they’re all on heels? You’ve got a problem.
This company would be an incredible heel factory for a top babyface, but they don’t have one. I don’t think Darby Allin is there yet, nor Orange Cassidy, and that’s a huge part of the reason I argued earlier that they needed more substantial wins on this show. There’s the likes of Adam Copeland and Samoa Joe due back at some point, but neither should be in a position to beat Mox, there’s also the possibility of a big new signing, or of Kenny Omega returning - though in the latter case, his natural return feud is with The Elite, and it would be foolish to bypass that.
And there’s the other problem. I’m not adverse to the idea of building a feud around a battle for the soul of AEW; it might be the kind of metatextual acceptance of the company’s failings that’s needed to get things back on track. But the last time we did this, it didn’t work out quite so well - it relied on the controversial airing of the CM Punk/Jack Perry backstage fight, and turned The Elite, the most visible avatars of AEW as a company, into a reviled on-screen act before petering out into irrelevance, the only long-term implication seemingly being the continued use of Christopher Daniels as an authority figure. A fight for the future of AEW without The Elite seems like a poor move indeed, but they’re also in no position to be readily slotted into the story as it stands, and doing so could only unduly muddy the waters. It’s another risk to the long-term viability of this programme. Once again, it’s all about timing.
How would I approach this, then?
AEW Dynamite tomorrow night needs to be shrouded in the misery and the chaos this angle has created. It can’t begin with fireworks and excitement and lead straight into a fun match; the fact that the future of Bryan Danielson’s health, and the state of the World Title and the company it represents, hang in the balance should be saturated through almost every segment of this show. I want regular status updates. I want the Blackpool Combat Club holding the show to ransom. I want Nigel McGuiness thinking they’ve gone too far even for him, and standing up against them. Never let me forget what happened on Saturday night.
In the weeks to come, Moxley can pick apart Orange Cassidy. At Full Gear, he can be taken to his limits by Darby Allin but brutalise him into submission - maybe even bring out Sting and have him choked out for good measure. Nobody is on Moxley’s level, make that clear. He runs this show. He defeats everyone thrown at him - Swerve Strickland, Will Ospreay, Jeff Jarrett, anyone else. Sometimes with the help of their rivals to keep the other feuds going, sometimes with the help of the BCC, sometimes alone. But he always leaves them beaten and hurting.
We get to a PPV - maybe Wrestle Dynasty in December, maybe Grand Slam Australia in February. Multi-man main event; the wrestlers who have tried their hardest to take Jon Moxley down team up against the Blackpool Combat Club. Moxley, Yuta, PAC and Claudio against Darby Allin, Swerve Strickland, Orange Cassidy and….just one problem. Nobody else is prepared to step up. Will Ospreay is busy with the Don Callis Family. Kenny Omega, if he’s back, is finishing up his business with The Elite. The good guys need to find a fourth man.
They don’t want to, but there’s only one place they can turn. They need a partner with nothing left to lose, who can match Moxley for sadism and violence, who is maybe even more unhinged than him. They know what they have to do, and none of them want to. Hangman Page has to come in from the cold, the pariah they turn to when all is lost. But he’s not interested in fighting their battles. Jeff Jarrett tries to talk him into it, nothing. Other babyfaces try and appeal to his better nature, still nothing. He doesn’t care. Let Jon Moxley run roughshod, and let AEW burn, for all he cares. But then, with a wicked glimmer in his eye, he sees his opportunity. He’ll do it. But only if Swerve Strickland comes to him, and admits he needs his help. Give him that satisfaction, and he’ll fight.
With Hangman’s help, the babyfaces come out on top. Slowly, he starts to come around, to realise that there’s something he’s been missing - pride. He’s happy to have helped people. He’s remembered who he is, who he once was. He’s no longer fighting just for himself any more. In the weeks to come, he helps fight off the Blackpool Combat Club as they try and prevent Darby Allin from winning a match to earn another shot at the World Title. When Kenny Omega needs help to face The Young Bucks, a hesitant Hangman Page offers his hand.
Revolution 2024. Darby Allin pins Jon Moxley to become AEW World Champion. Earlier in the night, Adam Page & Kenny Omega reunite to face the Young Bucks, five years since their last match, and end The Elite’s heel reign of terror while they’re at it. Restore the feeling, return to the good times, remind people why they fell in love with this promotion in that first place. There’s your story, there’s your Wrestledream.
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