Thoughts on AEW World’s End
When first founded, AEW promised to be an alternative to years of WWE’s domination of North American wrestling - but “alternative” is a broad term, and many fans saw in this shiny new promotion the answer to their specific prayers against their own grievances with WWE; in the parlance of Simpsons references, it was to be a realistic down to earth show that’s completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots. That is to say, while some were hoping for a revival of 1970s NWA booking and presentation, others wanted a showcase for international up-and-coming talent and styles usually not allowed a space on the American national stage, or simply an opportunity for talent they felt hadn’t been given a fair shake in WWE.
Across AEW’s first few shows, this resulted in a dizzying sense of a company with an identity crisis - old school wrestling storylines sitting uncomfortably alongside fourth wall breaking comedy, or the spooky nonsense of early Dark Order and the thankfully largely memory holed voodoo side hustle of Brandi Rhodes. What those early months did have, though, was a sense of promise, a pleasing sense of a company listening to its audience while finding its feet, unafraid to course correct and admit its mistakes, so that by the time that the pandemic saw the promotion confined to its de facto home arena of Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, they had seemingly found their identity as a crowd-pleasing feelgood promotion - a welcome thing indeed after years of WWE openly treating their core audience with contempt.
In recent months, though, the feeling of a company deep in identity crisis has seeped back into AEW. While the Continental Classic managed to shake off initial concerns of the “bloody hell, another title belt?” variety by consistently providing the reliably highest quality of in-ring action perhaps ever seen on American television, paired with solid and logical storytelling that puts the lie to the common and tedious online criticism that AEW “doesn’t do stories”, those matches sat uncomfortably alongside a masked man mystery storyline that has dragged on illogically for months, indulging all of the worst aspects of pro-wrestling storytelling.
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At the height of all of this, the day of a show that already felt like it would be somewhat snakebitten and inconsistent at best, continuing the Monkey’s Paw curse of MJF’s championship reign, after publicly expressing his frustration that his career highlights were consistently overshadowed by the out-of-ring behaviour of other, older wrestlers (I will note that the same criticism could be levelled at Max, as his threats to leave the promotion back in 2022 significantly overshadowed his loss to Wardlow), had a shadow cast over it in the form of rumours and allegations directed at Chris Jericho.
I don’t want to spend too much time on this issue. While social media has allowed vulnerable people a voice that would otherwise have been denied to them, and provided a space for victims of abuse and assault to speak out, it is important to remember that this is not what has happened here. Whatever the truth of the allegations against Jericho, they were not born of a victim bravely speaking up, but of a journalist attempting to score points and curry favour in a social media spat. Without knowing if said journalist had the support or consent of anyone affected, I feel extremely strongly that the only people who should be in a position to publicly name abusers are their victims and those given permission by said victims to do so. For all the good that social media can do for victims under the right circumstances, the grim counterpoint to that is that it opens victims up for further abuse, harassment, and the constant relitigating of what was surely a traumatic experience - to willingly bring that upon someone without warning nor consent is tantamount to an act of abuse in itself. Furthermore, with no victim’s statement to speak of, and only - to use a phrase I hate, but is favoured by the “journalist” at the heart of this story - “Rumour and Innuendo” currently available to us, we are left with a situation singularly unsuited to the dynamics of social media, and to the reactionary and tribalist tendencies of “Wrestling Twitter” most of all. Accusations of abuse and harassment are not best served by influencer reactions, hot takes, or the drive for immediacy over context and insight that social media thrives on, and wrestling has proven again and again that few of its journalists are sufficiently equipped to deal with these issues sensitively or appropriately.
There were - reasonably - calls for Chris Jericho to be pulled from the World’s End card, and in hindsight it is hard to argue that those calls were correct. On one hand, in most lines of work an employee would not see themselves suspended from their duties based on social media speculation with no explicit allegation or grievance raised against them, but wrestling is decidedly not most lines of work, and one has to factor in the optics of allowing the accused to still perform on pay-per-view, and in front of a live audience. The best case scenario is likely what we saw unfold at World’s End - a tired-looking and deeply rattled Chris Jericho beset by heckles and accusatory chants - while the worst case scenario is perhaps that supporting evidence was released after or even during the show, or that the story snowballed into something bigger and worse, with AEW looking like they very publicly opted not to act. The simplest decision would have been to have removed Chris Jericho from the match altogether - perhaps pivoting to a six-man tag with someone removed from the other team and given a make-good match elsewhere on the card, to a four-way tag team match with someone taking Jericho’s place, or simply a like-for-like replacement for Jericho in the existing match. It’s worth remembering that this match was already a hastily booked last-minute replacement for the planned Golden Jets vs. Starks & Big Bill tag team title match, and within the few days since it was announced had already seen Kyle Fletcher swapped out for Konosuke Takeshita; this wasn’t a case of AEW being hamstrung by long-term booking and forced to follow a well-built story to its conclusion - the match could have been altered again with little to no effect.
There is, though, morality aside, the cynical mental arithmetic of wrestling promotion - put simply, would the number of people likely to opt out of watching the show because of the continued presence of Chris Jericho outweigh the number of people watching for his presence? I don’t know the numbers as to whether Jericho is a draw, and it’s a call that would have been made in the context of AEW currently suffering from a spate of injuries and absences amongst their top stars, while trying to navigate the murky waters of TV rights deals - if not Jericho, who fits the bill? Here’s where it’s important to remember that AEW is no rinky-dink independent production, but a promotion backed by billionaire money. There are few top draw wrestlers currently on the free agent list, but the most recent spate of WWE mass releases saw their no-compete clauses expire a matter of months ago - while I have no real desire to see Dolph Ziggler show up in AEW on a full-time basis, a surprise replacement on that level would have worked wonders in clawing back some audience goodwill.
Instead, we were left with a match that was largely impossible to separate from the circumstances surrounding it, and a situation that was grossly unfair to some of the other wrestlers involved, working their arses off and taking spectacular bumps in front of an audience who at best just wanted the whole thing over with, and to not feel uncomfortable about the man they were being made to watch. Up-and-coming wrestlers like Konosuke Takeshita and Ricky Starks were left as afterthoughts in another story through no fault of their own, while Sting - the only man in the match who was consistently able to garner a positive audience response - has already seen his retirement run derailed by the presence of Ric Flair, and by unfocused and inconsistent booking, with no clear direction for his final match, and here, that this was his final match in New York could easily have been missed if not for a few comments by Tony Schiavone. An unedifying mess all round, that cast a pall on an already struggling show.
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It didn’t help that it wasn’t just one match dragging this show down. Miro vs. Andrade played to neither man’s strength, relied on a storyline that has failed to capture the audience’s imagination, and hinged on the actions of CJ Perry in a dynamic that has been confused from the beginning, while the knowledge that it would be Andrade’s final match with the promotion left the result in little doubt. Far from the performances he put in during the Continental Classic, this was as by-the-numbers as Andrade gets, and scarcely any more engaging from Miro, who also feels like a wrestler with one foot out the door. On another show this might have been passable midcard fare, here it had all the hallmarks of a symptom of a wider problem.
Other matches simply struggled to get into third gear - the pre-show triple-header of Willow Nightingale vs. Kris Statlander, Hook vs. Wheeler Yuta, and a 20-man Battle Royal all failed to reach the heights that the talent are involved are capable of, with the latter being a particular disappointment given AEW’s track record of presenting fun and engaging Battle Royals with dynamic and creative finishing stretches - though I still hate their illogical approach of allowing the match to start before all wrestlers have entered the ring. That the Battle Royal ended with the most predictable winner of all didn’t help matters. More on that later.
Elsewhere, Keith Lee’s last minute absence - from a match with Swerve Strickland that should have taken place almost a year ago - left Swerve having to play catch-up with Dustin Rhodes, a man that I’d wager the majority of the audience don’t readily think of as Keith Lee’s tag team partner. Dustin is a superb talent, and the kind of veteran presence that I think AEW could benefit from showcasing more effectively - particularly as one can’t help but notice Jeff Jarrett and Billy Gunn’s absences from television in recent weeks - but he had an uphill struggle here, forced to cobble together a compelling storyline for a match announced a matter of hours earlier. Dustin Rhodes is a pro, and was able to do that, but with an audience desperate to cheer Swerve Strickland and Prince Nana no matter how despicable their actions, the rarely seen veteran playing babyface-in-peril fell flat, and the match could have benefited from being shorter as a result - you should never find yourself in a position where the crowd’s response to a top heel wilfully injuring a veteran babyface is “one more time”.
Dustin Rhodes is, like many, a victim of AEW’s success. When the company opened, he was a genuinely surprising and high profile departure from WWE, and his match with brother Cody Rhodes was one of the most heavily promoted, and critically acclaimed, matches on AEW’s first pay-per-view, while the Rhodes brothers’ reunion as a tag team actually main evented a subsequent event. At the time, many - myself included - called for Dustin Rhodes to be given a championship reign, or at the very least a compelling “one last run” story of the old hand fighting for his first World Title, knowing it would likely be his last opportunity. But as bigger names and more ex-WWE talent joined the company, Dustin Rhodes - and many others - perhaps felt a little less special, a little less of a priority, as a result. This match showed, to me at least, that Dustin still has plenty to offer, but like his brother Cody, would be better served with a story that he can get his teeth into, rather than asking the audience to muster some enthusiasm for his first pay-per-view singles match in more than three years.
Swerve, meanwhile, I have seen compared to Steve Austin in 1997, and it’s as apt a comparison as any. Here is a wrestler with poise, presence and charisma that sets him completely apart from his peers, a compelling and vicious heel, but who audiences are desperate for the opportunity to love. If he is not a World Champion by this time next year, then AEW will have completely lost their way.
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The show had its positives. The opening eight-man tag team match, comprised of those wrestlers in the Continental Classic who were not booked elsewhere on the card, was fantastic, and while it could have been hampered by the lack of stakes, the talent involved manage to overcome that by expertly weaving in the rivalries and interpersonal issues born of the tournament, particularly the slow-burn programme between Daniel Garcia and Bryan Danielson, ably supported by Daddy Magic on guest commentary.
Elsewhere, the show proper’s pair of women’s matches were both excellent - though Julia Hart vs. Abadon was hamstrung by the result rarely being in doubt, and having the difficult task of following the crowd-killing Chris Jericho match. Others may have tired on Toni Storm’s gimmick, but I still adore it, while Riho is as good an underdog babyface as any in the world, and a welcome return to the division. As an old FMW nerd, seeing Dr. Luther repackaged in 2023 as a butler and comedic foil gives me tremendous joy.
My criticism of these matches, however, is that women’s matches in AEW tend toward the overbooked. So, admittedly, to many men’s title matches, but I struggle to recall a women’s title match in recent memory that hasn’t involved distractions, outside interference, and other assorted shenanigans. While Toni Storm’s current persona lends itself to such things, the beauty of having more than one championship should be in the ability to differentiate the two - if the Women’s Title match is going to hinge on interference sports, perhaps shy away from doing the same thing with the TBS Title.
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Adam Copeland vs. Christian Cage was a match of two halves - beginning as something of a pedestrian walk-and-brawl, it managed to grow into something compelling, heated and exciting. Christian Cage’s greatest in-ring asset during this run has been his ability to make matches feel violent and fuelled by hatred while taking very few significant bumps - witness his Coffin Match against Jack Perry for the finest example of this - in sharp contrast to the modern trend to make gimmick matches feel bigger by taking the biggest, most choreographed stunt bumps one can think of. It’s not a skillset that naturally aligns with Adam Copeland’s, whose WWE work, particularly in his post-comeback run, was typified by “moments” and overwrought acting over allowing a match to organically build heat and tension. Pleasingly, one or two moments aside, this match rarely played into the former Edge’s worst tendencies, and was perhaps the best example yet of what a post-WWE Adam Copeland can look like. While a programme with Christian Cage was unavoidable in Copeland’s debut, however, it runs the risk of having too quickly burned through the appeal of such a major name and presumed WWE lifer making the jump to AEW - in the aftermath, announcers speculated on “what’s next for Adam Copeland?”, as if retirement loomed, or all of his opportunities had been exhausted, and that’s just not where we should be at a mere two months into his AEW run, after only a handful of matches, and only one of those being outside the orbit of Christian Cage - across Copeland’s five AEW matches, only two have not been against Christian, one of which was against Luchasaurus, and heavily involved Cage regardless.
Speaking of Luchasaurus, or Killswitch as he is now known, we come back to the pre-show Battle Royal, and to the worst excesses of Adam Copeland. I can think of few booking tropes that suggest creative drought more than other promotions mimicking WWE’s “cash in anywhere” magic briefcase gimmick, which has been a tired and overdone staple of WWE booking for more than a decade at this point, and is more often than not an albatross hanging over not only the Money In The Bank briefcase holder, but over every championship match. Here, it was particularly lazy, given Killswitch had only won his title shot earlier in the same night, and in a match that was only announced - with no participants specified - three days earlier, giving the whole thing the feel of a panicked last minute booking decision, contrived to continue this feud beyond what otherwise could have been a logical end-point. That said, there is some intrigue in the question of what hold Christian Cage has over Luchasaurus - that’s the kind of mystery angle that can work in wrestling, assuming it doesn’t topple over into Father James Mitchell secret child territory.
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Next up was the Continental Classic final, between Jon Moxley and sentimental favourite Eddie Kingston, and it was long overdue as the show’s designated feelgood babyface win. It helped that the match itself was superb, confounding those who perhaps expected a Moxley drag-out bloodletting brawl, instead focusing on believable grappling and strike exchanges, helped all the more by Bryan Danielson’s expert commentary. That the match ended with an exchange of strikes culminating in Kingston’s signature backfist was a lesson in how to make everything matter - in an increasingly homogenised wrestling world where moves, spots, sequences and tropes are borrowed from old tapes and other countries’ scenes without a thought for the context and psychology that birthed them, ‘90s AJPW influenced strike exchanges are ten and penny in American wrestling these days, but here it wasn’t a bit of rote time filling or bravado, but a genuine contest between two men trying to out-punch the other, until one actually managed it and it won him the match. It’s a moment that only gave credibility and import to that particular strike exchange but, if wrestlers who build on it are smart, should give an edge to all subsequent exchanges, as the audience learn that this isn’t just a bit of “Yay/Boo” time-filling, but a moment that could actually bring the match to an end.
From the beginning, Eddie Kingston was the only rightful winner of the Continental Classic, and it was reminiscent of AEW at its best to see him justly rewarded here. He has been a sentimental favourite of mine for over a decade, somebody I have had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with, and someone I honestly believe to have been the most believable, and one of the most compelling, American wrestlers of the last decade. That the wrestling business for much of that decade has been so constituted that it seemingly contrived to rob him of the kind of opportunities he deserved, and of the platform to be the star he deserves to be, only makes victories like this even sweeter. When it comes time to tally the success stories of AEW as a whole, the career resurgence of Eddie Kingston deserves to be on that list.
What’s more, after winning arguably the biggest match of his career, on pay-per-view in front of a de facto hometown audience, for a championship that had been effectively created for him, that Eddie’s first instinct was to dedicate his win to Mad Kurt, a kid he worked with a handful of times three years ago and an ocean away, speaks volumes to the man and the wrestler he is. There is no one in wrestling today more deserving of that moment.
Mad Kurt was an exceptional talent, and one of the funniest, warmest, and most giving wrestlers I ever had the pleasure of sharing a locker room with. He would have found it fucking absurd to have heard his name on an AEW pay-per-view, I’m sure. In wrestling you always think that you’ll see someone again one day down the road, and it always hurts when that chance is taken away from you all too soon. I only worked with him a handful of times, and always hoped that we would have the opportunity to work together again. He made me laugh until I snorted, and I will miss hearing his voice as he loudly greeted everyone by their full ring name, with the most obnoxious grin he could muster on his face. He was a one-off, and fit a wilder, dafter career into a few short years than some could manage in decades.
”What’s your finish?”
”Nobody knows, I’d have to win first.”
Godspeed, Kurtis.
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At last, it’s time for the main event - Samoa Joe vs. MJF.
This was a rematch of an excellent TV match the two had earlier in the year, that, nonsense and overbooking aside, could have been excellent. But it was criminally overshadowed by a story that had already long since outstayed its welcome.
I have been no fan of the “Devil” story. I think wrestling audiences deserve to be treated with a modicum of respect, and wrestling stories should be presented as logical and internally consistent. I often reach to Orson Welles for analogies around the creative process, and here it was one quote in particular;
“I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.”
We are too quick to spoon-feed audiences, to over-explain or to simplify to the point of absurdity, for fear that they will miss finer details, not understand references, or lack necessary prior knowledge. But audiences are not that stupid, they are capable of following a story without having their hands held, and of picking up on context clues whether they appreciate the signified reference or not. Conversely, we are too quick to shove logic to one side and handwave away criticism because “it’s just wrestling”, so what does it matter? The Devil storyline has been rife with the latter.
From the beginning, the story was tied in with abject nonsense. The Devil and his minions’ first appearance was attacking Jay White, who has spent the subsequent months since his feud with MJF apparently not caring about this at all. That directly bled into Bullet Club Gold accusing MJF of being the Devil, while also believing that, despite the Devil having attacked Jay with the help of several masked accomplices, MJF would be unable to find three wrestlers willing to team with him. Then followed the story of Jay White stealing the World Championship, an interminably long story in which MJF never seriously fought to get his beloved belt back, but more damningly, there appeared to be no effort by AEW management to secure their stolen property either.
Subsequently, it’s become even more of a sports entertainment mess. On the same show that it was established Keith Lee and Swerve Strickland would both need to sign a contract for their match at World’s End, two masked and unknown wrestlers were able to fight for the ROH Tag Team Titles - presumably they too were required to sign a contract, which MJF also would have signed; so did Max not read it? The Devil has merchandise available on AEW’s website - where do the royalties go? Presumably he signed a contract, and his bank details are on record somewhere, yet AEW management have made no effort to discover who he is the whole time he’s disrupting their shows, hacking into their production feed, and assaulting their talent? These complaints may sound like nitpicking, but they cut to the heart of what separates good and bad wrestling - the logical storytelling of the Continental Classic, where the stories and wrestling mutually inform one another, or daft stories where wrestling is at best an afterthought and worst the story works to the wrestling’s detriment.
That was the problem here. Compounded by MJF working through injury, both men had an uphill battle to fight, as the match - for the World Championship, it cannot be restated enough - was secondary to the expected appearance and reveal of The Devil; the moment that referee Bryce Remsburg took a bump, the audience en masse turned away from the ring to look toward the entrance ramp and the big screen in expectation. Despite the wrestlers’ best efforts, they were working against the collective weight of wrestling tropes.
Back to the story leading into this match - Samoa Joe expressed his desire to watch MJF’s back, and ensure that he was at 100% leading into their title match. It’s a role that Joe can play better than most, of a nasty bastard who still has principles and his own code of honour, driven by his desire for gold but still valuing the spirit of competition. It’s a far more interesting dynamic than Joe as the generic heel against MJF as an injured babyface, and pivoting at the last minute to the latter smacks of the worst aspect of MJF’s title reign - somebody involved seems to lack confidence in his abilities as a babyface when he can’t rely on window dressing and bells and whistles, so every match needs an additional injury, or a bit of extra business to ensure he garners sympathy, as if fighting an uphill battle against Samoa Joe in his hometown isn’t enough. On top of that, Joe has had access to MJF for weeks, if not months, and could have attacked and injured him at any time, yet chose the moment that it was the most choreographed and dramatic it could be - it’s a bit of booking that serves a TV format, rather than the internal logic of a wrestling story. Why would Joe care to pick that moment? It’s particularly egregious because Joe, like Eddie Kingston, is at his best when he operates outside the most clichéd trappings of TV wrestling in favour of being a believable bad-ass.
The finish of the match was a complete surprise to me - a more or less clean win, MJF passing out in Samoa Joe’s Kokina Clutch. It was a surprise to the audience too, who clearly expected either an MJF hometown win - unlike WWE and their humiliation complex, AEW tend to allow babyfaces to win in their hometowns to give the crowd a positive experience; a novel concept, I know - or for the Devil to make himself known.
Instead, the Devil reveal came after the match, with a bait-and-switch reveal of Adam Cole, the only logical candidate since day one, flanked by Roderick Strong, The Kingdom and Wardlow. But again, we’re back to the question of wrestling logic. Why bother with the subterfuge, and with pretending that the goons were going to beat up Adam Cole? They had MJF hurt and outnumbered, why not just attack him without all the daft dramatics?
It seems that Adam Cole is still some way from returning from injury, and we’ll likely get an explanation for his actions next week on TV, but at this point, it’s difficult to grasp his motivations beyond “fuck with MJF”. The extent of The Devil’s “business deal” with Samoa Joe has resulted in Samoa Joe becoming the AEW World Champion, in return for Adam Cole getting…nothing, but losing the ROH Tag Team Titles in the process. After months of plotting, it seems that the Devil’s masterplan amounted to “just let Samoa Joe beat MJF”. Like the well worn online criticism that Raiders Of The Lost Ark would have played out exactly the same without Indiana Jones’ involvement, it’s unclear what Adam Cole et al actually added to this story, and with MJF by all accounts due to take a leave of absence immediately after World’s End, a group defined entirely by their opposition to one person are now left without that person to feud with.
As for the individuals within the group itself, Adam Cole makes sense, woolly motivations and flair for bad dramatics aside; he has manipulated MJF into situations that got him hurt, made him defend his championships while injured, and put him in the orbit of Samoa Joe. All criticisms of the Devil story aside, there is a logic there, and dating back to the beginning of their story, Adam Cole turning on MJF was always a more compelling option than MJF turning on Cole - the latter choice would have made Cole and the audience look like idiots for choosing to trust someone who repeatedly told us he wasn’t trustworthy, while Cole turning on MJF sees MJF punished for opening up, and losing the only real friend he’s ever had, and there’s potential for a compelling story in how he processes that betrayal.
Cole’s lackeys, however, make a little less sense. Outside of kayfabe, I question the logic of spending the months leading into the reveal of (presumably) the new top heel faction in the promotion presenting three of its members as pathetic goofballs. In kayfabe, not only have Roderick Strong and the Kingdom been sneaking around in masks targeting people tangentially connected to MJF, they also spent an inordinate amount of time filming and producing daft comedy vignettes of the time they spent with Adam Cole, and accusing MJF himself of being The Devil, all of which to seemingly no end whatsoever. They must just have too much time on their hands.
As for Wardlow, him being a part of this group means that he has been hiding under a mask and sneaking around to get at MJF, but also spent months in recorded vignettes and promos actively calling MJF, sometimes to his face, and making his motivations abundantly clear - so why bother with all the masked Devil daftness in the first place? Both in and out of kayfabe, it’s also putting Wardlow back in the role of henchman, which he had an entire character arc to get away from, as well as a feud with Samoa Joe, who he is now perfectly content to not only work with but allow and aid to beat MJF for the World Championship, something one would expect Wardlow himself would have wanted to do.
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The show had its highlights - mostly the Eddie Kingston/Jon Moxley match - but as a whole, it was perhaps the weakest AEW PPV to date; in a slightly concerning trend, I’ve found myself saying that about multiple pay-per-views in a row, when the golden rule for so long was that even when the build was lacklustre, AEW PPVs always delivered. The bloom is off the rose, largely through problems of its own making, and the direction to improve is right there within the shows themselves, by following the example of the Continental Classic.
I think comparisons to latter day WCW, or to the worst days of TNA, are overblown - we’re not in those deep waters yet. But this does have the feeling of late ‘00s/early ‘10s WWE, of booking that works against the audience rather than with them, that treats the audience’s hopes and wishes as an obstacle to overcome, rather than a wave to ride. Good booking is giving the audience what they want, great booking is convincing the audience that they want what you’re giving them; I’m not convinced that AEW right now are managing either, at least not at a main event level.
Obviously, the Jericho situation weighed heavy on this show, and perhaps things would have been different if that match had not been hampered. But so much of this show was a world apart from the feelgood moment of Eddie Kingston’s win; heels won more often than not, the babyface win of Adam Copeland was immediately overturned, and the main event was a double whammy of heel finishes - the dejection of MJF’s loss coming so abruptly, followed by the reveal of the Devil immediately afterwards. Sometimes shows have to end on the bad guys winning, but it’s rare that they get a visual win immediately after the literal one with no comeuppance in-between, and on a show that also saw a majority heel wins across the board, and a match that sapped the crowd’s enthusiasm for out-of-the-ring reasons. It would have been a quick fix to end this show on the high of Eddie Kingston’s win, rather than the low of MJF’s loss, and the show as a whole might have felt less of a downer for having done so.
The question now is what comes next. The name Worlds End suggests a sea-change coming, perhaps even more than intended, depending on if and how the company chooses to act on Chris Jericho. Based on the reaction to him last night, I think they would be foolish not to at least take him off television for the time being, even if only to cynically ride the story out and see if they can just lay low until the heat is off.
Without the Elite, MJF or Chris Jericho, and with Sting and Bryan Danielson counting down the days, it could feel like a worrying time to be AEW, but they have a brand new World Champion and all of the opportunities that opens up, a new champion in Eddie Kingston, a new heel stable on top, and the likes of Swerve Strickland poised to take the next step up to superstardom. There has never been a better opportunity to get back to the drawing board, wipe the proverbial slate clean, mix their metaphors, and right the ship. Whether they do that, like the AEW of old, or continue to plough head-long into problems of their own making, could be the central story of AEW in 2024.
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