World’s End 2024, and the state of AEW
AEW has never been a promotion without its faults, failures, and frustrations. In its early existence, they had the misfortune of promising an “alternative” to a moribund WWE that had been effectively the only game in town for the better part of twenty years, and as a result, promised to be all things to all men - to some, it promised a haven for the high spots and athleticism that had come to typify the American independent scene, to others, a platform for styles of international wrestling neglected by WWE, or a return to the blood-soaked brawls of Southern territory wrestling. The much-maligned phrase “sports-based presentation” was misinterpreted a thousand different ways, a throwaway (and largely accurate) description of how they intended to film and produce their TV show, instead understood (or deliberately misrepresented) as a promise to shy away from comedy or silliness. There were even some, in the days between the initial rumours of AEW’s formation and its first show, who speculated of high profile signings from WWE at the level of a John Cena, a Randy Orton, or even The Undertaker. When you project all of your own tastes on to a nascent product, it can’t help but let you down. I’m still salty that the OWE partnership never amounted to anything.
Criticising AEW has become a cottage industry, and one that makes it almost impossible to pick the wheat from the chaff, to sort the genuine and valid criticisms from the never-ending parade of dishonest actors, bad takes and bots; of 10 second clips taken out of context and presented as indicative of some wider problem, of old wrestlers who have realised there’s a podcast audience to be gained from attacking AEW, and of thousands of the profoundly weirdest people you’ve ever encountered on social media. Whereas once, AEW felt like a dynamic production, where when things went wrong, or angles felt a little janky, you could be confident that they recognised the same mistakes you did and would work on them, course correct, and do something better, now they can hardly be blamed for staying the course and shutting down outside voices, when so many of them are on the wrong side of the signal-noise ratio. But that’s a problem. Because whereas I have never come out of AEW shows without criticism, it’s only in recent months that I’m coming away from them with the same criticisms time and time again, and that speaks not to isolated problems, but to a culture that either no longer recognises the issues, or recognises them and does not act on them.
There’s an old aphorism, that perfect is the enemy of good; that is to say, that striving for a perfect version of something is the surest way to never produce a satisfactory version of that same thing, complete with imperfections. You can tweak and tinker away at something forever, but sooner or later, you have to accept that it’s as done as it ever will be. But equally, it’s all too easy to move too far in the opposite direction - a phrase I found myself using constantly while working in wrestling was, “good enough is never good enough”; “good enough” is what results in poorly made graphics because a promoter’s nephew “knows Photoshop”, so why bother paying a graphic designer? Good enough is the difference between looking professional and looking bush-league. When it comes to booking wrestling, “good enough” is the difference between doing the work to make things make sense, or just perfunctorily getting from A to B. It’s a problem that I ascribe to the mentality of “It’s Just Wrestling”.
“It’s Just Wrestling” is the mindset that says that because what we do is silly, it’s low-brow, it’s inconsequential, and everybody knows it’s a work, there’s no need to put in the effort - the audience know what you’re trying to do, surely that’s enough? It’s a mentality that gave us the worst of WWE’s “wins and losses don’t matter” 2010s, and that is used as the excuse for dropped storylines, dangling narratives, and missing story beats across the piste.
“It’s Just Wrestling” is where a single line of commentary, or a thirty-second backstage angle, could fill in all of the blanks and answer all of the questions, but nobody bothers to do the work because they decide it doesn’t matter. For the past few months, “It’s Just Wrestling” has infected AEW.
Continental Classic
That brings us on to World’s End 2024.
Thankfully, we can start with a positive. I love a tournament. Some eleven or twelve years ago, I was a rookie referee, in Channel Island Wrestling’s (as it was then known) first “King Of The Ring” tournament, and had the obvious realisation of how a tournament should be booked. As I argued with a heel manager for the second or third time that night, it dawned on me how stupid we were to be effectively treating every match as an individual story - could this manager not have gotten away with helping his charge in the first match, only for me to catch him out in the second, creating a satisfying closed narrative loop? A move that won a match early in the tournament would surely be scouted in subsequent matches, and that should inform how that wrestler’s next match plays out. These are simple ideas, that simply didn’t factor in to what we were doing. A tournament is an opportunity to tell the story of wrestling in microcosm; to use one match to build an audience’s expectations, and to subvert them in a future match. To tell, here’s that phrase again, sports-based stories.
The Continental Classic, now in its second year, has been a boon to AEW’s storytelling by enforcing a structure that insists upon stories told within the confines of a wrestling match, rather than through promos, skits, or staged vehicular assault. It keep things simple, logical, and, by virtue of its Round Robin structure, enforces a commitment to long-term story, and making every win and loss count. However, it’s not a cure-all - as good as this year’s tournament has been, I think we have overlooked how much of last year’s came down to the presence of Bryan Danielson and Eddie Kingston, rather than just the strengths of a tournament in its own right.
However, by the time we reached the semi-finals and final, all taking place at World’s End - a real “have your cake and eat it” approach to tournament booking, meaning you get the storytelling advantages of a one-night single elimination tournament as well as the long-term advantages of the Round Robin - everything was in place for some blockbuster matches. You had Will Ospreay at the height of his powers against his rival du jour, Kyle Fletcher, a rematch from a phenomenal previous encounter, with the prospect that Fletcher could again upset and play spoiler against his former friend, while the other semi was a strange heel vs. heel encounter with Kazuchika Okada against Ricochet; you could see AEW booking a Ricochet/Ospreay rematch for the final just as easily as the eventual Ospreay/Okada match we got, but it also wasn’t out of the question that this could be the opportunity to tie the rocket to Kyle Fletcher and push him to the finals. This was The Good Stuff.
While Ospreay and Fletcher didn’t reach the heights of their previous match, their chemistry together is still pure magic, and it didn’t need to be the same match as the last time around. The story here was that Ospreay got his win back, but that it took him almost everything to do it - could this bloodied, battered mess possibly pull out another win on the same night?
Ricochet vs. Okada, by contrast, suffered from the lower relative stakes, and the confused dynamic - the increasingly whiny and dorky Ricochet is newly cast in the role of heel, to a point that (prior to the first Dynamite of 2025) he wasn’t entirely established as a true villain, while Okada is a heel separated from the faction that made him so; ostensibly a member of The Elite, that becomes rather meaningless when the Young Bucks and Jack Perry have disappeared from television, and Okada’s heel behaviour is reduced to childish swearing and wilfully holding back from the kind of big match formula that made his name. Okada and AEW are often criticised, Okada for not working to the standard he once did in NJPW, and AEW for booking Okada as something of a midcard attraction rather than a flagship star; personally, I rather like the odd stooge heel that he’s grown into, though I dislike that his genuine gift for deadpan comedy has been reduced to him repeatedly saying the word “bitch”. It’s a trait of the bad old days of WWE that the worst thing a wrestler can do is get a reputation for being genuinely, organically funny, because they will find themselves with a team of writers trying to write gags for them, or will find their material reduced to a lowest common denominator reduced ad nauseum, and it’s a crying shame to see the same problem in AEW; Roderick Strong was a tremendous (and unexpected) comic act as Adam Cole’s needy and pathetic jilted friend, but became unbearable when the joke was reduced down to simply “Roderick Strong shouts people’s names”, and “bitch” is to Okada as shouting “ADAM” is to Roddy.
The eventual final - Will Ospreay vs. Kazuchika Okada - was fantastic, though the attempts to paint it as a generational clash between Ospreay and his “mentor” in Okada fell flat, as efforts to lean on largely forgotten NJPW lore that has never previously factored in to AEW’s product so often does. I’m sure there will be pundits out there still stubbornly accusing Will Ospreay of not “selling” well into 2025 and beyond, but he elevated this match by carrying the toll of his previous match and fighting through it, refusing to look weak in defeat. There are those who have claimed that AEW have lost something in Ospreay, that he no longer feels like the star he could be for them, and having him lose on two straight pay-per-views could be a symptom of that, but for my money, there’s nobody in the company with his presence. I’m not particularly enamoured with his style of wrestling, but it’s impossible to deny that he is among the best in the world when it comes to that style, and that he elevates everything he is involved in with AEW, bringing a star quality that is often currently lacking elsewhere on their shows.
The true story, though, was in the post-match angles. First, let’s talk about a bad one.
In the aftermath of Okada vs. Ricochet, Swerve Strickland - criminally not booked to wrestle on this show - entered to mock Ricochet, in a feud that so far has been all tell, and very little show. We’re told that there is history between these two, that they don’t like each other, that one will expose the “true” other, but, at this point, nothing had really happened. And nothing really happened here either, besides some embarrassing prop comedy, as Swerve Strickland had Prince Nana hand out rolls of toilet paper, to be thrown like streamers into the ring, at a dejected Ricochet, mimicking something the crowd had done naturally and organically on TV. This kind of obvious, cringeworthy prop comedy should be below AEW, and is certainly below Swerve Strickland - we’re supposed to believe that somebody who has been presented as a master manipulator, someone adept in psychological warfare, who has thought nothing of torturing, maiming and terrorising his opponents to get what he wants, would come up with this Monday Night RAW comedy bit to get into Ricochet’s head? It feels like the worst dregs of John Cena’s lowlights, or of the execrable DX reunion run. By attempting to claim something the audience had done organically, and turn it into a forced and mandated part of the show, it was reminiscent of the worst of AAA’s corporate synergy audience participation. None of these are comparisons a wrestling promotion should be happy to receive.
That this was the best that AEW could find for Swerve Strickland, their former World Champion and one of their stand-out performers, on pay-per-view was absurd, and he was far from the only key talent not featured on this show. One of the problems I have with the Ricochet/Swerve Strickland feud is not only that it feels unearned, but that it feels like a distraction - we last saw Swerve getting soundly beaten by Bobby Lashley, and he’s yet to receive any kind of revenge on the Hurt Syndicate, while Ricochet was himself humiliated and kicked around by the Hurt Syndicate, with similarly no follow-up; this feels like two men squabbling amongst themselves because they’re scared to fight the real bully who beat them both up, and that’s not a good look for a babyface former champion. To make matters worse, Lashley wasn’t booked on this show either, and has no meaningful follow-up to that win, so it looks like Swerve was sacrificed for nothing.
There was a better post-match follow-up, to a point, for Kazuchika Okada, though clunkily done, and in a way that makes me worry for the future of this programme. As the winner of the tournament, Okada was due to be awarded his Continental Championship belt, but Christopher Daniels announced that he was unable to do so, heralding the return of Kenny Omega to his position as EVP, and a staredown to remind the world of the matches Omega and Okada had back in NJPW, which were among the many catalysts that proved the viability of a promotion like AEW in the first place. By panning from the two to a clearly visible banner for All In: Texas, the plan couldn’t be clearer, and it’s hard not to get excited by, if nothing else, these two wrestlers being presented as the stars they so evidently are.
But here are my issues with all of this. Christopher Daniels’ involvement, first of all, only served to slow down and muddy the waters of the segment, and made it clear that Omega was back in his capacity as a non-wrestling executive, rather than as a wrestler first and foremost, and that’s not something to get excited about. It’s another WWE-ism to bog down wrestling storytelling in layers of bureaucracy that it’s nigh-on impossible to give a shit about; wrestling should be about conflict and competition, not about contractual wrangling, corporate titles, and boardroom deals, and with the Young Bucks absent from television, the story of corrupt EVPs and corporate in-fighting feels like a million years ago. Secondly, there was barely any mention of Wrestle Dynasty, the supposed AEW/NJPW/CMLL/ROH co-promotion show that increasingly just looks like a NJPW event with a few favours called in, where Kenny Omega will be actually wrestling. You’d be forgiven for not knowing that from watching AEW, and I don’t think the name of his opponent, Gabriel Kidd, was even mentioned on this show. Also wrestling on that show are the Young Bucks - again, this has gone unremarked upon on AEW television. Incidentally, I’m convinced that when the Bucks were first announced for Wrestle Dynasty, the plan was for them to face the team of Kenny Omega and Hiroshi Tanahashi, and I’m curious what led to a pair of relatively underwhelming matches in place of that.
The last time we saw Kenny Omega in AEW, he was assaulted by The Elite, in an attack that was convincingly sold as borderline life-threatening. That his return would be, rather than addressing that, to simply hand a title belt to a member of The Elite without incident, feels like a betrayal of the entire point of how wrestling storytelling should work. But, again, Jack Perry and the Young Bucks have vanished from television, so who knows? They are the obvious Omega return feud, but what does he do without them, and with the Okada match seemingly off the cards for another six months?
You’d be none the wiser if you tuned in to the subsequent episode of Dynamite expecting answers; logic would dictate that the follow-up show to a pay-per-view where one of the biggest stars of the company made their return would feature an appearance by said star, and a promo establishing their intent, but the best you got on Dynamite was a video package telling us that Kenny Omega would return next week, missing the hotly promoted first simulcast on HBO Max, and missing the chance of an easy pop for Omega’s Michael Jordan “NORTH CAROLINA” introduction schtick, given that Dynamite took place in North Carolina. There’s a lack of urgency to a feud that one would expect required it, and unless the Young Bucks return to confront Omega next week and pick up where they left off (well within the realms of possibility, admittedly), I have a dread feeling that the entire thing has been “Just Wrestling”-ed, and the internecine fighting between The Elite will be handwaved away in order to skip half the story and get to the part where they become a united front as babyfaces to save the company from the Death Riders. If that is the case, it would be a mistake ranking among AEW’s highest - I’m normally loath to make WCW comparisons, but it would be AEW’s Fingerpoke Of Doom, a moment where the audience are told in simple terms that there’s no point actually getting invested in anything, because the bookers will just ignore it and do what they want to get where they need to go. Good wrestling, like all good storytelling, rewards investment, and AEW increasingly does not.
Women’s Title Matches
One fault with AEW storytelling as it is, is the story of Toni Storm. I adored Timeless Toni Storm, thinking it by far her career best work, and the first time that Toni’s personality and impeccable comic timing really shone through on TV. Equally, I am very much enjoying her current persona as a possibly amnesiac throwback, the eager and awkward young rookie making her first steps into the big-time, all unsure gestures, hokey catchphrases, nervous laughter, and Aussie accent breaking through.
I feel there was still untapped potential in Timeless Toni Storm - I think they missed a trick by not having a series of vignettes of investigative reporter RJ City trying to track down the reclusive star - and audibly gasped at the comic revelation that Storm thought RJ’s mention of “Timeless” was him misremembering her “Toni Time” catchphrase, and I think there’s still a great mystery to be unravelled in whether Toni has genuinely forgotten her entire AEW run, or whether this is a long game to get into the head of Mariah May, perhaps ingratiating herself into an “understudy” role to the champion before re-enacting May’s heel turn, to bring the whole story full circle.
But there’s a lack of consistency in how AEW presents this story - Toni Storm thinks she’s a rookie, but we know that she isn’t. The commentators and other wrestlers know that she isn’t. But she is booked as if she is; here, she was in a pre-show match on the undercard, and elsewhere she has wrestled on C-shows and on Ring of Honor, rather than on Dynamite, rather than being presented as the star of the division. She is booked as if she’s a wrestler with something to prove, but she isn’t, she’s a three-time former Women’s Champion. It can be a minor wrinkle, and one explained away by the old TV Tropes favourite “The Rule Of Funny”, but it speaks to wider problems with the division, not least of all the decision, in Toni Storm’s absence, to have Mariah May carry much of the legwork of her feud with Toni and all future feuds on the microphone, despite being as flat and uninspired a promo now as she was in her first interminably long, audience-stultifying post-heel turn speech.
It’s a division crying out for the charisma of a Toni Storm, a Jamie Hayter, or a Willow Nightingale, yet none of them are the centrepiece. Toni is playing out a slow-burning story, while Jamie Hayter, having not appeared on pay-per-view since May 2023, has not been presented as must-see star or a former champion, but as just another face in the crowd, lucky to make it on television, and most recently seen in a losing effort to Julia Hart; I understand wanting to make Hart look strong in her return, but at the expense of a Jamie Hayter who they’ve shown no desire to rebuild to the level she deserves is a mistake. Willow Nightingale, I will come back to in the next section.
I have very little to say about Mariah May’s “Tijuana Street Fight” (in Orlando) against Thunder Rosa; there have been better and more brutal women’s Street Fights and Hardcore matches in AEW, and the emotional crux of the match being bizarrely built around Rosa’s father, who ultimately failed to play his part at all well, meant it’s best forgotten.
The other women’s title match of the night was for the TBS Title between Mercedes Moné and Kris Statlander and, as ever, the two had incredible chemistry and put on a fantastic match, save for a bafflingly slow and clunky closing stretch. The gulf in quality between Mercedes Moné as a pay-per-view big match wrestler, and Mercedes Moné as an entirely skippable TV promo act, is as staggering as I have ever seen from a single talent; Moné’s TV work makes me resent how heavily promoted she is as the star of the division, while her matches justify it every time, while also making it clear that here is a division that deserves to be better featured and promoted than it is - not only Moné and Statlander, but the aforementioned Willow Nightingale and Jamie Hayter, should all be regularly featured on television.
Kris Statlander, however, is yet another victim of “It’s Just Wrestling”, and of not only the stop-start approach to AEW’s women’s division where a wrestler can go from contender to also-ran on any given week, but of storylines entirely abandoned. In her pairing with Stokely Hathaway, Statlander was growing into a fantastic heel performer, but that partnership was abandoned without explanation, and Stat was turned babyface with no on-screen justification or kayfabe atonement for her turn on Willow Nightingale, seemingly only because Moné needed an opponent of her stature, partly to base for some of Moné’s more ambitious offence, and partly to provide a suitable opponent to Moné’s bodyguard Kamille (who has since returned to her home planet). Stokely, meanwhile, took to sniffing around Private Party, teasing either a heel turn or a break-up for that team under his tutelage - instead, Private Party stayed together, won the tag titles, and have done little of note since (they weren’t booked on this show), while Stokely has vanished. The best I can guess is that AEW decided they were going to do a break-up angle for The Acclaimed instead, and changed their plans for Private Party, and Stokely suffered the consequences.
The Never Ending Story
There is no part of current day AEW I find less enjoyable than the feud between Adam Cole and MJF, or the associated drama between the various members of The Undisputed Kingdom. The Cole and MJF feud dragged on so unbearably, beyond the point that MJF was on-screen effectively telling us to forget all about it. They were friends, until Adam Cole turned on MJF, and then MJF vanished from television, leaving an entire heel stable only defined by their relationship to MJF without MJF to play off. Then Adam Cole got hurt, and MJF returned as a babyface, with no Adam Cole to regularly work with, so quickly demolished him with a Brainbuster and made it clear that the whole thing was behind us. But then MJF turned heel, and it was Adam Cole’s turn to return and confront him, this time with Cole as the babyface, with the unenviable task of trying to retcon the entire story so that Adam Cole had been the good guy all along. This also necessitated a babyface turn for Roderick Strong, Matt Taven, and Mike Bennett, but AEW never bothered actually giving us a reason why we should suddenly like those guys other than that they were hanging out with Adam Cole. Something they had been doing anyway when we were supposed to hate them.
In the meantime, all of the other wrestlers who got beaten up backstage or otherwise assaulted by Adam Cole and company while they were sneaking around in a Devil mask and bodysuits to get to MJF, have seemingly forgiven him and put things behind them - every time Adam Cole comes out on television and says that everything he did was justified because it meant he got to strike first at MJF before MJF inevitably turned on him, the likes of Bullet Club Gold and The Acclaimed, all victims of The Devil, are seemingly perfectly happy to be treated as acceptable collateral damage in Adam Cole’s confusing vendetta against MJF. It is an absolute nonsense of a storyline that should have been abandoned months ago, and yet it persists.
To make matters worse, there’s the concurrent storyline of in-fighting between Adam Cole’s friends - MJF has the unexplained-in-kayfabe ability to insist that wrestlers jump through hoops and win matches to earn a match with him, so Adam Cole has had to compete against Roderick Strong, and later against Kyle O’Reilly, for the chance to fight MJF, without ever really explaining what Roderick Strong’s own motivation was in all of this. To put a hat on a hat, the match on this show was also for the Dynamite Diamond Ring, a trophy once won in a Battle Royal, but now a matter of two men winning a Battle Royal to earn a chance to fight each other to see who gets to fight MJF for the ring. This is exhausting. If MJF vs. Adam Cole has been getting long in the tooth, then the question of whether Kyle O’Reilly, Adam Cole and Roderick Strong are friends or not is positively prehistoric, having been dragging on in some capacity on and off for a decade, taking in stints in ROH, NXT, and now AEW. Enough is enough.
Maybe it would have worked, if the match at the end of it all was befitting a years-long blood feud, but it did not. The match had no more heat than the endless TV segments of Adam Cole arguing with an MJF pre-tape on a big screen, or MJF’s increasingly rote edgelord promos. This is a feud that has drastically lowered the stock of all involved, and this match was the opportunity to claw back some semblance of credibility, and it failed to do so. After all this, MJF won thanks to a cheap shot with the diamond ring, restoring the status quo, and achieving nothing. If MJF’s promo on the following episode of Dynamite was anything go by, this feud is finally over, and for what? For the heel to emerge victorious, for nothing to be gained by anyone, and for everyone involved to end up right back where they started. Great work, everyone.
MJF’s booking on pay-per-view smacks of creative control, of contractual entitlement, or of appeased ego. Even when the story calls for a babyface to stand tall, he still wins, and any comeuppance comes after the match. This happened in his feud with Daniel Garcia, where MJF won the match, and Garcia only got his revenge after the fact, and it happened here - MJF won, but the closing visual was of a reunited Undisputed Kingdom and Kyle O’Reilly standing tall, as if the real MJF feud was the friends they made along the way. It’s an unsatisfying half-way house, that flies in the face of a wrestling promotion that claims to care about wins and losses, and otherwise often demonstrably does, particularly in the case of the Continental Classic tournament that provided the highlights of this very show. At this point, MJF is an active detriment to the stories he’s involved in, and to AEW as a whole, and I dread to think what he does next.
But back to the Undisputed Kingdom, and to Kyle O’Reilly.
I complained in my review of Full Gear, about how the Death Riders’ attempted murder of Orange Cassidy had zero on-screen consequences, and how The Conglomeration’s involvement in the match amounted to nothing. To recap - going into a title match with Jon Moxley, Orange Cassidy insisted that he would fight alone, and asked his stablemates in the Conglomeration not to help him. When the Death Riders got involved, the Conglomeration rushed to Orange Cassidy’s aid - by the letter of the law, they didn’t help Cassidy, in that none of them targeted Jon Moxley, they simply levelled the playing field by fighting off the rest of the Death Riders, with Willow Nightingale triumphantly returning to take out Marina Shafir. But then what?
In the subsequent month, there has been zero follow-up. The Death Riders poured bleach down the throat of Orange Cassidy after the match, and attempted to do the same again on television, and his friends were nowhere to be seen. There was no promo or backstage angle where Orange Cassidy either accepted the Conglomeration’s help in his match, or pushed back against it. Mark Briscoe, the one member of the group who didn’t get involved in the Cassidy/Moxley match, has never been given cause to justify it - we’ve never been given reason to ponder whether he was the only one sticking to Cassidy’s word, or whether he let Cassidy down. Willow Nightingale, after making her return from injury in a pay-per-view main event, didn’t appear on television for two weeks, and then only to compete in an unrelated tournament with no mention of her rushing to her friend’s aid in a World Title match. Mark Briscoe entered the Continental Classic, Tomohiro Ishii returned to Japan, Rocky Romero to CMLL, and Kyle O’Reilly to the Undisputed Kingdom.
The Conglomeration have simply disappeared. No combination of them have teamed together since November, and they haven’t been associated together since Full Gear. There were no consequences, good or bad, for their involvement in a World Title match, and they have seemingly been broken up with no narrative explanation or justification, they are simply no more. On Dynamite following World’s End, Hangman Page brutalised Orange Cassidy after their match, and Cassidy had no friends rush to his aid, because the story now requires that he is a wrestler who fights alone, regardless of what months of prior episodes of the same show have taught you. Actions have no consequences, there is no reward for investing your time or your attention, there is no Conglomeration, and we have have always been at war with Eastasia. It doesn’t matter. It’s Just Wrestling. Why bother?
The Main Event
Okay, sure, there were other matches on this card - a perfectly acceptable clash between Konosuke Takeshita and Powerhouse Hobbs for the International Title, and dark matches that I struggled to care about, despite Jeff Jarrett vs. QT Marshall being, on paper, the sort of thing I would like very much. But I don’t have a lot to say about them, so on to the main event.
It was a Four Way match between AEW World Champion Jon Moxley, Orange Cassidy, Jay White, and Hangman Page.
This was a match that never got into the crucial fifth gear for me, never escalating to a point that it felt heated or like the result was in doubt; the finish came so abruptly that I was caught off guard. There were too many moving parts - for a start, there’s four wrestlers in the match, but then you have outside interference from the other members of the Death Riders, and repeated shots of Christian Cage and The Patriarchy watching from a skybox, and subsequently of Hook watching them from across the building. At its chaotic best, AEW differs from WWE in that it feels like a live event that is being recorded, rather than a TV show that happens to be filmed in front of an audience, and I think that’s a crucial distinction that makes it feel more genuine and alive - this match did the opposite, with the action crawling to a standstill to allow for shots of Christian and his mates, and smacked of bad WWE TV in doing so. The selling point of a match with more than the usual amount of competitors - and, rarely for AEW, this was the only multi-person match on the main card, with no tags or trios matches on the undercard - is the heightened pace of the action, yet this at times felt like a slog.
The dynamic was muddled too, by pitting three babyfaces (Hangman Page, for the purposes of this match, I would put temporarily in that category) against a single heel, so it was Moxley who had to defy the odds (at least until his stablemates got involved), while also having Moxley painted as the mastermind of the whole match, for realising that the other three would inevitably turn on and fight each other and allow him some breathing room. That Moxley didn’t need to be pinned to lose the match makes his genius plan a little less appealing.
I don’t think the Death Riders angle has worked. It began with the suffocation of Bryan Danielson, and there is simply nowhere it could have gone from there; you can’t begin at the height of violence and work downhill, and expect the audience to follow you with any enthusiasm. Pouring bleach down Orange Cassidy’s throat at Full Gear was clearly an attempt to replicate that sense of transgression, that feeling of a level of violence rarely seen in mainstream wrestling, but it was forgotten about almost instantly, brushed aside for a parade of run-ins, and then weeks of storytelling where it simply didn’t matter.
At first, following the Death Riders’ assault of Bryan Danielson, the locker room amassed against them, midcarders uniting to stand up for AEW in a show-long narrative. But now, nobody seems to care. We are told that Moxley holds the company to ransom, but he turns up and wrestles a match like anybody else. His mates get involved, but so do other heels elsewhere on the show, so what’s so bad about this one? There was no sense in this match that Moxley was any more violent or dangerous than any of his opponents, and in fact it was Mox who took the worst beatings and bumps, who went through a table and was left bloodied, not his opponents. So what’s the big deal, what makes him more than just another heel champion?
For this story to work, it needs to consume the company, but it simply doesn’t. Everything is booked in its silos, everybody waits their turn for their booking, and nothing bleeds into anything else. Will Ospreay, at least, has his own issues with Kyle Fletcher to keep him away from the main event story. It could have been argued that Swerve Strickland wasn’t going after Moxley because he was busy wrapped up in a personal issue with the Hurt Syndicate, but he’s since moved on to throwing toilet roll at Ricochet, so the World Title and the future and the heart of AEW simply can’t mean all that much to him. Jeff Jarrett, who rushed to Bryan Danielson’s aid, and who once stood in the parking lot with the rest of the roster prepared to fight off Moxley, teased his retirement and on Dynamite expressed his intention to go after the World Title, but for the sake of his own career, never even mentioning Moxley by name, let alone addressing what he has done. The Conglomeration don’t care, even after Jon Moxley tried to murder one of their own. Daniel Garcia, who once emotionally confronted Orange Cassidy about his need to stand up for AEW, has been off doing his own thing, and doesn’t seem to mind what the Death Riders are getting up to. The Hurt Syndicate came in promising to hurt people and win gold, but haven’t even looked in Jon Moxley’s direction. Darby Allin, one of the few who has consistently been fighting this fight, didn’t bother showing up to this pay-per-view. The Elite are sitting it out. The Undisputed Kingdom, The House Of Black, anyone who could be challenging the Death Riders for the Trios Titles that everyone has seemingly forgotten they hold? None of them could give a shit.
The story of Moxley spreading terror and holding the company to ransom simply doesn’t work when he demonstrably isn’t doing that, and when it has no impact outside of his one segment per week. Claudio Castagnoli was in the Continental Classic - do the Death Riders care about the Continental Classic, or the Continental Title? When they actively don’t carry or defend the titles they do have, why do they want another? They’re happy to break people’s bones, suffocate their own former best friend with a plastic bag, to do all manner of horrible things to the AEW locker room, but they abide by the rules of the tournament and make sure to not get involved? The rules are that there’s no outside interference, but this is wrestling, the rules are there to be broken - this could have been an opportunity to show us what the actual consequences of outside interference in the Continental Classic would be. But it’s “Just Wrestling”; Claudio isn’t in that tournament as a continuation of the Death Riders angle, he’s there because he’s a good hand to have in a tournament.
So Jon Moxley won, in underwhelming fashion, all to herald the arrival of FTR, and the return of Adam Copeland. Now, fair enough, Cope is a star, and someone AEW want to get a return on their investment from. But he’s also a 51 year old ex-WWE star, and it’s a bad look to have him get one over on the World Champion immediately after said Champion has laid waste to some of the younger and brighter, more relatively homegrown, stars of AEW.
In wrestling, when you’re hot, you can do no wrong, and when you’re cold, you can do no right. I try and shy away from the “ex-WWE” criticism - wrestlers should be able to seek employment wherever they’re able, and movement between companies is a good thing; not to mention that WWE being the only mainstream company for twenty years, and spending a good portion of that time hoarding talent, means that sooner or later almost everyone is “ex-WWE”. But there’s a fine line in being able to sell yourself, as AEW once could, as a place where the biggest stars in the world want to wrestle, where people leave WWE to come and be their best selves, and being somewhere to work when WWE don’t want you any more.
Cope has made an effort in his time in AEW to be something other than WWE’s Edge, but, particularly thanks to a lengthy injury lay-off, that’s an identity that will take some shrugging off, and it’s not helped by him retaining the same entrance music, the same nickname, and many of the trappings of Edge. I’m not suggesting he should abandon all of that wholesale, only that AEW need to be wary - they are setting up a 51 year old former WWE star as their next title contender, with another waiting in the wings with a Money In The Bank-style any-time title shot, while a 48 year old ex-WWE Bobby Lashley runs roughshod over homegrown AEW names, 54 year old Chris Jericho remains a featured act, and a 57 year old Jeff Jarrett declares his intentions to seek World Championship gold.
AEW has an incredible young roster - Will Ospreay, Darby Allin, Jay White, Swerve Strickland, Adam Cole and Adam Page are all under 35, while MJF, Konosuke Takeshita, Kyle Fletcher and Daniel Garcia are under 30, to name but a few - but they have a problem of perception, when the balance of power is pushing further and further towards older talent being the ones trusted to run with the ball. A young wrestler can only have so many breakout and star making performances, before they’re not so young any more, and the promotion has failed to allow them to break out, failed to make them a star. AEW consistently allows its young wrestlers a taste of that limelight, only to shuffle the decks and put them right back where they started - a few weeks ago, MVP spoke of how he tried to recruit Swerve Strickland to the Hurt Business because of his “potential”; as a former World Champion, is not a little past the point where we should have stopped talking about Swerve in terms of “potential”, rather than as a cemented, established name? But his presentation here and elsewhere does him no favours, and the kind of stop-start booking that AEW subjects its roster to is detrimental to sustained star-making, now more than ever.
There’s something rotten in the state of AEW, and it makes it difficult to care about promises of big future matches, or of a feeling restored, because we’ve been here before. I came out of All In full of love for the vision of wrestling that AEW presented there. I came out of All Out eager to see what the follow-up to Moxley turning on Bryan Danielson could be. But I have not been rewarded for that investment. If anything, quite the opposite. AEW has all the tools, but cannot get out of its own way, and constantly loses sight of what works, and of what brought it to the dance. I could talk about potential solutions to their problems all day, but we’re past the point where it feels like AEW even know that their problems are problems, and it’s starting to feel like they’re by design. Something has to give.
