The AEW Wednesday Night Dynamite Thread

[Worthits]

Yeah, that unsanctiined match put me off AEW too. If I wanted to watch deathmatches I would go watch CZW or Ian Rottens sons new promotion. Train Wreck Wrestling was it?

[SuperBacon]

4 hours ago, MPDTT said:

Well Full Gear was the best thing since sliced bread.....I had a great time in Washington DC, but Baltimore is an utter dive....also met someone else there who said they were on this forum - some bloke from Leeds who's name escapes me.

Did he mention the Chinese or pies by any chance?

[Arch Stanton]

I thought the PPV was a very strong show up until the Omega v Mox match, which was absolutely shite. Nearly forty fucking minutes of absolute shite at that.

[Otto Dem Wanz]

Didn't watch the PPV so can't comment on that, but the Dynamite TV shows have been great and I'm making sure I come back every week.

Amongst the usual positives (shout out to the people behind Sammy Guevara and Luchasaurus' music btw!) Scorpio Sky, who I knew nothing about beforehand, has impressed me loads 

Edited November 24, 2019 by Otto Dem Wanz

[tiger_rick]

Dynamite is really hitting it's stride. This week was an outstanding show. 

NXT was an exciting show. This "war" has been great for both so far. 

Both had good numbers this week. NXT winning is a bit hollow when they had to promise Raw and Smackdown guys to do it. Good TV though.

I didn't mind the Moxley/Omega match. Certainly wasn't unexpected given what's happened in the previous unsanctioned matches. Had my wincing a lot and was overly long but surprised by the criticism. Decent PPV overall. Cody and Jericho (and MJF) stole the show. Cody's head first bump might be spot of the year.

[boytoy]

I know kayfabe is dead but I have questions that need answers...

1. Does Kenny Omega make his own weapons or does he have help? Is there a wrestling version of acme that made them for him?
2. If DIY, how man hours did he put into making the barbed wire bed and mouse trap board? How does he fit that around his wrestling commitments?
3. Why would he make a giant barbed wire bed and then leave it backstage 'just in case' he needed it? Potentially a lot of wasted effort there if he gets pinned before he even gets a chance to use it.
4. Why make a barbed wire bed big enough for two? Surely you only need to plan to put one person through it.
5. How did he transport them to the arena?
6. Nailing thirty mouse traps to a board is more preparation than used by most killers so maybe not great babyface material. Also probably very low pain/workload ratio really.
7. Who collected the glass from the broken table? Why would anyone think to do this anyway?

[BomberPat]

If you watch the VICE documentary "The Wrestlers", they show Jun Kasai's wife helping make deathmatch props at home, and Danny Havoc producing full on blueprints and diagrams for all the contraptions he wants to use. So in or out of kayfabe, the answer is, "they glue mousetraps to stuff in their spare time".

[Accident Prone]

I can only imagine the discussion on here a day after that Mox/Omega match. Personally I really enjoyed it, but some of you comparing a match with sugar glass and bob wire to a CZW affair are overblowing it. 

Yeah, it was a bit long but never at any point did I feel the length (eh, steady on now!). The lads were letting moments sink in and selling, so that's a big plus.

Dave's rating though is fucking hilarious, and everyone defending it clearly needs to get their head out of his arse.

On a last quick note, despite the lows of the battle royal and the women's match, Dynamite was pretty damn good again.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Accident Prone

[BomberPat]

There were moments I enjoyed about the Battle Royal - the one thing they do well in them is giving people a chance to have a bit of a character moment; so Orange Cassidy just chilling out for the whole match, the Billy Gunn/Sonny Kiss interaction (with Cassidy's reaction adding to it), Kip Sabian and Penelope interacting, and so on.

What I didn't like about it was the amount of outside interference, and bits of business. Way too much outside interference and shenanigans for a Battle Royal, and I hate multiple "skinning the cat" saves in a single match, as it makes it look ordinary, rather than exceptional. 

[Chris B]

In the unsanctioned match, I think they both expected to be pretty bloody - the sugar glass spot, if it had ended up smeared in blood, would have looked horrific. Same with the screwdriver to the forehead. Because somehow they both seemed to get pretty nastily scratched up but sweat so much the blood just vanished, it made some of the spots look odd rather than brutal. That said, I don't like death matches and wasn't keen on watching this, so I ended up surprised how much I enjoyed it.

One longer-term point is that I'm loving the meta-story of Kenny losing his mind. The pressures of expectation and repeated high-profile losses, with him keeping building up to 'this one match can set everything straight' is really good. The idea that it isn't a straight a-to-b-to-c of him doing it, but it's more 'he has a bad spell, but focuses on something and comes back out of it, just to be let down again and have another bad spell...' is really interesting. It's not typical, it's not promos, and it's not going to work for a bunch of people, but I'm really enjoying it. This actually tied into the death match too - it's been made clear on BTE that the Bucks and Hangman thought he went way over the top preparing all this weird shit for the match and that they're kind of worried about him.

The last couple of Dynamite's have just flown by. It's just such an easy watch. The brawl between Proud and Powerful and the Bucks was entertaining, but the Orange Cassidy cameo and the reaction to it was one of the best bits of intentional comedy I've seen in wrestling in years. 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Chris B

[tiger_rick]

Dragged on a bit but the Battle Royal was decent otherwise. Mainly for MJF. He's a superstar.

As opposed to Pat, I liked a lot of the interference because it all served to set up or further feuds in the midcard. Battle Royals can be dull otherwise.

I skip all of the women's stuff on AEW. It's all so tokenesque at the moment. Sorry to come across all Russo, but American audiences rarely give a shit about Japanese wrestlers - unless they are given a reason to invest in them like anyone else and I've seen nothing other than they're Japanese and awesome elsewhere as a reason for their existence. And in fairness, there is nothing about any of the other women to care about either. Not just their back story but none of them, bar Brandi, are any good at presenting themselves. The WWE "womens evolution" might be a bit of a myth but in fairness to them, they're now promoting women who have personality, who carry themselves on the mic and work feuds like male wrestlers always have. It's a far cry from women being eye candy or all having one dimensional characters. That's why becky is the biggest star in their company. AEW women are so poorly presented and have nothing about them. They need a voice and a reason for being. They absolutely don't need more super-workers from Stardom or wherever. Not while Riho, Emi, Yuka, etc mean so little already. Otherwise they'll never be anything but FF material for the masses.

[Supremo]

The weapons they used being gimmicked or not is irrelevant to my point about Moxley vs. Omega feeling like a shitty CZW match. The problem remains regardless of whether they used real glass or not. Either way, going from stunt to stunt to stunt completely killed the match when saving one or two stunts for the final stretch would've been a million times more effective and made for a far more dramatic encounter. It stopped feeling like a match and became this weird exhibition of what daft stuff both guys could come up with or were willing to take.

You could hear it from the crowd. Those first couple of barb wire shots got huge reactions, especially the one where Mox took the barb wire mop to the head and immediately started bleeding. Fast forward ten minutes though, by which point we'd had the glass and the mouse traps and the gold chains and whatever else, and there was little to no reaction for it. It was just another round of someone forgetting which side of the ring they'd left something, taking forever to set it up, then doing yet another stunt for further diminishing returns. It shouldn't be the case than a random TV match between Moxley and Darby Allin pisses all over his PPV match with Kenny Omega but that's exactly what happened.

But yeah, this week's Dynamite was fucking blistering. Nick Jackson vs. Feniz was a fantastic opener, that Jericho promo was amazing and then the main event was tremendous. What a fucking finish, with Schiavone calling it perfectly, screaming, "HE'S BROKEN HIS NECK!" as Allin takes the middle-rope DDT.

The mind Chris Jericho has for the business is in the top 1% and it almost feels like a waste in retrospect that he spent so much of his career being scripted so tightly in WWE. I could watch him trying to make Jake Hager corpse all day long.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Supremo

[Cod Eye]

I've really been enjoying AEW, and it's become the first wrestling show in about a decade that I really look forward to and try everything I can to avoid spoilers. I think the biggest reason I am into it though, is that I have never been able to get into indie wrestling, so AEW is my first exposure to some fantastic characters like MJF, Derby Allen, Jungle Boy and Luchasaurus(and shit loads more!). You can tell MJF is miles ahead of everyone else on the roster barring maybe Jericho in terms of character work, and I can really see Derby Allen being a breakout star. He's already connecting with his audience and if they handle him right, he can be one of their fist "homegrown" stars.

I also love how they are presenting Moxley. He just looks like a mega star every time he is on TV, and looks a million miles away from what WWE eventually mae him!

There is a few that are not clicking with me though. I can't get on with Adam Page for one. He's dcent enough bell to bell, but the character feels he's realised hes a bit balnd as plain ol' Adam Page, so picked a random Cowboy gimmick and I don't think it fits him. i also have no interest in the woman division so far. Hopefully that changes! Also, Justin Roberts can fuck off...

[BomberPat]

39 minutes ago, Chris B said:

One longer-term point is that I'm loving the meta-story of Kenny losing his mind. The pressures of expectation and repeated high-profile losses, with him keeping building up to 'this one match can set everything straight' is really good.

I like this in principle, and I think his promo last week was one of the best he'd ever done, even if it was framed with some hokey comedy. It explained the story, felt real, and put over the match with PAC.

My problem with it is...who is Kenny Omega? They've been doing the "Kenny's lost his groove" story since the first show. Even if you started watching AEW from the beginning, and especially if you started watching from the first episode of Dynamite, you don't know what Kenny Omega should be, so it's not clear how the way he's behaving now is deviating from the norm.

33 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Dragged on a bit but the Battle Royal was decent otherwise. Mainly for MJF. He's a superstar.

As opposed to Pat, I liked a lot of the interference because it all served to set up or further feuds in the midcard. Battle Royals can be dull otherwise.

I skip all of the women's stuff on AEW. It's all so tokenesque at the moment. Sorry to come across all Russo, but American audiences rarely give a shit about Japanese wrestlers - unless they are given a reason to invest in them like anyone else and I've seen nothing other than they're Japanese and awesome elsewhere as a reason for their existence. And in fairness, there is nothing about any of the other women to care about either. Not just their back story but none of them, bar Brandi, are any good at presenting themselves. The WWE "womens evolution" might be a bit of a myth but in fairness to them, they're now promoting women who have personality, who carry themselves on the mic and work feuds like male wrestlers always have. It's a far cry from women being eye candy or all having one dimensional characters. That's why becky is the biggest star in their company. AEW women are so poorly presented and have nothing about them. They need a voice and a reason for being. They absolutely don't need more super-workers from Stardom or wherever. Not while Riho, Emi, Yuka, etc mean so little already. Otherwise they'll never be anything but FF material for the masses.

on the Battle Royal, I like how they set up further feuds, I just think it didn't need to be outside interference. Why not have Shawn Spears actually in the match itself? When you also had Penelope interfering (which I liked, in terms of establishing her relationship to Kip Sabian), plus Jimmy Havoc coming back post-elimination, plus Wardlow, and Christopher Daniels cosplaying as Fenix...it was all too much. If they want multiple characters and stories overlapping in a Battle Royal, put all those wrestlers in the Battle Royal. It just starts to be a bit much otherwise.

As for the women, I don't think it's even necessarily that the audience don't give a shit about Japanese wrestlers, specifically. They haven't given us a reason to care about most of the American or British or any other nationality of wrestler either. It's the most glaring problem with AEW, unless you're feuding with Cody Rhodes or Chris Jericho, you barely get a chance to establish your character, and that's ten times harder for the women when they're expected to get over with a tenth the amount of TV time. They have an extremely talented women's roster, with the scope to expand it even more - the problem isn't lack of ability, it's the lack of effort.

[Chris B]

1 minute ago, BomberPat said:

I like this in principle, and I think his promo last week was one of the best he'd ever done, even if it was framed with some hokey comedy. It explained the story, felt real, and put over the match with PAC.

My problem with it is...who is Kenny Omega? They've been doing the "Kenny's lost his groove" story since the first show. Even if you started watching AEW from the beginning, and especially if you started watching from the first episode of Dynamite, you don't know what Kenny Omega should be, so it's not clear how the way he's behaving now is deviating from the norm.

Yeah, I think this is entirely fair. And it's definitely something they need to work on. I'm coming at it after a year or so of liking him in NJPW and already having the emotional connection to the Golden Lovers storyline, so I'm already on board. It's difficult to both establish him and move him forward, so I'm not sure how they can do it.

One detail that I forgot to mention is the recent bit where Omega's not been cleared after the unsanctioned match, and his subdued reaction to finding out that Moxley is cleared (and thriving) was genuinely great. He doesn't need to come out and make clear how much it bothers him - of COURSE it fucking bothers him. And it's just one more thing needling away at him.