La Zona Muerta

It’s getting harder for me to know what to make of Dynamite. Take last night’s episode; It was probably fine and the show closing angle has people talking, but… I don’t know.

One thing I can easily sound off on; the audio was horrendous all night. They KNEW about it, but didn’t do anything to fix it. This seems to allegedly be a TBS issue; people who watch AEW on FITE or TSN don’t seem to have these issues, but I have no idea how the sound can be fine going from AEW to the truck, and then the truck to TBS and then TBS to the world but then somehow gets loused up, especially when the audio pitches and yaws for in ring, video packages, remotes, pretapes, whatever. IT’S BEEN FIVE GODDAMNED YEARS AND THE AUDIO IS NEVER GOOD. SOMETIMES, IT’S AWFUL.

Cough.

At any rate, speaking of five years, The Kentucky Gentleman, Sweet Chuckie T FINALLY got to say the s-word on TV, bless his heart. Honestly, I was pulling for him to turn heel as an evil Best Friends would probably be really fun going up against a potentially arriving Motor City Machine Guns or any other number of teams, but Chuck vs. Trent will be a fun program building Orange Cassidy vs. Trent, presumably at the Pay Per View.

Moxley cut a long, rambling promo. I realize I’m on an island, but his promos don’t do much for me. Essentially, he put over Hobbs as a dangerous opponent.

King of Men, our new Heavyweight champion Swerve Strickland came out, but not to speak on being the new champ or to celebrate, but to put on one hell of a match with Kyle Fletcher. Now, the booking of this made sense in that Fletcher got in a lot and made Swerve work for the victory, and Kyle’s loss played into the show later… but Swerve didn’t speak at all. Prince Nana did announce Swerve to the ring and did a vaguely heelish “stand up for the champ, you people” type thing, but I guess he isn’t a good guy. Swerve did stop to yell at someone on their phone, which is definitely a babyface move in my eyes.

Mina Shirakawa returned and had a nice match with Anna Jay. Boy, you can sure tell the night and day difference in the relationship with the STARDOM office now, huh? A cynical person (like myself) might think that Bushiroad or New Japan or whomever holds the reins is using the AEW relationship as a carrot; “Don’t go to MARIGOLD and we’ll get you on American TV.” I guess that’s not even cynicism; that’s just a reality of wrestling politics and the leverage a partnership can generate. At any rate, the match was good; Mina has a well-deserved reputation and even as someone who watches very little joshi, I can see how good she is… but the post match booking was a bit goofy. Mariah May came out to celebrate with Mina, Anna Jay popped up as if she weren’t just defeated and attacked Mariah, Toni Storm came out like a babyface to protect the protege she typically shows little care for. and then Serena Deeb came out to cut a promo into a camera with only it’s ambient mic turned on (which was death on a show where you already could barely hear anything). Using contextual clues and body language, I can report that Deeb essentially said something like “next time I touch this title, it’s because I’m going to be the champion,” and I like Deeb a lot, so I’m happy to see that match, but Anna popping up and Toni coming out to save the day all struck me as wrong headed.

Willow, Kris Stat and that beautiful little man, Stokely Hathaway came out to celebrate Willow’s TBS title win. I’m not certain if it’s a course correction or by design, but they’ve decided to lean into Willow being pretty literally AEW’s most likable babyface and Mercedes being a bit of a bully jerk from outside which seems fine to me. Gonna be a long month of listening to the “CEO” build up the match. That said, this was fine.

The Elite EVPs told us that Jack Perry was gonna have an in ring interview with Tony Khan later (and as it turned out, it was the main event segment).

Okay, this next bit was wild, but… this is something that’s frustrating about AEW. They have a real tendency to score own goals. I’ll often defend them when someone is like “they didn’t announce this” or “this didn’t have a video package” or other nonsense like that (usually because they DID announce it or they DID show a video package and you just didn’t watch Rampage or you sped through the announcement), but here… they randomly had something called a Casino Gauntlet match where the information concerning what the hell the match was slowly trickled out as each man appeared. The announcers, the cats who are supposed to know the stuff the audience doesn’t, had no idea what the match was. It’s hard to complain about a match that featured the likes of Pentagon Jr., Kommander, Kyle O’Reilly, Will Ospreay, Jay White and the like and is a good way to show the ridiculous depth of the talent AEW has on hand, but slowly being dripfed information about the match as Tony Schiavone screams about how innovative this match is… it’s pretty bush league, especially on a night where the audio was rotten. Essentially, men came out every so often and the match was “sudden death,” so if someone scored a pinfall, the whole thing was over. There were allegedly up to twenty one wrestlers in the back waiting to be used. It was wild and fun, but… man, what a mess. To cut to the chase, Will Ospreay won and gets a shot at Roderick Strong for the International Title at Double or Nothing, which will be excellent. It’s also a good way to keep Ospreay out of the main title picture. While Ospreay won, he went to use the Tiger Driver ’91 (which supposedly injured Bryan Danielson Sunday) on KOR and thought better of it, which nearly cost him the match. This would come into play later.

Chris Jericho, now officially called “THE LEARNING TREE,” came out,. This is one of his infamous “reinventions,” which really aren’t all that inventive, but basically here he’s a smarmy veteran trying to prop up the young guys by passing on his wisdom in the most disingenuous way possible. Big Bill came out and said he’d like to sit under THE LEARNING TREE. Jericho said.” Maybe.” That was about it but this felt like it went on for no less than three and a half hours. Go be THE LEARNING TREE in CMLL for awhile, Chiris.

Don Callis yelled at Will Ospreay for not using the Tiger Driver ’91 during the Casino battle royale thingie. Kyle Fletcher stuck up for Will but Don coldly told him “you’re the last one to be talking about winning and losing” and stormed off, continuing the slow burn break up of Will and Don. I thought this was good stuff.

Moxley and Powerhouse Hobbs had a pretty boring match for the IWGP title. Now, Hobbs appeared to have possibly hurt himself, but don’t let that fool you; this match wasn’t much of anything even prior to that. It’s clear they went home a couple of minutes early; I hope Hobbs is okay. Mox won with a sleeper. I quipped elsewhere that Hobbs wasn’t the only person he put to sleep, but I felt bad afterwards. Not bad enough to repeat the joke here, obviously, but bad.

So, that left us with the main event interview, something I’m not a huge fan of, but I get it when a heavy angle is coming. Jack Perry came out, and, to the Jacksonville faithful, the “home” AEW crowd, he was a hero for provoking CM Whomever. They sang “cry me a river” to him and “he’s our scapegoat.” A dastardly heel he was not. He asked, politely, to be reinstated and TK enthusiastically agreed. A blind person could see what was coming next.

Jack gave a smug, little smile to the camera and punched Tony in the gut. I guess, being rich, TK has never been punched in his life; instead of bending over and doubling up, he landed flat on his back. Can’t wait for the “Tony did a bump” type jokes. Then, the Young Bucks and Okada came out, ostensibly to save TK from the evil Perry, but they gave him the Meltzer Driver, instead and laid him out. Shad Khan came out and scowled. The referee corps (I was PRAYING for Okada to kill Bryce Remsburg) and the babyface locker room came out. The end.

This did end up on NFL.com with a great, classic headline saying that TK took “punch, piledriver on Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite” which I howled at. Hope he shows up at the draft today in a neck brace.

As far as the angle… look, it’s gonna work for some people. I’ve already seen clamoring for Shad Khan (!) to be a TV character, which is… no. Just no. My worry is then TK has to get an agent to be his proxy to fight the Elite and the logical guy to do that, Kenny Omega (more on him in a bit) presumably isn’t in shape to be that person. I guess Hangman Adam Page could be, but he’s still got a lot of loose ends from his last feud. I don’t know. One of my huge pet peeves in wrestling is when someone who’s only watched WCW through gifs and WWE documentaries says “this was like WCW 2000,” and it wasn’t, really, but it definitely was not unlike Kevin Nash and Scott Hall powerboming Eric Bischoff through a table. That was groundbreaking TV in 1996. In 2024…? It doesn’t blow up my particular skirt. If it did yours, cool. I didn’t hate it, necessarily, but I don’t see it having a lot of cool places to go. I’ll cop to having WCW PTSD, fine.

Speaking of Kenny Omega, they flat out said he’s “returning” next week in Winnipeg. Now, I don’t believe he’s had surgery for his diverticulitis, unless he did it on the SUPER downlow and none of us heard anything. Even if he had, that’s something that you need MONTHS of recovery from. Even if he didn’t get surgery, he would need months of rest. I’m sure he’s just going to be there to speak to the crowd, but they announced him as RETURNING at least twice and… I thought that was a bit sleazy, to be honest. I guess it’s a bit early to kill them on either that or the TK angle, but I’m running out of “let it play out” style patience for AEW.

Those are my Dyna thoughts. I really feel like, if they tightened a couple of things up, this would go back to being a near 100% enjoyable show for me, and even then, this was not a terrible Dynamite… but I did offer to let Mrs Convoy watch the Heat / Celtics on the big screen instead around the point of the Jericho promo, which is probably not a great sign.