La Zona Muerta

Whew! Good to finally have an episode of Dynamite that I can wholeheartedly get behind. Not that there weren’t issues or things I could nitpick… but this was probably the best Dyna in MONTHS.

Big picture stuff first… the Will Ospreay / Swerve Strickland segment was REALLY good. Like, REALLY, REALLY good. How’s that for some professional analysis? Seriously, the emotion both men brought to what could have been a by the numbers, ho hum segment was outstanding. A couple of things about their build:

1. People who think that “I want to be the best” isn’t a story are completely ignorant to wrestling
2. Swerve making it personal makes the battle that much more poignant, that much more important. It’s a cherry on top

I also came to the conclusion that Prince Nana should probably be AEW’s promoter. He ran down the match, cooling the tempers of the combatants (temporarily) and was a tremendous hype man, putting across the importance of the match up. Instead of forcing a “Mark Briscoe is silly again” promo down our throats yet again or the rapidly losing its charm Joe, Hook and Shibata backstage camera skit, why not have Nana run down cards and matches every week?

One of the best things in this program is, if you were one of the people upset by Swerve’s sudden alignment change… he EXPLAINED it here. He’s still the man who will do ANYTHING to be champion, and if that means dragging Ospreay’s new family into things, so be it! Both men were at top form, matching emotion with emotion. I had seen someone on one of the wrestling forums I hang out at say something along the lines of “boy, they need to heat up Ospreay and Swerve” dismissively. I hope this did it for that person.

What else was great here? Boy, that casual eight man featuring ZED ESS JAY was awfully good. Yet another reminder that AEW can do this, can field a match with huge stars, great in ring AND have it be meaningful for stories to come literally whenever they want.

Not today, dickheads

Zack Sabre Jr. is someone I’ve followed ravenously since probably 2016 or so. I can’t say I was there from the beginning; I didn’t watch much of his stuff in NOAH or in the various European groups prior to that but I started catching his work in PWG and the various World Wrestling Network-aligned shows. I admired his way to make grappling look not, well, boring. Guys like Timothy Thatcher work a really aggressive grappling style that I appreciate, but even I as a Thatcher fan will cop to the fact that his matches can tend towards the dull. ZSJ is better at keeping his stuff tight and lively. I also really appreciate that, when he performs in Japan, he doesn’t treat it like a holiday. Japan is his place of business and he’s there to work. It’s a treat, a pleasure watching him work and it was fun to see him here in one of the most ridiculously stacked, random eight man tags I’ve ever seen.

It’s also a tiny bit jarring to be reminded of just how small Orange Cassidy is, especially when he’s in there with ZSJ, who’s put on a lot of mass, or a monster like Konosuke Takeshita, who is the size of roughly three Orange Cassidys.

RUSH vs. Maxwell Jacob Friedman was fine, even good. As predicted, RUSH made MJF work for it a bit, bloodying his lip almost immediately and subjecting him to a couple of pretty good shots. There was a scary moment where RUSH almost lost Max when he picked him up for a pancake-type maneuver. Yikes. They didn’t do anything wacky on the finish to protect RUSH… RUSH took ninety percent of the match and then Max just kinda won. Not my favorite match format. What was dumb, afterwards, was that Hechicero (a thick man who I love) challenged Max for Forbidden Door. That’s fine, I guess, not really a match I’m dying to see but whatever. Then, later, as part of a big pull apart brawl, Max effortlessly got the better of Hechicero.

Huh?

Perhaps more baffling was Max and Ospreay getting into it in the back later after Ospreay sort of helped Max. We’ve already told the audience the Hechicero match means nothing and to look forward to the REAL match, which apparently is Max and Ospreay down the line. I found this all a bit of a headscratch. Don Callis reached out to RUSH later en espanol, and who knows where that may lead. I’d rather see RUSH back leading his version of Los Ingobernables but Jose is gone, Dralistico doesn’t technically work in AEW, Preston Vance still sort of sucks, Bestia del Ring is terrible, etc. I wonder what the long term plans for RUSH are.

What an embarrassment of riches this company has! It’s almost overwhelming.

The main event, of course, was tremendous; PAC and Claudio Castagnoli are two of the best at their craft and they have no problem beating the crap out of each other. The only minus, surprisingly, was the commentary by Bryan Danielson… who’s normally quite good at providing color! Here he didn’t seem like he had much to say and, he was so disinterested in the announcement of his match with SHINGO TAKAGI at Forbidden Door, they had to ANNOUNCE IT AGAIN five minutes later where he suddenly woke up and put over his opponent. The finish saw Claudio and PAC trade roll up pinfalls over and over until Claudio simply got caught. That might not be a satisfying conclusion for some people trained to accept a spectacular finishing move, so I don’t know how well the end went over with LA PUBLICA, but that’s the sort of thing I like. Both guys are, for all intents and purposes, basically equal skillswise and one competitor was able to catch the other. Claudio was very frustrated afterward which again subtly teases, I dunno, SOMETHING with Claudio and Danielson specifically.

While I wasn’t a huge fan of the Young Bucks / Acclaimed match and Anthony Bowens SOMEHOW kicking out of everything under the sun, at least it was a Bowens showcase. The Bucks are canny enough to realize that Bowens is the man in the team who can go, so giving him the pin was cool and hey, finally an Eliminator leads to a title match! Too bad it’s with the Acclaimed. The real star of the match was evil Kazuchika Okada “accidentally” cutting off Max Caster’s mic.

“Did you do the bit with the flapping dickie?”

Okada’s broken English is charming and his over the top heel mannerisms are SO GOOD. This all combines to make him a tremendous character. What a prick this guy is! I’m totally in love with this dickish incarnation and people who think they are “wasting” Okada are out to lunch. They probably need to cool it with saying “bitch” over and over, though, or at least limit it to just one character saying it.

On the less good scale was the contract signing between Timeless Toni and Mina Shirakawa. Oh, it wasn’t BAD, per se, but I was a bit surprised when Mina, with her broken English and mannerisms was roughly one thousand times more charismatic and compelling than Timeless Toni who is an outrageous walking cartoon character. Huh. As for the will they, won’t they love triangle storyline with Mariah May…? I don’t really care for it but I’m not really bothered by it, either. It’s mostly just an eyeroll for me, but if you dig it, mazeltov.

The other nitpick I have with this particular episode is the reveal of the Owen Cup; we were randomly told that it begins tonight, but we didn’t know the bracketing until today. Huh? One would assume the wildcard is finally the return of Hangman Page but if it’s him he sorta has to win, right? And fight Swerve at Wembley? I’m cool with that, but Page will have to be a heel, I would think. I’ll stop there and leave the weird obsession with fantasy booking Page to others.

At any rate, this Dyanamite managed the tricky balance of promoting the pay per view, being a complete unit of entertainment in and of itself and providing good in ring action. I can’t ask for much more than that. AEW is back on the good foot with me… for now.

Also, at the end, they casually just threw out the fact that Okada is facing ULTIMO GUERRERO ON COLLISION. RRRAAAAGGHHHHHHH LET’S FUCKING GO