La Zona Muerta

Yes, Revolution was great. Yes, the main event stunk. It’s okay to point both of those things out, I promise. You’d think saying one thing was bad was a capital offense! Blame the wrestlers, not the reaction.

The real diehard AEW fans will cop to EDGE / Jon Moxley stinking like a man covered in butane (EW, STINKY)…but they also don’t want that rotten main event to be the main topic of conversation today.

Here’s the thing… we need to talk about it. We need to talk about how EDGE won’t drop a fall, won’t put anyone over (and never forget he’s Mr. “I’m here to give back.”). We need to talk about how boring Mox is in main event matches, how the danger and urgency he has on promos EVAPORATES in ring. We need to talk about people talking themselves into thinking the build to this match was somehow good. We need to talk about overbooking and people having WWE-style “cash in” “title opportunities.” We need to talk about how the main event of a show that airs on Monday nights shouldn’t be acceptable as a main event on an AEW Pay Per View.

Then again… DO we (meaning you and I, dear reader) need to talk about this stuff? If you’ve been a reader of mine for any length of time, you know how I feel about Mox, and you CERTAINLY know how I feel about EDGE. You know how I feel about anything seeming even VAGUELY WWE-like in AEW. AEW, every time they lean into the overbooking, the celebrities, the skits, the slow, plodding matches… this is when they FAIL. AEW offers a peculiar but refreshing mix of the best of the American indy style, the best of Japanese wrestling, the (mostly) best of Lucha Libre… it’s this great hybrid and that’s where they need to concentrate their promotional efforts. I feel like five hundred words on the state of the main event scene or doing comparisons to WWE is a bit boring, a bit redundant. You guys know, the hardcores know, hopefully Tony Khan, one of the most online men alive, knows.

The only thing good you can say about the main event was that at least Christian burned his dopey WWE-like cash in thingiemabob up. It was VERY telling that people POPPED for Christian running in since the match itself had AbSOLUTELY ZERO JUICE WHATSOEVER (and I’m not talking the caveman-esque Juice Robinson). The match was boring, rote and just largely lifeless. Mox has these really peculiar instincts about working slow equalling working methodical, and EDGE is so fed pilled that I suspect he shits WWF Superstars cereal. The crowd was already pretty burnt out from three previous wild matches and so EDGE and Moxley’s big idea was to GRAB A HOLD or whatever. Fortunately, this (hopefully) takes EDGE out of the main event scene, takes Christian’s dumb cash in clipboard away FOREVER and hopefully means we can get back to Elite wrestlers doing Elite things. Swerve and Mox… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about it… sacrificing Swerve Strickland, probably the best candidate to be the face of the company both in and out of the ring to Mox would be a mistake but, for now… I have some hope about where they go from here, so that’s something at least. A LOT of people classified this match as being something that was necessary to “get past,” and man, if that isn’t an indictment of both it and the main event scene, I don’t know what is.

As for the rest of the show…

With the exception of the tag team match with the Hurt Syndicate (speaking of people who don’t want to drop falls… oops, did I say too much) and the pretty obviously in over their head (both in real life and kayfabe) gag tag team of the Outrunners… this was an excellent card. Even Mercedes Moné vs. Momo Watanabe had it’s moments (I like Momo a lot from what I’ve seen) and Toni Storm vs. Mariah May… especially May who I have been VERY hard on, probably had a match of the year candidate. I’ve been very critical of this feud; I don’t care for the Timeless Toni Storm gimmick and the endless head canon people invent to justify it and May I think is VASTLY overrated but both women MORE than delivered, here. It was easily May’s best performance in AEW. I mean… suddenly the ladies were having a TAIPEI DEATH MATCH like they were in the ECW Arena circa 1996! That was a wild time, not long enough to overstay its welcome, a total crowd pleaser and a hopefully permanent punctuation mark on this feud.

Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Hangman Adam Page absolutely SMASHED each other in the show opener. Both cats are young, hungry and willing to let it all hang (!) out in the ring… even MJF, who really is better in ring than some give him credit for. I have never seen an Angel’s Wings in the 25 years I’ve been following Christopher Daniels delivered with such brutal, face smashing force as the one Page DESTROYED Max with. The replay looked like the old ECW replays where they would show Chris Benoit LITERALLY breaking SABU’s neck at a gross angle reinforced by a telestrator (!). You should have heard me scream out loud and the venerable Mrs. Convoy cackle with glee, bless her dark, dark heart. I half expected to wake up today and see that the two men got into a fight backstage since the move was seemingly delivered with almost careless force… but to be fair, MJF also delivered this repulsively brutal running piledriver on Page to a chair on the outside, so tit for tat, I suppose. It felt like a King’s Road kind of night with head drops and stiff strikes for all.

Speaking of stiff strikes, Brody King and Kazuchika Okada had a solid match that would have been a tremendous Collision or Dynamite main event… here, on this stacked show, it was “just” a good match. Okada gave King a ton and his chest was absolutely destroyed by the end of the bout due to King’s NASTY chops and strikes. Obviously Okada is being set up for bigger things, but they need to seriously give thought to pushing Brody King sooner rather than later.

Swerve and the highly geeky but also commendable in his way Ricochet had an excellent match… there may have been just slightly too much in the way of shenanigans with Prince Nana… but that’s a fairly minor criticism… and being as the match was largely built around Nana’s feelings for both Swerve and the coat that belonged to Jimmy Rave, Nana’s most successful charge prior to Swerve… you knew that the outside of the ring stuff would factor in heavily. Do we talk enough about how Swerve always delivers in ring? Crisp, sharp attacks? Movements with purpose? And, while I have been VERY hard on Ricochet in this space, I have to give him major props for the character reinvention. He’s never going to be a favorite of mine to watch bell to bell but I have to admit that he helped make this detour of a feud fun and entertaining.

I think I want to talk about the cage match before I talk about what was my match of the night. Will Ospreay and Kyle Fletcher were ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED TO KILL EACH OTHER IN THE CAGE. I had joked with some pals that someone was gonna die tonight what with all the weapons and head drops, and if there was a match where both dudes wanted it… it sure as hell was THIS one. I know that some people had an issue with the interference from Mark Davis (although it makes sense within the story) and maybe some had a problem with weapons being introduced… the thing that got me personally upset was the absolutely risky and needless Spanish Fly (the Spanish Fly is actually performed by three people… a two man Spanish Fly is really Frankie Kazarian’s Flux Capacitor – signed, a pedant) off of the cage. It REALLY looked like Will Ospreay fucked his hip up on that move… hopefully he’s okay but the post show scrums are COMPLETELY WORTHLESS and did not provide an update to his health as far as I know. I hate being the safety guy but the move was NEEDLESS, especially when we already had a Styles Clash into thumbtacks (some of those tacks going into the groinable, crotchable area), multiple brainbusters (one onto a chair), etc. At any rate, the weapons and even the melodrama didn’t bother me much here since the feud is so personal and heated. I’m no fan of the mid match monologue, but at the end of this, Fletcher SCREAMED “I fucking hate you! Fuck you, you son of a bitch! I hate you!” (The wife reminded me of the Kevin Steen Show with Cliff Compton, IYKYK) leading to being CLOBBERED by Ospreay. Again, the melodrama works for me when it’s an appropriate thing, and the personal nature here… it all landed for me. Great match, maybe a little much due to dumbness, but that’s not a mortal sin.

That brings us to my favorite match of the whole goldurn night: Big Ken and Big Take. If you want to see what it is I like about pro wrestling when I’m not bitching about it or nitpicking it to death… it’s this match. It’s a heated feud, it’s stakes, it’s hard hitting, and best of all… they left stuff on the table for down the road. The video package they showed for this… good Gotch above. They showed Takeshita from DDT before he went through, uh… second puberty, and man, did he look like a different person. I know some people still aren’t quite getting or are annoyed by Kenny now having a weakness in his TUM TUM, but Brock Lesnar matches all added this vulnerability post his bout with diverticulitis. Bryan Danielson matches all pretty much focussed on his real life neck issues for the last year of his career. It’s gonna be a component of Kenny’s matches for some time to come if not the rest of his career, as well. It’s another storytelling option; Kenny has his own Kryptonite! I don’t have a problem with it, but I have seen some teeth gnashing about it already. For my part, I get a kick out of Don Callis gleefully talking about the time bomb in Kenny’s guts exploding and the psychological damage the surgery caused and etc. There was some tremendous exploitation of Kenny’s TUM TUM trouble… punches to the gut, knees, Kenny being dropped stomach first on the EDGE of a table (not through it)… Kenny taking a plunge from the top rope that saw the referee probably legitimately rush to check on him… this was all really good stuff. Each man struggled to apply the hissatsu (Japanese for “finisher,” Why yes, I am a weeb, but look at Kenny in his Hajime no Ippo gear) move but neither could quite make it happen… and the best part of all was Kenny won on a fluke roll up… they have WAY MORE that they left on the table for a potential rematch… but the smart money is on Kenny facing Okada at the Texas version of All In in July. That’s a few months out… is there more to come with Takeshita or is this the start of Takeshita’s stealth sidehack over to New Japan Pro Wrestling? I dunno: answers on a postcard. There’s a lot of time before All In and that’s where I tend to get worried with AEW; when they have a lot of time to kill between programs. I’m HOPEFUL they won’t waste Kenny and that he won’t disappear or anything but one never knows.

So obviously, this was a great show with a damp squib of a closer. They did bring out Swerve caving in Moxley’s face at the end to send people home happy… and it certainly made ME happy. There’s always this weird “just because one match wasn’t as good, blah blah blah” sort of reflexive thing from AEW fans and… I dunno, I think it’s perfectly okay to point out when something is bad or stale or both. You’re not obligated to enjoy match ten because matches 7, 8 and 9 were awesome. You’re not obligated to enjoy ANYTHING; AEW need to be the ones to WORK for YOUR enjoyment.

My only other real gripe on this show was largely because it was in Los Angeles… it had a stifling, stultifying amount of pointless celebrity interaction. Not a fan of that here OR in the other place.

Overall a TERRIFIC night of pro rasslin’ with a couple of caveats.