La Zona Muerta

Feels good when you place your faith in a product and are justly rewarded for said faith. AEW pay per view remains the surest bet in the PPV universe (yes, even better than “Naughty Co-Eds open a Car Wash” vol. 6) and when the complaints are already coming in about how LONG the show was, or that Hangman Adam Page wore pink… you know that the usual suspects have no real talking points and that AEW Double or Nothing delivered.

Hell, I’m at least semi-intelligent and I’m not sure if *I* have any talking points myself! SHOW GOOD WATCH IT.

Okay, you need more?

The show overall didn’t really have any misses, per sé, even if there were an awful lot of heel wins. I think there was definitely a weak match… we’ll get to it… and maybe a missed opportunity… we’ll get to that as well… but everything that was meant to deliver DID deliver.

I may as well jump to the main event… I’m not big on star ratings or what have you; I find enumerating things I enjoy to be more difficult than YOU might… but I’d be stunned if anything this year tops Hangman Adam Page vs. Will Ospreay for sheer enjoyment. I went into the match pretty unsure who would win… but I was determined to try to put fantasy booking and FINISHING THE STORY (TM) and whatever other agendas aside. In fact, I said something to that effect before the match on my BlueSky account… a LOT of people were preemptively mad that TONY KHAN HATES HANGMAN and I CAN’T BELIEVE OSPREAY IS GOING TO WIN and any number of permutations on same. What all those people seemingly forgot is that Will Ospreay is an INCREDIBLY unselfish performer. I mean, even right now, people are STILL angry, even after that incredible match, that Hangman will somehow fail to beat Jon Moxley (c’mon) or that Darby Allin is gonna do a snowboard kickflip ollie grind offa Mt. Everest and parachute into a title shot or any other number of ludicrous scenarios. FUCKING RELAX. SERIOUSLY. Stop treating Ospreay or Allin like the enemy. THEY ARE NOT. They aren’t cutting Hangman’s throat, they aren’t these political behemoths. Those kind of people, those political animals DO exist in this company but your attention is cast in the wrong direction. AEW has 100% faltered in the main event scene in the quest for HEAT~! but they aren’t going to fail to give you a happy ending (ooh er, missus) in Texas.

Anyway.

I said last week that Hanger and Ospreay are both dudes who aren’t afraid of getting up close and personal, aren’t afraid of making it snug.

THEY MADE IT SNUG.

The match was worked INCREDIBLY deliberately, and I don’t mean deliberate as some kind of euphemism for “slow,” I mean it built and built and built. This was like watching a main event in New Japan in the good old days of 2013 through 2019 or so. This was two young dudes, both SO GOOD at their craft and the portions of it that they have mastered, giving you EVERYTHING they had. This match had drama, emotion, tension, purpose, a terrifying malfunction where only Page’s quick actions SAVED OSPREAY’S LIFE, callbacks to other matches, callbacks to other WRESTLERS, all sorts… and none of it was overwrought or out of place. I SCREAMED when Ospreay gave Hanger a Styles Clash to the floor. I SHOUTED on at least one of those NASTY lariats Hangman served up. When the announce table collapsed prematurely, even my wife, who only just recently became a Hangman convert (and is afraid he’ll be too babyfaced of a babyface now that he’s ‘redeemed’) made a sympathetic noise. If you knew her, you’d know that was pretty much her highest form of showing concern. Speaking of that pesky, near career ending table, there was an (unintentionally) hilarious part where Ospreay was stalking to the outside to do in Hangman and diminutive referee Bryce Remsburg shouted “This isn’t like you, Colby! You don’t want to WIN like this, Will!” but of course, that was the whole point… Will was willing to do almost ANYTHING (shy of inflicting the Tiger Driver ’91 on Hangman) to win and was LOSING HIMSELF in that desire. In fact, I suspect that part of the story has only begun to play out as where Will goes next is fairly unclear. That’s when you know this shit is good… even though there was a climax… the story keeps building, keeps growing in new directions. It’s not the endless, repetitive loop of “will they get along / who’s in charge” strife of the Bloodline, it’s not the never ending Death Riders deal. There’s a new branch for Ospreay to take (does he turn heel?) even as Hangman now starts his quest to save AEW from Moxley. It’s EXCITING, dammit. I cannot recommend this match highly enough, especially if you are someone invested in AEW, invested in the journeys of Hangman or of Ospreay.

Of course the other big headliner of a match was Anarchy in the Arena, a match that I have said in the past that I don’t really care for. Despite my misgivings, this match was silly, wacky, dangerous and most of all… FUN. You still had the problems; insufficient camera coverage… the director missing key spots… all that sort of junk kind of endemic to this match type… but the contrived nature worked here and pretty much everyone got their chance to shine. The gimmicks were outrageous… glass bottles, staple guns, chairs and tables of all stripes, gimmicked boxes, forklifts… wacky costumes including Kenny Omega with some Captain America flair (shouldn’t he be Captain Canuck or at least Guardian?) and the Young Bucks dressed in colonial garb (cowards; why no powdered wigs?!)… and Swerve Strickland dressed as a Predator. I LOVE how geekery is the main engine that drives AEW. Towards the end, I said something to the effect of “they put women in this match… why are they shying away from women hitting men and vice versa?” and then the reason they were shying away from it was obvious; they had a bunch of spots set up where that was the point as Willow Nightingale delivered spear upon spear to her opponents. I joked last week that some people get more worked up about what song will play throughout the thing than they do the match itself (a trope they started after these matches transitioned from being pretaped affairs) but then Kenny Omega got on the mic and told someone in the back to “PLAY THAT SHIT” and suddenly Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” flooded the airwaves. GLORIOUS, just the dumbest nu metal garbo (and associated with wrestling to boot… the theme for a time for both WWE’s aborted version of ECW as well as Jim Cornette’s OVW, which is sure to frost his hide). I mean, this whipped the crowd into a FRENZY. You had Swerve pallet surfing on a forklift, Wheeler YUTA LITERALLY BEING THROWN IN THE TRASH by Katsuyori Shibata… Willow being handcuffed to the ring BY AN EARRING LOOP (ugh!)… all sorts of wacky BS. The match ended when all of the Death Riders were piled into the ambulance which apparently had been commandeered by Mark Briscoe after his stretcher match (more on that in a bit) and the Young Bucks were cut off from everyone else… leading to their destruction at the hands of Swerve and Kenny Omega. Kenny took Matt up the entrance ramp and gave him the One Winged Angel, THROUGH AN EXPLODING TABLE. In a clever, Bucks-ian tie in with his new Reebok shoes going on sale later this week, Swerve donned tack laced sneaks and stomped Nick Jackson into another time zone. Now that the Death Riders are FINALLY showing ass, it’s hard to be upset about the never ending horseshit they’ve dealt out since September of last year. They’ll have one last thrash over the next seven weeks, one last burst of obnoxious unbeatableness… and then Hangman is going to Old Yeller this deal at All In. Count on it.

I also wanted to shoutout Powerhouse Will Hobbs here, who they booked to be an absolute KILLER. I would go so far as to say he might have been the MVP of this wacky deal, no selling chair shots, staples, spinebusting everyone that moved… he looked GREAT in this and the match was definitely engineered to spotlight him. For a time, Hobbs seemed a bit adrift in the AEW ocean, but they have really got a handle on him now, I think. Great showing from him.

Strangely, the only person that didn’t really get a lot was Samoa Joe, of all people. HOOK did appear to pay back Claudio Castagnoli for whatever CLaudio did to take out HOOK (the stomach drop on the chair thing?) and they then teased some tension between HOOK and Joe, which I think is a mistake but… eh. Not too concerned.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the FTR match with Danny Garcia and Nigel McGuinness. NO ONE TURNED, although that could be a story to come, coming to a Collision near you soon. The match itself was fun and well worked, but Nigel seemed to be slower and breathing a LOT harder than he did in either his matches with Bryan Danielson or with Lee Moriarty, so I wonder if he was legitimately hurt. They beat on him a LOT. Tony Schiavone ultimately did NOT interfere in the match, but they SURE seemed to be building to it. We were HOLLERING for Tony to kick the evil Stokely Hathaway low. Fun match, the bad guys won and the story will continue to unfold, for better or worse. If the common thought is that Edge (ugh) returns to take on FTR, they would have seven weeks to somehow get him on side with Christian (and THAT is a babyface turn I can’t see happening), so I don’t know where THAT will go and honestly have little interest in that aspect of things, but the FTR / Garcia stuff is good and… let’s face it, this is the best FTR have ever been in AEW.

I didn’t think much of the Hurt Syndicate match with Dustin Rhodes and Sammy Guevara. Sammy bumped his ass off… but HE was the one to get pinned, and not the predating the Big Bang itself shambling body of Rhodes. They (Rhodes and Bobby Lashley) also did the dumb WWE main event barricade spear spot which just makes me reflexively retch. Not a fan of this. I get that a lot of people don’t like Sammy because he’s a flips guy (or maybe more accurately because he proposed to a woman in ring and then married someone else… dude STILL gets heat for something that really isn’t any of our business), and I’m not his biggest fan either… but when he’s the ONLY young guy in the match and everyone else is near or over fifty… and HE’S the one to eat the pin? It’s horseshit.

The other thing… look, the blog will show I’m not a fan of Mercedes Moné, her very WWE-coded promo style, her character big leaguing everyone, her somewhat sloppy in ring work (do you SEE the finish of this match? Poor Jamie Hayter)… I genuinely feel she’s marking time until she can return to WWE, fair or not. I realize that it’s PROBABLY in the company’s best interest to have their biggest home grown women’s star (Toni Storm) face Moné in a title for title match. I don’t need to be WRESTLESPLAINED TO as a presumably well-meaning do gooder tried to do to me last night on BlueSky in regards to Mercedes (and sorry, anonymous do gooder; Mercedes DOES have input over her wins and losses. She just does, whether you believe it or not. NO, she isn’t the booker. YES, she has say). I just think that Mercedes eats up her opponents, doesn’t give them much in return and although Jamie Hayter had a VERY good outing here… it was DESPITE Mercedes and not BECAUSE of her. When I watch Mercedes, I feel like I’m watching Edge… like they are holding their nose and doing something because they HAVE to and not because they WANT to. I lived through YEARS of that mentality when I was a regular TNA watcher, and I’ve seen it here, too.

Hayter, for her part looked terrific in this match; she’s finally got back whatever it was she had before she was on the shelf for well over a year. People BOUGHT her near falls and even thought she might have been able to eke out a victory! Was this a missed opportunity? I think the crowd would have loved it… I don’t know if Hayter and Storm would feel as special as Mercedes and Storm presumably will. Obviously there was no chance of that; they are working backward from the All In card, but it’s a testament to Hayter putting in the work that people were able to talk themselves into her having a chance.

YMMV, of course, and if you dig Mercedes, that’s fine. I don’t. Hopefully reasonable minds can disagree.

Before I get out of here… I again have to eat some humble pie in regards to Ricochet. I didn’t think that the ambulance / stretcher match he and Mark Briscoe were slated for was going to end up as much of anything… and then they only went and had the best ambulance match I’ve seen in YEARS. Ricochet has OWNED this heel turn and made it work for him SO WELL, and Mark Briscoe is possibly the best utility player on the entire AEW roster. Kudos to these gentlemen taking something that was kind of not a big deal and making it work so well.

Again, overall, despite the large concentration of bad guy wins… this was a great show. It laid SO MANY seeds for the future, and All In is already shaping up very well. AEW has enough goodwill and momentum built up with me that I’m not gonna worry about Hangman choking against Mox or Mercedes doing Mercedes things or Darby rappelling down from the ceiling at precisely the wrong time or FTR vs. Edge and Christian or any of that stuff. I’m going to try to enjoy the forthcoming shows as they come and trust that the good stuff they have cooking is indeed COOKING.