La Zona Muerta

Well, that’s that. All In came and went. It played host to probably something near 30,000 spectators and apparently is on track to be one of AEW’s most purchased pay per views EVER. So business wise, an absolute smash. And yeah, for ME, the back half of the show delivered. It’s not even that the first half of the show was bad… nothing was PARTICULARLY bad… it just depends on how you feel about certain things. Me, being a bit (well, MORE than a bit) of a curmudgeonly misanthrope… me famously hating older stars not putting over newer ones… there were a couple of things that kind of took me out of the show and in some ways, they never really got me back.

Look, frankly, I’d rather talk mostly about the main event and how near perfect it was. AEW has a new champion, and, of course, it’s Hangman Adam Page. He of the chain, he of millennial anxiety, he of the house burning downing. I can’t WAIT to talk about that… but…

I said to one of my pals about at the halfway point, after the Young Bucks lost (!) to Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland that I wasn’t feeling the show. And I stand by that. I guess that means I need to go through this match by match… since I know so many people were PSYCHED about the show and feeling great about it afterwards.

The trios match opener (Death Riders vs. the Opps) was fine… but they sent Samoa Joe out on a stretcher at the end and did the soft “Owen Hart is dead” type SUPER CONCERNED voices. Amusingly, someone in the back didn’t realize that the selling of the demise of Joe had to lead DIRECTLY into an ad read for Draft Kings.

Oops.

The men’s Casino whatnot gauntlet (essentially a timed battle royal where it just goes until someone wins) took place. There was a lot of good stuff in it… but it also took FOREVER and featured a million scenes of dudes just laying around while others did their little sequences in the ring. This was NOT laid out to best effect. ROCK HARD Juice Robinson made his return, as did the Gunn Club. I knew Maxwell Jacob Friedman was winning, so I was practically SCREAMING at the TV to hold off on giving us Jay White during this impromptu Bullet Club Gold reunion, as there would be no point in bringing him back if he weren’t willing. No Jay White to be seen as it turned out, and no beard on Juice, which ultimately looked fairly cursed. He looked like a jacked Joey Lawrence wearing the EXTRA stupid version (the dumb, biker one) of the Undertaker’s gear.

WHOOOOA

Mistico was in the match largely just to lead the crowd in the sing along to the theme song they don’t know the words to. Each time they try to recreate that beautiful, organic moment from Arena Mexico where the entire crowd sang along to Me Muero … they don’t QUITE get across the finish line with it. That’s one of those pro wrestling things that I HATE; something that was cool once has to be repeated and RUN INTO THE FUCKING GROUND until all coolness is stamped out of it. I think he did one or two spots with Max and just laid in a heap on the outside the rest of the time. Why bother? Y’all better KEEP HOPING that Mistico FINALLY has that apuestas match with Max and that Max DOES THE RIGHT THING. Ooh, another mood dampener was MVP joining commentary on this… and he absolutely COULD NOT SHUT UP during Mistico’s entrance, or anyone’s. HE STINKS. There, I said it. A SELFISH performer. Actually, there were a number of questionable things on commentary tonight. I’ll pick another time to REALLY go in on the SAINTED Jim Ross (hyper bowl? PS, he hates you WE fans and he OBVIOUSLY doesn’t like the product, so I don’t know why so many work so hard to defend him. He was one of Vince McMahon’s LOYAL lieutenants despite McMahon treating him again and again like a kicked puppy. HE IS NOT A GOOD PERSON) but my main bugbear, besides the commentators NOT SHUTTING UP DURING ENTRANCES was largely Taz. I LOVE Taz… when he’s serious… but especially during the final two matches, he kept trying to add an unnecessary level of levity and dorkiness. I’m about out on him as a commentator… the wackiness was cute on AEW DARK. Not so much here.

The next bummer was a multi layered one. During the pre show, it was announced that suddenly Adam Cole would be unable to defend the TNT title, which sucks so hard. A lot of people online have been unnecessarily mean or weird about Cole… bordering on cruel. I don’t care if you don’t like his work… that’s fine and is no reflection on the actual man Austin Jenkins, but all the weird comments about his body, about no longer dating Britt Baker, all of that stuff… people are really weird and petty and jealous, I guess. Maybe this will stop the flow of vile hatred towards the man? Probably not. I had JUST watched an interview with him on Thursday where he was smiling and happy, grinning about about how much All In and having the match with Kyle Fletcher meant to him… and instead of tearing it down with Fletcher, he had to give a “I’m not sure if I’m retiring but yeah, maybe I am” speech, a terrible, deflating and genuinely sad moment. Heartbreaking. He’s genuinely one of the GOOD people in a horrible, carny driven business and this guy again isn’t sure if he can continue on wrestling any longer. So first, you had this worry about what had happened to Adam Cole. Then, suddenly, instead of simply subbing in, say Roderick Strong for Cole, or maybe Daniel Garcia who has openly been sort of feuding slash working with Cole whilst being courted by the Don Callis Family… Sammy Guevara, Dustin Rhodes AND Danny Garcia were now fighting Fletcher in a four way. Dustin and Sammy were relegated to the preshow (and the ONE long, not so great match on ROH Supercard of Honor on Friday)… but they were WARRIORS for “agreeing” to take this match at the last minute. So Kyle Fletcher, who was supposed to be coronated on this show, this HUGE show that will be watched again and again… got shut out in the cold and was nearly a NON FACTOR IN THE MATCH, and Dustin Rhodes, a man well, WELL into his fifties, a man who shows up on Dynamite once in awhile to scream “BITCH” at someone, is now YOUR TNT champion.

If you LIKE Dustin Rhodes, it was a great moment, I’m sure. If you were in the crowd, it was probably a lovely little moment, especially after the funereal gravity of Adam Cole’s speech where he said he had to leave for awhile and didn’t know if he was coming back. If you’ve followed Dustin’s career as he shambled from company to company and back, if you think he’s average at best, entitled and not necessarily the ally he portrays himself as… if you aren’t blinded BECAUSE HE’S THE RHODES WHO CHOSE TO STAY… it wasn’t quite the heartfelt whatever they WANTED it to be.

Smarter people than me instantly reached out to say that it was a bad day to coronate Fletcher given the nature of Cole’s abdication; Fletcher will be fine. And they are right, of course… but what’s better… Fletcher killing Rhodes (if Rhodes LETS himself get eaten up by a young guy, that is) at a random Dynamite no one will remember or winning in front of thirty thousand people at a huge show that will be endlessly rewatched?

I was NOT feeling the show at this point and frankly, Cole’s possible retirement plus the Rhodes stuff took me out of it. The Bucks and Swerve / Ospreay came out with that SAVE THE SHOW mentality and worked their asses off… but somehow Swerve and Ospreay got the win (I’m half convinced this was a last minute pivot to get the crowd back) and all that stuff I talked about in the last Dyanamite column here about the perfection of having Swerve and Ospreay having an aggressive six month program against each other while being thrown out of the main event picture was RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW. My thumb was SLOWLY TRENDING DOWNWARD.

The women’s Casino thingamajob gauntlet was pretty good, actually VERY good, largely well worked, well laid out. Of course, it’s never enough that the women have a good match or whatever, they HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN THE MEN. “Show the men how it’s done!” I saw someone write and it’s just like… where do you even begin? IT IS NOT A COMPETITION. This match was better than the men’s gauntlet, yes. But it wasn’t because anyone PERFORMED BETTER than anyone else in this never ending, dopey battle of the sexes. TINY CON HATES WOMEN. WHY HE NO GIVE US WOMEN TAG TITLES? I dunno who needs to hear this, but no matter how much you sing along to her theme song, JULIA HART WASN’T BETTER THAN ANYONE IN THE MEN’S BATTLE ROYAL. The women’s gauntlet was tighter and featured less wrestlers and less down time and therefore was better. BREVITY IS A THING (said everyone who has ever clicked on lazonamuerta.net). Athena (another person people get weird about for all sorts of reasons, probably primarily because they think she has been “demoted” to ROH although she’s largely been it’s FOCAL POINT) got the win so she is relegated to ROH no longer, one assumes.

The Hurt Syndicate won a boring three way over Jetspeed and the Patriarchy. MVP helped partially rap their entrance theme and unsurprisingly, unlike ‘P, NO ONE TALKED OVER HIS RAP. Tells you what you need to know. FTR came out and were actually pretty good on commentary, so that was something.

The fun stuff happened AFTER the match when Young Nick Wayne FINALLY turned on Christian Cage (with the support of Mother Wayne and Kip Sabian, Kip bedecked in a shirt from his wife’s closet). The slow burn on this has been YEARS in the making and it was great. Less great was the return of EDGE, one of my least favorite professional wrestlers of all time, to save Christian from the dreaded CONCHAIRTO. Edge helped Christian to his feet and asked him to “go FIND yourself,” which means we will be getting that E&C reunion, that 2002-3 WWE nostalgia run that no one asked for, sooner than you think. FOR THE BENEFIT OF THOSE OF YOU WITH FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY, AMIRITE. Again, someone far smarter than I pointed out that meant they would be out of the title picture, at least, and he is definitely right… but I really have no idea why AEW fans want to celebrate a WWE nostalgia act from well over twenty years ago, longer than some of these people have actually been watching wrestling. Baffling.

I really was out on the show at this point, for better or worse. Again, it’s not like anything was HORRIBLE exactly, but it was dying a death of a thousand cuts.

I don’t have a ton to say about Mercedes Moné and Toni Storm. It was a good match, well worked and only had a little bit of the kick out spam that turns me off. I saw some people throwing around the BIG FIVE for this one and yeah, I don’t know about that. If you factor in that it was the culmination of a long feud and so forth, sure, why not? If that’s the validation you need as opposed to just liking it, go for it.

I don’t talk a ton about these ladies because, largely, I know their stuff isn’t really for me or mine and frankly, I’m not very into it… I try not to bring people down whining about their antics too much and try to give credit where credit is due (like last week where I largely liked Toni’s promo, hated Moné’s and am getting a little weirded out by the high sexual content of the Toni stuff). Before the gimmick change, I liked Toni Storm fairly well as a hard hitting worker (I prefer Jamie Hayter, but there you go). Toni, as Timeless Toni at one point just when people were REALLY complaining about the presentation of her character, went back to more of her former hard hitting in ring style but began like kicking out of everything and the kitchen sink, which bugs me. I recall a match she had with Serena Deeb where Storm was VERY MUCH not the white hat, kicking out of EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN that Deeb hit her with and it was like “why is Storm suddenly heroically kicking out of shit like she’s Kurt Angle?” I thought Sasha Banks was a great addition to the roster back when I watched WWE and was only occasionally puzzled by some of her offense looking more devastating to herself than her opponent. I think her matches in STARDOM and “New Japan” have largely been overrated and it took her a LONG time to get into the groove in AEW. AEW fans seem to have this puzzling ability to retcon past mistakes with current performances (more on that in a bit) and it perplexes me. A couple of strong matches doesn’t really make up for a couple of years of mediocrity, in my opinion and therefore I don’t usually go on about either lady too much. I don’t LIKE them as much as YOU probably do.

There was something in the match that annoyed me… both in ring and outside of it. Towards the end of the match, Toni hit the Storm Zero (not just a Japanese alcoholic beverage, but rather a short, sit out piledriver) three times in rapid succession, which was REALLY cool, a totally memorable spot. I said to the wife, “if that’s not the finish, whatever they do will NOT be as cool as that.” It was not, in fact, the finish. Two or three minutes later, Toni hit ONE MORE Storm Zero from the second rope and that was it, the match was over. It was not, in fact, as cool as the three short ones in rapid succession. That sort of thing, missing the peak and going a few more minutes, kicking out of stuff that SHOULD have been the finish has been a plague in American wrestling forever, probably popularized by Ring of Honor… I’m pretty used to it… annoying, but not a deal breaker. However, I went online and saw someone say with dripping condescension, in regard to the three Storm Zeros “The weirdos who think a piledriver shouldn’t be anything but a finish won’t like that,” which was irritating enough. BUT THE MEGA IRRITATING THING WAS THAT THREE MINUTES LATER A FUCKING PILEDRIVER WAS, IN FACT, THE FINISH. Not a PEEP about that, of course. A rush to defense against *checks notes* people who think piledrivers should be devastating (!) and then NOTHING. Listen, I know he thinks he was defending the POOR WOMEN from, I dunno, the Jim Cornettes of the world or whatever, but guess what? WOMEN DON’T NECESSARILY NEED WHITE KNIGHT DEFENSE ALL THE FUCKING TIME. THREE PILEDRIVERS IN A MATCH IN MEXICO WOULD PROBABLY MEAN RETIREMENT. That genuinely isn’t some crazy, can’t enjoy modern wrestling thought to think three piledrivers, one right after the other, being kicked out of is a little bit much.

Maybe there would be less weirdness from ALL SIDES about “women’s wrestling” if people were willing to judge it they way they do “men’s wrestling,” whatever that means. Maybe matches should just be MATCHES and judged on their own merits, and not defended simply because of who’s in them? I know, I’m a garbage human being for saying that.

*cough* Sorry. This is EXACTLY why I don’t normally get on these screeds and don’t talk much about women’s wrestling. The match really was a good, solid affair, mostly free of bullshit and the things I thought were “wrong” with it were mostly more matters of preference than technical acuity (tell Mercedes to lay off of the meteoras, tho’. She spams them the way Kenny used to spam the V-Trigger).

It was finally time for Kenny Omega / Kazuchika Okada FIVE. Good heavens.

It’s another match where, strangely, I don’t have a ton to say about the match itself. It was very good, solid, well worked. Was it as good as their previous efforts? No. Was it BAD, somehow? No, certainly not. Will it live on in my memory banks forever? Probably not.

Again, it comes down to a matter of preference. We knew the main event was going to have a ton of run ins and horseshit overbooking… but they gave this, the semi main, it’s fair share of that, too. And it’s not like that doesn’t make sense… Don Callis and his interference have been a running theme in Omega matches since, what, the first Forbidden Door show with Ospreay? It’s just that… this was a very WESTERN style match… and they did this back to back with the other match. TONS of work on Kenny’s compromised TUM TUM (and obviously, that’s going to be a component of Omega matches forever going forward; I’ve talked about that here plenty). Interference. Callis running around, doing stuff (and hey, how shitty of a boyfriend, if boyfriend he indeed is, is Kota Ibushi? Like, protect your man, dude). A referee pull out (Kenny had successfully hit the One Winged Angel, and Callis pulled out the ref at the last second, leading another ref to get involved). Kenny, ultimately couldn’t overcome the horseshit and succumbed to a Rainmaker. Again, good, even great match. Anyone that tells you that Okada OR Kenny are “washed” don’t know what fucking “washed” means, and should immediately be exiled to the Shadow Realm. I get why this match was so different than the ones they’ve had prior… they’ve DONE everything in their New Japan series so it actually makes sense that this one was so different, so Western. If you were THAT kind of pundit, the kind that invents stories out of whole cloth and assigns more meaning to things than is actually there, you could maybe say it was karma for all of the times Bullet Club interfered on Kenny’s behalf or some bullshit like that, but Omega / Okada I thru IV were largely free of BC shenanigans.

It’s just not really the kind of wrestling I prefer… not for these two, anyway. People seem to think that since this had a bullshit finish, this is the lead up to ONE MORE one more time, possibly in Canada. We’ll see but that had better be a cage match or something. Frankly, there are a NUMBER of other Okada matches I’d rather see, and honestly, Kenny matches as well, for that matter. I don’t know how much more time Kenny has on the clock, and even if Okada and Omega turned in a FIVE STAR PERFORMANCE, whatever that’s supposed to mean, we’ve seen them have BETTER than five star performances already. Give me Okada / Konosuke Takeshita! Give me Kenny / Hangman! Give me LOTSA stuff. I don’t need Kenny / Okada again. Their rivalry is already permanently immortalized.

And so we reached the main event.

And this? You could nitpick a tiny bit here and there. You could pearl clutch about it being too violent. You could try to complain about the interference THEY LITERALLY TOLD YOU WOULD BE A COMPONENT OF THE MATCH. You could get mad that they didn’t use my idea about the World Heavyweight Championship belt not being in Mox’ mystery briefcase (WHERE WERE THE PAPER SPRING SNAKES, DAMMIT). You could TRY to complain about all this stuff but THE MATCH WAS BASICALLY PERFECT. They took this nine plus month hostage holding, nine long months of bad main events and ambiguity, nine months of maybe not perfectly explained motivations and somehow channeled it into an emotional, climactic catharsis.

It was a pretty tidy piece of work. Well, tidy might be a poor descriptor. Jesus God, was it VIOLENT. Right away, Hangman gaffed Mox with a fork, and it wasn’t worked in any way. I saw some (not so) bright bulb claim the fork was a “paint pen.” It most assuredly wasn’t. Occam’s Razor (NOT the big gleeps on the other channel); sometimes the easiest way to make it look like you stabbed a guy with a fork is to, well… FUCKING STAB HIM IN THE HEAD WITH A FORK. SHOOT GLASS (Cry me a river TM Jack Perry) came into play. Barbed wire. Tables. Another babyface (Will Ospreay) got taken out on a stretcher (groan; I probably would pick that as my main nitpick). They gazumped it accidentally by rooting around under the ring but a nail… or maybe more accurately a screw bed came into play. Just every gross, brutal thing under the sun was brought out, but contextually, it all made sense. When the run ins started… they didn’t really detract from the match itself. Bryan Danielson came out in a Blue Panther mask, which was a nice touch. He promptly killed Wheeler YUTA, that shaggy, little turncoat, which was PERFECT continuity. Darby Allin cut a fucking PROMO WHILE HE WAS ON MOUNT EVEREST, which apparently distracted people from seeing that he was rappelling from the top of the Globe Life Field roof while the promo played (and yes, holy Christ, the place had a FUCKING ROOF. EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN BAD FAITH ROOF DISCOURSE SHOULD HAVE TO GARGLE TOMORROW WITH TACKS). He didn’t make it about himself, he said that he was going to make it his mission to fuck with Jon Moxley and his crew and promptly coffin flopped Coffin Dropped onto the Death Riders, and they all WENT AWAY AFTERWARD, brawling to the back, presumably, which was the key to making this all work without detracting from the match itself. APOLOGIZE TO DARBY, HANGMAN WEIRDOS. Marina Shafir got Death Valley Driven into a table and wasn’t a factor until the end of the match. When she was finally up and about, Mox loudly told her to “GET THE FUCKING BRIEFCASE,” (a number of people probably owe some money to the swear jar after the end of this show) and she obediently did so, but suddenly found herself SHACKLED. The devious PRINCE NANA had apparently been hiding under the timekeeper’s table and caught her. This was GLORIOUS when people realized what it meant. Swerve came out, glared at Hangman AND PASSED HIM THE CHAIN FROM THURSDAY. Hangman promptly hung Mox with it. Mox fought out, but he got hung AGAIN and then took a GNARLY bump into the bed of nails / screws. The end. Beautiful violence.

The thing here that’s weird; EVERYONE was immediately rushing to congratulate Mox… if Mox hadn’t been this unbeatable force, beating him wouldn’t have mattered. And they are right. But that fact can coexist with the fact that for the first, four? five months of this angle? IT SUCKED. Mox’ intentions, his promos, did not match his actions, did not match what we were seeing on screen. Did Private Party benefit? The AEW FRONTLINE? Orange Cassidy?

Yes, EVENTUALLY, he dialled in and things made more sense, but I can not, WILL NOT pretend that the last third of this thing working and making sense somehow excuses the first two thirds of this thing CUTTING PEOPLE OFF AT THE KNEES, so the overall efficacy of this angle is hard for me to judge. It DEFINITELY put people in seats, definitely got people to buy this show. It also probably ran some folks off, quite frankly.

Overall, it’s hard for me to judge All In ’25. The main event was a beautiful thing, practically perfect. Kenny / Okada was very good, despite my dislike of the shenanigans around the match. Toni / Mercedes delivered, maybe even over delivered depending on what you thought about it. The women’s Casino dealie was good and hopefully elevated Athena to the level that a two plus year champ should be seen at if she is FINALLY starting her AEW run. I liked the Nick Wayne turn, even if I didn’t like the Edge return. MJF has the men’s heavyweight title shot and despite what I might think about that, his interactions with Hanger since January have been EXCELLENT. A lot of the stuff I didn’t like come down to stuff where if YOU liked it (Rhodes, Edge, Kennyference, the show killing Hurt Men, etc.) I could see where you would think this show was excellent. Again, a matter of preference. Just because I didn’t like probably the first half or even the first two thirds of the show, I couldn’t say it was BAD. Am I as excited about the future of AEW as I was when I hit “publish” on my Dynamite column on Thursday night? Hard to say. A strong Dynamite on Wednesday will help, but I guess the answer is LARGELY yes, with some caveats and asteriks. As always, if you liked this show differently or better than *I* did, that’s no reflection on YOU; this blog is where, for some reason, a few dozen people come to get my feelings and I have to be honest about ’em.

And while I have the pundit / reviewer / won’t shut up hat on, a rare crossover with the CHEF RECOMMENDS branding (something I really need to get back into; recommending cool matches but I watch so little wrestling these days); you have to, you OWE IT TO YOURSELF to watch the Takeshita / Bandido main event from Supercard of Honor. Honestly, the whole show was great, and man… as good as the ROH PPVs almost always end up being (I can only really think of one clunker during the TK reign), I wish the same level of care was placed in ROH TV. I dunno if he farms that out to others and then just throws together the PPVs the week of or what but… damn. Bandido and Takeshita, despite the size difference, despite the style difference… frankly, they had a better match than ANYTHING on All In save the main event. Crisp work, great crowd heat, and a TREMENDOUS finish that didn’t really hurt anyone, a rarity in pro wrestling. Maybe mute the commentary, though, where neither Ian Riccabone nor Caprice Coleman recognized that Bandido was using finishers of previous ROH champions to try to secure a victory. I BESEECH YOU to check that one out if you have a chance.