La Zona Muerta

“The heat, my god, the heaaaat!” – Elaine Benes

I was prepared to come here and tell you, brethren, that Dynasty was an all timer, and what a dummy I was for almost skipping it… but the final two minutes of the show saw the collective AEW audience sentenced to a summer of repeats and mediocrity. I don’t care about the HEAT and whoever it is that finally manages to put Maxwell Jacob Friedman down… and THEREIN lies the trouble. Who cares?

Think about the main event picture as it currently stands. MJF and Darby Allin? Seen it already. (and apparently this is a TV match? Prepare for fuckery. If he somehow wins in front of a small Everett crowd, and don’t hold your breath, he’s dropping it right back in three weeks). Hangman Adam Page can’t challenge again and we’ve seen that a million times, anyway (and the fantasy booking I saw involving him interfering somehow tonight evaporated in a puff of logic). Jon Moxley? I guess you could do that but that doesn’t particularly move me and WE. HAVE. SEEN. IT. Will Ospreay? I mean, yeah, but we’ve seen that, too, and apparently he has both neck and EGO trouble given tonight’s show. He’s got to walk the path of hubris, but does it lead to MJF? How about Swerve Strickland? Maybe, but they seem shy on pulling that trigger for some reason. Konosuke Takeshita and Kazuchika Okada are locked in their neverending death spiral, so they’re out. Kyle Fletcher is hurt. Who does that leave?

Regardless of whatever name you throw out, I don’t really think any of them GET anything out of beating MJF at this point. He’s not like the monstrous Moxley, hogging all the air at the top of the card, ruling with an iron fist… he’s a try hard who does the same dopey cheating finish over and over. Frankly, I don’t think WE, the viewing audience get anything out of it, either… here’s a decent match with a dumb finish that will make you groan. Repeat for another four or five months. CAN WILY MJF OUTSMART EVERYONE ON THE ROSTER? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK.

I suppose this HEAT is to help add importance to the Owen Hart Memorial Cup, but man, that feels like a race to the bottom. Step up, step up. Who’s first to lose to a low blow and a foreign object shot? Maybe well get REALLY LUCKY and Bobby Lashley can be the one to take on Max at Wembley.

The long, hot summer has passed me by.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t some fun, surprising booking on the show and some excellent matches. I think just about everyone would have bet Chris Jericho was gonna win against Ricochet, but noooope. “I’m okay now! I didn’t forget to wear deodorant this time!” I bet most folks would have similarly bet on Edge and Christian getting one more title to add to their respective trophy dens, but nope. A pal said she thought that meant we definitely get TLC (or whatever the AEW version is; I forget) for All In, and yeah, that sounds about right. I personally assumed Ospreay was gonna kill Moxley on his march to Wembley, maintaining a perfect record on the way and nope. He essentially fucked around and found out, and Moxley killed him to death in a terrific match… so there was some cool or unexpected booking here and there, but the main event? We get the MJF Special; the ref bump, low blow, punch with the Dynamite Ring. That’s what we get, over and over into infinity, and summer turns to blah.

Let’s go thru this show quickly. Gonna be a long week.

A lot will be made in the coming days about how GOOD Jericho looked in his match with Ricochet, and yeah, he did take some tough bumps… but dude has always been tough. My dad thought he broke his neck in 1997 in a match with Gedo (yes, THAT Gedo) and he turned out to be okay. The thing is, yes, he was FINE in this match, but Ricochet really put in the work moving around the guy. And not everyone Jericho will have a match with is Ricochet. Fine enough tonight. Next time…?

Thekla and Jamie Hayter beat the crap out of each other. Tough gals and honestly, while I love Thekla’s persona, I’m never quite sure about her in-ring, but when she’s in there with someone like Hayter, someone unafraid of giving as good as she gets… they had a snug little match, and probably Thekla’s best overall showing in AEW thus far. I enjoyed this a lot.

The Young Bucks remain pretty much untouchable in the tag team annals (no Kenny, not anals) of history. You give them a match with Takeshita and Okada, even at max “can they coexist” levels, and you still get one of the best pay per view openers I’ve ever seen, with an EARNED ending; after finally coming to blows, Takeshita allows Nick Jackson to hit the Meltzer Driver on Okada. Beautiful, really, and now they can finally have their full blown match, but maybe THAT has been too long in coming, too. I’m less invested in the BIG TURN OF ’25 ’26 than I was, and that’s CRIMINAL. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the match or the finish; both were great, and without Kyle, Takeshita has less reason to hang out with the Don Callis Family. Callis, by the by, was UNREAL in this match, calling for (not a) bounty on Nick Jackson’s right eye (!) before simply trying to gouge it out himself (!!) and then being grossed out that he had EYE JUICE on his finger (!!!)… an amazing man.

The Casino Gauntlet Thingamajig was really good. RUSH got to show dominance, El Clon looked amazing (Hologram is gonna have to step up his game BIG TIME whenever he returns) and they did something really interesting, here. Kevin Knight got the win, which is great, a perfect time to strike while the iron is hot (for once) with that kid… but he sort of did it at the expense of Speedball Mike Bailey. Danny Garcia had Bailey in the DEATH SHOOTER, his version of the Scorpion Death lock where he leans back into it and basically exposed his belly. Knight did his amazing UFO frogsplash and nailed Garcia, but it also hit Bailey a bit, too, and Bailey had a sort of subtle, mixed reaction when Knight hoisted up the belt. Liked this match a lot, and the finish even better.

Darby Allin / Andrade was pretty much what you’d guess it would be. “Darby is gonna get beat up for 90% of the match and fluke into a victory,” the uninterested Mrs. Convoy said. She wasn’t WRONG; Darby got like a LITTLE more offense than that, but maybe not a great deal. I think the “Andrade gets a selfie with a lady” thing has jumped the shark but that’s wrestling for you; a kind of cool thing gets recreated and repeated into the dirt. Mrs. Convoy was also unimpressed with… um… another portion of… let’s say Andrade’s offense and leave it there.

Booooiiiinnnnnng.

I got up and did the dishes when Edge and Christian came out. Mrs. Convoy, she of even less patience than me, which is saying something, went and got the mail. Retrieving Fred Hembeck sketchcards was significantly more important than this match. Yes, MOTHER, I realize that I PAID to VIEW this; I did see the lion’s share of the damn match. There were some fun shenanigans with BIG STOKE; at one point Christian used Stokely as a human bullet to break up a pinfall which did get a legit chuckle out of me. FTR winning was a bit of a surprise, but will surely lead to El Gimmicko down the line. Diminishing returns for me, maybe neat for you.

I’m not going to speak ill like I normally might of someone who got hurt for real, but the Conglomeration doing this wacky sitcom entrance LIVE, doubling or tripling down on their wacky sitcom TonyTron video was a bit zany for my tastes, but then Clark Connors coming out and humping the couch and then Gabe Kidd PISSING on it… look, I support vulgarity, but this was pretty nasty, too much for me. Yuck. I get it; they are DOGS. Perhaps they should have been struck with rolled up newspapers.

Also yuck… Kamille? Really? The announcers told us she had been out for five hundred and twenty some odd days… but not even a hint as to WHY. Hopefully it’s a limited re-engagement and Willow Nightingale sends her back to the Shadow Realm (or version four of American Gladiators, whatever is worse).

The Will Ospreay / Jon Moxley match was EXCELLENT, just terrific. Ospreay was a dumbfuck to begin the match, absolutely KILLING Mox with two Hidden Blades (and if Mox BLADED HIS LIP to sell those elbow strikes…he’s a better man than I, Kemosabe) in the first thirty seconds of the match and then he stopped to jaw jack with the audience and just generally fart around without simply pinning Moxley. “Oh, I have TIME,” Ospreay boldly proclaimed, tapping his wrist tape. Mox immediately attacked his neck, and from then on, there were counters and counter counters, Ospreay losing structural integrity as his neck slowly unraveled, gradually being unable to do more and more of his spectacular offense. The story of the match was that Ospreay’s need for vengeance basically overrode his tiny, little brain. Moxley was feeling GOOD, doing his little hand jive dance he does when he’s really into the match. There was this incredible spot where Mox delivered the Death Rider, his double armed brainbuster variant (different to the Paradigm Shift, his double armed DDT variant) and Ospreay, on his way down, managed to hit Mox with the Hidden Blade elbow so convincingly that it made me yell out loud. Great stuff. Needless to say, Ospreay dipshitting around ultimately cost him the match as he succumbed to the increasing neck damage. He will now have to be VERY serious to win the Owen Cup, and Mox…? I dunno what they do with Mox as the Death Riders (I subconsciously mistyped the Death Riders as “the Dean Riders,” so make of that what you will) seem a bit aimless at this point, and Mox feels too important to be merely a gatekeeper. I really don’t want to relive Candidate Jon vs. Incumbent MJF or whatever that was way back in 2019 or 2020, probably MJF’s first real stinker of a feud… but surely Moxley has been so strong, so protected that at some point he will have to heroically go for the Heavyweight title. Jon! Watch out for the ref bump, low blow, ring punch combo! Maybe MJF will threaten to set Renee Paquette on fire.

Which brings us to the main event. I don’t… look. The match was fine, even good. Maybe great? I’m unsure. There were points where it felt great and points where it felt like a collection of moves, of spots, which was my complaint last month. There was great STUFF in it, Kenny outsmarting Max with ring IQ. Frankly… if you are going to do a fuck finish like this, an unsatisfying finish, I think you can probably shave some time off of the thing. Max’ skin had the mottled color of a particularly poor pot of butter chicken. There is no one tone in the 64 crayon box that truly captured the grossness of Max’ spray tan. Actually, come to think of it, Jericho also had skin tone issues, spray tan pooling up on the small of his back, looking like a Betadine stain. At one point, Max teased a CrossRhodes… TO NO REACTION. Anyway, they actually showed some restraint in regards to Kenny’s fabled TUM TUM trouble, staying away from it until roughly halfway through the match… but once Kenny’s rumbly tumbly started… giving out? He was gasping for air, having trouble doing moves that involved his core, etc. Kenny hit an avalanche One Winged Angel, and that’s where you knew it was trouble… that wasn’t the finish. Death flag the first. Then it was basically a war of attrition. Kenny got fired up and did this great, from the bottom of his tank comeback… and then there was a ref bump. Another flag. Kenny hit another OWA. No ref. The second ref came out too late as Kenny got the visual pin (another death flag; the fifteen count visual pin). Max recovered, fished around FOREVER for the Dynamite Diamond Ring (earlier confiscated by Bryce “let me show you how the sausage is made” Remsburg), got it, low blowed Kenny and then, the final indignity, he PUNCHED HIM RIGHT IN THE KING HIPPO NO NO PLACE. Chekov’s table was employed. Heatseeker. 1,2,3, yawn.

I dunno.

I wrote probably ninety percent of this column last night and am coming back to it with the cold, sober eyes of the Monday morning quarterback. There were the people that didn’t like the heel heavy wins (perfectly within their rights), the people that liked the show because of the great action, sort of despite some of the finishes (also valid) and then there are the people who are finger wagging at those who didn’t enjoy it exactly in the manner that they did.

Again with this?

The fall back argument is that you don’t have last year’s All In main, the catharsis that result gave without the year of Moxley on top, so you have to endure the HEAT now. Yes, that’s true in regards to the Hangman victory over Mox. But that seems to leave out the fact that AEW either intentionally or not, sacrificed like four or five months’ worth of pay per view main events to get to that point. The worst part of the Death Riders deal, BY FAR is the retroactive “ends justify the means” reframing of it. The turning point of the whole thing was the SECOND Edge / Moxley match, almost certainly a pivot and given away on TV because the FIRST one was received so poorly. That took place what, in February? Mox was champ since SEPTEMBER. I maintain, for ME, that Mox started having terrific matches AFTER he dropped the belt. There was a LOT of empty time between September and July, a lot of stinkers. And I’m worried we’re staring down a similar barrel.

MJF is a good wrestler, a GREAT wrestler. But he is also a stagnant one who hasn’t evolved in YEARS. His confidence was rattled when he was essentially turned face by the audience and then he went on to have a disastrous good guy champion run that still haunts the company. He ISN’T one note but right now, he’s CHOOSING to be. My problem with the main event of Dynasty ISN’T that a heel won. My problem is that a heel won in a really boring way and it basically assures, even if Darby coffin flops into a win next week, that the next SEVERAL AEW pay per view events will have a boring, heat building main event with the same or similar finish. GIVE ME SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Kenny Omega as elder statesman having new matches we haven’t seen, holding the belt until Wembley and losing a rubber match with Ospreay would have been different. I think Ospreay and Omega have a more interesting history than MJF and Ospreay do, and frankly, I think that’s a bigger, more exciting match. I’m not upset MJF won. I’m just bummed. Tired. I don’t think that there’s this amazing heat that’s going to pay off in some unforgettable denouement. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy.

Was Dynasty BAD because of the main event? Of course not. I’m not even sure you could say the main event was “bad,” even though that’s a matter of personal preference. I DO think it threw a bit of a wet blanket over the rest of the show. It definitely makes me less enthused for the summer in AEW to come. So sue me if I don’t join the voices of the people yelling at those who didn’t like it.

The other avenue of attack is that the show was too long. I dunno… it flew by for me, but YMMV. It’s one thing if us working stiffs thought it was too long… but the podcasters complaining about the length when they will willingly be consuming twelve plus hours of Vegas-based SLOP next week… NO SYMPY. It’s just noise; I try to block it out.

We’ll see what Wednesday (and Thursday) bring, I suppose. I’m not fired up about it. I wish I were. I wish MJF was out there living up to what I personally believe he’s capable of… but he’s not, and I’m not looking forward to the summer. I am going to be WAY more choosy as to what I buy, even if this show didn’t look amazing on paper and ended up being pretty strong.

Since this is another Dynamite / Collision back to back thing this week, I’ll likely speak to you again on Friday. If there are any Mania-week adjacent shows that are worth catching (don’t hold your breath), I’ll likely chat with you a bit about those as well.