La Zona Muerta

In essence, we’ve got two things to go over, here.

Thing the first?

No victory laps on Forbidden Door, please. Sure, it looks like a good card NOW, but that largely all came together between the time I last wrote in this space and the time I’m writing this now. I dunno if that’s a good job of “promotion.”

Thing the second?

Holy Gotch Above, was that a great Dynamite or what? Like, even if Forbidden Door doesn’t deliver (and let’s face it, it probably will, don’t get me wrong), man, that Dynamite sure did.

I definitely saw people crowing about the (now seemingly) obvious supremacy of the Forbidden Door card (ranging from pointing out that Forbidden Door coming together is always a last minute thing, which, yeah, I suppose that’s fair, if distressing, to way too psyched “TK never misses, suck it haters” rhetoric) and it’s like… yeah. I don’t think SHOTA UMINO here on these shores is anything to get PSYCHED over. Unless PAC sends him to the local medical facility, that is.*

Realistically, the only “Forbidden Door” match built WELL, of course, remains Thekla versus Starlight Kid. Thekla even went to Japan to threaten STARDOM head Taro Okada (which honestly seems like the REAL match that’s being built towards) and then snarled “You know how you can tell they don’t care about you [Starlight Kid]? Because they put you in a match with me.”

This is the greatest woman currently drawing breath on this wretched planet.

The Kenny Omega / Zack Sabre Jr. match will be good, perhaps even great, but the match has been so unevenly built. Like, tonight we got some sweet, almost heelish BIG KEN comments, which was cool, but, yeah, I dunno what the deal is with Kenny. Wildly swinging back and forth between hot and cold, like a run down apartment faucet.

Why are you mumbling about me clearly speaking from experience? MY FAUCETS RUN FINE. Except that one in the washroom.

Sure, they added Mistico to the card. And SHINGO Takagi. And some other cool folks. But again, that’s all a random add on. I mean, in theory, Mistico WORKS for AEW, anyway. Allegedly.

Jon Moxley / Bandido will either be great or a stylistic mismatch of epic proportions. Pay per view Bandido is usually something fairly special, so hopefully this ends up on the good side of the ledger. Bucks / Sky Team / Unbound Company will be a zany spot fest. Maya World versus Mercedes Moné is an unexpected feel good situation and if they have the balls to let World go all the way, it could be an all time AEW moment. Obviously Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland will be excellent. It’s gonna be a good show, even if I’m not personally wowed by the “Forbidden” content or the twelve man snorefest cage match (which you have to assume Mark Briscoe is winning so Maxwell Jacob Friedman can definitively beat Briscoe on TV in the build up to facing Kenny). As I said last week, the seeming FALLOUT of that match seems more interesting than the match itself. Maybe they should have done the “Blood and Guts” branding; Briscoe himself brought it up!

I think that’s enough Forbidden Door talk. I guess I have to write about that this weekend, huh? Sigh.

I’d much rather talk about how much ass Dynamite kicked. So much ass. ALL of the ass.

As always, this is not a MOVEZ blog, so I’m not going to break down each match in excruciating detail. What I AM gonna do is tell you why this show worked so well, why the show flew by so fast.

There was a minimum of backstage nonsense, and for the most part, the backstage nonsense we got was pretty effective. The show was 90% WRESTLING, flowing seamlessly from one match to the next, generally in very logical ways. And the wrestling we got? By and large, it was EXCELLENT wrestling.

Once upon a time, it was so obvious that the actual quality of in ring work in AEW had generally surpassed that of their major North American competitor, that the word went out… “well, AEW may have the better matches, but the matches don’t mean anything. They don’t tell stories. We have the better stories!” And lo, the narrative magically became “AEW doesn’t tell stories.” Never mind the fact that one of the bigger problems of AEW has traditionally been the fact that they tell TOO MANY stories, drawn out over too long a time, often missing the peak, but I digress (TM Taz). Of course, the “stories” in the other place have cratered this year (well, to be fair, probably not JUST this year, but now it’s so obvious that even those fans have to cop to it) so “they don’t tell stories” has now morphed into “AEW has too much wrestling.” Too much pro wrestling.

On a pro wrestling show.

About pro wrestling.

I’m not saying my ideal pro wrestling show would be angle free, interview free. You need some of that stuff. But lately, especially lately, I have found AEW a bit lacking in both interviews and angles. There’s been a lot, a LOT of repetition lately, a lot of emphasis on catchphrases and a over reliance upon use of what others call the “subtlety hammer,” where certain concepts are just BEATEN into the audience ad nauseum.

This episode of Dynamite was (mostly) largely free of that stuff. We got a very brief Death Riders thing backstage to start the show. A short MJF / Don Callis Family segment. There was a tiny bit of in ring back and forth between Kenny Omega and Zack Sabre. Jr. The Dogs attacked Edge and Christian in the back. There was an excellent Thekla promo package showcasing her misadventures in Japan. A less than 30 second Mercedes Moné package. And then there was a very brief Conglomeration promo that led to an extended main event angle with Mark Briscoe, MJF and the Callis men, etc.

That was it. Before the main event angle, everything I just listed above probably took up in total somewhere in the realm of seven or eight minutes or so. Everything else was WALL TO WALL WRESTLING, and Dyanamite was the better for it.

I get down on AEW sometimes, and justifiably so. But this is a company where hey, here’s MISTICO in a six man with Bandido and Brody King facing the Death Riders.

Marina Shafir interfered in the match and that rolled into her match with Harley Cameron (the only real misfire of the night in my opinion).

Will Ospreay, the evil, misogynistic monster** as a few people were DESPERATE to paint him as last week came out, mocking his own BUFFOONISH NONSENSE, as during the opening segment, he was in a huddle with the Death Riders, and SHOOT FELL DOWN IN A TUB LIKE A CLOWN. This empty headed puppy dog of a man is now history’s greatest monster? PLEASE.** At any rate, he mocked himself, slapped hands and faced off with one El Phantasmo. I go back and forth on what I think about ELP; obviously he’s a great, talented wrestler, but he leans too far and too often into comedy for my taste. There was little comedy here and man, MAN, the last three or four minutes of this match were STELLAR. ELP actually got a surprising amount of offense (too much? I can see some people saying that since Will is the one fighting in the pay per view) and Ospreay is excellent at making it look like his opponent can do the impossible. This was another case of rolling smoothly into the next match as Swerve Strickland came out and shared MANY MEANINGFUL LOOKS with Ospreay.

Danny Garcia was the sacrificial lamb here against Swerve but again, much like Ospreay, while the outcome was never in doubt, Swerve did good, subtle stuff to put Garcia over. There was this excellent spot where Swerve DARED Garcia to hit him with a lariat. Swerve no sold the lariat strike and told Garcia to do it again… and Danny, acting like he would, hit a low kick instead to initiate grappling. I LOVE little things like that; Garcia outsmarted Swerve, even if only for a moment. Danny even got to kick out of a House Call (the absolutely nasty flying kick Swerve does… and friends, I know how much of the sausage is made, but I still don’t understand how the House Call works… because it looks like Swerve KILLS dudes with it every time, but obviously he doesn’t)! Garcia tried to do a Rave Styles Clash either in tribute to Ospreay or to rattle Swerve, but this had the opposite effect as Swerve HELLMURDERED Danny with a Hidden Blade elbow strike to the back of the head. GOD, I LOVE WRESTLING. This led to, ultimately, Swerve and Ospreay brawling post match but Prince Nana intervened. Their match at the PPV is probably going to be worth the cost of entry just on it’s own.

Jack Perry and Zack Sabre Jr. had a solid match; and frankly, I was surprised Perry was able to keep up with Zack somewhat. I was really, REALLY hoping for Zack to hit one of his more ridiculous holds simply so Excalibur would have to say one of the REALLY long winded names like “Hurrah! Another Year. Surely This One Will Be Better Than The Last; The Inexorable March of Progress Will Lead Us All to Happiness,” or especially for an Aphex Twin dork like me, “Selected Technical Works Vol.2.” The hold Sabre eventually finished the match with may, I say MAY have been called “I’ve mistakenly run off to Windsor,” but I may have misinterpreted that.

This transitioned (and you were wondering how they would fit all of this into one show) into The Young Bucks versus part of TMDK. I know I’m on an island with this but I find Bad Dude Tito utterly charmless, and fortunately the other half of the equation was Mikey Nichols, to whom I have no strong feelings for or against. Thank goodness his partner, Temu Tom Lawlor Shane Haste is *checks notes* THE GLOBAL HONORED CROWN CHAMPION IN PRO WRESTLING NOAH?!

That’s it, I hate pro wrestling again.

I said to the missus that the Bucks don’t really hit the Superkick Parties like they used to, but I wanted to see it here and BY GEORGE, THEY DID IT. Thanks for the house, boys. This all led to big Kenny coming out and cutting a pretty catty, almost heelish promo on Zack, basically treating him like a stepping stone, to which Zack replied “Don’t wind up in the hospital before our match, darling.” OH NO, ZACK KNOWS ABOUT THE TUM TUM TROUBLE. I had better see a STOMACH CLAW this Sunday.

Queen Aminata (yay!) went over Red Velvet in a decent enough match that had a really, really solid finishing sequence. I like Aminata a lot; please get her more reps. Some of her offense looks amazingly stiff especially given her somewhat lanky and slender frame. That NECKBREAKER she did looked like it lives up to the name.

Then, after some of the excellent stuff we had already seen on the show, we got Konosuke Takeshita versus Ricochet, and if it weren’t for two mistakes from the referee (!) this could have been a low key match of the year contender. It might still rack up some votes, anyway; it was about as good of a TV match as you will find. I have said my mea culpas about Ricochet again and again, so I really have to shift from my being wrong about the guy (those first two or three months when he was new to AEW still sucked) to now saying “Boy, I wish he had left WWE sooner.” Dude is so good. He took more of the match than I personally might have liked but… Big Take is a BABYFACE now, so that means he gets to be behind the eightball a bit. As I said, there were two mistakes from the ref, one you could kind of handwave away (the ref looked like he counted three on a Ricochet nearfall, but that could be a number of factors, up to and including Takeshita trying to be a touch too dramatic with a kick out) and one that was just a complete fuckup where whatever they were going for did not come off on camera AT ALL. Essentially it looked like Takeshita was going to smash in Ricochet’s brains with that jumping knee, straight from Jumbo Tsuruta to Big Boss Jun Akiyama to Takeshita to Ricochet’s cheekbone, but ref Paul Turner leapt in front of Takeshita and waived it off. What the announcers said, either to cover this up or to reflect whatever the original intention was, was that Ricochet pulled Paul Turner in front of him as a shield.

He did no such thing.

Anyway, despite these gaffes, this was still an excellent match and even this rolled into Takeshita’s friend Mark Briscoe coming out and led to the main event beatdown angle. All there really is to say about it is that the Conglomeration is REALLY bad at having each others’ backs; dudes take FOREVER to come to the ring. Too much sitcom style nonsense, one supposes.

Again, the keys here were having practically everything flow into practically everything else. All throttle, no brakes, but not in a way where the show made you say “STOP” or “LET ME CATCH MY BREATH,” but in a way to get you excited, to make you want to see the ball keep rolling. I know certain podcasters will be mad about the lengthy overrun or the fact that there were few backstage angles, so they weren’t able to speed through everything or watch on 1.5x speed, but to me, this was absolutely one of if not THE best go home shows AEW has EVER put on. Collisions are often booked this way, with a stronger emphasis on wrestling, but frankly, a lot of the wrestling on those shows, while fun, comes off as inessential. Here, everything was razor sharp and pointed towards a greater goal. An EXCELLENT episode of Dynamite, my favorite in MONTHS.

*Why, yes, I did receive a monogrammed cheese board in the mail recently. Why do you ask?

**I already said my piece about this last week, but I read someone, someone who could even be reading these very words right now, who LEGITIMATELY was saying things like Ospreay USED Alex Windsor and ABANDONED her and all of these other things and someone else I interacted with during the week felt it was okay to bring Will’s stepson into matters; again, if you objected to the promo, I’m right there with you. But if you are taking things to the point where only YOU recognize that Ospreay is this abusive monster and poor, frail Windsor needs to be SAVED… I’m sorry, but while you’re entitled to your opinion, so too am I entitled to my opinion… and my opinion is that trivializing misogyny by saying EVERYTHING is misogynist, especially when someone was being laddish and gross as opposed to purposefully hurtful, by saying the woman involved has NO agency… that is more detrimental than anything Ospreay did