AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 4/1/20

What Worked

-I laughed at Cody saying "Anna Jayy with two Ys for some reason"

-I'm a fan of amusing product placement, and having Britt Baker casually eating a chicken sandwich at ringside while trash talking Shida, leading directly to a KFC commercial, worked for me. We don't need to know where she got the sandwich, but we can be grossed out that she was kinda letting it just rest on the guardrail while Shida came over (these are people who clearly don't care about social distancing anyway, as there are 8 people at ringside and they all managed to be clumped together), but Baker just suddenly wanted a chicken sandwich while watching wrestling. My dad is a dentist who treats his daily food intake like one extended meal, so this felt like it captured my own individual view of dentists.

-Marko/Archer was a great use of both guys. Marko shouldn't be competitive against Archer if we're talking level playing field, and he was perfect as the guy making Archer look like a monster in his debut. Stunt took some brutal stuff, loved the release vertical suplex that sent him all the way across the ring, and that high angle flipping powerbomb finish was awesome. Tossing Stunt violently into the crowd would have been made better if there was nobody to catch him due to social distancing, but the whole presentation of this was great.

-Dustin on my TV is almost always going to make top side, and I was way into the Dustin/QT team. Dustin teaming with one of the promotion's scrubs against two identity-free cult members is good wrestling by me. I mean hell yeah, give me a fucking QT Marshall showcase against guys that QT *should* be showcased against. He's a good pro, hit a big dive down the stretch, broke out a sweet corkscrew senton that really landed hard, and had a couple nice double teams with Dustin (including the cool assisted suplex finish). Dustin worked like Dustin, so it was great. Love seeing him run hard into the ropes, slap cult members in the face, hit the - STILL - best powerslam in wrestling, all of it was good. 8 and 9 got in an appropriate amount of offense for what they're doing, this whole thing worked.

-Darby had another monster main event performance, really letting his lunatic superstar shine in a match with too much horseshit. Both of his dives into Guevara were pulverizing (why did the camera show Cody's not good dive instead of Darby's first great dive??) and his coffin drop off a pole was some classic Darby shit. Love this guy.


What Didn't Work

-Omega/Trent was one of those matches that kept winning me and losing me. I liked it when it was 80/20 Omega, felt like a kind of slow, dominant Omega win. And then when Omega was finally taking too long and Trent came back, stomped on Omega's hand and started working him over, I got really into it. I suddenly thought Omega's last couple weeks of sluggishness were being played into a match, where he was dominant but not necessarily capitalizing, and this time it might cost him. Even when Omega came back the match felt like it had a whole new energy, with Trent getting tossed hard into the guardrail and eating a great powerbomb into a support pole. I was hooked. But by the time it just turned into Trent taking a cross legged brainbuster onto Omega's knee and responding by getting up and hitting a tornado DDT, I was back out. I didn't love the end stretch as we got far too much of Trent selling offense by fixing his hair, and Omega selling offense by getting to his knees and peaking to see what time he should hop back up and hit a knee. I think there was a really good match in there, but I didn't love the direction they took it.

-All of the stuff that was supposed to purposely miss in the Shida/Jayy match looked really awful, clotheslines missing by two feet while thrown at 2/3 speed, a Shida enziguiri that missed even with Jayy completely forgetting to duck, and all of that followed up by Jayy getting one of the very ugliest backslides possible. I don't think there has been a Dynamite women's match without some disastrously ugly moments.

-Still not feeling Brodie Lee as the abusive father who angrily breaks a glass in a restaurant when the waiter brings his wife something she didn't order but she doesn't want to ruin the night by sending it back.

-They've been getting into a bad habit of letting the main events run way too long. It's the old 205 Live problem or the PWG problem where a tight 14 turns into a loose 23 and we get too many stops and starts and a bunch of shtick that goes on too long. Shtick is one of my favorite things in wrestling, but it's way tougher than it looks. Great shtick is integrated into the match by the personalities of those involved; bad shtick makes everything grind to a halt and all rules of the match get thrown out the window for the jokes. There was a really good 14 minute match in here, but I got to see a really long "working on material" match. Some of the bits work (I laughed at Brandi excitedly catching Cody's weight belt), a lot of it wore out quick.