AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 5/1 - 5/7

MD: Going to be more words than usual this week. I can't fill any sort of void except for maybe in my own heart but I'm feeling inspired. I know to a lot of people Dean was a sort of distant memory, someone who inspired them years ago or that went to shows or wrote with them. Those stories have meant so much to so many to see. Eric's post was wonderful. To people still on the DVDVR board, however, and there is still a board, and it's a pretty damn good place to talk about wrestling in longer form with more permanence than you can get on twitter or reddit, he was still a fixture. Dean retired a few years ago and started to watch every bit of televised wrestling and drop a sprawl of text immediately after it finished. It was distilled DEAN and an essential daily part of my life even just two weeks ago. Go click on this and read some of his posts over the last few months; you'll be glad you did. 

As for AEW, I said I might shift to covering a the webshows a bit more and what they do? Kill the webshows. If it's really because their TV partners didn't want them pushing content out on YouTube and if it speaks to the strength of that relationship, great. I'm really going to miss Dark and Elevation though. Elevation especially was how I got into AEW the most in late summer and early fall of 2021. Squashes and competitive mid-card matches with no commercials or time constraints or even plot progression built up my connection to wrestlers unfamiliar to me, and there were a lot. I get that you don't want to put squashes on TV and I get that sometimes these extra matches wore out crowds, but at its best, it allowed wrestlers to experiment, to get reps, to figure out what worked and what didn't and let crowds see certain stars (the Matt Hardys of the world), pop for their entrances and themes and signature moves, even when they weren't going to be on the main show. It gave us an Emi Sakura or Nyla Rose tag week after week after week after week and they were all a blast. It let the Acclaimed figure out how to be the Acclaimed or the Gunns figure out how to be the Gunns and let Athena as hard as one could go during one night in Canada and suddenly become one of the the best things in wrestling. I'm not sure how things will shake out in the months to come, if Rampage will serve this purpose more and if we'll get that itch scratched with the ROH studio tapings or if extra matches even end up on Bleacher Report, but I'll miss goofy rookie Elevation commentary from Wight and Menard (and Eddie Kingston for a while there!) and even goofier expert Dark commentary from Excalibur and Taz. I hope we see the return of Super Strong Suplex Machine sooner than later.

AEW Dynamite 5/3

Jericho Appreciation Society (Daniel Garcia/Jake Hager/Angelo Parker/Matt Menard) vs Orange Cassidy/Bandido/Adam Cole/Roderick Strong

MD: Nice big 8 man tag with a lot of little story beats. It's nice to see Strong outside of the WWE system again where he can feel like a big deal. That's part of the joy of AEW. I don't usually have a ton to say about Cole. My main takeaway on him is that he's been woefully miscast as a heel forever. The fans want to cheer him. They want to cheer his song. He has the offense of a scrappy babyface. He has the size of a scrappy babyface. I've seen him in interviews say that it's not an issue because he gets the fans to boo him during the match, but I honestly don't think that has played out in practice, at least not in AEW. This feels fresh. They played up the relationship between Cassidy and Cole but never really did anything with it unfortunately. The only sign of anything off at all was Bandido tagging Cole by slapping him on the back.

I liked how the match turned on the caught dive on Cassidy (with Garcia coming out nowhere with a knee to the back). I like Cole getting taken out when he went for Jericho at first opportunity; in general, even with him getting to tag with Strong again, he portrayed a certain intensity from his entrance to his first big boot, to the finish and both charges up the ramp. The buried what I was looking forward to the most in the commercial break, but 2.0 feeding and stooging for Orange Cassidy was a ton of fun as you'd expect, as was the suplex spots with Bandido. Garcia was a glorious jerk during the beat down on Cassidy, walking over him repeatedly and stepping on the ankle to prevent him getting away. Everyone got to get something in down the stretch. I'm looking forward to Strong against any of these guys and certainly to Hager vs Bandido if they ever want to run that, but Garcia is a top potential AEW Cassidy opponent and they're running that next week.

Darby Allin/Jungle Boy vs MJF/Sammy Guevara

MD: I don't think anyone would say that this main event angle has been a total success, though people can definitely appreciate that they're taking this swing and trying to elevate the pillars like this. What has worked, more than anything else, has been the MJF/Sammy pairing. In fact, given that we're still weeks from the PPV, it's a shame they've gone away from it here. I wouldn't mind if they go back to it at some later point. They were full on Heavenly Bodies/Too Cool here, full of themselves, congratulating one another, constantly jawing (including with the crowd during the commercial break to get big heat), constantly posturing. I would have liked some dumb simplistic double teams but I was ultimately happy with what we got, including the assisted abdominal stretch and Hollywood Blonds' terrible towel with Max's scarf.

Darby and Jungle Boy hit everything clean and played face-in-peril well enough, though the focus was really on the heel antics instead of the come back attempts. It's a bit like seeing Jarrett again. AEW's tag scene has had such a focus on big spots and cut off near falls that bullshit like this is fresh and really stands out. I liked Jungle Boy as a hot tag. We saw him so long with Luchasaurus where he didn't get to play that role. And Sammy looked amazing taking the tiger driver and code red, almost as good as I've ever seen either taken, which was impressive in such quick succession. Max's convoluted killshot looked great too, though he'd probably be better served with something way more simplistic that is just put over as deadly due to superior execution or some such. The finish with MJF and Sammy hitting moves but the other wanting the pin contrasted Darby tagging himself in but to hit a move and then go for the pin instead, making the babyfaces look somewhat more respectable while still playing into the animosity between them and pushing the 4-way to come. I have no idea what Khan has planned between now and May 28 but hopefully it's even more entertaining than the Sammy/MJF pairing; that feels like a bit of a high bar to clear though.

AEW Rampage 5/5

Lucha Bros/Hijo del Vikingo vs QTV (Powerhouse Hobbs/QT Marshall/Aaron Solo)

MD: Figured I'd give this some time too. There are a lot of different possible structures and narratives in pro wrestling. It doesn't have to be shine/heat/comeback. As long as there's a narrative throughline and things have weight and matter, as long as they have some semblance of build and payoff, you can do a lot of different things. Some stories are easier to tell than others. Some are more natural. Some require less work on the viewer. And, it's valid to occasionally just do a your move/my move fireworks spotfest so long as it's driven by a purpose on the card and it doesn't have a negative impact on it. Even then, however, I tend to find that last option limiting. If you pull back just a little on that, if you just take a breath and think things through, you can still hit a lot of those spots but underpin them with a more compelling narrative. Doing that will only make the spots feel more impressive and compelling because there'll be something providing them with actual substance. It's almost always additive if done well and smartly. The best wrestling is when people combine working smart and working hard, when you have both "workrate" and narrative, when one is the means and the other is the end.

So often with the Lucha Bros, I see a heck of a lot of means and not a lot of end. That's most especially true when they're up against similar opponents with similar mindsets. They try to go over the top and in doing so end up completely untethered. It pops the crowd in the moment but you end up remembering spots and moments, not the match as a whole.

One of the great things about AEW is the WAR-like nature of the potential pairings. You'll see Lucha Bros and Vikingo against the most logical guys in the world (let's say Rush and Dralistico) but you'll also see them here against QT, Hobbs, and Solo, three guys with wildly different skillsets. After a bit of posturing, QT took all of Vikingo's flashy stuff. I'll admit I had mixed feelings about his basing. In general, we applaud wrestlers for getting into positions on dives and saving the spot and their opponent. That's outside of the ring; when it happens in the ring however, it always feels a little dodgier. That was the case with the implosion 'rana. QT rushing to position made it feel more impactful but also poked at the suspension of disbelief just a tad. Still, it felt novel for him to be taking all the offense instead of someone like Kommander or Gringo Loco. There's value in that sort of dissonance too. Then Hobbs came in and just shut everything down. Solo is a 14 year vet 34 year old still trying to find his way but he can hit stuff clean and is pretty punchable, so it's not like he's a bad hand to have in there and to follow up Hobbs' stuff with a bunch of annoying offense to get under the crowd's skin. The built through the commercial break to the comeback and went into a finishing stretch. That's where we got the dives and the real bombs and because of the anticipation everything felt bigger than it would have if they were just escalating and escalating through spot after spot after spot. Speaking of escalating, I'm glad we didn't get the 630 through the table here. That shouldn't be an every match move, even if it's teased every match. It's one of the biggest spots in the promotion and they should only use it when it really matters, not against QT on a Rampage with a weird time spot. It was ok to do it a couple of times early to establish it but now keep it in the pocket so that when it happens, it means as much as humanly possible and that it also doesn't devalue other big dives and spots people do across the promotion. The finish felt a little abrupt to me but ultimately worked; Hobbs was distracted. Why was Hobbs distracted? Because he was choking Abrahantes and that's the best reason to lose a match I can think of.