By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
AEW Dynamite Hits
Will Ospreay, Kyle Fletcher, and Konosuke Takeshita vs. Kazuchika Okada, Matthew Jackson, and Nicholas Jackson: They saved the best for last with a good six-man tag match that actually served a purpose. This wasn’t one of those all-star eight-man or now all-star ten-man tag team Collision specials where it’s more about filling television time than advancing a storyline. In this case, one of next week’s challengers pinned one of the tag team champions. They also told a couple of stories with Takeshita, who continued to build the rivalry with Okada, and also rejected Ospreay’s friendly gestures before and after the match.
Hangman Page and Jeff Jarrett: It was great to finally hear Page heel on the fans for choosing Swerve Strickland over him. The fans have been very receptive to Jarrett in his babyface legend role, but why is his babyface character still hanging out with the goof troop sidekicks?
Orange Cassidy vs. Chris Jericho: A soft Hit that would have been a full fledged Hit had the match ended when Cassidy caught a cocky Jericho with the Orange Punch early on. It would have been a fun way to open the show and Jericho wouldn’t have really lost anything by essentially costing himself the match. Rather, they went nearly 20 minutes and had all sorts of interference.
Ricochet vs. The Beast Mortos: A soft Hit for a good, yet predictable match. At some point, they need to sit Ricochet down for an interview and let him establish his persona and why he opted to join the company. Right now it comes off like fans are supposed to know him from WWE. And they do recognize him from WWE surely, but it’s not like WWE ever did a good job of establishing an actual character for him. Mortos is a great wrestler, but I just can’t take the guy seriously with the weird mask on his head, which his actually an upgrade over the mask he wore while working as Black Taurus.
FTW Champion Hook vs. JD Ink: An in the middle for a quick squash win for Hook.
AEW Dynamite Misses
Bryan Danielson vs. Nigel McGuinness build: Dreadful. The video package early in the show felt like it should have been the first in a series of video packages regarding their history rather than the only one. Worse yet, AEW is struggling to sell tickets to the Grand Slam event and yet they still didn’t bother to confirm whether Danielson will actually wrestle next week. Will they make this announcement on one of the weekend shows that play to a fraction of the audience of Dynamite? Unless there’s some legitimate issue with Danielson and it’s not just a case of him selling the suffocation angle, then this is just a baffling move.
Mariah May and Serena Deeb vs. Yuka Sakazaki and Queen Aminata: This felt like a turning point in the night, as the energy in the building seemed to fade during this match and my own interest in the show subsided. It feels like May has cooled off since winning the AEW Women’s Championship, and the fans need to be given more reasons to invest in the other three wrestlers who were in this match.
Overall Show: Forget the Hit and Miss count, this was a mostly dull and uneventful show that did a poor job of making next week’s Grand Slam show feel important.
You’ll be hearing from angry Mike.
The creepy prick whose love of AEW is equaled only by his hatred of women? Bring it on.
That’s the guy.
That felt like what I imagine a Collision/Rampage ep to be.
Are you and Angry Mike going to the Texans game together, like Jerry and Newman at the SB?