AEW Dynamite (Dec. 11th, 2019): That's Better

So last week was radio silence on my end. Sorry about that... fortunately, that means two Dynamite musings for the week. Today will cover last week's episode, which was a fine episode of Dynamite and that will lead us to Thursday's final weekly Dynamite musings for tonight's episode, which promises to be big.

But that's later. Let's get last week's show out of the way first.



The opening contest sees Jon Moxley beating Alex Reynolds in ten seconds to establish a new speed record in AEW. See, now why can't most matches in AEW last just a short amount of time? Not every match needs to be a marathon. It's okay to have a couple sprints here and there. That way, you'd have time for more character building vignettes and stuff.

Speaking of which, here comes Le Champion Chris Jericho and his inner circle out to greet Moxley and invite him into the group. They bring up their past history, make mention of Mox's Kurt Cobain haircut from his WWE days, and then offers a T-Shirt as incentive to join the Circle. Well, I would've offered a bottle of the Bubbly; that would've been a better sales pitch than just another T-Shirt, but then that's why I'm not Le Champion.

The Butcher and The Blade (with The Bunny) defeated CODY and QT Marshall when the Butcher pinned Marshall. The picture-in-picture commercial break was weird because the action was completely dark... which seemed pretty pointless, but I presume technical difficulties was at work here because the announcers inform us that the B&B were in control. Other than that, this was a perfectly fine match. This QT fellow got a moment to shine and the B&B got a strong first win... and then Darby Allin shows up and offers himself as a partner for Cody... okay.

In the designated "jerk segment" according to Tony Schiavone, MJF comes out to a promo and demands a ring crew guy kiss the ring - perhaps a knock of Cody's ROH run where he had a ring to kiss - and then does the shitty Crossrhodes or whatever it's called. MJF cuts a masterful play of words, countering "knock-off Chris Jericho" with quips about "cat piss blond hair" and "Gary Busey teeth." Them fightin' words leads to MJF accepting the match and holding off on announcing stipulations until January 1st. So we're having a New Year's Day offering of Dynamite, huh? I'm down with that.

The jobber who lost in ten seconds gets invited to join the Dark Order... okay.

Big Swole defeated Emi Sakura in a pretty good match. The Freddy Mercury-inspired entrance of Sakura continues to confound me and the only bits of Swole I've seen were on Dark, so I guess this is a step up for here. Not much else to say other than occasional shots of Hikaru Shida in the crowd, who is NOT Adam Cole's girlfriend.

Kenny Omega and Hangman Adam Page defeated Shawn Spears and Kip Sabian when Kenny hit the V-Trigger and Hangman tagged himself in for the finishing lariat and pinfall. Apparently, Hangman Page has left the Elite and this is being treated like common knowledge despite the fact that not everyone watching watches their Youtube stuff. I honestly wish they'd stop doing that sort of thing and explain these things on television. Not everyone is going to follow you on social media channels, especially those folks who think social media is the devil's tit. Meanwhile, the lights go out and we see Joey Janela with a tied up Tully... because apparently the Joey/Ten Guy feud must continue. The match was alright for what it was, but not much more than that, really.

There's a Brandi Rhodes promo video where she talks about Riho going missing and Britt Baker talking about her boyfriend... I still don't get these things... but okay.

Le Champion and Jake Hager kick Excalibur and Schiavone out of commentary to talk to the only guy that matters, Jim Ross.

Luchasaurus (with Jungle Jack Boy Perry Man and Marko Stunto) defeated Sammy Guevara. The commentary is mostly Jericho and Ross going back and forth with some entertaining enough banter and Hager saying little. After the brief match, Jericho and Hager run in to attack the dinosaur, only to be thwarted by Jungle Boy who gets a visual pin on Jericho to build to their match next week. As entertaining as the match was - partly because Lucha is a beast killing the punchable Sammy and partly because of aforementioned banter - it served its purpose of building towards the Jungle Boy-Jericho match next week, which I'm actually looking forward to.

The next AEW PPV is taking place in February and is going to be called Revolution. Oh yeah, because the last PPV to call itself a Revolution turned SO well.

And in the main event, the Young Bucks defeated Santana & Ortiz in a fun little Texas Death Match (basically a street fight with weapons and stuff) to earn themselves a title shot at SCU's tag-team championships where they can presumably win the titles and be the best tag-team that they're advertised as being.

So after a couple "so-so" episodes, Dynamite gets back on track with another fine episode with a couple good matches and some minor bits of intrigue for the future. I'm particularly curious to see what happens in the Jericho vs. Jungle Boy match as well as what MJF has planned for his eventual showdown with CODY. There's even a tag-team offering that's going to be shown commercial-free, which is novel enough for NXT to counter with their own commercial-free offering.

December 18th is going to be a big day.