AEW Dynamite (Rest Of July and a bit beyond)

So here's a bit of catch-up from the past couple episodes of Dynamite since... well, it's not worth doing individual posts for episodes from the prior month. I'm not going to point out every single piece of business on the shows, just the notable bits.



From the July 22nd episode:

TNT Champion CODY defeated local indy hero Eddie Kingston in a No DQ match via submission to retain the title. Good, strong promo from Eddie Kingston before the match where he challenged Cody to a no DQ match and a good strong showing from Kingston even in defeat. A week later, Kingston was signed and I approve.

MJF defeated Who The Fuck Is Griff Garrison in a short match.

The Young Bucks defeated the Butcher and Blade.

Diamante defeated Ivelisse with a small package. Meh.

Hangman Page beat some boob from the Dark Order... then gets beat up by more Dark Order boobs before Kenny and Fuck The Revival show up. Hangman gets beer, Kenny gets fuck all afterwards. The plot thickens.

Chris Jericho/Jake Hager defeated the Jurassic Express with an assist from a masked fellow who turns out to be the returning Sammy Guevara, back from "sensitivity training" due to a bad joke he made years ago coming to light because Twitter is worthless.

From the July 29th episode:

There's a big multi-man tag match between the Inner Circle and the Lucha Crew that is won by Luchasaurus... it was a thing that happened. Plenty of excitement, but sadly didn't pay much attention to this one.

TNT Champion CODY defeated Warhorse to defend the title. Warhorse is another indy guy with face paint and weighing a billion tons of heavy metal or something. I'm sure he has his fans, but he didn't do much for me. Good effort and all, but I wasn't feeling this one.

AEW Tag-Team Champions Hangman Page and Kenny Omega defeated The Dark Order to retain the titles and give Evil Uno another concussion courtesy of Mr. Brodie Lee's papers... so I guess that's now officially a thing. More masked boobs show up to lay down the beating before the FTR guys show up for the save.

AEW Women's Champion Hikaru Shida defeated Diamante in the rare occasion where I wasn't blown away by Shida. Something didn't click here.

MJF comes out for a good promo talking about dictator John and the old guard refusing to let go of their spots. Just watch the thing on Youtube and witness a young guy cut a great promo to challenge the champ for his title.

Jon Moxley & Darby Allin defeated Brian Cage & Ricky Starks in a no-Dq match where Allin smashed poor Ricky's back with a thumbtack-laced skateboard for the win... for fuck's sake, man, save that shit for when there's paying customers! Absolutely insane finish with Starks showing some real balls taking something like that.

And then it's announced the following week that Darby has a shot against Moxley next week (a.k.a. tonight's show) even though he's like ranked 5th in singles while MJF (the number one ranked challenger) has to do the whole speech to get a title shot. That is some wonky WWE logic right there. I don't need wonky WWE logic on my Dynamite shows.

From the August 5th episode:

The Dark Order defeated the Elite and FTR in the twelve-man tag match when Brodie Lee discused Hangman for the pin. Sadly, he did not hit anybody with a bunch of papers.

The big spot where Matt Hardy was attacked by Sammy Guevara from behind, which lead to a bit where Sammy tossed a chair at Matt for a gusher of blood that wasn't intended... if you didn't know that last bit, you'd think this was excessively bloody and didn't need to go that far.

Best Friends beat Santana and Ortiz in a perfectly acceptable tag match. Santana and Ortiz then proceeded to vandalize Trent's mom's van and Trent threatens that he will make them APOLOGIZE to his mother via speakerphone... well, you gotta have that comedy come from somewhere.

The big debate between Chris Jericho and Orange Cassidy (moderated by Eric Bischoff, which brought notable dread from Tony Schiavone) feature Jericho talking about himself and degrading Orange, while Orange mostly passed. When Bischoff asked about global warming, Jericho dodged the question (it's irrelevant, next question) and Orange gave a relevant answer to the question. On the last question, Orange cut Jericho off and cut this great promo about embarrassing Le Champion next week... and then he gets beat up by Hager and Le Champion. Debate segments have sucked since the dawn of time, but this was actually pretty good because it showed that OC is a capable talker who knows when to pick his spots and only do as much as he needs to in order to get a reaction. And a reaction is what he would've gotten if this had fans. It's a good philosophy to follow and it works,

AEW World Champion Jon Moxley defeated Darby Allin to retain the title despite a belt shot from MJF that busted Mox open... but not the gusher that poor Matt suffered from Sammy. It's a fine main event with a solid story where Mox admires Darby's fortitude and didn't want to end him until he had no other choice. See, sometimes the simple approach works.

For the most part, a solid string of episodes with this week's being the best one in regards to matches and story. I'll probably do a write-up on next week's show, but not so much the rest, since the scheduling starts to get a bit messy.