BRM Reviews the 1/1/2020 Dynamite (disappointing, despite great wrestling)

[Big Red Machine]

OPENING VIDEO PACKAGE- good, but…
They showed us the Elite losing a lot and getting beaten up said that they were supposed to be the best but now they’re losing. They wondered whether they still had their fighting spirit or not and said that tonight we would find out whether the Elite are still the best.
This was nice framing, but I did have two issues with it. The first was that it felt a little too much like it was also intended to be able to apply to their own recent ratings losses, which I would have done as much to avoid as possible. Maybe it was just unavoidable, but this felt like something that was meant to deliberately be read both ways, which I don’t like because I don’t want a promotion talking to me about their ratings and their war with the show on the other channel. Just give us your art and we’ll decide if we like it enough to watch it.
The other reason I didn’t like this was the inclusion of Adam Page. Page leaving the Elite has probably been their biggest flopped storyline so far due to the fact that it doesn’t actually feel like he has left the group and we never saw him do it on TV, and now they’ve got him in here as well, which makes this even more confusing.

Tony Schiavone isn’t here this week, so we’ve got Taz filling in for him. Well… I’ll give him a chance, but he doesn’t have a good track record.
They ran down the card (or at least a chunk of it), which definitely feels big. It very much feels like what NXT did two weeks ago, which was essentially put on a mini-PPV. I think doing something like this is going to be a necessity for AEW (or NXT, or anyone running a similar schedule with a longer than one hour weekly show and PPVs every three months or so) if they want to start pushing the match-ups for the next PPV starting the first week after the previous one so that it feels like things are actually moving forward and not stalling the way a lot of AEW stories have felt like they were doing. (The alternative way to do things is to run some shorter stories for people in between PPVs).

DARBY ALLIN vs. CODY RHODES (w/Arn Anderson)- 7.5/10
They had some band singer who is pals with Darby be there for Darby’s entrance to help him feel like more of a star, I guess. Arn is apparently now the “head coach of the Nightmare Family,” according to Excalibur. So that means he’s working Brandi and her whole group, too, right? Because if he isn’t, then who else is in this “Nightmare Family?” Maybe Dustin, I guess, but the only one we’ve really heard the term “Nightmare” applied to is Brandi and her group (in AEW, I mean. I think WCW was calling Dustin “the American Nightmare” for a while, and NJPW did it for Cody for a short time as well, but this is AEW).
It was VERY jarring to keep hearing the announcers refer to Arn as “the head coach of the Nightmare Family” throughout this match. Like I said above, “the Nightmare Family’ is not a term that has really been used before and this is Arn’s first appearance as their “head coach” so it felt like I had missed a whole lot of TV between the previous episode and this one.
They did a great job of telling their story about both Darby’s desperation to beat Cody and about both men working over injured body parts. I also liked that they were able to come up with a finish that created a way for Arn to have a noticeable impact as a babyface manager… but it did feel kind of weird. Doesn’t Cody know to put his knees up? If a wrestler doesn’t put his knees up to block a high-risk move I assume it’s because he’s not able to do so, not because he hasn’t thought of it. And if Cody didn’t know that Cody was coming down for the Coffin Drop, having Arn tell him about it feels kind of heelish.

JENN DECKER INTERVIEWS SCU- bad
Jenn Decker asked them a WWE-level question (“What can we expect from SCU in 2020?”) and then stood there in her very asymmetric dress hiding the mice in one hand and with her other hand on her hip, looking a lot more than an object to be ogled than the WWE interviewers ever do). SCU proceeded to ignore her question and just cut promos on the Young Bucks, Dark Order, and Proud and Powerful instead. Sammy Guevara showed up and talked some trash to them- especially Daniels- so they got finger prints on the lens of his phone’s camera, which upset him because he’s a dweeb.
I really don’t like the positioning of Proud and Powerful as the next contenders here. I don’t remember them having any sort of interaction with SCU, and the most recent match we saw them in was them losing a #1 contendership match to the Young Bucks. Why are they suddenly being treated like top contenders? And why didn’t SCU mention the Lucha Bros. who they had (another) confrontation with on last week’s show?
The end result of this was Sammy Guevara vs. Christopher Daniels being set up for next week.

AEW WOMEN’S WORLD TITLE MATCH: Riho(c) vs. Nyla Rose vs. Dr. Britt Baker, DMD vs. Hikaru Shida- 7/10
So Nyla Rose gets suspended for attacking a referee and is then rewarded with a title shot her first night back? What has she done to earn this title shot? Hell… what have any of these three really done to earn a title shot? Nyla and Shida are both an unremarkable 4-3 (and at least one of Nyla’s wins was against a jobber), and while Britt is 7-4, she recently lost a title match, at least half of those wins came before here most recent title shot.
Nyla jumped Riho and took the title belt and clobbered her with it. She then kicked Baker in the gut and hit her with the belt as well. Both women sold like they were paralyzed but also had to get into position to eat the belt shot. It looked very hokey (especially Britt’s).
They did moves and stuff for a while. It wasn’t unexciting, but I had been given no reason to really care about any of the challengers, and Riho beat Britt yet again, so this match really didn’t change anything.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- meh
Nyla clotheslined Riho and put her through a table. Unlike the last time Nyla tried to put someone through a table after a match (which they showed us a clip of right before this match and talked about constantly throughout) no one- wrestler, security, or referee- came out to try to stop her. She put Riho through the table with a big splash. The announcers wondered what kind of condition Riho would be in one week from tonight when she has to defend her title against Kris Statlander. Oh yeah. Statlander. Didn’t they make a big deal out of winning her match last week and talk about how a win would surely put her in title contention? So why the hell did these three get a title shot before her? Merely the fact that Statlander is someone I can remember has been winning her matches lately while the other three are just random people who haven’t been doing much of anything shows what a mistake this match was. It would have been much better to just book Riho vs. Britt non-title, let Riho win again, and then have Nyla come out afterwards and attack Riho. You get to the same place but without cheapening your title by giving title shots to a bunch of undeserving women and without having your big monster heel get a title shot and lose at the beginning of your story to build her up for a title shot.

A MALE INTERVIEWER INTERVIEWS JOEY JANELA- didn’t like it
This guy asked a better-worded version of the dumb question Jenn asked earlier (“You ended the year on a high note by beating Shawn Spears. What are you looking forward to now in 2020?”). Before Joey could get more than a few words out, he made a goofy face and I thought he was trying to mimic a strenuous bowel movement because it’s Joey Janela and I can totally see him randomly doing that in a promo.
What actually happened was the Penelope Ford snuck up behind him (apparently crawling down the hallway so we couldn’t see her) to hit Joey in the balls. This felt SOOOOO random. It shouldn’t, but it did. And the reason for that was AEW’s terrible pace at telling this story. TWO MONTHS AGO Penelope cut a promo from the Tron burying Joey Janela after a match. Everyone proceeded to ignore this for two months, not even doing anything with it when they booked Janela to interfere in a match that Penelope’s new boyfriend was involved in and that Penelope was at ringside for. And now all of a sudden this is going to be a feud? NO! You do the initial promo the week before Joey interferes in the match, then you do this angle the week afterwards! Putting Joey and Penelope in the same place and not doing anything with them desensitizes us to the idea of their former relationship being in any way relevant, thus making the story weaker when we you do try to make it relevant.

DARK ORDER VIDEO PACKAGE- It turns out they have a Higher Power. This had better be worth it in the end.

JON MOXLEY vs. TRENT (w/Chuck Taylor & Orange Cassidy)- 6.75/10
A very good match that would have been better if someone hadn’t decided it needed a break for some Orange Cassidy goofball sh*t. Also, if Orange Cassidy did this purposely to distract Moxley and buy Trent time to recover, and that makes him and Best Friends heels.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- bad and annoying
Sammy Guevara comes out to introduce a TonyTron video where Jericho sweetens his offer to Moxley to join the Inner Circle. He now says he will let Moxley be an “executive vice president” of “The Inner Circle, LLC” as well as give him 49% of that company, as well as a very expensive car. Really ANOTHER angle with an expensive car used as a pot sweetener? AEW really is running short on ideas.
The announcers put over that this was an excellent offer, but really it’s just a f*cking car, as the rest of that stuff is meaningless because what even is “The Inner Circle, LLC?” What do they do that would make the position or stock valuable?
Moxley says he’ll give Jericho his answer in person next week. Didn’t they build up that they would reveal Moxley’s answer this week? I’m pretty sure that was the deadline Jericho gave him. Yes, Jericho is allowed to extend the deadline, but it does make one of the big selling points of this week’s show feel like a bait-and-switch.

SAMMY GUEVARA vs. DUSTIN RHODES- 5.5/10
They did stuff. Dustin dominated a lot of the match, and while that’s fine because the babyface is getting his revenge here, having Guevara need a distraction to get control makes him look like way too much of a putz. He’s supposed to be the future. He should not be getting outclassed by a fifty-year-old. I also don’t need to see Dustin doing a f*cking Canadian Destroyer on the apron. Everyone can do the move now so it’s not special and doesn’t mean anything. We all know that the guy taking the move is doing most of the work and having guys like Dustin Rhodes and Ricky Morton do it just exposes that.
I also didn’t like the finish. I’m almost fine with Dustin wanting to go for the low blow because he doesn’t care about winning and just wants to hurt Sammy for revenge, but we definitely got this same finish with Dustin in an earlier Dustin vs. Inner Circle match. It also REALLY bugs me when someone goes for something that should cause a DQ but the ref stops them and the fans all start to boo, just because I know that if the guy actually hit the move and the referee did his job and called for the DQ, they’d start booing that, too.

JENN DECKER INTERIVEWS PRIVATE PARTY IN A BAR- They start to hit on her. Adam Page comes in for a drink. Or maybe this was Private Party’s private suit? If so, they’re completely in the right to be annoyed at Page, because he tried to steal their liquor. Arguing happened. Private Party came off like goofs and Page came off like an asshole. No one came out this segment looking good.

MJF REVEALS HIS STIPULATIONS TO AGREE TO A MATCH AGAINST CODY AT REVOLUTION- The stips were as follows:
1. Cody can’t touch MJF between now and then.
2. Cody must defeat Wardlow in a cage match.
3. Cody must submit to ten lashes from MJF, live on TNT.
That third one there made this very weird. I just don’t know how to feel about it. It almost feels a little too extreme for something Cody needs to do in order to have a match.

JENN DECKER INTERVIEWS THE JURASSIC EXPRESS- They were meh. The real news here, though, was Jenn Decker telling us that the records are resetting. What? Since when? That seems like some very important news that we should have been made aware of before this time.

THE MALE INTERVIEWER INTERVIEWS RIHO- bad
She is immediately interrupted by a ranting Britt Baker, DMD who is a heel now because Riho “came right in and stole the win.” At least they’ve learned that bringing up Britt Baker DMD’s dental degree has become a heel move at this point so they had Britt bring it up. So I guess we’re going to be building to YET ANOTHER Riho vs. Britt Baker match.
Unlike Jenn Decker with SCU last week, this guy actually stuck with the person he was supposed to interview after she was interrupted and asked his question (about her upcoming title defense against Kris Statlander). Michael Nakazawa was there to translate, but he spoke so softly that I couldn’t understand anything he said.
Also… the last time we saw Michael Nakazwa he was apparently magicked away by Pac so Pac could torture him to convince Kenny Omega to have a match with him or whatever. Maybe torture is a little extreme, but the last time we saw this man was in a situation where we were supposed to be fearing that terrible harm was about to be done to him. He seems perfectly fine, and made no mention of any such thing. So what the f*ck was the point of last week’s segment?

PAC & THE LUCHA BROS. vs. THE ELITE (Kenny Omega & the Young Bucks)- 8/10
Adam Page was on commentary for this match. He pushed the idea of himself and Kenny Omega vs. Private Party. The match was full of spots and was very exciting, but at no point did it feel like any sort of a big grudge match or that it was some sort of must-win match for the Elite. The Elite won and Cody came out to celebrate with them afterwards. They invited Page to join them but he stayed at commentary.

This was a disappointing show from AEW, despite having several great matches. Pretty much everything else felt like a big spotlight on AEW’s problems, including horrible booking in the women’s division, poor storylines with inconsistent focus that feel like they take weeks off and thus cool down before the next match, and forgetting details in their basic week-to-week continuity. There are some bright spots, but slogging through the other stuff to get to them is getting a lot harder.


STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Jim Ross said that some people consider the Lucha Bros. to be the best tag team in the world, to which Taz responded “it’d be tough to argue with that, considering that they’re ranked #3 in the AEW rankings.”
Um… actually that makes it pretty f*cking easy to argue against that claim, as it means that there are three teams (the top two ranked teams and the tag champs) who are better than they are.

[Bob-O]

The other reason I didn’t like this was the inclusion of Adam Page. Page leaving the Elite has probably been their biggest flopped storyline so far due to the fact that it doesn’t actually feel like he has left the group and we never saw him do it on TV, and now they’ve got him in here as well, which makes this even more confusing.

Did they show him more than just blowing off Kenny? I took that as more of symbolic of The Elite falling apart.

JON MOXLEY vs. TRENT (w/Chuck Taylor & Orange Cassidy)- 6.75/10
A very good match that would have been better if someone hadn’t decided it needed a break for some Orange Cassidy goofball sh*t. Also, if Orange Cassidy did this purposely to distract Moxley and buy Trent time to recover, and that makes him and Best Friends heels.

Orange is used as a distraction in almost every match they have, so nothing is really out of character.

Tony Schiavone isn’t here this week, so we’ve got Taz filling in for him. Well… I’ll give him a chance, but he doesn’t have a good track record.

I get ptsd whenever I hear his voice now. I usually like their guest announcers, I thought Vickie and Janella were GREAT on Dark, but Taz really took some enjoyment out of this for me by just being there.