BRM Reviews the 9/2/2020 Dynamite (terrible)

[Big Red Machine]

SANTANA & ORTIZ vs. BEST FRIENDS- 6.75/10
Best Friends jumped the heels on their way to the ring, allowing them to brawl on the outside and use weapons for a while without getting counted out or disqualified because they had never been in the ring and thus the match couldn’t officially start. Jim Ross apparently doesn’t know that last part, as he praised referee Bryce Remsburg for “using good discretion there to not start the match officially with one team with a big advantage.” How long has this guy been calling wrestling?
I’ve included the pre-match brawl in my rating. This was a very good grudge-match opener with the heels cheating to win to keep the feud alive. One presumes that tonight we’ll see a stipulation match signed for the PPV.

MJF IS A MEANIE BACKSTAGE- bad
The lawyer is scared because he doesn’t want Moxley to murder him. That’s fair on his part, but this whole thing is dumb and they’ve already wasted too much time on it by doing it in the first place. Why are we wasting even more time on this? What did this segment actually accomplish? It showed us MJF being mean to his underling, which they’ve shown us every damn week for two months now. There is no value added by doing this segment, and you’re wasting time that could be used for a productive purpose.

WINNING TEAM FACES EACH OTHER AT ALL OUT: Private Party & SCU (Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian) vs. the Young Bucks & A Boy & His Dinosaur (w/Marko Stunt)- 7/10
The action here was fine, but they gave me no real reason to want to see either match-up and thus I really wasn’t invested in the match.

JAKE HAGER TELLS ORANGE CASSIDY TO COME TO RINGSIDE DURING JERICHO’S MATCH OR ELSE- Okay, I guess we just wait to see what the trap is.

TULLY BLANCHARD GIVES FTR A PEP-TALK AND FTR CUT A PROMO- very good

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS KENNY OMEGA- bad segment
Kenny has the Hana Kimura tribute shirt to raise money for her mother (from Pro Wrestling Tees if you want to buy one). Kenny says that Adam Page “made a mistake” and will “have to live with” it. He also says that he and Page will beat FTR.
Speaking of FTR, they came out with Tully Blanchard and a cooler, and gave Kenny Omega some chocolate milk. Kenny called them dickheads. And they kind of are. But in this particular feud, Kenny was a dickhead first, so it’s hard for me to be mad at them where Kenny is concerned. Kenny was ready to fight and pointed out that he was outnumbered.
Cue Adam Page. Cash cut a promo absolutely burying Page, which seems like the wrong move, strategically. If I were them, I wouldn’t do anything to make Page fired up and angry at me, and wouldn’t do anything to increase the chances of Page reconciling with Bucks, either because I know they are my enemies as well.
Page was ready to fight but Kenny held him back and told him “they’re trying to get in your head again.” I’m not saying that that’s not what’s happening here, but I don’t see how Kenny thinks getting into a fair fight with their challengers a few days before the title match will hurt. Sure, you could say that Tully will jump in and it will be three-on-two, but if FTR wanted that, they could just start that fight on their own. Hell, if they wanted to fight with an unfair numbers advantage, you’d think they would have just run out and started attacking Kenny from the get-go rather than offering him a drink.
FTR had the tag belts for some reason, which they proceeded to drop instead of handing them back to Page & Omega, and then they left.
Like so many of the other segments in this feud, this left me completely baffled as to the wrestlers’ motivations. Don’t get me wrong: I understand the story they’re trying to tell with Adam Page. What I don’t understand is the motivations of the wrestlers in taking the actions they are taking in this segment. Why did they all make the choices they did. The story with Page makes sense, but none of the decisions around it that set up the situation in which they are telling that story here make any sense.

ALEX MARVEZ INTERVIEWS CHRIS JERICHO- good

JOEY JANELA vs. CHRIS JERICHO (w/Jake Hager)- no rating, bad segment
Orange Cassidy was at ringside, as requested. He brought a mystery bag. Jericho was wearing an OC t-shirt. Jericho obliterated Janela, then ran him into an exposed turnbuckle after the match. If only Janela had a friend or even a tag team partner to make the save for him. Oh well.
Janela was bloodied, so Jericho wiped the blood on the Orange Cassidy on his t-shirt, then ripped it off and threw it at OC. This made OC start to care for some reason, and all of a sudden he’s rushing in to have a brawl with Jericho. He took the mystery bag into the ring with him, but then just put it down so his hands would be free. Why did you take it with you in the first place, then?
Hager jumped in and they beat Janela down. Sonny Kiss showed up to get some revenge for the beating his tag team partner got. He knocked Jericho down but was then taken out by one slam by Hager. OC knocked Hager out of the ring, then got the advantage on Jericho but Hager pulled him to safety. OC revealed that the item in the mystery bag was a bottle of Jericho’s champagne- because a glass bottle is definitely not the sort of thing you’d want to have handy in a fight- which he poured out because symbolism.
Look… symbolism is great and all, but not when a character has to do something completely illogical just to be able to set up the symbolic moment. Orange Cassidy’s thought process here appears to have been “I’m about to rush into this fight that will likely wind up being two-on-one. I’ll take this glass bottle to the ring with me, but rather than use it as a weapon, I think I’ll put it down in the corner of the ring on my way so that if I happen to win the fight, I’ll be able to do something symbolic at Jericho.” THAT'S F*CKING MORONIC! That’s the sort of thing that makes a situation feel fake. Wrestlers should be more concerned with making sure they can win the fight than making sure they can do something symbolic afterwards, and knowing that is the difference between being competent in the art of storytelling and being a pretentious dilettante poser douchebag.

MATT HARDY VS. SAMMY GUEVARA VIDEO PACKAGE- very good
They also did a thing with cue cards during the commercial. I didn’t care for it.

LOTS OF PEOPLE ARGUE OVER WHO WILL WIN THE CASINO BATTLE ROYALE- dull
It broke down into the predictable brawl. I would have said that this was only marginally better than when WWE does this sort of thing, but then this dragged on for WAY too long.

DARK ORDER/ANTI-DARK ORDER GROUP VIDEO PACKAGE- This would have been really good if last week I hadn’t seen the supposedly dangerous heels unable to count above five without help, cackling with glee about how they celebrated their great victory by buying lawnmowers, and generally acting like the biggest group of losers you’ve ever seen. #NoOneCaresAboutTheDorkOrder (is that too long for a hashtag? I don’t do Twitter).

THUNDER ROSA vs. SERENA DEEB- 5/10
If the point of this match was to build Thunder Rosa up for the PPV, why did she go 50-50 with Serena Deeb?
Ross told us that Serena Deeb is “a Yoga practitioner, to a large to degree.” What the f*ck does that even mean? I don’t do Yoga, but my understanding it’s a binary thing. You either do Yoga, or don’t. You can’t only be doing Yoga 90% of the way. It’s zero or a hundred. You can’t “in large part” be a Yoga practitioner. If you’re practicing Yoga and also doing something else, you’re still doing Yoga!

JON MOXLEY PROMO- meh

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS BIG SWOLE- meh
Big Swole says she’s going to come to Britt Baker’s office and attack her on Saturday.
Then Rebel shows up shaking her chest and offering Tony Schiavone a complementary pizza. This was apparently necessary so Britt could sneak up behind Big Swole and attack her with a crutch. Britt can walk again, so that’s good. Then they rubbed Swole’s face in the pizza, then Britt locked in the Lockjaw. Ross is shouting “HOLY PEPPERONI!” while Excalibur is saying “how dare Reba besmirch the name of Top Quality Pizza,” because that’s how AEW thinks you get fans to take an angle seriously.
Excalibur is now talking about something called a “tooth and nail match” between these two. When did this get signed? Also, what the f*ck is a “tooth and nail match?”
They rubbed more pizza in Swole’s face. This is the second time we’ve done the “rub food in your enemy’s face to humiliate him/her” angle in about three weeks (they did it with Orange Cassidy and the champagne, too).

JON MOXLEY vs. MJF’S LAWYER (w/Wardlow)- no rating, TERRIBLE segment
And, of course, they’ve named he lawyer “Mark,” because that joke didn’t get old about five years ago.
Our hero beat up a man who had no idea how to defend himself. He even threw weapons at the guy, which should have been a DQ but wasn’t. Also, they were on the outside forever and didn’t get counted out.
Once the match was over, Wardlow attacked Moxley and beat him up. MJF came out. Guess what: he’s not really hurt. I’m pretty sure everyone had already figured that out. They beat Moxley up two on one and bloodied him. I just saw Moxley for an unwilling and untrained person into a match so he could hit with a dangerous wrestling move, so I’m having trouble feeling sorry for Moxley right now. In fact, he kind of deserves it, and that’s pretty much the opposite of the feeling AEW should want me to have at the end of the go-home segment for the world title match.


Another bad episode of AEW. Today I learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that’s basically AEW’s booking in a nutshell: People with low ability at a task overestimating their ability at that ask and being unable to understand that they’re not good at it.

[Thelone]

Someone on 411mania or Scott Keith's blog made a good point about how none of the current programs feels serious and/or like a big main event program. The closest they've got is the whole Elite/Page/Revival stuff, but has been made confusing because the protagonists have mood swings every two seconds. The women's title match is also pretty serious, but it's clearly just a placeholder match because there's no one in this division right now. Finally, Hardy/Guevara is serious, but not a main event feud.

So yeah, MJF/Moxley, Jericho/Cassidy and Baker/Swole are goofy midcard feuds, and the filler is... well, filler no one really cares about.