BRM Reviews the 2/22/2023 Dynamite (started off great but fell off a cliff)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 2/22/2023 Dynamite (started off great but fell off a cliff)

Post by Big Red Machine » Feb 23rd, '23, 00:46

AEW ALL-ATLANTIC TITLE MATCH: Orange Cassidy(c) vs. Wheeler YUTA- 7.75/10
They started off with a good wrestling sequence that OC eventually got the better of, so YUTA rolled to the outside to regroup, and Claudio came out and slapped him in the face and yelled at him to get back into the ring and properly represent the Blackpool Combat Club. I hated this spot with a fiery passion. Does Claudio really think that YUTA needs to be motivated after that promo YUTA cut on OC on Rampage to set this match up? It’s not like he was on the outside being a coward. He was regrouping. William Regal would be proud! And this is coming from Claudio, the most chill member of the group. This came off as a spot someone came up with to add supposed drama and to show us that the BCC are “intense,” rather than feeling like something that happened organically, given the situation.
After this pep talk from Claudio, YUTA gets into the ring and dominates OC, then dives onto him on the floor. Then he starts throwing him into barricades and into a table and kicks the table over onto him, and when the referee yells at him to get back into the ring, he does so, but takes a victory lap around the ring with his hands up in triumph. He came off like a total heel.
OC stuck his hands in his pockets, so YUTA smacked the sh*t out of him. Good. That’s what should happen every time he does that.
Despite the stuff that annoyed me, I thought this was an excellent match. The wrestling was great, the intensity was great, and Orange Cassidy- aside from the one aforementioned spot- wasn’t Orange Cassidy. OC won cleanly.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- hated it
After the match, the announcers were talking about how we saw a different side of Wheeler YUTA in this match. Orange Cassidy wanted to do the big hug after the match. YUTA was considering it, but Claudio Castagnoli came out and ordered him not to, and Wheeler obeyed. Why? It’s not like I haven’t seen Dragon or Claudio hug an opponent after a tough match. It’s rare, sure but I’m sure it happened back in ROH, and I’m certain it has happened in PWG or other places that Excalibur has referenced before and thus are AEW canon.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but this felt to me like the beginning of some classic AEW “storytelling” where in order to create conflict, someone will all of a sudden dislike something to an extreme degree, like Jericho’s hatred for ROH last year. It’s just that in this case, the someone will be the BCC and the thing they dislike will be things they perceive as too silly. The hug is comedy spot during matches. After the match, it’s not necessary a comedy spot, but they will treat it like it is one because it is a comedy spot during matches.
The fans booed this.

They told us that if Jon Moxley wins his match tonight, he will be the first person in AEW to reach 100 wins. At no point on Rampage did they mention this while hyping this match up, and he didn’t win on Dark: Elevation between the two, so Moxley was approaching this supposedly very important milestone, and no one noticed until the day of.
Holy crap that’s the main event. Jon Moxley vs. a dork who is barely above being a jobber. And apparently Evil Uno has 85 wins. This dork comedy loser is just fourteen wins behind Jon Moxley.


RENEE PAQUETTE INTERVIEWS ADAM PAGE & EVIL UNO- great
Remember just last week when Adam Page got annoyed that the wife of the guy he is feuding with kept being assigned to interview him about the feud? Well, apparently Tony Khan is a dick.
Page started to yell at Uno for getting involved when Page had apparently asked him not to. Uno then cut an excellent promo about how to him and the Dark Order, Page constantly telling them that sounds like Page telling them that they’re not on his level, and it’s time that the Dark Order stood up for themselves, and thus he asks Page not to get involved in tonight’s match so he can prove himself.
This was really great stuff, but the Dark Order have been so damaged that I don’t think you can really repair them. Part of that is the damage that has been done to them, but part of it is also this culture of letting the underdog get too much offense in that AEW has created. If Uno puts up a great fight against Moxley tonight, it won’t feel like he is being elevated. It will just feel like AEW doing the thing they usually do where they give a guy way down on the card a lot of offense so that a match can be more exciting.

RICKY STARKS PROMO/SEGMENT WITH CHRIS JERICHO- TREMENDOUS!
Starks says that he has been plagued by cheating and interference from the JAS… and he has come to accept that Jericho won’t allow a rematch with him, so he is moving on. He has in his hand an open contract for a match at Revolution 2023, so who would like to come out and face him?
Enter Chris Jericho. He comes out onto the stage and tells Starks that he sees what Starks is trying to do, and it’s not going to work, “so good luck with your little open challenge.”
Well, if Jericho doesn’t want to the match, Peter Avalon sure does. He comes out… and Jericho attacks him, and accepts Starks’ challenge. And not only that, but he is goaded into writing it into the contract that the JAS will not interfere, because despite his best efforts, Chris Jericho’s Achilles heel is his ego. It doesn’t matter if he sees your trap coming from a mile away. If you either bruise or (as Starks did here) massage his ego enough, he will convince himself that your trap is a swimming pool and dive in head-first.

PROMOS TO BUILD UP THE TAG TEAM BATTLE ROYALE- Top Flight were great, everyone else was meh to bad.

THE ACCLAIMED (w/Billy Gunn) vs. THE FIRM (Lee Moriarty & Big Bill) (w/Stokely Hathaway)- 6/10
Max Caster was in top form with his pre-match rap tonight. Gunn Club came out and attacked Billy, which distracted the Acclaimed, but they recovered and won anyway.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS CHRISTIAN CAGE- bad
This took place on the stage, right after the previous match, forcing the guys who won to exit through the crowd, and before the guys who lost had even gotten up. Could they not have waited thirty seconds before starting this interview? Or done it backstage like they do 90% of their interviews?
It just so happened that when they made the odd decision to do this interview in this relatively unusual place, that place just happens to have been able to provide Jungle Boy with cover so that he could spear Christian without Christian seeing him coming until it was too late. Anyway, Jungle Boy beat Christian up a bit, then got some chairs and went for a Con-Chair-To, but he hesitated because he once considered Christian a mentor, and when he was finally ready to do it, Christian recovered enough to hit him in the nuts before he could do it. Christian smashed Jungle Boy’s head into a chair.

I could have sworn we already did the “but can he bring himself to it?” thing with Jungle Boy. And earlier in this feud, Jungle Boy TRIED TO RUN CHRISTIAN OVER WITH A CAR, and you want me to believe that now he can’t bring himself to hit a guy in the head with a chair?

SAMOA JOE PROMO- great

SKYE BLUE vs. SARAYA (w/Toni Storm)- no rating, bad segment
This wasn’t good at times, but my real objection to it was the booking. Not only did Saraya need interference to beat the most jobbery jobber in the division, but Sky Blue even got a f*cking visual pinfall on her!
After the match the heels were going to spray-paint Skye Blue, but Britt Baker and Jamie Hayter came out to stop them. Why didn’t you come out to stop Toni from interfering when she was beating the crap of Skye Blue on the outside?
After that, Ruby Soho came out and signaled that she wants a title shot.

BRYAN DANIELSON’S PROMO IS INTERRRUPTED BY MJF- bad
Danielson started to cut a great promo on MJF. MJF interrupted him and cut a promo that I didn’t care for. I understand the mind-game he was trying to play with Dragon, but it took so long to get there I got very bored.
Then we got the part where MJF brought up Dragon’s kids and Dragon said that if MJF said anything to or about his kids, “I will kick the sh*t out of you.” That dastardly MJF proceeded to do exactly what Dragon just told him not to do… and Dragon just stood there, and didn’t do anything until MJF got into the ring and got right in his face. This made Dragon look like sh*t. They brawled, but were quickly separated by security. Each got to break free, etc. etc.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS BRITT BAKER & JAMIE HAYTER- bad
They’re just total babyfaces now. Hayter thinks that both Saraya and Ruby Soho deserve a title shot, but she can’t figure out which one of them deserves it more. If only this company had some sort of system to rank contenders. Oh well.
She says she’ll face both of them at the same time.

TAG TEAM BATTLE ROYALE FOR A SPOT IN THE AEW WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH AT REVOLUTION 2023- 4.5/10
Mark Briscoe showed up and attacked Mark Sterling at ringside. Josh Woods came to Sterling’s defense.
Battle Royale stuff happened. The fans were really into the Lucha Bros. It came down to just Trent Beretta vs. Jay Lethal & Jeff Jarrett. Fifteen referees stood there and just watched people interfere to the point where it got ridiculous. Jeff Jarrett was the final survivor, just in case you weren’t sick of seeing him and Jay Lethal in the tag title picture.

HOUSE OF BLACK PROMO- snore
Remember how two or three months ago they cut a promo claiming that there were people in the company who were “problems?” Well now they’re finally going to do something about it. The reason they didn’t do anything sooner is, of course… um….
They tell the Elite that they “want to discuss your status as AEW World Trios Champions face to face” on Rampage.

Up next is Tony Khan’s major announcement, which they haven’t mentioned at all tonight, to the point where I thought it just wasn’t going to happen. If wouldn’t be the first time.

TONY KHAN ANNOUNCES THAT ADAM COLE WILL MAKE THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT- They’re getting a new show. It won’t be in-ring, and it sounds like it won’t be kayfabe, but we’ll see.
Also, Cole says that he will return to the ring the night in March that that show debuts.

Lance Archer returns on Dynamite. Snore.

TEAM TNA’S PROMO IS INTERRUPTED BY GUNN CLUB- bad
The Gunns proposed that they each take care of each other’s enemies. Everyone here was a clown.

Hook has been reinstated and will face a wrestler of Stokely’s choosing on next week’s Dynamite.

JON MOXLEY vs. EVIL UNO- 4.75/10
Evil Uno is such a big star that he didn’t even get his entrance show for this main event. During this match Taz informed me that Evil Uno has been undefeated for eight months. This is the first I have heard of this.
Moxley won in six minutes and fourteen seconds, dominating most of it and making Uno bleed like a stuck pig. In a six-minute and fourteen second match against a loser, someone decided that Moxley should kicked out after getting hit with two consecutive piledrivers.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- bad
Moxley decided that even though this guy was bleeding badly he would leave the Bulldog Choke locked in after the bell, making blood continuously squirt from Uno’s head. What a bad person. Why would anyone ever cheer for this man?
Alex Reynolds and Jon Silver came out to make the save, but Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler YUTA attacked them. This, of course, brought Adam Page out. He just happened to be carrying some barbed wire around, which he hit Moxley with, because G-d forbid Moxley not go three weeks without bleeding on television. No security came out to try to break this up. Did they all just go home after breaking up Dragon vs. MJF?
This was another one of those segments where it feels like everything that happened happened for the purpose of accomplishing the booker’s goals of building to Moxley vs. Page and creating a reason for Page and the Dark Order to argue next week rather than for any organic reasons. None of this happens if Moxley doesn’t decide to see if can murder Evil Uno by squeezing all of the blood out of his body.



The first forty-five minutes or so of this show were great, but it fell off of a cliff after that.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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