Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Pizza Pizza Dynamite

AEW promoted this week’s Dynamite from Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena as a pay-per-view quality show on free TV, which usually means it would have a special name like Motor City Mess-Around or Lower Peninsula Lawlessness, but in this case the card was just extra good without the additional branding. Two titles were on the line, a new #1 contender for one of Ring of Honor’s top titles would be declared, and two extreme match types brought some added intrigue. But it’s easy to claim a pay-per-view quality show – I mean, do you know how many bad wrestling pay-per-views there have been over the years? Like WWE’s ECW December to Dismember, TNA’s Victory Road 2011, and WCW Slamboree 2000 were all pay-per-views. Or take your pick of any of WWE’s Saudi Arabia shows but especially Crown Jewel 2018. Is that the level of quality we were being promised? Presumably not, but then how good of a pay-per-view are we talking here? All Out 2021, or Revolution 2021? Let’s take a look at all the best and worst from this week’s show to see how it stacked up to the level of quality (or lack thereof) from those aforementioned shows.

Best Match of the Night

Cards on the table here: I really think this show lived up to its billing overall. Maybe calling it “pay-per-view quality” was a bit of hyperbole, something Tony Khan is definitely not a stranger to, but it certainly over-delivered for a weekly show. After several weeks of middling TV, this week’s Dynamite really stepped up the match quality overall. I’ve had a hard time finding more than one or two matches to highlight in this segment over the past few weeks, but this week I would argue any of the matches on the card could easily find its way onto a best match list. Anna Jay vs. Julia Hart was a decent no holds barred match but ultimately the lack of televised justification for the stipulation held it back, and the House of Black vs. “Best Amigos” (Trent Beretta and Chuck Taylor teaming with Bandido) was fun and a decent introduction to the Open House rules (which were clarified before the match, thankfully) even if the match was somewhat hampered by a lack of time. I did like the presentation of the match, however, and I think with some actual buildup (and maybe a more inspired “dealer’s choice” rule than simply having Julia Hart banned from ringside to give her a breather after her match…er, I mean to prevent her from interfering) the next Open House match could be especially cool.

My first honorable mention this week goes to Orange Cassidy vs. Daniel Garcia for the AEW International Championship. Shockingly, Orange Cassidy wasn’t in the opener this week! Unfortunately, maybe that lack of opening magic held Freshly Squeezed back a little bit as this match wasn’t the best he’s had recently, but given the quality of his recent run that isn’t really too disparaging. OC and Red Death are two of the best young wrestlers in the company, so of course this match was going to be good. In fact, Garcia was probably the most likely challenger to dethrone the champ in the past couple of months. With that said, however, the match never quite clicked as much as it could have with more of an established story or feud. Both performers were still at the top of their game, but it felt like they were held back a little to avoid overshadowing other matches on the card and, most likely, to prevent them from giving away a true pay-per-view caliber match without any build. Essentially, this was the appetizer version of a match that could have been a main course – there’s nothing wrong with that, but it likely left fans hungry for more. Still, Cassidy and Garcia continue to impress virtually every time they step into the ring, and they should continue to receive opportunities to prove themselves among the top stars in the company.

Top honorable mention goes to the main event cage match between Jon Moxley and Kenny Omega. About the only negative here was that it didn’t quite live up to the hardcore epics both men are capable of, partly due to time constraints and partly because the post-match developments in the ongoing Elite vs. Blackpool Combat Club storyline were more important than the actual brutality of the match itself. But that’s it. Omega and Moxley battered each other with Mox actually bleeding from his back due to a barbed wire chairshot before bleeding from his forehead, though that may just have been because he didn’t blade hard enough to get the red stuff flowing and the barbed wire chair actually drew blood for real. Broken glass was introduced into the match at one point, and Omega hit a nasty-looking V-Trigger through the cage wall that actually looked like it did more damage to him than Moxley as his leg got pinned between the ring and the cage and his knee was wrapped around one of the metal bars that forms the cage’s structure. Unlike the earlier Anna Jay vs. Julia Hart match, there was actually a well-established reason Omega and Moxley wanted to beat each other into steak tartare, so the action fared somewhat better, up to the swerve finish that was probably inevitable since the endgame here is a big faction war at Double or Nothing so there couldn’t be a conclusive ending here. They pulled off the Don Callis heel turn about as well as they could have – it doesn’t seem like he’s necessarily throwing his support behind the BCC, though he might turn to them for protection now, but he clearly has no further need for or interest in Omega. Plus it makes sense to protect Omega’s finisher while preventing Mox from losing clean. This wasn’t the best match these two are capable of having together, but they threw enough hardcore action into this encounter to elevate it above the average weekly main event. It just wasn’t quite the best match of the night.

Look out Orange Cassidy – Claudio Castagnoli and Rey Fenix are coming for your crown as king of the opener! Okay, we probably won’t see either of them in another opening match for a while, so maybe not, but their “Double Jeopardy” match that opened the show was ultimately the best in-ring output of the entire show. The name of the match was somewhat weird, but I get the general gist of what they meant by it – both men are champs in Ring of Honor, hence there were “double” the belts represented than in a regular #1 contender’s match, and whoever lost would find themselves in “jeopardy” from the other earning a title shot. It was not, it turns out, a match in which all the dollar values are doubled or a wrestling adaptation of a mediocre Ashley Judd movie from the late ’90s. (Ask your grandparents and parents respectively if you don’t get either of those references. Also maybe learn some culture, Brad.) The pairing between these two was great – the Swiss Superman is a big athletic power guy who can throw the smaller Fenix around but still bump well for his smaller opponent’s high-flying offense, while Fenix sells so well that Claudio’s offense looked devastating without ever feeling like he was completely out of the match due to his speed advantage. One of the most impressive examples of their chemistry was when Fenix went for a third tope suicida and Claudio effortlessly caught him in midair and dropped him onto the guardrail by the entrance ramp. I can’t imagine the strength and coordination it must have taken to make the spot look as good as it did, yet Claudio did it with the nonchalance of a standard hip toss. Claudio won clean with the Ricola Bomb, which was an interesting choice – on the one hand, BCC is all about being the best wrestlers around, so it does make sense for them to win matches legitimately, but on the other hand, they are heels and often rely on their superior numbers to overwhelm their opponents. There’s more intrigue in having a heel trying to rack up all the belts, plus we’ve been conditioned to believe a singles star can more easily have success in the tag ranks than a primarily tag wrestler having singles success, so the result makes sense and Claudio could try to psych out his opponents by not naming his partner until the last minute. Whether he names Wheeler Yuta, Jon Moxley, or Bryan Danielson as his partner, the Lucha Brothers will have a very different match on their hands and preparing for one would not necessarily benefit them if it ends up being someone else. I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what’s been going on in RoH lately, but I have to imagine that they have an established rivalry that this will play into. I also have no idea what kind of pay-per-views they are running in 2023, though I know Supercard of Honor already happened so they could either do Best in the World or Death Before Dishonor next, or they may be part of this year’s Forbidden Door. Regardless, two of the BCC guys against the Lucha Bros should be great whenever it happens, and the singles match between Claudio and Rey this week was an exceptional preview of that encounter.

Best Moment of the Night

Christian Cage cut a pretty good promo this week, which is good enough for an honorable mention. I feel like his decision to challenge for the TNT Championship when it seems like they were angling for Wardlow vs. Luchasaurus is interesting, but it’s entirely in keeping with the established selfishness of his character and he’ll probably lose before his muscle steps in and seizes the opportunity for himself. Christian obviously hasn’t done anything to earn a title shot, but since AEW doesn’t really bother with rankings anymore, the door is open to an opportunistic heel like Captain Charisma to just step up and claim an opportunity. It would be pretty funny if Wardlow ended up just saying no in response to his challenge. To avoid that, though, Christian did his best to rile up not just Wardlow but his newfound manager Arn Anderson, claiming that he tossed his son Brock aside to align himself with Wardlow and questioned whether his lack of championship pedigree would really lead the Wardog to the level of success that he wants. Granted, he did also take a shot at Wardlow’s “daddy issues” so the promo wasn’t entirely aimed at the champ’s manager, but it seems like he was mainly hoping Anderson would be mad enough to accept a match on Wardlow’s behalf to drive a wedge between them. It was a good promo, a little short but given the timing issues with the rest of the show I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, and his shots at Detroit were generic and lazy but at least elicited the desired response.

I’m going to give the appearance of Miro and Thunder Rosa backstage an honorable mention because it was totally unexpected and generated some major intrigue even though anyone who has been reading the dirt sheets lately was probably able to connect the dots as to what was going on. It gets an honorable mention because the payoff was weak, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. Still, just the visual of two wrestlers we haven’t seen in forever was worth a mention anyway.

I’m going to lump a bunch of separate moments into the moment of the night because they were so obviously connected and there wasn’t anything particularly close quality-wise this week. All 4 Pillars – MJF, Sammy Guevara, Darby Allin, and Jungle Boy Jack Perry – cut promos throughout the night that may not have been anything more than what they have already established in the buildup to the four-way match at Double or Nothing, but they kept it short and brought in other wrestlers like Chris Jericho, Tay Melo, Sting, and Christian Cage to add some additional gravitas and legitimacy to the segments. Again, I don’t know if these promos really added any excitement or anticipation to their upcoming match, but the bulk of their feud has already been established so they pretty much just need to remind us until the week before the pay-per-view when they can ratchet the heat up a notch right before the match.

Worst Matches/Moments of the Night

There’s this trend in media where a movie studio will release a commercial promoting when they’re going to drop a trailer for their new project. I hate this trend because the commercial almost always contains just a tiny snippet of what is going to be in the full teaser so it serves as a sort of tease for a tease. I don’t need that much teasing. Just show me the trailer when it’s ready. Besides, who needs an announcement that you’re going to announce something that will happen at some point in the future? The trailer isn’t appointment viewing for me – the movie that the trailer is promoting is the thing I’m going to put on my calendar. What does this have to do with professional wrestling, you might be asking unless you just think this is another of my “old man yells at cloud” moments. Well, maybe it is or maybe it’s that Tony Khan appeared on Dynamite this week to tell us he has a big announcement…that he’ll tell us next week. I’m not one to complain about the head honcho just for appearing on television – he’s done an admirable job of staying out of his company’s on-screen storylines except when absolutely necessary – but this appearance was a frustrating nothingburger. Now, we were arguably primed for something by the aforementioned appearances of Miro and Thunder Rosa going into his office earlier in the evening, but if that wasn’t getting paid off this week, it would have worked better to either leave the internet to speculate wildly about what that could mean before doing the standard “Tony’s got a huge announcement” tweet before next week’s show or to have Renee Paquette catch him coming out of his office to ask about what’s been going on only for him to hurriedly respond that there’s no time and he’ll address it next week. Maybe while he’s on the phone with some unnamed wrestler trying to angle for more TV time. Otherwise, it seems like this segment could have been cut entirely, or he could have just quickly told us whatever he needed to tell us this week. “Hey everyone, we’ve obviously got plenty of talent hanging around looking for something to do, so we’re going to debut a third televised show where all your problematic faves can hang out away from the people we’re more invested in who don’t get along with them.” That takes, what, 30 seconds? A minute? Saying “I’ll tell you next week” took as long as just telling us would have taken. TK, if I may, you are not Hulk Hogan. You do not have to declare that you’re going to tell us something, brother. You can just, y’know, tell us.

Parting Shots

• I rarely comment on Rampage anymore, but the Firm Deletion from this past week was…certainly something. The “cinematic match” has mostly been played out at this point, even though there have been some good ones since the Hardys’ original Final Deletion match in Impact. This installment was nothing new or special, but it did give us Stokely Hathaway being beaten up by Matt Hardy’s kids, one of whom hit a second turnbuckle Swanton Bomb on him to close out that part of the segment. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going out of your way to see it, but it was interesting and different if you’re into that sort of thing.
• I continue to be uninterested in seeing Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal challenge FTR for the tag titles, and I’m glad to know I’m not alone in that sentiment. Dax Harwood asked the fans if they should accept the Lethal Guitar Impact’s challenge for a title match and was met with a fairly resounding “no” from the live crowd in Detroit. Which was awkward because he then had to explain under what circumstances he would accept the challenge despite the audience just telling him not to.
• Tis the season, with Forbidden Door coming up in June – Kyle Fletcher from Aussie Open appeared backstage to attack International Champion Orange Cassidy. Expect to see more of these NJPW stars to randomly show up over the next month or so.

That’s it for another week – a really good show from an in-ring perspective and a decent enough episode from a storyline perspective with a pay-per-view just a few weeks away. Thanks for joining me once again, and I hope you’ll all come back next week for more Chair Shots!