Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Keep Dynamite Weird

Austin, TX played host to this week’s Dynamite, one of the final opportunities for AEW to build up its big Memorial Day weekend show, Double or Nothing. With that in mind, the company booked three of its Four Pillars in matches, prominently featured one of its main title feuds, and devoted the main event segment to one of its longest-running feuds. Did the show deliver the goods to make fans more excited for the pay-per-view, or was it a letdown that will certainly cost the company money and cause Double or Nothing to fail miserably? Or, y’know, something between those options.

Best Match of the Night

This week’s show wasn’t very good from an in-ring standpoint. I feel like this shouldn’t be a particularly controversial statement. Simply put, there were six matches on the show and only two of them, one of which was a squash match, had a clean finish. That, uh, is not great. Especially for a company that is famous for almost always delivering clean finishes. Granted, only one match actually ended in a disqualification, but it’s hard to say a rollup with a handful of tights or a can of spray paint to the face behind the ref’s back counts as a legit finish. So I’m going to do something unusual: I’m going to rank my top three based not necessarily on the overall quality of the wrestling itself but how much the ending didn’t completely suck. First runner-up is Hikaru Shida & Dr. Britt Baker DMD vs. Toni Storm & Ruby Soho. Yes, it was a good enough match to be considered one of the top three matches on the show, but Storm hitting Baker with Storm Zero after she had been sprayed in the eyes with green spray paint provided by Saraya was a sucky ending. Look, there are plenty of babyface women on the roster – Willow Nightingale, anyone? – who could have backed up Baker and Shida if Jamie Hayter truly wasn’t available this week. But because babyfaces are stupid, Baker keeps wandering into situations where she’s obviously going to be at a disadvantage. Maybe by the time Double or Nothing finally rolls around more than two of these ladies can get on the same page so we can stop having these 3-on-2 matches masquerading as regular tag team bouts.

Second runner-up is Ricky Starks vs. Jay White. What’s that you say? A disqualification must be worse than a dirty pin? Okay, I guess you could argue that if you want, but given how predictable the dirty pin was yet wasn’t prevented and how the disqualification reflected something more germane to the feud, I would argue in this case the DQ is slightly less crappy. Starks didn’t get disqualified because he was trying to cheat and got caught or because he realized he couldn’t beat White and chose to take the easy way out. The chair that caused the DQ was introduced by White’s crony Juice Robinson, and Starks chose to use it because he figured it would be more satisfying to deliver some punishment to two guys who have been a thorn in his side than to win a TV match that wouldn’t have meant as much as the inevitable rematch at the pay-per-view. Which he’ll probably lose anyway, but hey – an actually somewhat smart decision by a babyface! Huzzah!

Best match of the night goes to AEW International Champion Orange Cassidy & Darby Allin vs. Big Bill & Lee Moriarty. The finish here actually didn’t suck at all – Allin hit his finisher, added on a side headlock takeover to troll the AEW Champion MJF, and won the match via pinfall. Minus the trolling, that’s literally the way matches are supposed to finish. No, there wasn’t any point to putting Cassidy and Allin together other than consolidating two matches into one. No, I don’t understand why Bill and Moriarty are still teaming together despite the Firm Deletion that was supposed to, uh, delete…the Firm? Okay, so the Firm disbanding wasn’t a condition of the match, just that Matt Hardy and Private Party are no longer required to be a part of it, and I guess having two guys continue to team together isn’t exactly the same as the faction continuing to exist. But hey, out of the top three most decent matches of the night, it had the least bogus finish, so it wins! An award! That means nothing! Hooray!

Best Moment of the Night

Umm…bad news, amigos. The non-wrestling stuff this week wasn’t that amazing either. Yeah, it turns out this was not really a great episode. The opening segment involving Wardlow, Christian Cage, and Luchasaurus was pretty good, I guess. I definitely don’t want to think about the kind of fetish they (inadvertently?) played into by having Wardaddy command Christian to “spit in my face” but at least this segment established that we’ll get a TNT Championship ladder match at Double or Nothing.

Best moment of the night clearly goes to Adam Page coming to the aid of The Elite in their ongoing feud with the Blackpool Combat Club. Granted, we didn’t get much of an explanation for why Don Callis turned his back on Kenny Omega last week, but there probably wasn’t anything he could have said that would have made it make perfect sense. The main purpose of the segment was clearly getting Omega into the ring by himself, after the BCC took out the Young Bucks backstage earlier in the evening, only for Matt and Nick to surprisingly return nonetheless. However, the numbers advantage was still clearly on BCC’s side, as their four members were set to have the advantage over the three reeling babyfaces, but their onetime best friend Adam Page emerged sporting a gold eyepatch to even the odds as they charged with weapons in hand. The final segment of the night may have been rushed, but it still managed to deliver a crowd-pleasing capper to the show that sparked instant excitement for the promised Anarchy in the Arena match at Double or Nothing. In that respect, it was probably the most successful aspect of the entire show.

Worst Matches/Moments of the Night

I could go on another long-winded rant like I did last week, but instead I’ll just point out that Tony Khan did finally reveal that the heavily rumored Collision show is a thing. And it will premiere on June 17th. But he couldn’t tell us where it will be held despite the fact that AEW booking the United Center in Chicago was one of the first pieces of information that got people speculating about the new show in the first place. And no details about the rumored brand split or, y’know, that CM Punk will reportedly be the centerpiece of the new show. Of course TK couldn’t possibly cover any of that stuff beyond the announcement of the show itself, but he could promise yet another announcement for next week’s show. So…yeah, pointless segment is pointless yet again.

Parting Shots

• Chris Jericho vs. Roderick Strong was a pretty average brawl, but at least there was an enjoyable swerve at the end with Adam Cole getting involved once the two competitors left the arena that Cole was banned from. Most people expected Jericho to employ someone outside of the Jericho Appreciation Society to intervene on his behalf because heels are smart and babyfaces are stupid, but for the second time in a single episode (!!!) the babyface actually did something smart and plotted to have his buddy wait outside to tip the scales in his favor. Shame the entire “match” leading up to it was just a mediocre hardcore-ish stumbling and punching affair.
• Orange Cassidy had a pretty funny two-part segment in which he declared that anyone who wants to face him for the International Championship should go talk to Tony Khan, only for Renee Paquette to report that in fact 20 people had done just that. Cassidy, in his usual nonchalant fashion, agreed to fight all of them in some sort of convoluted battle royale that AEW specializes in. Cassidy then asked Paquette if she wanted in, which she politely declined, so it will remain a 21-man match that AEW will presumably turn into some sort of blackjack…thing because that’s what they do and the show is in Las Vegas. Yeah, maybe this should have gone in the best moments section of the review, but considering it set up a battle royale, which I almost universally do not care about, it gets a mention here instead.
• Karen Jarrett made her debut this week to help out husband Jeff in his continued feud with FTR, hitting Cash Wheeler with a low blow from behind to set FTR up for a pair of guitar shots, so I fully expect that signing to be made official on Twitter anytime now.
• I get that Sammy Guevara is from Texas, but I’m not convinced having him cut a babyface promo after squashing some jobber named Exodus Prime (uncle Optimus will not be happy) and having him make the save as Jungle Boy Jack Perry was getting jumped by Rush and Preston Vance was actually necessary. He may come out next week and undo any feeling of sympathy his home state gave him this week to reinstate the face-heel balance for the four-way match at Double or Nothing, but then why bother booking him like a hero this week?

That’s it for another week – a pretty sub-par effort in my opinion, though at least we got confirmation of a few Double or Nothing matches and there’s room for next week’s show to bring everything together before the pay-per-view. Thanks for joining me once again, and I hope to see you all back here next week for more Chair Shots!