Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: AEW Full Gear 2024
A lot has changed in a little over a month, both in professional wrestling and in the world at large. And although not all of those changes have been positive or well-received, we can generally count on AEW pay-per-views to deliver the goods and bring back anyone who may have drifted off since the last one. So let’s take a look at what Full Gear was able to dish out for those of us in need of a good show to reignite our excitement for the product as this year winds down.
Cheers
As always, check my Threads if you want to see my match ratings and to have a good laugh at my inability to predict match results. Hey, at least I’m only doing this as a hobby!
There wasn’t that much to discuss on this show besides match results, which is not a bad thing for the record, but it does mean that there isn’t a lot to highlight here other than how well I feel certain storylines are going because I can’t exactly talk about that surprise return, shocking heel turn, or incredible debut. Though I guess there was one debut on this show to talk about, so let’s start there: Bobby Lashley. Sure can wrestle good. Swerve Strickland made him look like a million bucks too. The Hurt Syndicate as a whole has been presented really well in my opinion, and that continued here. Also that Swerve Stomp through the table was perfection.
Another positive takeaway from this show was how over the House of Black is – both Buddy Matthews and the Kings of the Black Throne were very well received by the live crowd in their respective matches, which is a great sign moving forward. Matthews could easily find himself in line for a TNT Championship program with the newly crowned Daniel Garcia, and I suspect Malakai and Brody are not done with the tag titles after not even figuring into the finish of their 4-way match. On the other hand, AEW might remember that they have trios titles floating around somewhere and have the team reform with a returning Julia Hart urging them to reclaim the gold. Either way, it feels like now would be an ideal time to give them a long-awaited push.
Speaking of pushes, strap a rocket to Kyle Fletcher after his stellar match with Will Ospreay. Yeah, I know, Will Ospreay could have a great match with a broomstick, but Fletcher deserves a ton of credit for his meteoric rise since breaking away as a singles star. (Sorry Mark Davis.) After his clear match of the night performance, there are a ton of potential feuds ahead for the Protostar – my money is on him being a significant contender for the Continental Championship as that tournament figures to start very soon – and considering how much success fellow Don Callis protégé Konosuke Takeshita has been having lately, it’s not hard to imagine Fletcher taking a similar path.
AEW is clearly in its villain era right now, so I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the top heel in the company right now, Jon Moxley. His match with Orange Cassidy was fantastic – after the utterly bleak ending to WrestleDream, I was glad that they gave us just enough hope that Cassidy might win after a briefcase shot to the head of the champion only for Mox to kick out at the last possible moment before taking the underhanded route to retaining the title. Moxley deserves a ton of credit for transforming into the most despicable heel in the company despite how well-liked he is. I mean, he’s easily one of my favorite wrestlers in the world right now, but I absolutely hate him for what he did to Bryan Danielson, for poisoning the minds of Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta (PAC was always that way anyway), and for cheating Orange Cassidy out of the title. AND HE DIDN’T EVEN BLEED. What a jerk. I love him, but in a way where I still completely hate him.
Boos
The tag team 4-way match was probably the weakest match on the card in my opinion, but it must be said that it was still far from a bad match by any means. What I really want to talk about here is just how odd it was that a match involving four teams managed to focus on only one of them, and their impending breakup at that. While The Acclaimed were far from the favorites to win this match (I think most people knew Private Party would retain in their first title defense, with some hoping for the aforementioned Kings of the Black Throne to finally get their due or The Outrunners to catch lightning in a bottle) Caster and Bowens were oddly the focus of a large portion of the match. And it…wasn’t particularly good for the match as a whole. Considering a 4-way match is generally booked so that the action remains free-flowing even when one performer or team needs to take a quick break on the outside, there were portions of the match where Bowens and Caster were bickering while seemingly nothing else was going on. I know a lot of people have really stopped caring about The Acclaimed since they lost the tag belts, and while I’m not really among them, I definitely feel like I’m not that invested in their potential breakup. Certainly not at the expense of the tag titles and Private Party as new champs in particular. I would rather have seen Zay and Quen defend the titles against Black and King in a straight-up match and have The Acclaimed implode on Dynamite or in a pre-show loss to The Outrunners. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the youngest men alive got their main roster due on this show. I just wish it hadn’t been overshadowed by drama over a team that the audience has mostly soured on recently.)
Parting Shots
Big Boom AJ’s Zero Hour match against QT Marshall was totally fine (credit to the always dependable Marshall) and hopefully it brought in some casual fans who might not have watched the show otherwise. I will happily go back to not caring about him, Big Justice, and The Rizzler now. That’s really all that needs to be said about that.
I really wanted to see Kris Statlander win the TBS Championship back from Mercedes Moné, but they had a great match that made both of them look good and I really can’t ask for more than that. The only reason it wasn’t included in the Cheers section was that finish – after Stat kicked out of two backstabbers and a Moneymaker, she lost to…a rope-drop and a rollup? Maybe we’ll get a rematch somewhere down the line and that lame ending will be forgotten, but at the moment it is a bummer. Still a really good match overall, though.
I really feel like either Jay White vs. Adam Page or Jack Perry vs. Daniel Garcia should have been some sort of no-DQ match. It felt like this show was nothing but standard matches, which is okay, but considering how much of both matches was spent outside of the ring with the chaos barely being reined in, it felt like a missed opportunity not to have a stipulation on at least one of them. I get that you don’t want to devalue Page’s Lights Out match against Swerve Strickland from All Out by having another hardcore match so shortly afterward (and maybe he and White aren’t done and we’ll get a more extreme version of this match later) but the show overall needed something…more. There really wasn’t anything to break up the flow of matches and although the quality of those matches was very high overall, it felt like a shot of adrenaline somewhere along the line would have been welcome.
The main event may have descended into chaos a bit too much for my liking – I get it, lots of people want to be the one to take out Jon Moxley – but can we just appreciate the moment of Willow Nightingale laying out Marina Shafir to a huge ovation? Yeah, that was nice. I liked that.
That’s it for another show – I don’t think this will be on anyone’s shortlist of “best pay-per-views of 2024” but it was a really solid show overall and I like the direction the company is going in overall at the moment. It really feels like we’re in AEW’s version of The Empire Strikes Back when it feels like the evil Empire has the upper hand and nobody knows how our heroes will ever recover. And considering ESB is my favorite Star Wars movie, I’d say that’s a pretty good place to be, even if it means a lot of downer finishes where the bad guy wins. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you’ll come back next time for more Chair Shots!
