Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Alltering Elite Dynamite

After a Revolution pay-per-view that many reviewers ranked as one of the best AEW shows of all time, it would have been unsurprising but somewhat disappointing if the company had taken it easy with this week’s Dynamite. And heading into the show, it appeared that might be the case – only three matches were announced in advance, only one of which with seemingly any title implications, albeit for an unofficial championship. However, with this show being the season premiere and a huge show promised next week, this was no time for the company to rest on its laurels. Would the wrestlers of AEW rise to the occasion, or would the physical and emotional decimation of a hard-hitting pay-per-view just three nights earlier be too much to overcome?

Cheers

• Actually, let’s answer that question from the intro right now: this show definitely delivered beyond my expectations. Seriously, just look at the show graphic above (which is cropped to fit but you can imagine the full thing) and tell me this didn’t look like an absolute stinker. Only the main event has pictures of the people involved! The rest of the graphic is just a list of things that were scheduled to happen on the show! Did somebody forget to make a show graphic before the show? Were they trying to hide the redesign so they waited until the absolute last moment to create the graphic so it couldn’t be leaked? Did they not have any stock photos of the Young Bucks, Kris Statlander, Hook, or any of the others? So it’s not inconceivable that the show wasn’t going to be one for the record books, but AEW sure managed to get the most out of each match and segment.
• With that said, only one match really blew me away – with all due respect to Statlander vs. Riho, Hook vs. Brian Cage, and the other two unannounced matches that made up the show’s card. That match, of course, was Kyle Fletcher vs. Will Ospreay in the main event. Ospreay was of course coming off a match of the year candidate against Konosuke Takeshita at Revolution – something that I didn’t go into a ton of detail about in last week’s predictions, but if you follow me on Threads (which I can’t really recommend but you could if you wanted to) you might have caught a particularly interesting prediction that I made. So with his first match as an official member of the AEW roster delivering at such a high level (leaving him in what must have been rough shape physically, especially after the sheer drop brainbuster he took off the top turnbuckle that caught him on the lower back on the way down) it would have been easy to imagine him phoning in this match, but dear me he absolutely did not. Ospreay vs. Fletcher is definitely among the best TV matches of the year so far, and we’ll see how high it ranks by the end of the year. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still in the top ten. Obviously they were somewhat limited by the amount of time they had to work with – the match did end up going a few minutes past the top of the hour, but they only started with about 15 minutes to begin with – and with Fletcher coming off injury and Ospreay having just had an incredibly intense match on Sunday, they probably had to hold back at least a little. But as it so often happens, you put two great wrestlers who know each other so well into the ring together, and they’ll deliver. Both men threw everything they had at the other, and while it would have been inconceivable for the Aerial Assassin to lose mere days after picking up such a momentous win, there were quite a few near-falls that looked like they genuinely could have been the finish. I may have prematurely predicted Ospreay’s exit from the Don Callis Family, but I wonder how long AEW can keep someone as popular as Ospreay with a group as unpopular as the Family. At least his immediate future looks bright with Bryan Danielson coming to the ring after the main event to apparently just get a closer look at Ospreay as the show went off the air. Danielson’s recent run (after declaring this would be his final year as a full-time wrestler) suggests that he may have hand-picked a dream match with Ospreay as his next major opponent, which would be a very exciting development indeed.
• There had been rumblings that Kazuchika Okada a) had already signed with the company, and b) was going to debut this week so as to not take away from another $urpri$e debut next week, but I don’t think anybody would have predicted the way he would debut. Matthew and Nicholas Jackson teased not one but TWO big announcements, and when they made their way to the ring, most were probably expecting something to do with the AEW Tag Team Championships now that Sting is retired and Darby is having one last match next week before attempting to climb Mount Everest. The Bucks did air some grievances about Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, and Sting’s sons all getting involved in their match at Revolution, and they did announce that they would be entering the tournament for the vacant tag belts, but then they surprisingly turned their attention to other members of the Elite. First, they announced that Adam Page would be suspended (from the Elite, without pay, whatever that means) due to his actions on Sunday, attacking two referees during his three-way match for the world title. Second, they announced that Kenny Omega was fired (again, from the Elite, whatever that means) as a result of not keeping up with his obligations to the company. (He’s been out due to suffering from diverticulitis, in case anybody was unclear on that point.) For some reason, this drew out Eddie Kingston, who confronted the Bucks and threw a roll of cash in their faces as prepayment for what he was about to say. He didn’t get much out before the Bucks pounced, using their numbers advantage to get the upper hand on the Continental Crown Champion. That’s when the familiar sound of a coin dropping as the Rainmaker made his first appearance as a member of the AEW roster, momentarily seeming to even the odds with Kingston. That might be a little generous, however, as it never really seemed like he was on Eddie’s side, not least because he was dressed in a suit that looked much more in line with what the Bucks were wearing. We’ve seen Okada in basic athletic attire before, so if he was really going to team up with Eddie, that would have made a lot more sense. Plus he never quite put himself between Eddie and the Bucks, instead standing off to the side until Eddie made his move, at which point Okada grabbed him and spun him around for a Rainmaker, officially aligning himself with the Elite. It was a shocking debut and a very interesting use for his character – instead of riding the natural excitement of fans seeing him as a member of the AEW roster for the first time, the company opted to start him off as a heel, which is a role that he has thrived in at times in his New Japan career despite mostly being known as a babyface. This will presumably set him up for a title match against Eddie in the near future – maybe next week at Big Business, maybe next month at the newly announced Dynasty pay-per-view. (And it’s certainly not inconceivable that he might win the title in his first official AEW match.) This was a good segment, the seeming lack of serious tease that Okada would align with Kingston before his sudden but inevitable betrayal notwithstanding.
• I’ve talked in enough depth about the best two things that happened on this show, but I fear I’m underselling the quality of the rest of the show by kind of glossing over it. Riho vs. Kris Statlander was really good and worth going back to if you missed it, Adam Copeland making a fiery return and challenging Christian Cage to an I Quit match for the TNT Championship in Toronto on March 20th was fantastic, and the opening promo between Swerve Strickland and Samoa Joe was awesome. Heck, even Hook vs. Brian Cage, pointless as that was, ended up being a pretty fun big guy/little guy hardcore match. (Shame neither guy got more than one or two thumbtacks in his back because the only reason to dump out thumbtacks onto the canvas is the visual image of those tacks being stuck into somebody in a way that looks genuinely painful.) So yeah, this was a good show overall. Hopefully that’s clear.

Boos

• Chris Jericho was pointlessly thrown into what was supposed to be “Meat Madness” at Revolution. On Dynamite, Jericho randomly crossed paths with Hook backstage to casually mention the respect he has for Taz, so of course he also randomly came out to defend Hook from the Mogul Embassy later in the night. What was the point of any of this? I feel like somebody put the names of all the wrestlers not booked on this show into a hat, pulled out three at random, and thus this segment was born.
• Speaking of random, can we not do the “how will they ever coexist” odd couple team in 2024? And especially, can we not do the odd couple team beats an established tag team decisively? And especially especially, can we not do the champion and challenger defeat a pair of tag champs decisively with one member of the odd couple team doing the vast majority of the offense? Matt Taven and Mike Bennett have looked really good in recent weeks, yet they were absolutely fed to Swerve Strickland and Samoa Joe this week for no good reason. I’m just glad the titles weren’t on the line – as much fun as MJF and Adam Cole ended up being back when they won the Ring of Honor tag belts together as world champion and #1 contender, we really didn’t need a repeat of that storyline. We especially didn’t need the tag belts being devalued even further by using them as a meaningless prop in the ongoing Joe/Swerve storyline.

Parting Shots

• Normally I would talk about Collision from Saturday night, but with Revolution on Sunday, I really don’t remember much of anything significant. So let’s talk briefly about Revolution instead. I went 6 of 9 (nice) in my predictions, but more importantly Sting’s retirement match was absolutely pitch perfect. He deserved to go out on his own terms after his WWE run sadly ended due to injury, and allowing him to remain undefeated in his AEW career was the right call as well considering how selfless he had been the entire time he was in the company. He didn’t try to pad his résumé with more world title reigns, he didn’t try to shoehorn his way into high-profile angles, and he didn’t try to put on 30+ minute matches that his body simply couldn’t handle. In fact, he didn’t even have a singles match during his time in AEW, sticking entirely to tag and trios matches to allow him to maximize his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. Sting has absolutely earned my respect not just for the overall body of work that he’s done over the better part of 40 years in the industry but particularly in how he’s choosing to leave the business at the peak of an unimpeachable run with AEW. Let’s just hope he doesn’t screw up this fairytale ending by showing up in TNA in a couple of months.
• Now that Orange Cassidy is no longer International Champion, it makes sense for him and Trent Berretta to team up and chase the recently vacated tag titles, especially considering Chuck Taylor is still not medically cleared to compete. They won’t win the belts in all likelihood, but it should be a fun new direction for Cassidy, who has served as quite the workhorse for AEW during his two runs with the men’s secondary belt.
• Speaking of the tag tournament, what a perfect time to have an ongoing event that involves a bracket, just like Mid March to Mid April Madness! (I’m not calling it March Madness because that name implies that the tournament takes the entire month of March and it doesn’t anymore due to inexplicable scheduling on the NCAA’s part – just start the season two weeks earlier so we can get through the tournament within the month of March! Why are we waiting until March 19th to get the tourney started?) This is again why it was so much smarter to have Sting and Darby Allin retain at Revolution rather than putting the belts on the EVPs.
• Kyle O’Reilly returning (with a visible glucose meter on his arm, no less – yay for disability representation!) was a nice moment at Revolution, and his return promo this week was interesting in that it confirmed what we saw on Sunday – he’s not joining the Undisputed Kingdom, at least not right away – while also implying that we should expect to see him as a solo act for the time being. Bobby Fish doesn’t appear to be walking through that door to reform reDRagon anytime soon, if AEW would even want him back considering how poorly received his Impact debut was, so I suppose it makes sense to keep KOR by himself for a while.

That’s it for another week – as I said, this was a pretty strong episode considering the state of the roster following Sunday’s pay-per-view. The fact that Will Ospreay had one of the best, most physically demanding matches on Sunday and turned in the best, most physically demanding match on Wednesday is absolutely insane to me. Thanks for joining me once again, and I hope to see you back here next week for more Chair Shots!