Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Backstage Footage Dynamite

Charleston, WV played host to the penultimate Dynamite before its inaugural Dynasty pay-per-view, and let’s not beat around the bush here – whatever matches they might have advertised (and there were five of them, for the record) were always going to be secondary to the blockbuster footage from All In that the Young Bucks promised to air for the first time. Would it be legitimate security footage or just some kind of hoax cooked up by the EVPs to further their storyline descent into villainy? Would the company finally put a disgruntled former star in his place or come across as desperate and pathetic? And most importantly, would any of this nonsense get fans more excited for Dynasty?

Boos

I know I normally start off with the positive elements, but I’m starting with the negatives this week because although I don’t think the show was terrible, I do have more negatives than usual and hopefully it will be clear why I want to get them out of the way first. My main gripe with this show was the very weird structure of the episode. If you had asked me what the show’s main event would be before the show started, I would have assumed Samoa Joe vs. Dustin Rhodes, which is not a match I particularly care about but I get that the world champ is probably going to close out the show. Now, I’m not trying to insult The Natural here – he’s been a great wrestler his entire career, and he’s still capable of going hard in the ring even at his age, especially with his seemingly newfound ability to pull off Canadian destroyers and Code Reds – and I get that AEW wanted the symmetry of having both Rhodes brothers face a Samoan world champion named Joe in the same week. But this was an eliminator match, meaning Dustin would have to beat Joe (not likely to happen) in order to earn a future shot at the title (lol absolutely not). So when Joe made his way to the ring to open the show, I was surprised but actually…kind of relieved? Like I didn’t expect Joe vs. Rhodes to be a bad match, but I assumed if AEW was putting it on first, they must have had something better planned for later in the show. Then Swerve Strickland appeared to lay out the champ and I thought, “WOW, not only are we getting this match out of the way early, we’re not even going to have the match AT ALL. What a bold choice!” Imagine my disappointment then when it turned out they were just using that pre-match attack as an excuse to make the fans wait *the entire show* to finally see a match that wasn’t that exciting to begin with. The main event didn’t end up being bad, but making us wait the whole night as if there was any anticipation to see it didn’t improve matters whatsoever. And in the end, Joe had to cheat to win against a man who is 10 years older than him and who has never held a world title in his long career. If that’s how this was always going to play out anyway, why not have the match in the opener with Joe having to tough it out immediately after Swerve’s attack rather than giving him the whole show to recover from what was admittedly a pretty tame assault? And if Swerve wasn’t going to take Joe out to prevent the match from happening, why would he allow Dustin to benefit from it? If Rhodes won this match and Swerve won the championship at Dynasty, he would have just handed the former Goldust a free title shot at his newly won belt! Long story short (too late) the logic and execution of this entire show-long storyline were significantly lacking.

I fully expected the “backstage footage from All In” to either be the best or the worst segment on the show, and yet it somehow managed to be…both? Let’s start with the negative. This entire segment felt like Tony Khan and the Young Bucks wanting to eat their cake and have it too. (Yes, that’s the way this saying was originally phrased, look it up.) On the one hand, this whole segment literally only exists because they wanted to clap back at CM Punk after he made some disparaging remarks about his former employer in the leadup to WrestleMania. On the other hand, they had to have known how controversial airing the footage would be, so they had FTR go out there and question what the point of airing such old footage actually was except pettiness on the part of the EVPs. And don’t get it wrong – it was petty and unnecessary. The logic of “FTR are friends with Punk so they must have been the masterminds behind this incident to throw us off our game so we would lose to them, so let’s show some footage that doesn’t substantiate that theory in any way” is simultaneously so convoluted and so paper thin that it’s almost as if they could have floated the theory without the footage and the segment would have worked exactly the same. Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think the footage was all that outrageous or surprising. It did somewhat validate AEW’s decision to fire Punk, as he clearly initiated both the argument and the fight, attacking Jack Perry and then lunging toward Tony Khan as backstage officials tried to restrain him. But like, actually seeing it happen did nothing for anyone. It played out just like you probably expected it to, unless you were expecting something way different than what was reported at the time. So it was entirely pointless to actually show it on TV. Punk doesn’t look great in this whole situation, but WWE hired him back despite knowing the basic gist of what we saw and probably won’t be reconsidering that hire based on this footage. I can’t imagine anybody really changing their mind on the incident based on what we saw so…what actually was the point of airing it? What was achieved by putting this on television? It didn’t serve the on-screen narrative, it didn’t make AEW look any better or Punk look any worse, and it just came across as the company being run by petty people who are unable to just let it go. Which is exactly the point FTR made to justify it being used as part of the storyline. Which leads us to…

Cheers

FTR and the EVPs absolutely nailed their portion of the segment at the very least. Sure, Dax and Cash may not know AEW’s pay-per-view calendar – Cash referred to Revolution (which was last month) and Dax mentioned All Out (which was the week after All In where the incident footage came from) – but otherwise their response to the Bucks was fiery and built excitement for their tag title match at Dynasty. (Dax referring to the fact that without the Bucks forming AEW, he might still be shaving Cash’s back, which is a good way to throw shade at the other company, in case anybody from AEW is taking notes here. Also the Rod and Todd Flanders reference while wearing a Bart Simpson shirt was choice.) The EVPs claiming that FTR’s victory at All In was invalid was perfectly in character and added to the idea that their upcoming showdown is going to provide the ultimate, definitive answer as to which team is the best of the generation. Unless FTR does something underhanded or the sun’s in the Bucks’ eyes or Mercury’s in retrograde or whatever flimsy excuse Matthew and Nicholas can contrive, in which case they’ll probably use their EVP powers to book a rematch. (But they probably won’t have to because they’ll use Jack Perry to help them win and that was secretly the point of airing the backstage footage but again they could have done that without actually showing the footage.)

Another segment that turned out really well was Will Ospreay’s promo, which he claimed to have asked Tony Khan for some time to address his upcoming match with Bryan Danielson. I’ll admit, I was a little lost in the sauce in the beginning when he was responding to, I guess, the idea that WWE didn’t want to sign him because he wanted less of a grind and AEW’s schedule is lighter? And he made a veiled reference to the fact that Triple H married the boss’ daughter? I don’t read the dirtsheets as much as some people do, so I couldn’t totally follow, but it was obvious that he was fired up about whatever he was talking about. It got better for me when he turned his attention to Danielson, who he claimed he needed to beat at Dynasty in order to claim he’s the best in the world. The promo wasn’t a career highlight for the Aerial Assassin by any means – as he said at the beginning of the segment, TV time is expensive so he couldn’t go on for too long – but it was good for what time he had and further put him over as one of the top babyfaces in the company.

The match card coming into the show was really uninspiring, but Adam Copeland vs. Penta was pretty awesome at least. First of all, Penta’s all-blue gear was rad as heck. Like he usually doesn’t veer too far off from the typical black and white color scheme you probably associate with his character, but this was a really cool variant. Besides that, this first-time matchup was just plain fun. Copeland speared Alex Abrahantes by mistake, Penta hit an avalanche Code Red, and the TNT champ retained after hitting a spear to counter a flying move attempt by the challenger. The post-match House of Black appearance and setup for a mixed tag were also enjoyable, with Willow Nightingale coming to Copeland’s aid to take out TBS Champion Julia Hart. Yes, the TBS and TNT champs will be on opposite sides of a match for the first time ever next week. My only quibble with the post-match segment was Copeland’s (hopefully) ad-libbed nickname for his trio with Mark Briscoe and Eddie Kingston. I didn’t fully understand what he said – the Rated Chicken Kings? – but it was awful and definitely does not need to be made official. (Looking at you LionHook.)

Parting Shots

So we all agree Willow Nightingale is either winning the TBS Championship and going on to face Mercedes Moné or the CEO is costing her the title in order to turn heel, right? And we agree that nobody actually attacked her in the dark during her interview with Alex Marvez, right? She’s playing the victim to give herself cover to attack Willow without seeming like the clear villain, yeah? Okay, just making sure we’re all on the same page here. Carry on.

Speaking of the women’s side of things, Toni Storm remains a treasure even if her “Charleston Championship Champagne Toast” was just a barely-veiled excuse to throw sparkling wine in Thunder Rosa’s face and…smear her facepaint a little? I guess maybe the intention was to wipe off Rosa’s paint entirely, but the small amount of liquid that splashed in her face wasn’t enough to pull that off.

Also speaking of the women’s division (dang, there was a lot of women’s content on this week’s Dynamite! Way to go, AEW!) I feel bad for the live audience, who clearly had no clue who Mina Shirakawa was or why she came to the ring to save Mariah May from Anna Jay’s post-match attack. I mean, I would have been just as lost if I didn’t have Excalibur to inform me. As far as the live crowd knew, though, this was just some rando from Stardom who likes drinking champagne and kissing other women, which come to think of it was probably as much context as they really needed to get on board with it.

Pac vs. Kazuchika Okada is an exciting matchup for Dynasty even if we could have done without the Okada squash match that preceded that announcement. Pac did take a wicked chair shot for his trouble, though.

I know I’ve ragged on LionHook in the past, and their trios match with Katsuyori Shibata against Shane Taylor Promotions didn’t do much to make me care any more (though it did tease the possible breakup of Jericho and Hook which…fingers crossed?) but I did enjoy the pre-match segment in which Shibata used his phone’s text-to-speech translation feature to say “what’s his deal” after Jericho tried to micromanage their strategy and compliment Renee Paquette’s necklace. Yeah, it doesn’t say anything good about your tag team when the best part of their segment was someone who isn’t even part of the team. Also, they brought Anthony Ogogo back for this? He didn’t even play a role in the finish!

That’s it for another week – this was a very average episode in my opinion. The talking segments were pretty good, the matches were meh (at best) other than Copeland vs. Penta, and the shots at WWE were gratuitous and unnecessary. We’ve got one more Dynamite before the pay-per-view. AEW, please focus on your own product and don’t worry about what the competition is saying or doing. Just build the best show you can with the time you’ve got. Thanks for joining me once again, and I hope to see you next time for more Chair Shots!