Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Championship Week Dynamite

Championship Week is officially upon us, as between Wednesday’s Dynamite, Friday’s Rampage, and Saturday’s Battle of the Belts 2, all of the titles in AEW – and even some Ring of Honor belts for good measure – will be defended. This week’s stacked episode of Dynamite saw two titles defended and several other matches with championship and storyline implications. Tony Khan even promised that the show was so overstuffed with momentous matches that the network had granted AEW some extra time in case the show ran over, so all the ingredients were there for a quality night of wrestling, with some commenting about the show’s pay-per-view level on paper. However, despite my short-lived attempt to create an origami wrestling federation, wrestling shows aren’t fought on paper but in the squared circle, so let’s take a look at how things played out in the ring this week.

Best Match of the Night

AEW has built up quite a reputation for giving the fans what they want, so when CM Punk went fishing on social media for an opponent for this week’s show and Penta Oscuro volunteered his services as an opponent, AEW did the logical thing and booked them together in a match. And wouldn’t you know it but it ended up being the opening match on the show, and a pretty good one for that matter. A lot of the post-match chatter will rightly focus on Punk’s left knee, as he landed awkwardly a couple of times during the match including an uncharacteristic botch of a top-rope hurricanrana. It’s hard to tell whether he was just selling an injury from his suicide dive early in the match or if he was genuinely hurt (or possibly a little of both) but it did detract from the overall quality of the bout just slightly. That said, this was a very competitive, back-and-forth match in which both men looked good and the right person won as Punk continues his pursuit of the AEW world title.

I know this is going to be a somewhat controversial choice, but for me Samoa Joe vs. Minoru Suzuki for the Ring of Honor World Television Championship was the best runner-up to match of the night in my opinion. I get it – this was an absolute dream match between two men who have (as far as I know) never faced off in their careers. And they did pretty much what you’d expect two of the best strikers in professional wrestling to do – chop, slap, and elbow the living hell out of each other. That said, and this is the controversial part, I just felt like they didn’t do anything more than what you’d expect. There were tons of strikes back and forth, Suzuki tried to soften Joe up with a sleeper hold so he could deliver the Gotch piledriver, and Joe tried to maneuver Suzuki into position for the Muscle Buster, which he ultimately hit for the win. Don’t get me wrong – the match was a blast to watch for fans of hard-hitting, shoot-style brawling. It was very nearly on the level of Suzuki vs. Bryan Danielson from last year. There is absolutely no shame in that. And maybe my expectations were just too high given the matchup and its place at the top of a loaded card of exceptional wrestling matches. It just didn’t feel like it overdelivered on its potential – it delivered for sure, but there was one other match that I felt just went a little bit further in what it was able to achieve.

That’s why I’m giving match of the night honors to reDRagon vs. Jurassic Express for the AEW Tag Team Championship. It was smoother than Punk/Penta and more varied than Suzuki/Joe, and the incredible pace of the action coupled with a few standout spots elevated it above everything else in my mind. Jurassic Express may get overlooked slightly with teams like the Young Bucks and FTR on the roster, but they absolutely deserve to be considered among the best tag teams in the world at the moment, and reDRagon should never be overlooked for their combination of technical mastery and ability to deliver a high spot like Bobby Fish’s top rope Falcon Arrow over Luchasaurus who was in a guillotine from Kyle O’Reilly. The post-match involvement of FTR was another exciting development, as it would be great to see these three teams face off down the line (maybe at next month’s Double or Nothing) or just a #1 contender’s match between reDRagon and FTR. That doesn’t make this match better or anything, I’m just pointing that out because there’s only so many ways to say “this match was a very good match on a night full of very good matches” and I’ve kind of run out of other things to talk about.

Best Moment of the Night

There weren’t a lot of non-wrestling segments to highlight this week with so many matches on the card, so I’ll take the opportunity to shout out a couple of signs in the crowd that I particularly enjoyed. “MJF stay home and pet your cat” was an obvious response to MJF posting about his cat on social media, and “MJF puts tomatoes in his gumbo” is the best region-specific way of calling someone bougie that I’ve ever seen. (If you’re interested but unfamiliar with the cajun vs. creole debate, this covers it pretty well.)

Another specifically Nawlins highlight was Ricky Starks walking the ropes better than Undertaker ever did. In fact, his facial expressions and mannerisms throughout this match were an overall highlight for a guy who doesn’t get to show out as often as he should. Of course, Powerhouse Hobbs got the pin for his team in Starks’ own hometown, so that was an odd choice, but at least he got the hero’s welcome in front of his people.

Nyla Rose is often a contender for line of the night, whether on TV or social media, but I couldn’t help but laugh when she said “I love cake…and violence!” after Thunder Rosa thwarted her and Vickie Guerrero’s attempt to ambush her with a celebration cake backstage. I also found it hilarious that Nyla decided not to get anything written on the cake because that costs extra and Rosa isn’t worth it. Of course the cake ended up in Nyla’s face, but that didn’t stop her from attacking anyway, leading to that instant classic line.

Worst Matches/Moments of the Night

Marina Shafir vs. Skye Blue could not have been colder if it was contested inside an industrial freezer in Antarctica with Victor Fries as the referee. I feel bad for Marina because this was her televised debut, but the New Orleans crowd could not have cared any less, and Skye Blue is a talented young competitor but does not have nearly enough exposure for the fans to feel too bad about her getting utterly squashed. Jade Cargill browsing her phone backstage in complete indifference and the Baddie Section booing at ringside also did the match no favors – it couldn’t have been clearer that the outcome did not matter one bit as the TBS Championship is not going anywhere regardless of what Shafir does in pointless matches like this. The AEW women’s division continues to need work, and for this to be the only women’s match on an overloaded card like this was a particularly egregious example of the divide between how the men and women are portrayed.

The worst moment of the night had to be the debut of Diet Great Khali…er, Satnam Singh after the main event. There are few things that get me less excited than a former MMA fighter making the jump to professional wrestling (see above) but a former basketball player who seems to have limited mobility and even more limited wrestling aptitude might just be one of those few things. I don’t want to be too harsh on Singh as he just signed with the company last September, but rushing an unheralded prospect onto TV is never a good idea, especially when he’s reportedly been training to become a wrestler for less than a year. I get that India is a big market, but what is the deal with wrestling companies trying to shamelessly pander to that audience by hot-shotting unproven wrestlers of Indian descent into high-profile positions on the card? Has that ever worked? Do companies think Indian wrestling fans are so unsophisticated that they can’t see through such a transparent stunt? Are they supposed to be so excited just to see someone who looks like them on television that they just blindly accept it no matter how bad the wrestler in question is? And even if Indian fans were that gullible, would it be worth the tradeoff that the rest of the audience knows this person is on TV in spite of their skill, not because of it? Look, if Singh had signed with the company, trained for a while, and debuted when he was ready and able to show off his skills, I would have no problem with it, and I can only hope he either proves to be an absolute wrestling savant or is given the opportunity to step back from the spotlight until such time as he’s developed acceptably. From what we saw this week, though, it seems like neither of those is a realistic possibility, and it’s no wonder the reaction to this show-ending segment has been so universally negative.

Parting Shots

• The announcement that Ring of Honor World Champion Jonathan Gresham will face Dalton Castle at Battle of the Belts 2 is ridiculously exciting. If you’ve never seen either man wrestle, get ready for a treat on Saturday. Gresham is an extraordinary pure wrestler, and Castle backs up his flamboyant persona with a rock solid in-ring game. Get hyped.
• MJF pretending to have zipped his scarf in his jacket just to sucker Shawn Dean in for a cheap shot was a simple yet perfect example of why Friedman is widely considered one of the greatest heels in all of wrestling. It’s such a small detail, and it was almost entirely unnecessary as it gave him a minor advantage that probably could have been achieved simply by beating Dean to the punch once the bell rang, but that’s exactly what makes it great – MJF takes these shortcuts not because he needs to but because he wants to. Because he’s a massive tool, you see.
• Ortiz wearing Angelo Parker’s stolen shoes to the ring was such a hilarious moment – the earlier scene in which he, Santana, and Eddie Kingston jumped the Jericho Appreciation Society at the airport and stole their wheels was great, but Parker being left shoeless seemed like such a random, odd detail. At least they paid it off, regardless of how strange it was at the time. Unlike the shirtless security guard shown backstage during the MJF/Shawn Dean match, which was clearly foreshadowing for Wardlow to appear disguised as a security guard, though that was fun in its own way too.

That’s it for another week – really good show from an in-ring standpoint, despite a couple of questionable bits along the way. Thanks again for joining me, and I hope to see you all back here again next week for more Chair Shots!