5 Ups & 5 Downs From AEW Dynamite (8 Mar - Review)
AEW TV stutters yet again as the true magic of Revolution feels like a false dawn on Dynamite.
The recent spate of bang average Dynamites were easy to forget while watching Revolution.
One of the best entries into AEW's pay-per-view archive, the Sunday supercard was stuffed to the gills with so much of what the company promised before it even existed. All In and the shows before Dynamite's existence lived and died on Being The Elite skits and/or the prestige and pre-existing legacies of the wrestlers themselves. To this end, "good" wasn't good enough. In this brave new world and with so little camera time to tell stories, match quality had to do a lot of the heavy lifting and the poorer efforts had damaging consequences.
As with 2022's Forbidden Door, the opposite was true here. Some stories had been haphazardly reheated from thier once-perfect temperature (Christian Vs Jungle Boy), some felt obligatory to the point of counter-productive (Chris Jericho Vs Ricky Starks) and some felt like they weren't really stories at all (The Elite Vs The House Of Black, the Tag Team Title four way dance).
And yet, the model of stacking and jacking a roster worked - the company could and should be too good to fail when it comes to producing a quality wrestling show, and Revolution was evidence of that. If you are a quarterly customer and no more, you let again left feeling like your financial, emotional and time investments were all satisfied.
For the rest of us, Dynamite needed a drastic upswing in quality to ensure the anticipation of the next PPV cycle could be as enjoyable as the show itself. Did this week's clear that bar?
Let's light the fuse...