10 Best Wrestling Storylines Right Now
3. Eye For An Eye
Jon Moxley stormed to the top of the AEW rankings after half-killing Kenny Omega at Full Gear, thus setting up an inevitable date with Le Champion Chris Jericho.
Jericho tacitly put Moxley over all the more by recruiting him into the Inner Circle - an act of cowardice concealed as mentorship. Moxley wasn't interested. He didn't leave money on the table to lazily grab more of it. Infuriated, Jericho, and this is why stables should be mandatory in professional wrestling, tasked his underlings with incapacitating Moxley before February 29, but not before attempting to gouge his eye out. This was biblical storytelling, but it was only the premise: ironically, there's so much depth to this eye-for-an-eye concept. Did Santana reveal to Jericho or the booking committee his father's ailment, or was this arrived at accidentally? In a storyline designed to get one babyface over, some real thought revealed another, primed and ready for the years ahead. That so much attention was placed on an ancillary character furthers AEW's strength as the storytelling company.
The same outrun aesthetic germane to the Bash At The Beach setting informed the payback element when Moxley jabbed the Ford GT key into Santana's eye. That Moxley had to wear a patch on a boat was tremendously inspired stuff, and this vile heel behaviour allowed Jake Hager to show personality (!) by impersonating a pirate (!).
A classic story that has made expert, expressive use of a shared universe and location-specific aesthetic flourishes to give AEW an inimitable personality, in which three stars have cut incredible promos for a one-on-one title match, this is intricate, sumptuous episodic television.