10 Troubling Things AEW Won't Change
8. The Lights Out Trick
At Double Or Nothing 2019, AEW's very first show, the Dark Order debuted.
The lights went out. The crowd fell into an expectant hush because you're meant to recognise the wrestler who appears when the lights turn back on. It's a reveal. You can't, or at least shouldn't, reveal nobody. What's there to reveal?
The crowd, who on the night were otherwise locked into a life-affirming state, shrugged. This was rat-pissing-on-cotton stuff. Deeper into 2019, the Butcher and the Blade appeared from underneath the ring to attack Cody Rhodes. Nobody outside of the northeast indie hardcores (with good taste!) knew who they were, and the angle died.
After getting the debut right for so long, not that a vignette or two would go amiss, Khan reverted to weird type and debuted Satnam Singh under identical circumstances to those infamous dud angles, which is troubling. This sort of thing hardly signals the death of a promotion, but it does invite ridicule and is perhaps indicative of an inability on Khan's part to look inward and recognise that certain things don't go down well with his audience. These are minor issues that aren't likely to cause a social media uproar - and thus aren't likely to receive an emergency fix - but might one day add up.
On the subject of which...