12 Exact Moments AEW Booking Stopped Making Sense

11. Bryan Danielson’s World Title Reign

Something clearly happened during Bryan Danielson’s AEW World title reign that wasn’t communicated. The easy if perhaps unfair inference is that he was far more banged up than he and AEW anticipated when the decision was made to plot his World title run last stand.

Darby Allin had become #1 contender by winning a Royal Rampage battle royal, and was indeed meant to dethrone Bryan Danielson in a Seattle derby at WrestleDream. He was made to look like an idiot when the booking plans changed; it was thought a better idea for a heel Moxley to dethrone Bryan and later drop the belt to Darby. Darby put his shot on the line against Mox at Grand Slam and lost. This weird shift wasn’t helped by Mox’s experiments with cryptic Malakai Black-style promos.

In the meantime, Christian Cage won a Casino Gauntlet match at All In: London, securing, essentially, a Money In The Bank contract. Didn’t AEW think WWE was bad?

Surely, the idea wasn’t for him to cash in on fellow heel Jon Moxley. He was either going to ruin Darby’s big moment or fail in the pursuit when challenging Danielson, perhaps when Luchasaurus had finally tired of his bullying. Luchasaurus was suffering terribly unfortunate health issues at the time, so if that was the plan, clearly AEW could not proceed. In another odd development, Nigel McGuinness and his return from injury, a great story AEW didn’t even need to write, was complicated by Nigel’s insistence that Bryan was a coward who might not even make it to Grand Slam. That match was a worthy last chapter that needed no bogus episodic TV crap to build. It made narrative sense for Bryan to work Jack Perry, who'd been favoured in the booking, but who really asked for that?

Here and thereafter, AEW’s booking fell off a gorge, was airlifted back up, struck a tree, and went back down again.