5 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE Fastlane 2023 (Results & Review)

2. A Boisterous Opener

WWE Fastlane 2023 Cody Rhodes Jey Uso Finn Balor
WWE.com

Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso were not a tag team before Saturday night. They had never teamed together, despite somehow earning a match graphic that they would be vying for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championship at Fastlane.

And still, their win over the Judgment Day to capture the tag titles was a fantastic moment because everyone involved is just committed to getting everything over by sheer force of will. This goes for Rhodes and Uso, but also the entire Judgment Day, and especially groupie JD McDonagh, who took the most perfect Cross-Rhodes bump ever.

The tag title match opened the PLE, but it got plenty of time to breath, with multiple heat segments, a flurry of run-ins, and a fantastic finish that even included an explanation of why we wouldn’t be getting a Money in the Bank cash-in later that night.

If anyone wants to pick nits, the West Side Story standoff trope still needs to be killed off, as both teams had a standoff before heading into the finishing sequence. Still, this overall was a solid match that didn’t finish Cody’s story, but definitely completed a chapter.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.