7 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (19 Jan)

1. Fantastic Delivery, But...

Cody Rhodes cut a promo in spotfest form last night.

His delivery was phenomenal. Passionate, fiery, and believable, Rhodes started slowly and gradually turned things up to ten, peaking his intensity at all the right points. As always, he did a tremendous job of conducting the crowd's loud mixed reactions because he knows exactly what he's doing here. Cody is generating the kind of heat he wants to generate. He's playing between the lines of kayfabe and reality when he briefly flirts with his contractual situation before diving back into storyline stuff.

The high spots were good. Putting over young talent like Ricky Starks, Brody King, and Sammy Guevara is always welcome, as is pointing out, rightly, that he was instrumental in building the Forbidden Door in the first place. That he took so long to find and set up the oversized ladder fits his current character as well.

But like a spotfest, there was little tying the high spots together. This was a long, fragmented, and often meandering promo segment with little connective tissue, bouncing from point to point with little rhyme or reason at times. Whatever Rhodes had in his had to glue these pieces into a coherent picture didn't manifest onscreen, making it feel like little more than a series of well-spoken non-sequiturs.

Break this down into parts and you could probably build two or three shorter, more effective promos on everything going on in the CodyVerse at the moment. Tying them all together as one didn't quite work here. Again, extremely well-performed, but lacking elsewhere. Spectacle over substance.

A spotfest.