7 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (January 17 - Results & Review)
1. Joe Rules, HOOK Belongs
Samoa Joe Vs. HOOK was a perfect end-to-end presentation.
AEW by their weirdly apathetic standards promoted this big as a major hook at the beginning of the broadcast. HOOK's awesome, nihilistic rain-soaked social media promo was screened alongside a replay of Joe's fantastic champion's inauguration last week. Both champion and challenger were shown entering the building to further lend the match the big fight feeling. The hype was real and AEW probably should have done more to sell something that had captured the imagination of the public.
The match itself was tremendous, another simple story perfectly told, like the opener but also not at all. The range on the bookends of this show was so wonderful that the filler spot-fest quality in the middle was all the more pronounced.
Crucially, until he really got the crowd on side, HOOK only launched into brief offensive flurries by flying into Joe. He was the helicopter; Joe was King Kong. HOOK attempted flying clotheslines using the barricade and the apron, but he was for a while woefully outmatched. Joe demonstrated this, brutally, by rocking HOOK with a gruesome uranage on the announce desk. HOOK skimmed it skull-first and the thing still broke. In just one defence, Joe restored the transgressive meaning of the commentary table wreckage spot. That's aura.
He then basted HOOK with a powerbomb on the apron in another familiar scene that his awesome presence elevated. He tried to put HOOK away with a Muscle Buster, but HOOK - glowing with an aura of his own - kicked out at one. That was awesome, earned, and while HOOK's subsequent barrage of flying clotheslines didn't feel all that snug, that only added to the sense of pathos. He wasn't really ready for Joe, but came across as a badass for trying and for surviving for as long as he did. Paul Heyman once said that, in the perfect match, one wrestler goes over and their opponent gets over. AEW tries this a lot, possibly too often, but this was exactly that.
In the post-match, in a deft touch, Khan both further teased a rare interesting and logical three-way at Revolution between Joe, Hangman Page and Swerve Strickland - but also, via Page's post-match endorsement of HOOK, gave the challenger his well-earned moment.
Dynamite's excellent 2024 form continues.