8 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (16 Feb)

1. That Finish

Dynamite's main event will be covered in greater depth later in the article (spoiler: it was good), but its disappointing finish was such a bummer that it warrants its own entry here.

Jose the Assistant interfered, hopping onto the apron. Sting chased him off, distracting the referee's attention, allowing Andrade El Idolo to clock Darby Allin with his tablet. This allowed Sammy Guevara to land the GTH and retain the TNT Title. Afterwards, Matt Hardy hit the ring to attack Guevara (following another tablet shot) before Sting ran him off.

With this finish, AEW remains overly reliant on contrived interference-based match outcomes involving multiple parties. Beyond that, the tablet stuff isn't believable. Hitting somebody on the head with an iPad isn't going to knock them out unless you swing with the force of a thousand men. That Darby went limp on the turnbuckles after taking the shot, even though he'd been through a whole match by that point, looked weak. This isn't a steel chair we're talking about, here: it's a book-sized slab of plastic and glass.

A shame to close the night on a relative downer, as the TNT Title fight was great up to that point.