8 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (Nov 30 - Review)

4. MJF Is Able To Turn Heel Again, Because Of Course He Is

John Cena couldn't drown out the jeers as a babyface. Nor could Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes; when the crowd wants to do something, they will do it. The crowd wanted to cheer MJF, but they didn't last night because his promo and the resulting angle was masterfully performed on multiple levels.

Good matches happen every week. The standard is so high in promotions of renown that great matches happen so often that it's easy to forget good matches that happened three weeks ago. They are almost unimpressive in some warped way. A good angle is altogether more difficult to execute.

It requires more in the way of true creativity. Shocking an arena into stunned silence cannot be achieved the via the Pavlovian conditioning of a finisher kick-out. Tony Khan and MJF stunned the Indianapolis crowd into silence with a mind-blowing swerve of an angle that actually made sense: you only didn't think about it before last night because AEW, at its best, is a level above.

MJF talked in a deliberate, steady rhythm and low tone. For this to work, he could not allow the fans to get high on his charisma. Without being boring, since it is impossible for MJF to be boring, it went long. It went long by ingenious design; he wants you to resent him, and in threatening a Triple H 2003-style title reign, he may have located the thing that the millennial AEW base hates and fears the most. The custom Burberry World title is far more elegant than he must have realised, so the reveal didn't quite generate the reaction intended, but the twist did: MJF, who has told you he is a snake this entire time, out-heeled William Regal and brayed him in the back of the neck.

Regal's selling was superb. He made the gravity of the situation feel unsettling. MJF used Regal's words against him, issuing a sick callback to their phenomenal face to face confrontation as he crowed over his prone body. He never did forget that email all those years ago, and, in a great moment of foreshadowing, Regal said last week that an email would form the crux of this week's segment. Also last week, it was established that nothing can be done to William Regal as a result of his dire medical history. At most, it was thought, Regal could get "attacked" offscreen, a la Dean Malenko when the Pinnacle dusted him up.

Instead, AEW delivered a phenomenal and unexpected twist in what might be the angle of the year.