It's Official: AEW Needs A MAJOR Wake-Up Call
Mox stole a beautiful sports car and crashed it into a Dynamite with an outrun aesthetic, on which Jericho stabbed him in the eye ahead of a show on a cruise ship that allowed him to play a badass vengeful pirate. And, if this scanned as cute and location-specific, the heft of the eye-for-an-eye storyline revealed itself when Santana disclosed that his father had gone blind to set up a match with Moxley in, following an unexpected war with one-night mercenary Jeff Cobb, yet another very cool detour that preserved the big match for the big show.
The star name wrestles rival's stablemate trope hasn't reached that brilliant height since. That is far from the only Tony Khan signature booking device to have lost its lustre.
AEW Dynamite is simultaneously a fantastic, 8.5/10 show seven weeks out of eight and a show to which over 100 improvements could be made. It's hard to unpack, but an attempt to do so follows.
The standard of greatness has been normalised. That can't be overstated. One other problem might be that the core selling point is slightly flawed - with an embrace of range, it is impossible for AEW to unify the base. The people who love Jon Moxley's bloodstained wars tend not to opt into the Elite's earnest, corny melodrama. Trios aficionados aren't into Timothy Thatcher's intricate limb work. Technical wrestling devotees cannot abide the irreverence of the Best Friends or the Lucha Bros.' more choreographed brand of exhilaration. By its very design, AEW attracts criticism, but most reasonable people understand the value of a promotion with such a diverse offering. That can't be the core problem, even if the lack of one cohesive identity is by definition polarising.
The base however is unified in that something needs to change.
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