Ranking Every Major Current Wrestling Storyline From Worst To Best
5. The Recruitment Of Hangman Page
Hangman Page's arc is something else entirely. It's something unprecedented in episodic TV wrestling both in scope and quality.
This particular storyline beat is tremendous, intriguing, and loaded with pathos - but the very best is yet to come, not that this won't inform it.
The Dark Order want to recruit Page, and this is really quite wholesome and so removed from everything we once knew about all of this, because they just...like him. They want to be his friend. It's probably not how this was originally set to unfold, but it's true to Page's arc; just as he feels unworthy of a support network, because he's poison, one comes along. It's heartbreaking in a way that resonates more powerfully than the betrayals of what wrestling used to be like, before Page reinvented the babyface role.
Matt Hardy, meanwhile, is trying to recruit him into his new stable as part of his new motivation to take back from an uncaring industry he feels left him for dead. There's a correlation with Page here, and Hardy is savvy enough to recognise it.
And it's so typical of AEW; before Page and the Dark Order unite and take down Omega's Elite, another series of matches have been spawned.