AEW Dynamite 3/27/24: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved
Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s weekly review of "AEW Dynamite," the show where the company's actual EVPs are doing parody EVP characters in response to a guy who doesn't even work there anymore. Hooray! And with that, we have officially used up our allotted "talking about The Young Bucks" time; thanks for playing, Matthew and Nicholas! If you want to read more about what they did on the show, you can check out our "Dynamite" results page, which is as comprehensive as it is objective. But that's not why you're here, reading this column. You're here so you can read what the WINC staff actually thought about this week's episode — or skim it and then immediately head down to the comments section, whatever works for you!
With that in mind — did we enjoy "Dynamite's" bookend matches featuring the likes of Will Ospreay, Katsuyori Shibata, Konosuke Takeshita, and Swerve Strickland? Are we still super into Mercedes Mone and the general performance of the women's division? And most importantly, is there any way we can get Chris Jericho as far away from HOOK as possible? Like, pronto? Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 3/27/24 episode of "AEW Dynamite."
Loved: Will Ospreay and Katsuyori Shibata engage in one-upsmanship
This week's "AEW Dynamite" opened with a rollicking good time, and possibly one of Will Ospreay's best TV outings of his young AEW career.
Ospreay faced seasoned veteran Katsuyori Shibata, anxious to prove himself against the man his Dyanasty opponent, Bryan Danielson, faced recently. Ospreay has a tendency to stick to a certain script in his matches and Shibata immediately broke him out of that routine to genuinely thrilling results. Both men seemed to be playing a game of "anything you can do, I can do better" throughout the blistering twenty-minute contest.
The match had all of the fast-paced action that people expect from Ospreay, but Shibata's priggish determination to prove he still had a step or two that the young Ospreay couldn't predict made for a sensational foil to Ospreay's hard-headed determination. Shibata seemingly slowed down Ospreay's psychology, no longer focusing on having "the best match" and instead focusing on proving his mettle to his opponent and showing that he could go strike for strike with one of the best pure strikers in professional wrestling.
For a brief, shimmering moment, years of Shibata being treated with kid gloves due to his 2017 head injury, the fiery veteran showed the competitive spirit that made him "The Wrestler" people know and love today. Ospreay is not going to treat his opponent like he's fragile and Shibata has been waiting for an opponent like that. The match was akin to a resurrection, brought about ironically because neither Ospreay nor Shibata cared about dying in the ring. That reckless kinship made for an electric pairing, the likes of which I hope we see again.
Written by Ross Berman
Loved: The women of AEW do it again
Skye Blue, Anna Jay, Kris Statlander, and winner Willow Nightingale all brought their A game in this match and put on quite a banger. The match was fast paced and enjoyable, and included four of AEW's most promising competitors in the women's division. Not only did they all show what they can do in the ring, but they also showed why AEW's women's division deserve to have more than just one match on their weekly shows. Nightingale winning the match felt like the right choice, and made sense given the push she's received as of late.
While it would've made sense for Mercedes Mone to compete in the match, having her at ringside still made the stakes of the match higher and brought more eyes to the match itself for those tuning in to hear her. Having her involved in the build to come between TBS Champion Julia Hart and Nightingale for their Dynasty title match is nice to see when you consider her history with Nightingale, and it will be fun to see if she gets inserted into the match at some point down the line.
Written by Olivia Quinlan
Hated: What is AEW doing with Mercedes Mone? (yes, we're doing this already)
I know, I know, it's only been three weeks and I should probably be more patient, but I'm really starting to wonder whose idea it was to have Mercedes Mone talk instead of wrestle on three consecutive episodes of "Dynamite." Now look, I love Mercedes. Huge fan over here. But I don't love her because of her promo skills. Mic work has always been her biggest weakness as a performer; theoretically that should be fine in AEW, where she can easily get and stay over based on her advanced ring work, but she hasn't wrestled a match yet. She actually hasn't even had her first match announced yet, and her booking hasn't exactly made it clear what she'll be doing. My best guess is that Willow Nightingale dethrones Julia Hart at Dynasty and moves into a title feud with Mone, but that would seem to suggest that Mercedes' debut match for the company won't come until after Dynasty on April 21, which is a long time to wait for someone who made her debut on March 13.
And in the meantime, AEW has her cut two consecutive in-ring promos the last two weeks, and then they put her on commentary tonight. She didn't embarrass herself, but she was also barely there. Tony, I know you were clearly never a fan of women's wrestling, so take this from me: didn't nobody become a Sasha Banks stan because she could talk. We became a fan because she could wrestle. If she's still not fully recovered from her injury, that's your own fault for putting her on TV before she was cleared, and if she is fully recovered, you have to get her in the ring. Is AEW really going to sign Mercedes Mone right before they debut a big new PPV and then not have her wrestle on that PPV? What's going on here?
I very much hope this hatred ages badly, and that by next Wednesday we'll know that Mone has a Dynasty match against Skye Blue or whoever. But if she doesn't, and if AEW puts her in another talking segment rather than booking her in-ring debut, I am going to start seriously wondering if they're already botching their biggest free agent signing of 2024.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
Hated: The Kingdom are as dead as dead can be
The reigning Ring of Honor Tag Team Champions have been dead for sometime now, and seemingly no one has noticed. The cold body has been propped in the corner, eating loss after loss while the silver belts hang around their waists. Maybe they defend the titles in Ring of Honor — I would have to watch that show regularly to know, and life is short — but from what I've seen on AEW programming, The Kingdom have distended bellies and flies buzzing around their eyes.
On this week's "AEW Dynamite," The Kingdom were handed another loss, this time from Orange Cassidy and Trent Beretta. To add insult to injury, they weren't even finished off by the recently-dethroned AEW International Champion, but by Sue Beretta's favorite son, Trent. While I am thrilled for Trent, and Best Friends in general, it's hard not to feel bad for the Ring of Honor tag division, who were written off by the unfortunate booking of MJF and Adam Cole winning the tag titles in Wembley Stadium and turning the titles into nothing more than a shiny, worthless trinket, possibly even cursed.
MJF and Cole won the titles and now both of them are too injured to ever be interesting again (prove me wrong, children, prove me wrong), and now the reigning champions — who won them under masks in one of the stupider moments of a very stupid winter — can't seem to buy a win. Unless Tony Khan has some secret machine that he can stick in Matt Taven and Mike Bennett's ribs and jumpstart them back to life, it might be time for this losing streak to extend to ROH so that the titles can go to an actually competitive team. As I said, I'm not a regular ROH viewer, so this unfortunate state of affairs may be exactly what the tag division deserves, but I highly doubt it.
Written by Ross Berman
Hated: Chris Jericho offers to be HOOK's mentor
AEW is known for having some really random storylines, and the partnership between Chris Jericho and HOOK is the perfect illustration of one of those.
Jericho and HOOK have only been paired up for a mere few weeks, competing in one tag team match together, one match against each other, and an Eight Man All Star Scramble at Revolution. Having Jericho offer to essentially be HOOK's mentor tonight and doing it in a not so subtle manner just seems a little strange, especially when you consider that HOOK's father is a famous wrestler himself that can easily do just that (and at some point certainly has).
The entire storyline between the two has felt like it's almost being planned on a week to week basis, and it's been a little messy. One week they're a tag team, the next week they're facing each other to see who the better man is, and the week after that, they're now mentor and mentee.
Written by Olivia Quinlan
Loved: Swerve and Takeshita rewrite the formula
One of my most frequent criticisms of AEW is that the majority of their TV matches are poorly structured and poorly paced. Matches frequently go longer than they need to, utilize too many false finishes, and just generally try to do too much. In the case of Swerve Strickland vs. Konosuke Takeshita, however, even I have to admit that both the pacing and the structure of the match was dead solid perfect.
There's a standard formula for a singles wrestling match that gets used a lot: the babyface shines at the beginning, then the heel takes control; the babyface mounts a comeback that fails and ends with the heel taking over again, then the babyface mounts a comeback that succeeds and gets them back in the match, and then you go to the finish, whatever that happens to be. Swerve vs. Takeshita basically followed that formula, but put a distinct AEW spin on it that I appreciated. A lot of formulaic matches get bogged down in the long middle part where the heel is in control. This is where you see a lot of rest holds, the heel just maintaining a side headlock on the babyface for five solid minutes, etc. It's also where you see the big, dramatic moments where the babyface tries to rally back into the fight with the help of the crowd — a time-honored wrestling trope, but also one that involves a lot of slow movement. You don't want any long periods of slow movement with athletes like Strickland and Takeshita, so how do you insert them into the standard match formula?
The answer, in this case, was to change the style of the "heel in control" period. Instead of utilizing rest holds or taunting the crowd or anything like that, Strickland and Takeshita simply structure that part of the match around a series of exchange that Takeshita repeatedly won. From massive forearms to wicked knee strikes to dives to the outside to Takeshita's incredible Blue Thunder Bomb, the match conveyed the heel being in control simply by having him hit big move after big move, rather than getting Swerve in a wristlock or whatever. And the nice thing about this strategy is that it easily informs the rest of the formula. The failed comeback can be Swerve finally hitting a big move of his own (a massive DDT, for example) but then getting shut down by another big move from Takeshita, and when it's time for the actual comeback, Strickland just wins a few of the exchanges in a row, and now we're ready to get into the finishing sequence. Here, that sequence was almost its own story, as Strickland kept trying to hit the Swerve Stomp for the win, only for Takeshita to kick out when he finally nailed it. Swerve was ultimately forced to pull out the JML Driver to finally prevail (love me a super-special even better finisher).
I'm sure it helped that this was a main event match with real stakes on the line, which justified the match's length and structure, and maybe none of this is revelatory and AEW does this all the time. I don't know. All I know is that this time, I noticed it, and was impressed by it. Too often, every match on a given AEW show is trying to be Strickland vs. Takeshita — but when the match actually is Strickland vs. Takeshita, it's pretty damn awesome.
Written by Miles Schneiderman