AEW Dynamite 7/9/2025: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s weekly review of "AEW Dynamite," here on the final Wednesday before the biggest show on Tony Khan's calendar, All In 2025! It wasn't the most newsworthy episode of AEW TV in history — probably the "biggest" things that happened were Megan Bayne's four-way win and the return of Gabe Kidd, and the WINC staff has basically nothing to say about either. If they interested you more than us, feel free to read more about them on our "Dynamite" results page. In this column, we focus on giving opinions and analysis of the segments and storylines that caught our attention most strongly, in either a positive or negative way.

With that in mind, we have a lot to say about the final Toni Storm/Mercedes Mone promo segment that opened this week's show, as well as MJF invoking Jay Briscoe's name for heat, Swerve Strickland destroying the Young Bucks' limousine with an excavator, and more! Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 7/9/25 episode of "AEW Dynamite!"

One of the matches I'm most excited for on the All In Texas card is the AEW Women's World Championship match. However, "Timeless" Toni Storm and Mercedes Mone didn't do justice to what I expect the match to be on Saturday in any way when they opened "Dynamite" tonight. Their face-to-face was a clunky, rather awkward affair that had me glad the talking portion of their feud is over for now.

Mone has never been the strongest promo despite how freaking good she is in the ring, and sadly, that's even more noticeable when she's paired up with one of the best talkers and greatest characters in the game today. Storm's portion of the promo was excellent, but Mone's half of the segment just wasn't there for me. Storm had the better lines, saying Mone "had the emotional depth of a kiddie pool," and Mone didn't say anything that stuck out or could be considered noteworthy toward Storm.

It's worth mentioning, but I can't pick on her too much because she wasn't the only one to make the mistake tonight, but Mone did confuse me there for a second with a slip of the tongue when she said All In was on Sunday. However, that only gets mentioned here in the hated section because I didn't need the extra tiny bit of panic during an already busy, confusing weekend. She recovered quite well, though.

The other thing that bothered me was the way the segment ended. The women toasted with whatever the heck was in those glasses, because it certainly wasn't champagne, and Storm got the last word. She told Mone something along the lines of, "eat s*** b****" and she wasn't in striking distance of Mone when she said it, so the small brawl that followed between them was a bit awkward. Mone got her hands on Storm first when it looked like the "Timeless" one should have been the one to punctuate the line with some physical offense, especially as the champion looking to end the segment strong.

I'm also so torn on just who I think is going to win this match, and this promo segment tonight didn't help me make up my mind. Not that it's necessarily an issue, but it's not clear where AEW is going with either of these women following All In. If Storm retains the title, I'm not sure who she goes on to face next. At least if Mone loses (which I'm leaning toward in regards to my prediction), she has the TBS Championship, in addition to her other belts, to defend.

Written by Daisy Ruth

There's a famous scene from the Adult Swim show "Smiling Friends," where a group of nihilists take over the world of the show, and bring everyone under their angry, incel-tinged spell. They are interrupted, mid-speech, by a guy with a machine gun, who threatens to shoot them in the head. Suddenly, the nihilists care very much. They care so much that the spell is broken, and people realize that these guys care as much about things and stuff as anyone else.

That is essentially how I feel about the Death Riders: they're fake nihilists.

Toni Storm, on the other hand, is the real deal. 

On Wednesday's "Dynamite," she told Mercedes Mone point blank that "We're all going to die one day," and then capped it off by saying "You fear an ordinary life but I only fear an ordinary death." It might've been one of the hardest bars I've heard in a wrestling promo in a long time. It was everything that the AEW Men's World Champion's pseudo-Mussolini schtick wants to be, and so much more.

In that moment, Toni Storm became the hard-nosed world champion that Jon Moxley pretends to be. I'm not sure that Mercedes Mone held up her end of the moment, but I'll let my colleague Daisy have the final word on that. Toni Storm has taken a character that probably should've had the shelf-life of one feud, the Mariah May/Sunset BLVD deathmatch, and somehow found a way to keep it not just fresh, but bracing and exhilarating. "Timeless" indeed.

Written by Ross Berman

Nothing against Blake Christian, but like ... why?

This isn't just a valid question, it's actually three valid questions. First, why has Blake Christian now been on 10 episodes of AEW TV since the beginning of March? He's wrestled more televised matches during that time than Kris Statlander, Willow Nightingale, and Anthony Bowens, just to name a few. Prior to March he hadn't been on AEW programming for almost two years, so I'm just very curious what happened, because it just kinda seems like he's here to lose to more important people. Second of all, why is Blake Christian wrestling on the All In go-home episode of "Dynamite?" He's not anywhere near having anything to do on the card, as far as I can tell, and yet we're devoting go-home show minutes to ... a heel vs. heel match with Ricochet?

That brings me to my third "why," which is, what the hell is AEW doing with Ricochet and why is it a random heel vs. heel match that he's apparently wrestling to impress the Gates of Agony? Didn't this guy completely reinvent himself and start doing some of the best character work of his career against some of your top stars? And now he has zero creative for AEW's biggest show of the year, presumably because Tony Khan ran out of guys you remember from "SmackDown" 20 years ago? Just a complete and total lack of vision for someone who had really emerged as one of AEW's stronger performers.

Written by Miles Schneiderman

A lot can be said about AEW's main event scene right now, with Hangman Page, Swerve Strickland, Will Ospreay, The Death Riders, The Young Bucks and so many more all making it seem as rich as it has been in a long time. They have all contributed to AEW's run of form as of late and are key reasons as to why the company has so much momentum right now, but every company that has had a hot streak or golden era has had one thing in common; the midcard is just as strong as the main event scene.

This was evident in the tag team match from this week's "AEW Dynamite" that saw Konosuke Takeshita and Kyle Fletcher (sorry guys, but Protoshita sounds like some sort of weight loss drug or laxative I simply can't get on board with that name just yet) taking on Brody King and the ROH World Champion Bandido. All four of these guys have the capabilities to end up in the main event scene post-All In, but for right now, they are doing a fine job of giving each show a solid base of good action that will always get people excited whenever a match graphic involving them drops on social media two hours before the show.

If you read these each week, chances are you've probably heard me in particular banging the Brody King drum for months in saying he needs some sort of major singles push, and this was another great example as to why. He's great in the ring, he literally has the crowd barking at him each week, and as the weeks go on you get to see a little more of the man behind all the tattoos that only makes him more relatable. If anything, I actually feel sorry for Buddy Matthews sitting at home in Australia because he might end up getting in the way of King's ascension towards the top of the card.

Bandido is firmly back into the swing of things after that awful feud with Chris Jericho, which just goes to show what having good opponents can do for your confidence. Yes, he may have eaten the pin in this one, but his interactions with Takeshita ahead of their ROH World Championship match on Friday at Supercard of Honor only make me want to see that match more because it's going to be great.

Takeshita is in the prime of his athletic career at this point, and while getting the pin here makes me question if he will get the win on Friday, he NEEDS to be near that AEW World Championship in the future (and he should probably win the G1 too). As for Kyle Fletcher, he is almost certainly walking out of All In with the AEW TNT Championship, which is the least that he deserves given all the work he's been doing over the past nine months. A great tag team encounter that proves just how deep AEW's roster is right now.

Written by Sam Palmer

Here's the thing: MJF's entire character is centered around garnering heat from the AEW fanbase. That's all fun and games for the most part, there is still a line in the sand that needs to drawn when it comes to certain matters such as the death of a wrestler's loved one. That line felt like it was crossed tonight when MJF started talking trash once again about Jay Briscoe's tragic passing to his brother Mark Briscoe, and we've seen time and time again that choosing this tactic never works out well in professional wrestling. While things were surely cleared with Mark himself ahead of time, that didn't make it any less uncomfortable to watch as a viewer nor did it actually work to accomplish the intended goal of bringing more heat on MJF in order to get the fans behind Mark ahead of the Casino Gauntlet Match at All In. Name dropping Jay did nothing to truly benefit this entire segment, especially considering that there are at least a dozen other ways for MJF to get himself some heat and it shouldn't have even been the focus of the segment in the first place.

Given that The Hurt Syndicate, JetSpeed, and The Patriarchy got into a massive minutes long brawl with one another in the moments that followed MJF and Mark's "talky talk" anyways, this entire part of "Dynamite" should've just been dedicated towards some last minute build for the All In AEW World Tag Team Three-Way. Not only would've it had avoided a controversial moment for AEW, but it also would've brought The Patriarchy more to the forefront of everything since they felt like an afterthought in this segment and storyline as a whole. Sure, you can still have MJF and Mark get into a verbal spat but that could be done in a backstage interview or short in-ring segment (key word being short). On the whole, everything just felt so unnecessary and a low point on a "Dynamite" that was nothing more than mediocre at best.

Written by Olivia Quinlan

This week's "Dynamite" succeeded in bringing some weight behind "Hangman" Adam Page ahead of this weekend's Texas Death challenge against Jon Moxley, with the goal of rescuing the AEW World Championship from both the kayfabe and often-times literal reign of terror under the Death Riders. 

Until now, it had been the run of the mill Death Riders numbers game shenanigans constantly getting the upper hand over Page and hardly doing anything to cement the challenger who is supposed to be the flag-bearer for the future of the company heading into its biggest show of the year. And while that obviously cannot be changed by a single segment on the go-home episode of "Dynamite" at the very least it was certainly the right time to finally give him some form of momentum, as well as some well-needed progression on the status of Swerve Strickland's kindling alliance with the man that burned his house down. 

Again, Page was running the route of getting jumped by the Death Riders and falling prey to the pack, with the Young Bucks also in the ring to put the kicking to their former friend. They looked to make a statement ahead of this weekend with the return of the plastic bag – that which they used to write off Bryan Danielson at WrestleDream – until the big screen flashed up with satellite image of Strickland in the cockpit of an excavator. Strickland then proceeded to crush the Young Bucks' flash limousine, much to their dismay, and simultaneously providing enough of a diversion for Page, Will Ospreay and The Opps to get the upper hand over the heels and set them into retreat; Page came close to landing the Buckshot Lariat, hitting Claudio Castagnoli instead as he launched himself in the way, and making for the shot of Page standing tall against the World Champion. Meanwhile, the Bucks had gone to check their limo only to find it had been destroyed and dropping the golden line, "How are we going to financially recover from this?" 

It was a goofy bit of fun yet it delivered on what it needed to do, the limo spot itself being the hook for a message that the heroes have aligned and the numbers are no longer purely in the Death Riders' favor. Time will tell where the story goes but for now, tonight at the very least was an entertaining spot of TV and felt like the right way to close the go-home.

Written by Max Everett