For Great Justice

Between the house metal theme and the taunts, Penta’s debut gave me big “La Parka is the most over guy on Nitro” vibes. And that’s awesome.

Give Hobbs the title

Man, this is so good. You are 100% right. Kenny is Laser-Tron.

I agree with what everyone is saying - TK is overcommitted to his long term storytelling vision, and they need to mix it up. Run a big show-long angle completely out of nowhere where [top babyface] somehow earns and wins a world title match. Big babyface celebration, Mox goes away for a few weeks. Luger on Nitro is exactly the play (minus Hogan getting the title back at Hog Wild).

Great matches. Awful crowd. They REALLY REALLY need to pivot away from Death Riders. They won’t do it because TK won’t tell Mox no, but they were going for NWO and got 2000 Triple H As for the crowd, it’s all been downhill in Tennessee since they turned the Pyramid into a Bass Pro Shops

POWERHOUSE HOBBS

I’m cool being the high voter on this. I don’t know; I just mentally compartmentalize WWE as big, glossy, showy pro wrestling. Like, I know that going into it. This stuff is the Jake Paul / Mike Tyson of pro wrestling (actually, this show looked VERY similar to that one, visually). This episode doubled and tripled down on a lot of that.

Speaking of Cole, I thought he was really good last night. He’s at his best when he’s blending in historical context and facts/stats to tell the story, which the unique nature of this episode allowed him to do a lot of.

That was WWE at its best: the summer blockbuster Marvel movies of pro wrestling. Production values, celebrities, and a big, hot crowd. Really tremendous stuff.

The real money is MVP bringing in Kevin and Danny O’Shea to counter the scissors. Rick counters with Spike, but then you get the Icebox run-in for the huge pop.

Sometimes I wonder if Tony is intentionally doing WCW cosplay with these amazing undercards followed by Main Event Bullshit

Great action, great crowd, minimal Death Rider BS Awesome show.

I was joking with the Lost reference a few pages ago, but after watching the weekend shows… Someone contact Oxford University

Toni Storm has become unstuck in time ”If anything happens, Luther is my constant”

This means we get Kommander / Brody and Kommander / Claudio!

While I adore all three guys (who doesn’t), I’ll go the opposite route and say that the New Day segment fell flat to me. I think it’s one of those things that read very well in the writer’s room, and it was well presented, but it was so patently obvious to me at least that the performers Kingston and Woods didn’t actually believe any of the words the characters Kingston and Woods were saying, that it came across awkward and “playing wrestler”. I know that’s a silly thing to say as of course that’s always the case, but in this particular segment, with this issue, to me it pulled me out of it as a viewer. To me at least and by the sound of it at least some of rest of the audience, this angle still has “I legitimately don’t want to see this; stop this angle” heat, not good heat.

Am I the low voter on Ricky Starks? Because I don’t really see it. Dude kind of stinks. Like a lot of others I did think he was a potential Next Big Deal upon his debut, but relatively immediately it became obvious how Year One At The Performance Center-level over-choreographed the whole presentation is and I more or less tuned out. A smaller Austin Theory with a little more (but not a lot of) natural charisma probably doesn’t get out of first gear in WWE.

So, all these tournaments within an AEW calendar year sort of feel inorganic to me in the same way that WWE’s monthly gimmick PPV’s used to. So I don’t dig that, but this tourney does seem to be doing something AEW really needs right now, which is a focus on action and basic direction. So that’s cool.

Hopefully the CC is a way to AEW’s booking to - to make an analogy to a match - grab a headlock and reset things Matches look awesome

The Costco Guys match was the most joy presented on an AEW show in months and was, dead serious, my favorite thing on this show.

Yeah I was gonna say, love OC but none of these guys are 1997 Luger Dude was crazy, crazy over

This is probably better for the navel gazing thread but, man, I agree. AEW has now gone ice cold to me to the point that I was watching whatever mid-major college basketball game was on ESPN+ last night instead of the show. And I hate that, and it’s never been the case before. Like I don’t want to like Louisiana-Monroe basketball more than AEW, but here we are. It’s bad bad. I don’t have great solutions, but we’ve lost that loving feeling. This Death Riders thing is just awful. Not to beat a dead horse, but where is the heart and soul? Even OC has had to go to the dark side in order to fight evil.

This show is in a major rut. These dead crowds aren’t helping. Just no spark.

It is interesting that not counting trios teams there are, at minimum, six heel stables running at once: BCC, Hurt Syndicate, Callis Family, Patriarchy, Elite, Learning Tree There are….two? Babyface stables? Conglomeration, I guess Dark Order, and I guess even if you stretch that to trios you can add PP+Garcia and Bang Bang Gang? It’s extremely lopsided, and literally every single one of those six heel stables has the upper hand in their current feuds. There are 8 segments per show. Something has to give at some point. I’ve called for the Syndicate babyface turn but they aren’t even fully formed yet and that’s like a half year away from now.

Man I wish AEW did house shows because I’d love to see the before and after Hook wrestles a loop with Christian. Exactly what he needs at this stage.