AEW Dynamite 6/28/23: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

All Elite Wrestling was coming off what many consider their best PPV of the year (and one of the best shows of the year from any promotion) in the form of Sunday's AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door. With the massive crossover event in the rearview mirror, Tony Khan claimed it was now time to focus on the build to All In and All Out, which will take place one week apart from each other and on different continents. The Owen Hart Foundation Tournament was set to continue with Ruby Soho taking on Britt Baker, Jack Perry would address the AEW audience after his shocking betrayal of HOOK, and we'd also hear from Blind Eliminator Tournament partners — and AEW World Championship rivals — Adam Cole and MJF.

Unfortunately, wrenches started getting thrown into the gears almost immediately when Baker was forced to withdraw from the show due to illness, presumably the same illness that had kept Cole off Forbidden Door. That illness might also be why we didn't hear from Cole and MJF so much as see them in a couple backstage segments. And Jack Perry ... well, we'll get to that. The point is, "Dynamite" seemed very much to have been weathering some storms this week, and as a result, the water was a little choppy (it didn't help that the Hamilton, Ontario crowd was largely disinterested throughout).

Still, it wasn't all bad, and in some cases, AEW managed to maneuver admirably and pull through. Here are 3 things we hated and three things we loved from the 6/28/23 episode of "AEW Dynamite."

From a purely storytelling perspective, the stuff going on between Jon Moxley and Eddie Kingston (who love each other but have wildly different opinions on Claudio Castagnoli) was the highlight of Forbidden Door, and it was by far the best part of this week's "Dynamite," which opened with a delightfully brutal slugfest between Moxley and NJPW star Tomohiro Ishii, who seems to have been the only Japanese Forbidden Door participant not to immediately catch a flight out of Canada. It was perfect booking — Ishii is also a friend of Kingston's, so naturally the mere hint of interference from Moxley's fellow Blackpool Combat Club members brought Kingston out to even the odds. Crucially though, Kingston didn't interfere himself; he just kept the BCC from getting involved. And when Moxley won, Kingston applauded him, telling him the victory proved he didn't need the BCC.

The segment continued backstage, with Moxley and Kingston loudly arguing in front of Moxley's real-life wife, AEW interviewer Renee Paquette. And while the high point for some of us was Moxley's dismissal of the years-long feud between Kingston and Castagnoli with the words "Who cares about some CHIKARA B.S.," the really interesting bit here was the insertion of Paquette into the storyline, seemingly demanding that Moxley and Kingston both act their age and work things out. We'll have to see if AEW can satisfactorily resolve this angle in the next three weeks, before Kingston leaves for Japan to participate in the G1 Climax — he's actually scheduled to wrestle EVIL in Sendai on July 19, the same day Mox and the BCC will be in Boston to take on The Elite in Blood & Guts — but for the time being, it's by far AEW's most emotionally compelling feud.

Shortly before "Dynamite," AEW announced that Daniel Garcia had challenged his current rival, International Champion Orange Cassidy, to a trios match against the Jericho Appreciation society, but Cassidy's usual partners, the Best Friends, weren't around. No matter — in the video AEW produced, the characterisitically imperturbable Cassidy looked around and enlisted the first two people he saw, who happened to be Keith Lee and AAA Mega Champion El Hijo Del Vikingo, and with partners like that, the contest was almost guaranteed to be a good one.

Well, we did say almost. It wasn't just that there was no real logic behind either this match or Cassidy's partners (Vikingo was a somewhat random choice, and the feud between Lee and Swerve Strickland that's been going on since December was apparently just never getting resolved). There was just something off about the entire thing, and unfortunately, it manifested in the match being a "Botchamania" wet dream. Now, we don't usually go for botch-shaming around here — wrestling is live, acrobatic entertainment, and s*** happens. But when it happens this much, it casts a shadow of weirdness over the entire affair, and it becomes more of a relief than anything else when the final pinfall is counted. In ended up being a match far below what we know the majority of these performers to be capable of, and that's always a shame.

Oh, and it was announced later on that the Blind Eliminator Tournament, which continues to be the most convenient plot device in history, had paired up Lee and Strickland, so maybe we are getting the blow-off to that feud? Better than just never mentioning it again, we suppose, but almost certainly too little too late.

While the evening's first trios contest turned into a mess in a hurry, the evening's second trios contest was far more palatable to us ... though maybe not for the reasons AEW wanted it to be. Earlier in the day, the company had announced that the Young Bucks and "Hangman" Adam Page (aka the Hung Bucks) would be competing in trios action, and the Bucks themselves revealed backstage that they were issuing an open challenge. That challenge was immediately accepted by Dark Order, who surprised Page, their old friend, by clearly wanting to fight him. Dark Order's newfound animosity toward Page came out in the ring, as well, and after Page won the match (with all the necessary pathos) and The Elite were immediately attacked by the BCC, Dark Order walked away instead of helping Page, even though he was bleeding all over the mat.

It seems like we were meant to sympathize with Page here, but honestly ... Dark Order is completely in the right. They were the ones who embraced Page after he was abandoned by The Elite, and during Page's feud with Moxley, they went through absolute hell for defending him, with Evil Uno in particular suffering bloody injuries at Mox's hands. Now Page is back with The Elite, and he has no time to return Dark Order's calls? Also, if you follow "Being The Elite" (which you really shouldn't have to, but still) you know that Page was talking to the Young Bucks and ignoring Dark Order's attempts to reach out to him before he even officially re-joined. As far as we're concerned, Dark Order has legitimate reason to be upset with Page (not to mention legitimate reason to not stand up to the bloodthirsty BCC on his behalf again) and while we'd naturally have preferred to see them get the win as a result, it's always nice to see characters act in ways that make sense and that follow logically from previous storylines. Dark Order were already some of our favorite characters on AEW programming, and their character work Wednesday night actually made us like them even more.

In our Forbidden Door review, we praised Jack Perry's heel turn, calling it "a welcome change for a competitor who can only benefit from a fresh coat of paint."

Welp. This is certainly a fresh coat of something. Not sure it's paint, though.

We would like to officially apologize for any part we played in manifesting this character into reality. It's one thing to change your character; it's another thing to suddenly transform into the least believable edgelord since ... maybe ever? None of the words Perry was saying sounded in any way natural coming out of his mouth, and there was simply no possibility of recovery after "I'm still young, I'm still cashing fat checks, and I am still banging the hottest b**** in this entire place," followed by an insipid wink at the camera. It came across as entirely inauthentic, one of the worst pairings of character and performer it's ever been our displeasure to witness, to the extent that it's making us retroactively question things we'd previously taken for granted — like why we should actually care about the breakup of two people who had only wrestled three matches as a tag team. Whoever decided Jungle Boy should turn heel and immediately try to be Christian vastly overestimated his ability to pull that off, and while we will remain cautiously hopeful that Perry can make adjustments and turn this thing around, we are far from optimistic.

We can't prove that Adam Cole's illness over the weekend resulted in he and MJF appearing in a pair of backstage segments rather than in the ring, as it appeared had been advertised, but it seems fairly likely. It's definitely true that his girlfriend, Britt Baker was supposed to wrestle Ruby Soho before she was announced as being unable to compete at the last minute. This left "Dynamite" without two of its marquee segments, and while that's obviously disappointing, we can't really complain about the results.

MJF can be a frustrating performer to watch, in that he's so obviously a massive talent, but he occasionally seems unable or unwilling to go to creative and interesting places with his character work. When he's in the ring cutting a typical MJF heel promo, he can get stale in a hurry. When he's doing something different, though — as seen in his feud with CM Punk, or his face turn flirtation in the lead-up to Full Gear 2022 — we can't take our eyes off him. The stuff he was doing here, playing mind games with Cole by acting friendly, inviting Cole out to get to know each other better, and unveiling a spectacular "Better Than You, BayBay" shirt (not to mention referring to Roderick Strong as "generic white guy") is the exact kind of quirky nonsense we need in order to get invested in him as a serious heel when he inevitably shows his true colors.

Soho, meanwhile, edited up wrestling Local Enhancement Talent, which was what it was, but afterward, she cut a promo on Baker that was so savage it made us wish even harder that there was a cohesive storyline going on with the Outcasts. It would be nice if this was the start of something in that regard, but the ostensible "Originals" are dropping like flies at this point, and it doesn't look like Tony Khan has a backup plan. Still, if anything can convince Khan to give the Outcasts something better to do, it's promos like the one Soho delivered tonight.

Okay, look, we can hear you yelling already, and it's fine. If you have a ton of love for Sting, or you're an old-school WCW fan who loves that he's finally getting in the ring with Jericho, or you just think it's cool that a guy who's been in the business for almost 40 years and could show up in any promotion in the world and collect a paycheck without lifting a finger is out here jumping off ladders instead, that's great. We're happy you enjoyed it. But we don't have a terribly strong sense of wrestling nostalgia. Watching a main event match center itself around Sting and Jericho — two men with a combined age of 116 — isn't our idea of great booking, and watching a 64-year-old with a lengthy injury history leap from a ladder set up in the ring toward a pair of tables set up outside the ring and come up short, possibly injuring his face in the process, isn't our idea of a good time.

There are other complaints we could make about this match, such as the fact that it's now going to be even harder to take "The Painmaker" seriously going forward than it already was, or that Sting has now apparently no-sold table spots two shows in a row, or that the camera caught someone blading again. But it mostly just boggles the mind that AEW, a company that has come under fire in the past for not caring enough about the safety of its performers and that was already the focus of another discussion around wrestler safety following the dangerous-looking Tiger Driver '91 taken by Kenny Omega at Forbidden Door, would come out on the following "Dynamite" and have Sting throw himself off a ladder. Did it finally get the Hamilton crowd to their feet? Sure. Does Sting make his own decisions and take his own risks with his health? Absolutely. But for us, this kind of thing completely destroys our ability to lose ourselves in the entertainment of a wrestling show. If that's not the case for you, awesome. We're not judging. That's just how it is.