AEW Dynamite 7/12/23: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc's "AEW Dynamite" review, taking the pure facts and match results you can find in our live coverage of AEW's flagship program and getting all kinds of opinionated about them every week! Wednesday's episode was set to be quite the banger, with semifinal matches in both the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament and the Blind Eliminator Tag Tournament, the long-awaited debut of teenage sensation Nick Wayne, and the announcement of the fifth and final members of both teams in next week's Blood & Guts match! Would one of them be Kota Ibushi? Did AEW have the balls to announce anyone besides Kota Ibushi? How violently would the crowd riot if it wasn't Kota Ibushi? The answers to all these questions and more lay ahead of us.

Now those answers are behind us, and spoiler alert, The Elite's fifth man was Kota Ibushi! Hooray! Granted, there's a lot of non-Kota Ibushi stuff to talk about this week, some good, some bad, but the important thing is that we get to write Kota Ibushi's name over and over again because Kota Ibushi rules. We'll get to that. For now, here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 7/12/2023 episode of "AEW Dynamite."

We're honestly not sure how we feel about this thing with Jack Perry and HOOK right now, but we at least wanted to mention it, because it has the potential to grab our attention. The trick is for this feud to never leave the parking lot. Drag this bit out as far as it will go, AEW. Have Jack hide in different cars, or under cars, or in HOOK's car. We don't really care as long as the action stays in the parking lot and never, ever makes it back into the actual arena. And to blow off the feud? Parking lot brawl for the FTW Championship. Give this to us, Tony Khan. We need it.

Also, anything that keeps Perry out of the ring and a live microphone out of his hand is a win as far as we're concerned. We'd rather hear him curse child safety locks any day of the week.

The saga of MJF, Adam Cole, and their inexplicable maybe friendship continued this week, and it still has us in the palm of its hand. We weren't entirely sure what to make of an in-universe commercial for "Fight Forever" being simultaneously used as an important character bonding moment, but taking the commercial aspect out of the equation, it was an incredibly well-done segment, featuring a profound juxtaposition between MJF's public persona (the guy who picks up four women at the same time) and his private persona (the guy who didn't know about multiplayer video games because he never had any friends). And yes, part of us is still waiting for the other shoe to drop — we've been tricked into having sympathy for MJF before, only for it to come to nothing — but part of is starting to believe that in this moment, sitting there playing video games with his nemesis, the MJF character is being sincere. The moment when both men laughingly admit that they were planning on sabotaging each other was oddly heartwarming, and their newfound determination to win the tag titles together carried over into their Blind Eliminator tournament match.

Pretty much everything about this match was perfect. MJF's apparent sincerity is sold well by the fact that he's still doing slightly heelish things like trying to run away from the massive team of Brian Cage and Big Bill, but Cole is firmly on his side now — he's even wearing the Better Than You, Bay Bay shirt — and convinces him to get back in the ring. This storyline has taken the "can they co-exist" wrestling trope past all its previous boundaries, to the point that the uber-heel AEW World Champion is playing face in peril before making the hot tag to Cole, who ends up winning the match. Whether it ultimately works remains to be seen, but the fact that their post-match promo solidified MJF and Cole as what looks like a cohesive babyface tag team was unquestionably the right choice, in large part because this is now uncharted territory. They could go anywhere from here.

The move here, for our money, is the double-turn. Fans have been dying to cheer MJF for months now, and as we've noted before, Cole works best as a heel. It would also have some real poignance given the journey we've taken so far, and would really lock in some real sympathy for MJF. That having been said, AEW will probably just have MJF turn because it was all a ruse, which would be the most disappointing option, but even if they do — when? During the tournament finals? During the championship match with MJF's old running buddies, FTR? After they've won the championships? How far is this going? Because the further it goes, the better the payoff is likely to be.

At the very least, we'd better see that double clothesline next week. That is a must.

The other Blind Eliminator match was somewhat less enjoyable, not because it was bad, but because we didn't really care about either of the stories it involved. The primary one was the apparent division between Sammy Guevara and Daniel Garcia. Ironically, despite their existing alliance under the auspices of Chris Jericho, this team feels much closer to breaking up than Cole and MJF, but whatever the endgame is here is lacking a lot of connective tissue. The brief story involving Guevara being Garcia's mentor or whatever never really went anywhere, Garcia has pretty much been dead in the water as a character since his storyline with Bryan Danielson crash-landed — no, a hip-thrust dance doesn't count — and we simply can't imagine why AEW would think it's a good idea to try turning Guevara face again, which they're clearly doing. Just a lot of weird decisions on display here, and not much to keep us invested in the outcome.

Beyond that, Orange Cassidy and Darby Allin losing because Swerve Strickland got involved and hit Allin with the Last Call behind the referee's back is some ass-backwards storytelling that relies on viewers knowing waaaaaaaay more about the Pacific Northwest independent scene than is at all reasonable. There was a way to do this that would have actually made sense, educating viewers about the previous history between Strickland, Allin, and newcomer Nick Wayne, and using that history to set up matches and feuds. The way it as actually done makes everything feel like a jumbled mish-mash to anyone who is less than extremely plugged in. It's a little disappointing. AEW can appeal to the hardest of the hardcores all they want; the rest of us are still wondering if they're ever running Strickland vs. Keith Lee.

Oh, and speaking of disappointing...

So that's Nick Wayne, huh? Okay. This was our first time ever watching him wrestle, and honestly, he just kind of seemed like all the other flippy white guys AEW hires because they can do a poisoned rana off the top rope. We're not trying to be mean to the kid, but there was a decent amount of hype for this debut (including AEW signing Wayne before he'd even turned 18) and we still don't really see why. He had a very good match with Strickland, but again, Tony Khan is relying far too heavily on viewers knowing that Strickland and Wayne had a 36-minute title match in DEFY back in April. There's just no reason to care unless you have outside knowledge of Wayne, r unless the video package that aired earlier in the show did something for you (it did not do much for us). If Wayne had a unique look or anything that conveyed a character beyond "teenager," it would be one thing, but he came off as extremely generic. We were pretty thrilled that Swerve got the win, and we doubt that was the desired reaction.

Again, we hasten to point out that this is our first time seeing Wayne wrestle. It's very possible he will make believers out of us with further appearances, and we're certainly not writing him off. He has an entire career ahead of him, and we wish him all the success in the world. But in terms of helping him make a good first impression on an entirely new audience, we don't think AEW did him any favors.

Still no storylines to speak of in the AEW women's division, but the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament match between Ruby Soho and Skye Blue was excellent, and it was really nice to see Soho get a clean win after her Outcast cohorts were ejected from ringside.* Now she's in the finals for the second year in a row, and as much as we love Willow Nightingale (who we presume is beating Athena on "Rampage" later this week) Ruby could really use that tournament win. Like pretty much every former WWE star AEW has hired for its women's division, Ruby floundered initially due to bad booking, the lack of emphasis on the division overall, and Tony Khan's obsession with Britt Baker. Now would be the perfect opportunity to right some wrongs and start building her up again as the game-changer we initially thought she'd be. When she joined the Outcasts, she felt like the least important member. Now she feels like the leader of a stable that includes the AEW Women's World Champion.

Just to reiterate, none of this makes up for the fact that this match was the only women's segment of any kind on this episode (Harley Cameron's music video not withstanding) and that the division as a whole currently has two more champions than it has storylines. We have no intention of letting this go. But the match was good and we're optimistic about a Ruby push, so it gets in the "loves" this week.

*Does it seem like this is happening a lot lately? Ringside ejections? Seems like we see at least one per episode now, and not just on AEW programming; WWE does it a lot too. It's getting very overused.

Last week, we discussed with absolute certainty the fact that Chris Jericho was inserting himself into the Elite/Blackpool Combat Club feud via his interaction with Don Callis. As we'll discuss very shortly, it turns out we were wrong. Jericho won't be in the Blood & Guts match, and his decision about whether or not to join Callis' "family" will be postponed at least one more week (we would still not put it past him to get involved in the finish of Blood & Guts somehow, though it seems less likely after this episode). Obviously we're not complaining about Jericho not being inserted into that storyline, but that doesn't make the Jericho segments we saw on "Dynamite" good; it just makes them weird.

Jericho opened the show with Komander in a match that was surface level fun, but nothing special. Having watched him on AEW and Ring of Honor programming for a few months now, we confess to not being the biggest Komander fans so far. The things he can do are extremely impressive, but they also seem pretty frequently prone to error, as one might expect from a wrestler whose signature moves all involve walking the ropes. He's really only blown us away when he's in the ring with El Hijo del Vikingo and the entire point of the match is "Which of these luchadors will hit the most insane move on the other?"

After the match, Don Callis arrived to get Jericho nostalgic for the good old days in a decent talking segment that had us fairly convinced Jericho's decision would come at the end of the night, with the announcements of the Blood & Guts participants. But it didn't. All we really got afterward was a backstage segment between Jericho and longtime AEW associate Jake Hager. Watching Hager turn in his purple hat like it was his badge and gun was admittedly hilarious, but we just find the timing and structure of all this strange. We expected Jericho's story to bookend "Dynamite," because that's how wrestling typically goes. It was odd to see Callis back out for the main event segment with Jericho nowhere to be found, and while AEW's non-adherence to "traditional" wrestling TV structure isn't inherently a negative, it did make this week's Jericho segments seem largely pointless.

But again, that is about all the belly-aching we're prepared to do, considering who was actually announced for Blood & Guts.

For us, it would almost have been enough that AEW brought PAC back into our lives. It's been six months since "The Bastard" was last seen in AEW, and four months since he last wrestled at all. He's one of our favorite wrestlers and favorite characters on the AEW roster, and we are thrilled at his return. He's working heel again, which suits him, and he's aligned with the Blackpool Combat Club, which really suits him. We're not sure we want to see him become a full-fledged member of either BCC or the Don Callis Family, but he fits the vibe perfectly, and from a performance standpoint, he's about as close to Bryan Danielson as they were ever going to get. Does this mean the end of Death Triangle? Probably, but we can live with that. Penta and Fenix are wasting away on HonorClub these days anyway; it's high time PAC got the kind of singles AEW run he deserves.

And on the other side of things ... KOTA IBUSHI. We are extremely hype. There are some complaints we could make if we really wanted to — it was a very slight letdown to see a video package announcing him for next week rather than seeing him in the flesh, and we're still a little salty that the entire Moxley/Kingston thing is just being put on ice until Eddie gets back from Japan — but really, we can't be anything but happy. For the first time in years, Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega are going to be in the same ring at the same time, in a match that just so happens to involve several of the best wrestlers on the planet (and also Wheeler Yuta). If the point of announcing Ibushi ahead of time was to make sure everyone KNEW to show up next week instead of playing any sort of guessing game, mission accomplished — this is probably the most excited we've ever been for an upcoming piece of AEW programming. Kota Ibushi has that effect.

Blood & Guts in Boston next week. We can't wait.