AEW Dynamite 4/9/25: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s weekly review of "AEW Dynamite," the show that, like Lucy, had some 'splainin' to do after the controversial ending to AEW Dynasty. And to its credit, the show opened by addressing that exact storyline — though your mileage may vary in terms of how the segment actually went. As you might expect, the WINC staff have some thoughts on that segment, as well as the extremely unfortunate injury that almost immediately followed.

As usual, we can't quite cover everything in the format we have, so you'll have to go elsewhere for opinions on MJF's latest attempt to join The Hurt Syndicate. If you're just looking for a list of things that happened on the show, you actually want our "Dynamite" results page, but if you're interested in what we thought of this week's program, from Kris Statlander's Owen Hart Cup quarterfinal win to Chris Jericho possibly (but probably not) bailing on the entire company, here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 4/9/25 episode of "AEW Dynamite."

AEW really needed a hot, meaningful start this week after the disappointment (to some, myself included) with the ending of Dynasty on Sunday, but that's not what we got. Jon Moxley kicked off the night with a match against Katsuyori Shibata, which makes sense because the Death Riders are feuding with The Ops, but, Moxley isn't really involved too much there outside of being the leader, since he's not one of the men holding the trios championships. The match itself was fine, with Moxley getting the victory by making Shibata pass out, but it was everything that happened after that was just kind of a disjointed mess.

The Young Bucks came out and traded a word with Moxley, but then Mox and Marina Shafir left with the title/briefcase. They went on to explain why they did what they did, but mentioned they did it for their friends, telling "Hangman" Adam Page he was welcome for them taking out Swerve Strickland. In all of this and throughout the rest of the night, however, the Bucks and Page didn't cross paths. They also called out Moxley, who had just left the ring, to come back with his Death Riders. Thankfully, instead of Mox awkwardly coming back out somehow, it brought out Kenny Omega, who didn't even bother to bring his International Championship. And while I love Omega and him confronting the Bucks make complete sense, and he also had a great point about thinking it was the Bucks, not the Death Riders, who killed AEW, he got to that thought through a terrible story about pooping dogs. He got to his good point eventually, but had to get there through a tangent.

Omega's reported All In Texas appointment, Kazuchika Okada then came out, and the pair didn't do much more than stare at each other, like they have been doing for awhile. The only good part about any of this was Strickland finally coming out with a chair to run the heels off, and the chance of getting Omega and Strickland teaming up would be excellent.

Through all of this, however, and with everyone involved, we still have no satisfying answers and "Dynamite" started almost as much of a cluster as Dynasty ended. It still doesn't make sense that the Young Bucks came back to attempt to align with the Death Riders, after it was Moxley's crew who ran them off in the first place. Moxley wasn't even involved in this segment outside of the Bucks calling him back. This didn't have the punch that it needed to get me back interested in all of this following Dynasty outside of Omega and Strickland being in the same ring together, and while my expectations weren't high, it was still pretty disappointing.

Written by Daisy Ruth

It's safe to say that Tony Khan had a fair bit of making up to do given the ending of AEW Dynasty, so he loaded up this week's episode of "AEW Dynamite" with a number of matches that, on paper, looked like a great time. The one that stood out to me personally was Swerve Strickland going one-on-one with PAC, as it not only gave us a glimpse of what Swerve's mindset was after Sunday night, but it was a chance for PAC to remind people just how good he really is amongst all of the Death Riders nonsense he has been involved in over the past six months. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

During the match, Swerve powerbombed PAC into the turnbuckles, but upon landing, the Englishman's ankle landed at an awful angle, and given the painful yell he let out immediately afterwards, something was definitely wrong. PAC took a little bit more offence before rolling to the outside to get checked on by the doctors, and upon returning to the ring on one leg, he got kicked in the face, hit with the Swerve Stomp, and that's all she wrote. Of course, this was not the original plan, which was evident by the fact that you could clearly see the referee telling Swerve what to do, and the fact that if you listen carefully, you can actually hear PAC apologizing to Swerve for getting hurt.

This is not a hated piece in the traditional sense of "I think this match was bad." Far from it. Instead, this is more of a plea to whoever has got a hold of PAC's voodoo doll, can you please stop messing with it? The man has been through enough over the past two years.

As far back as the best-of-seven series between The Elite and Death Triangle, PAC had to do that whole series with a face mask as he broke his nose in the first match, before missing six months of action to rehab nagging injuries. Then as soon as he got back, he got injured again wrestling fellow Death Rider Claudio Castagnoli, and would miss a further nine months, which included AEW's first trip to Wembley Stadium, and was reportedly so beaten up that he almost retired. 2024 rolls around, and while he's injury free, his creative plans get derailed by The Lucha Brothers wanting to leave the company, which led to his AEW International Championship match with Will Ospreay not happening in the UK, and after being part of a stale Death Riders storyline, he is seemingly injured once again. To put it simply, the guy cannot catch a break and it sucks.

PAC is, pound-for-pound, one of the best wrestlers on the planet, but for whatever reason, he just has the worst luck imaginable. If anything, the Death Riders story will actually become popular now that he is probably going to be on the shelf, because that's just what happens to him. Prayers up PAC, get well soon.

Written by Sam Palmer

This great business we love is built on guys fighting for money. It really is that simple. It's why some people love sports betting, or watching people play craps, or watch the stock market go up and down, there's just something electric about knowing there's a bunch of money on the line. Boxing, basketball, baseball, the guys in the movie "Heat," your job, at the end of the day we're all just fighting over money, which is why Wednesday's $400,000 8-Man Tag Match was so relatable.

A lot of "the AEW style" is routed in wrestlers doing ridiculous highspots and being unable to be pinned unless they're hit with anything short of a shotgun blast to the face. In the normal "doing their job" context of wrestling, it makes absolutely no sense. In the context of "All of these guys are fighting for roughly $100,000 a person," it suddenly makes all the sense in the world. Suddenly, anyone could win. Is Mark Briscoe gonna get $100,000 to do ridiculous Briscoe stuff with? Is Lio Rush gonna buy $100,000 worth of puffy, spiky jackets? Kevin Knight signed with the promotion like two weeks ago and now he's winning $100,000. It's just a better story for what could've been a throwaway match.

There was literally nothing about the in-ring action that was different in any way, but seeing guys like Lio Rush and Will Ospreay bounce around the ring has something just a bit more tangible when all of the high-risk moves could cost that person $100,000. In fact, I'm not sure there's a single problem with "the AEW style" that couldn't be solved by having them at least fighting for about $25,000, even if it's just in kayfabe.

Written by Ross Berman

On "AEW Dynamite" this week, there was a women's match in which one participant wore fiery orange, while the other wore ice blue. Which, fire vs. ice, yes, good, I love it. Excellent gear choices from a thematic standpoint, kudos to the designers.

There was just one problem: Both sets of gear were on the wrong wrestler.

A terrible thing happened on the November 20, 2024 episode of "Dynamite": Kris Statlander wrestled Hikaru Shida wearing bright orange gear. It didn't suit her at all and was a massive distraction the entire time, and I thought she had realized that, because she hasn't worn that gear since — or anything like it. Coming into this week, she'd wrestled 10 AEW matches since the match with Shida, and seven of those saw her in what's become her standard silver-and-green gear; only once (her battle with Megan Bayne in February) did her gear even approach the warm color spectrum. I thought we were past that November 20 phase. And yet, Wednesday night, there it was: the exact same orange gear.

Kris Statlander is not a "fire" character. Even discounting her time spent as an actual alien (which, space is cold, not hot, incidentally), the "More Than A Woman" character she's been using for the last few years is powerful and deliberate, evoking the crushing inevitability of an iceberg rather than the unpredictable flickering of fire. You know who's way more of a fiery character? Thunder Rosa, the hot-tempered Latina warrior whose name evokes "lightning" (which sets things on fire) and who almost always wrestles in black and/or white and/or some shade of red. Unless it's a street fight and she's in jean shorts, blue is not a color Rosa wears, ever. Ever! Except this week, apparently, for no reason.

If this seems trivial to you, I get it, but please understand that I was watching this match while growing increasingly confused as to which wrestler was which. Every time I expected to be seeing one of them, it was the other; part of my brain is still convinced Rosa won. I'm not saying the match was great, but if it had been, I don't know that I'd have been able to enjoy it because of these gear choices. Hell, maybe it was and I couldn't enjoy it because of these gear choices — I don't actually know how good it was, because I could barely follow what was happening, I was so thrown.

And to top it off, Kris Statlander owns ice blue wrestling gear. She used it in her rematch with Mercedes Mone at Worlds End, and again on "Dynamite" a couple weeks later! I know there were bigger things to complain about this week, but come on, really? What are we doing?

Written by Miles Schneiderman

Look, I'm aware that there are a lot of people out there who are perhaps a little bit tired of seeing Chris Jericho appear on AEW television. While I more often than not tend to be one of those people, I surprisingly like the newfound direction that they seem to be taking Jericho's character in after they planted the seeds for it (pun intended) this week.

Jericho's current "Learning Tree" gimmick has grown to be fairly stale, and his partnership with Big Bill and Bryan Keith haven't really gone anywhere the last few weeks or worked to get one or both of the latter men over with the AEW fanbase. Not only was it actually refreshing to see Bill stand up for himself against Jericho rather than take another week of being berated by him, but it was also nice to see Jericho take his own character in a bit of a different direction by having him intimidate Bill and Keith in a less overt way than is normally seen by his character in recent memory.

The dichotomy of Jericho's actions not matching the words that he was saying worked really well here, and got across the message of Jericho being angry and frustrated without having to spend an entire promo segment berating Bill and Keith for their recent action. The image of Jericho repeatedly hitting the television on the set of "TV Time With The Learning Tree Chris Jericho" (a name that I can only hope AEW chooses to shorten or get rid of entirely sooner rather than later) as he repeats the words "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed" is one that will linger in the minds of fans for quite some time for better or for worse, and sent a clear message to Bill and Keith that there were beatdowns waiting for them if they didn't make changes soon without Jericho even needing to say the words.

Written by Olivia Quinlan

After the Young Bucks helped Jon Moxley retain the AEW World Championship at Dynasty, there was oddly little said about that as the main event saw a step in a completely different direction — and I was here for it. Swerve Strickland faced PAC and under unfortunate circumstance he would get his win early with "The Bastard" sustaining a legitimate ankle injury. After which the victor appeared more focused on the Bucks' costing him his shot at Moxley, and the main event between The Opps' Samoa Joe and Hook against the Death Riders' Wheeler Yuta and Claudio Castagnoli certainly pointed to theirs being the program for the foreseeable future. Joe and Hook got the win and were dominant with the Death Riders as Katsuyori Shibata even locked in a chokehold to Moxley on the outside — getting some semblance of revenge for his earlier loss in the opener. But Hook fell victim to a post-match ambush and a Gotch Neutralizer onto an upturned chair. 

Afterwards, the Death Riders retreated — as they often do — and Joe took to the microphone. It is about time that The Opps get stuck into something legitimate and it crafts a pathway to get the likes of Joe and Hook in the ring with Moxley, Castagnoli, and Yuta. There is the unresolved matter of PAC's injury and how it will impact the Death Riders' reign as World Trios Champions, but either way it seems certain that one way or the other The Opps are coming for one of the titles under the stranglehold. It is obviously still really early in the feud and there is a chance it will not pan out the way it is hoped, but for the time being it certainly seems like the right decision to make use of The Opps in more than squash matches and to do so against the Death Riders might be the spark that's really needed — here's hoping. There is a compelling angle with Hook's attack prompting something of a vengeance storyline for Joe as his mentor, or Hook himself, and that feels like a promise for something different and exciting in the world title picture — because to be frank, the Cope feud was a drag and Strickland has been dragged into a feud with the Bucks.

Written by Max Everett