AEW Dynamite 7/26/2023 Match Ratings and Commentary
AR Fox and Orange Cassidy (Credit-AEW)
Here’s how we rated this week’s AEW Dynamite from the home of Steamed Hams, Albany. Curious how we rank matches? We’ve got a rubric for that.
AEW Dynamite - 7/26/2023
Orange Cassidy def. AR Fox to retain the AEW International Championship: ★★★
PAC def. Gravity: ★★
Swerve Strickland def. Darby Allin: ★★★
Dr. Britt Baker, D.M.D. def. Taya Valkyrie: ★
Lucha Bros def. BCC and Best Friends: ★★
Best Friends and Lucha Bros (Credit-AEW)
Show Highlight—
AR Fox and Darby Allin backstory video. With AEW fixated on the bonds of friendship, showing how Darby Allin and AR Fox trained together gives the viewer an organic reason for why they care for each other, and by extension, why we’re supposed to care. Going through that experience explains why the wrestlers have the loyalty to each other, and also, how they could reconcile if they turned on one another. All this makes it easier to accept the invite to live vicariously through the performers, which is always the goal of professional wrestling and sound storytelling in general.
Showing a wrestling school is one of those fantastic tiny details that AEW is able to do that WWE can’t do. WWE has to work their own wrestlers and the fanbase to think you can only get trained at the Performance Center and can’t acknowledge the existence of other schools, when just basic common sense would tell you that every human being has their own schooling/classroom preference let alone learning preference.
The exclusion of AR Fox talking himself and focusing so much on Darby was a subtle tell that a turn was a bloomin’, as you wouldn’t want to devote time giving him babyface sympathy or going against the grain too much from Orange Cassidy if he wasn’t turning.
What Worked—
OC vs. AR Fox. Orange Cassidy will always surprisingly slay me with his schtick and this week I laughed at the power of putting hands in pockets to summon the strength to get out of a body scissor.
AR Fox’s shocking punch worked as at some point someone had to be pissed about getting bested by Cassidy and then being offered his glasses. Why wouldn’t someone get hot or feel patronized? Nice worked punch, too. AR Fox always worked best in Evolve as something of a pied piper from the streets.
MJF clowns Dax. MJF could pull off doing a better version of that infamous Rock promo from Raw of December 2000 where he did impressions of his opponents for Hell In A Cell. And maybe I’m reading too much into it, but you got to unintentionally peer behind the curtain a bit as Dax said Max was going to reference his wife and daughter, leading you to believe Max had given Dax the heads-up on what he was going to say to avoid heat.
What Didn’t Work—
Gravity. He’s not domed but PAC’s reaction to seeing Gravity do his little walk on the moon towards the ring was entirely the same reaction I had. That and the Austin Powers in space gear was a bit fucking much. Also having him cower away from PAC after he submitted only makes him look weaker. Won’t say it can’t be fixed, but Lucha wrestlers seem to get the same random splattering of appearances as the women’s division so, yeah, oof.
Jericho’s Unappreciative Society. Not saying it can’t be done, but devoting so many segments to a passive antagonist gets repetitive to the viewer. Having a bad guy decide if he should jump stables and ditch lackeys can work, but not when the character is only shown thinking about it and mulling it over perpetually. Based on the misses and plodding nature of Jericho’s storylines in recent memory he needs action and a faster clip. Have Don give Jericho a deadline so there’s some hint that the story is on a path. And why should the audience sympathize with the JAS on a dime when they’ve only been portrayed as one dimensional props?
Show Cringe—
“Book The Women’s Divison Better.” That shot was an embarrassment for Tony Khan and AEW but one that’s entirely deserved…
Production truck. There’s no excuse for showing that sign. This’ll reads like a podcaster or Twitter troll hot take but you gotta fire someone for that, or, at the very least, put them on timeout and not let them man the decks until they’re probably retrained. The production truck’s choices of camera angles and cutting looks like a student’s shoot but with last week’s fuckups of missing critical moments in Blood & Guts and this egg on the company’s face, a message needs to be sent for embarrassing your own product.
Women’s division booking. Four years into the company you can’t use injuries as an excuse for derailing storylines. You didn’t have Austin vs. McMahon or the nWo penned on paper, let’s be real. A sudden injury isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s happened what, three times already? The problem is not having storylines on deck for when the challenger wins the title. An argument wrestling bookers make is that the money is in the chase, which, yeah, sure, but there’s also money in having a strong babyface that draws merch sales consistently. It’s been handed on a platter with Statlander. What are we doing with her that makes you want to watch? Where’s the angle that makes some little girl watching wrestling for the first time want to sink her teeth into a storyline and be a lifer? Major wrestling promotions have taught us that the death slot is the match before the main event and you can’t keep relegating the women’s division to that slot, especially when you know the fanbase is smart to that. There’s frustration with the audience because we want to see women’s wrestling, but the fanbase gets the sense Tony Khan would rather AEW be like New Japan that’s all men and a separate women’s promotion a la Stardom.
Booking in general. Your WrestleMania III is a month away and your audience has no idea what’s going to be on the card, save for maybe one match. This is your chance to make a statement, this is your shot to create the high water mark for AEW, your audience is loyal but losing faith that you’ll make the most of it for all its worth.
Darby and Swerve (Credit-AEW)
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