AEW Rampage 11/25/2022 Match Ratings and Commentary
(Credit: AEW)
Here’s where we landed with this week’s Black Friday Rampage from the second city. Curious how we rank matches? We’ve got a rubric for that.
AEW Rampage - 11/25/2022
FTR def. Top Flight to retain the ROH World Tag Team Championship: ★★★
Darby Allin def. Anthony Henry: ★★
Hikaru Shida def. Queen Aminata: ★
Rush, The Butcher, and The Blade def. The Dark Order: ★★
Top Guys (Credit: AEW)
Show Highlight—
FTR on TV. Put them on the show and of course they’ll deliver with the match of the night. With the standard of their performances so astonishingly high, I sometimes project and wonder if Tony Khan sees all their matchups as Dream Matches and perhaps that’s why they’re not on TV at the quota of say, a Sammy or Orange Cassidy? I dunno. The announcers fed a little into that narrative by hyping up how this pairing of them vs Top Flight as something we thought could never happen (this is also aided by the real life injury curse Top Flight has hanging over their heads). Dax challenging Bryan Danielson was fucking great, too! Talk about goddamn dream matches! I hope the announcers lean into the natural story of Dax having the best year out of anyone in wrestling and that’s why he’s facing the best wrestler in the world.
What Worked—
Powerhouse vignette. When you read about the real life guy, he has an interesting as hell story, full of pain but an amazing sense of self-reliance. He’s a great talent, and saying he’s been misused or cast wrong is Skip hot take shit, but there’s more to Willie Hobbs than a guy that’ll fuck you up with a spinebuster—not that that’s not great shit! This video was moving and can absolutely reshape how the audience thinks of him. I’m certainly not in the minority in the fanbase to think if you cycle these in every two or three weeks with a new performer, it’ll allow characters to come alive that need a little extra boost to tell their stories that make them realer.
Toni Storm’s backstage promo. Anyone else getting vibes of the promo on Raw in 1995 of Shawn Michaels after he forfeited the IC title after his incident with those Marines? They held their bodies in the same slumped way, with black eye makeup extenuated. Nevertheless, it looked raw and real, and AEW does a good job of featuring the loser of a big match lamenting their loss to show what the title means to them. I’m glad Toni got to show vulnerability here, as opposed to the typical cliche route of being off tv for two weeks only to serendipitously return for a stare-down after some heel gets heat on some babyface.
Athena is pissed. This heel persona is working. Collecting grievances like not having footage of why she was suspended is a simple but effective motive for why a heel clings to victimhood. Athena vs Mercedes Martinez should be very good on the upcoming ROH PPV, glad they got to start building that now.
Poor Negative One. He did a great job of acting there. What a cruel thing—in kayfabe—of Ten to do. I like how he’s already a little worker, as they’ve allowed QT Marshall to get heat on him, too. The whole saga of if Ten will or won’t commingle with Rush was a middle of the road storyline, but dammit if they didn’t stomp on the evil pedal when it needed it here.
What Didn’t Work—
Hard Nipples. Maybe it was Adam Cole that was going to be the returning ROH champion to stop Jericho’s run? I dunno. Maybe this is pivoting with an audible. Claudio and Jericho will have a very good to great match on the PPV but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE end this rivalry. I’m afraid it’s going to hurt the buyrate of the PPV as it’s not a fresh matchup. That being said, you can tell why Jericho loves having Matt Menard around. Once Menard went into his silly pronunciation schtick of putting the imfasis on the wrong sylable, Jericho couldn’t help but incorporate it himself to the arousal of his areola.
Show Cringe—
Final Battle fret. This show was perfectly fine, so I’m telegraphing my own pithiness to fill the column…Perhaps this is me looking to far into it with Tony Khan suggesting that maybe ROH and their titles could become less of a priority to focus on AEW’s titles, but there’s only four shows left before that PPV, and ROH is still an unknown more than ever to an identity or a path. If you’re like me, this next couple of weeks are a sprint where time flies impossibly fast with little sense of what day it is before the imminent holiday. The business of this time of year renders so much meaningless where there’s supposed to be meaning, and maybe that’ll cloud the fanbase too if there’s not a plethora of programs that matter or else this PPV could be something of a wash. Just wondering if people’ll care from the apathy towards ROH growing within the fanbase. There’s great talent available that’ll surely produce an in-ring show that’ll be up to the typical standard of a Tony Khan product, so maybe that is the draw. Of course, let’s not kid ourselves, wrestling fans are nothing if not fickle, with viewing habits so ingrained a hate-watch triggers dopamine. Will the buy rate get hit? Not sure, but at least ROH will be aided by a lack of college football competition and no WWE PPVs until the Royal Rumble, too.
(Credit: AEW)
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