All Elite Wrestling comes our way from the Entertainment & Sports Arena in Washington, D.C. Last week, The Best Friends interrupted Story Time with Adam Cole BayBay and got a tidy beatdown for their troubles. CM Punk rolled up Wardlow after a series of brutal MJF ordered powerbombs. Dante Martin defeated Powerhouse Hobbs with a little help from Jay Lethal. Eddie Kingston and Chris Jericho continued to get on each other’s nerves. Lance Archer made his championship desires known when he laid out Hangman Adam Page. FTR challenged Brock and Lee to a match, and they accepted. Serene Deeb completely lost her sh*t on Hikaru Shida. Brody King of the House of Black debuted to help Malakai take out Penta El Zero Miedo and The Varsity Blondes. Sting & Darby ruined The Acclaimed’s victory celebration. A blindfolded PAC had an ominous message for Malakai Black. Andrade El Idolo had a business offer that Matt Hardy couldn’t refuse, and finally, the interim TNT champion, Sammy Guevara, defeated Daniel Garcia despite 2.0’s constant interference.
This Week’s Headliner:
The World Women’s Champion Britt Baker is teaming up with her boyfriend and undefeated singles wrestler Adam Cole to take on Orange Cassidy & Kris Statlander.
On the one hand, this is very cool. AEW could do more mixed-tag action, especially since they refuse to have intergender wrestling. We all know that Britt & Adam are an IRL couple, and since he joined AEW, they have been casually hinting at that. It’s great that they finally acknowledged - it’s canon now, baybay! Having the team together to take on OC and Statlander makes a ton of sense. Cole and OC have been circling around each other for weeks and have been in some pretty great matches. They have good in-ring chemistry, and the differences between The Best Friends and The Elite ReDRagon conglomerate make for fun pairings and good storytelling. It’s no wonder they want to continue to capitalize on that. Bringing in Britt to take on the only female member of The Best Friends is the right move. To balance the playing field and potentially set up a future title opportunity for Statlander now that Britt is done with Riho. Good stuff!
On the other hand, it’s driving me absolutely bananas that Britt isn’t walking around with her championship in these segments. She’s the goddamn women’s champion. Whether or not the initial phrasing was used as an insult, she IS a pillar of that company. She is coming to help them out not the other way around (though Cole should 100% show up and help during her matches too). She’s doing them a favor! She’s the only one carrying gold, and she should be swinging around that championship swagger in every segment. This feels very much like a “we don’t want her to look more important than Cole & the boys” move, but the thing is, SHE ABSOLUTELY IS. Put some respect on her name.
The Title Scene:
The World Champion, Hangman Adam Page, has a lot on his plate right now. He may have said that he’s ready for his next challenger post Bryan Danielson, but I don’t think he expected to be completely blindsided by The Muderhawk Monster. Lance Archer has been MIA for a minute, but it seems like he may have teamed up with Dan Lambert to take on and take out the champion. To say Archer’s style is different from Danielson’s would be quite an understatement. We’ve seen the champ defeat two technical geniuses to earn his title, but he hasn’t taken on a bruiser quite like Archer. It looks like another test of strength (literally) for everyone’s favorite Cowboy!
Not to mention the fact that former champion Jon Moxley is set to return tonight! He was in the middle of the number one contender tournament when he left to take care of his personal needs. Now that he’s back, you can bet the former champion will have his eyes set on the title sooner rather than later!
I don’t know about you, but I got used to seeing the TBS Championship in action over the past couple of weeks. It would be nice if they continued to bill the women’s secondary title as important and worthy of screen time!
The real TNT Champion Cody Rhodes returns tonight. Gonna be real awkward when the interim TNT champion hears about this...
Tag Team Champions had an absolute barn burner of a match with The Dark Order on Rampage. To quote Taz, “Both teams kicking ass tonight on RAMPAGE!” They’ve made it known that they are fighting champions and the whole tag team division let them know that they are taking them up on the offer (the gathering of the teams on the ring apron was not very subtle). So now the question is, who’s next?
Other things to keep an eye on:
-All CM Punk wants to do is destroy MJF. It’s a simple request for a simple guy. Unfortunately for Punk, MJF has a cache of “friends” that Punk must first work through. CM Punk barely made it through his match with Wardlow - and frankly only won due to MJF’s own incompetency. But tonight? Somehow I don’t think “the chairman” can stand up to The Best in the World.
-Serena Deeb has been feuding with Hikaru Shida for months now. Last week she lost her damn mind and viciously attacked Shida’s injured knee. Shida had to go back to Japan to recover away from this madwoman! This feud surely isn’t over, but in the meantime, Deeb will continue her destruction of the women’s division tonight when she takes on Skye Blue. Thoughts and prayers to the Blue family.
-Sting & Darby Allin took a baseball bat to The Acclaimed. The Acclaimed took a verbal baseball bat in the form of a scathing “music” video to Sting & Darby Allin. Tonight they finally get their hands on each other in a sanctioned match.
-Brody King makes his in-ring debut alongside his spooky sovereign Malakai Black while the Varsity Blonds continue to delude themselves. It’s like watching cows walk into the slaughterhouse. It turns out Blondes don’t have more fun in AEW. Now the real question here is will PAC show up and if he does will he help or hurt The House of Black?
Tune into AEW on TBS at 8pm ET for the final time to see how all this plays out.
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