This episode of Dynamite is a great example of why I don’t like AEW. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the show and I still thought it was godawful. Now look, I admit that I’m in a bad mood for other reasons today, but usually, good wrestling can brighten my mood. I didn’t feel like we got a lot of it here, and it’s for one main reason: suspension of disbelief.
To be specific, I was not suspending my disbelief for any of this shit.
Why not? Well, let’s go through the show and I’ll point it out to you.
Okay so that was a bit of a tease, but just because I’ve formatted this badly, it’s late, and I don’t want to rewrite a bunch of shit. Basically, the intro (what’s above) and the Reprise section were originally connected, but I didn’t write a separate intro for the review itself. So I’m going to put the review here, then I’m gonna repost the intro as part of the Reprise so that doesn’t get lost.
Got it? Cool. Also, I will do the Thursday Dynamite Review commentary but I’m working a temp position so I can’t do my write-up during the day, thought it’d be better to get this done while my thoughts were fresh and then do a separate post for the commentary.
Review
Benjamin vs. Fletcher, Blue League: Slow, methodical match. Blown spot with the T-bone suplex dodge. Guys really need to just fucking wrestle in their first matches, stop trying for these spots. Long fucking PIP this sucks. Benjamin being really stupid in chasing Fletcher to the floor; AFAIK a count-out win is worth as many points as a pin win. Too much goofy on the 9 count tease. Crowd hates Fletcher, shows the Ospreay turn worked. Drama down the stretch. Very slow follow-ups, most likely because they have spots in mind. Good spot for cheating but the “grabbing the ropes” cheat doesn’t make much sense. ★★★★☆ (4 stars)
Hook promo: Eh. Was okay. Led to the Patriarchy jumping him. Action was a bit rough. Conchairto to Hook’s hand. They’ve done a lot of this shit lately, who cares.
Mercedes interview: Wow are you trying to be a fucking Disney villainess. Syrupy thick, it’s supposed to go to 11 not to 30. Okay movement on storylines.
Hurt Syndicate segment: Really fucking stupid. I get it, I’m just over it.
Dynamite Dozen: Cole really does feel cold. Entrance sucks, why is it so important that Cole gets to do his stupid fucking entrance spots. Immediately turned off of this match with the Cole/Uno shit. God do battle royals suck. It took me a second to see that Action Andretti is with Lio Rush now. Good thing I was already watching with the sound off when it went to PIP. Ended with O’Reilly and Cole doing dinner theater. NR. 🛇
Julia Hart video package vs. Hayter: Stupid. Just could not care.
Max Caster promo: Just too goofy.
Swerve vs. Caster: Decent little squash for Swerve, good performance from Swerve. Caster did well in his spot. Post-match attack likely spells the end of the Acclaimed as Gunn/Bowens didn’t come out to help. ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
MJF promo: On principle not listening to a pre-tape that’s supposed to be shot at the time. Shut up. If you’re going to do a pre-tape, you don’t get to slot it in like you’re commenting in real-time, and I do not care what sort of streaming bullshit you cook up. It just screams “this was all pre-booked” and it makes it impossible to enjoy
White vs. PAC: Match started okay, good movement and action. Was leaning 4 but the really stupid finish drops me down to 3. Good job just killing your fucking unit. Death Riders attack, eh. Hangman comes down, staredown with Moxley. Orange jumps Moxley from behind, big schmozz, they throw out Hangman, Orange gets the upper hand. Faces all give their finish to Moxley. Christian standing in the back watching sucks so much. ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
Hayter promo: Pretty decent. Managed to weave together everything she has going on to try and explain why she wants to face Hart, convincing enough from her end.
Chris Jericho promo: Alright, just a shill in his Learning Tree character.
Bandido vignette: Fun enough, corny but for Bandido it was okay. Originally I thought it’d have been for Hangman or something and I would have hated it.
Jay vs. Ford: Jay’s music is bad. Jay should not be on TV. Should she get real shots? Sure. But you can make sure she’s solid enough before you throw her out there, you don’t have to put training matches on live television. Decent action but too sloppy. ★★☆☆☆ (2 stars)
Jay calls out Mercedes: Okay little segment, Mercedes a bit too over the top but fine
May/Mina segment: Muted on and off, originally by accident (came back from commercial) but not great. Decent delivery from May. Too horny.
Castagnoli vs. King, Gold League: Throwing bombs. “Hand match”. Double down. I’m extremely unenergized by this point and this match isn’t doing it yet. Picking up. Another cheap win. TK doesn’t really get that having cheat wins also cheapens the tournament. Oh well. ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
Reprise
This episode of Dynamite is a great example of why I don’t like AEW. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the show and I still thought it was godawful. Now look, I admit that I’m in a bad mood for other reasons today, but usually, good wrestling can brighten my mood. I didn’t feel like we got a lot of it here, and it’s for one main reason: suspension of disbelief.
To be specific, I was not suspending my disbelief for any of this shit.
Why not? Well, let’s go through the show and I’ll point it out to you.
- Benjamin/Fletcher: Where is the leverage coming from when you grab the ropes? When you put your feet on the ropes, you are getting your weight up higher so more of your weight is on top of your opponent (rather than resting on the ground). When you grab the ropes, what are you doing? Also, back into the match, why did Benjamin go out to get Fletcher when he was on the floor? Makes no sense. It’s not like Benjamin is a babyface.
- Hurt Business segment: Why did they all freak out like that? Why should we accept that wrestlers just get to assault people who are backstage for no reason? When Lashley came in to try to pry Shelton off and then other refs stepped in as well, why did Lashley start beating them up?
- Dynamite Dozen match: Why did everybody just stand there and wait for Cole’s entrance? That’s how the complaint would usually go, anyway, but honestly, the complaint really is: Why does Cole feel the need to do his stupid fucking entrance bullshit every single time he comes out for a match, am I supposed to like this guy? Why didn’t everybody else get their entrances? If we’re supposed to believe that everyone has an even chance, how come only one guy is treated as special?
- MJF promo: Why should I believe that Max is paying rapt attention to Dynamite and can just set up a crystal clear stream for everyone to watch?
- White/PAC: Why would you set up having PAC and Yuta go two-on-one on White and basically beat him to shit only to have White just be good at the end and take them both out himself?
- Death Riders schmozz: Why does Hanger care? Why don’t the Death Riders want to fight him? If they just go to steamroll through Hangman, they’re not in position for Orange to attack them.
- May/Shirakawa segment: Why is Mariah May saying that the women’s division is shit, does she not want to be champion?
And these are just the things that stuck out best to make this point. There is always a lot on the show, big and little, that makes me scrunch up my nose. And what all of them share is that the usual way to deal with them is the same: to paraphrase Mystery Science Theater 3000, “so just say to yourself, it’s just (pro wrestling), I should really just re-lax”.
There are reasons that MST3K works in its format, mainly that when you see the seams in comedy (so to speak), it doesn’t ruin the experience. A level of detachment from the subject is almost necessary in comedy. The point is not to pull you in as deeply as it can. So in that way, a comedy with obvious “flaws” can be better for that fact.
In serious pro wrestling (aka wrestling that isn’t explicitly for comedy), the opposite is true. Wrestling is trying to draw you in as deeply as it can. When wrestling fails to do that, it fails to be truly compelling; compare this to comedy, where it being compelling as a comedy is really not tied to how much it’s drawn you in.
Suspension of disbelief is like jumping a gap. If you make the gap too long, it’s impossible to jump over it. If you keep having lots of short gaps, one after another, it becomes too tiring to keep going. The best thing to do, when the objective is to capture attention, is to require as few jumps as possible. This is part of why more people are into “realistic” dramas than they are into sci-fi or fantasy, and honestly, why sci-fi has always been more popular than fantasy: the jumps that one has to make are shorter and the whole process is less tiring.
Modern pro wrestling is full of these gaps, both big and small. The in-ring action is a huge source of these gaps. Irish whips, vertical suplexes, slapping thighs, limbwork, all of these scream that what you’re watching is a show, it’s not real, so that to stay engaged you have to suspend your disbelief over and over, almost constantly. Watching pro wrestling is a bit like flying in that way.
Is the answer to go entirely against the grain, to make things so hyper-realistic that you are rarely needing to test someone’s credulity? No, it isn’t, not necessarily. Stage drama and film drama have plenty of elements that force suspension of disbelief, even in “realistic” works. For example: scene transitions. We don’t often think about the unreality involved in watching a performance and having the action transport itself from one supposed location to another. Some of these tricks are useful in telling a story.
The more of these tricks you use, however, the more artificial your product, and the harder time you will have in getting people to successfully suspend their disbelief. Of course, general engagement is one of the best ways to get past this: if your performance is exciting enough, the fact that it doesn’t exactly make sense is not going to make it uninteresting to people. There is a point where the lack of sense interferes with the excitement, though.
Sometimes, we act as though excitement and similar emotions are unexplainable or non-rational. They just happen to us and it’s almost not worth going into further. I don’t want to try and pull it all apart right here, but I want to make the point that these emotions that feel kind of pre-conscious still rely on some kind of processing. We might not feel as though we are thinking through the emotion, but if there was no sense involved, the emotion wouldn’t come across.
Think about being angry at your spouse for something that they did in your dream. Obviously, looking at all the facts, this doesn’t exactly make sense: they’re not controlling what they do in your dream so it isn’t their fault. But in the moment, it did make sense: for whatever reason, you weren’t separating the two, so you believed that your real spouse was behind what your dream spouse did. You wouldn’t be mad at your town’s mayor for something that your spouse did in your dream, you’d only get mad at your spouse; even though it doesn’t make literal sense, the level of sense it does make has its boundaries, it doesn’t go just anywhere.
To return to excitement, what I’m trying to say is that it is possible to become excited about something that doesn’t exactly make sense, such as not thinking about how the defender has to jump in and extend their own legs order to properly take a vertical suplex. However, it has to at least appear to make sense, and the more that the appearance looks like something that actually is logical, the more stable the basis of the excitement. In other words, there’s less chance that you will find out something about the event that makes you feel less excited about what happened.
One of the reasons that I think “legit sports” has a stronger and more long-term interest than pro wrestling is that when you see a feat in a legit sport, you know that someone actually accomplished that. You aren’t wondering to what extent they were “being carried” to their accomplishment or anything of that sort. If someone hits the most home runs in a season, they hit that many home runs. Even finding out things like corked bats and steroid use often damages the reputation that players have in the eyes of fans.
More and more as I’ve grown, I’ve found that it’s hard to stomach all the gaps that pro wrestling presents. It’s not really that I’m looking for legit sport. I honestly just feel that the gaps are too long and too many. And these gaps are not the only interesting things about pro wrestling. Some are necessary, sure. To focus on throws instead of strikes, for instance, you have to act like throws are more damaging than they actually are. But many are not. Do we need to have someone grabbing the rope with their hand as a method of cheating? We don’t. We can find a way to cheat that makes more sense, we’ve gotta be able to do that.
Both in the ring and out, I would love to see a pro wrestling product that just makes more sense on the face of it. Can we stop just having random, vicious attacks, especially on non-wrestlers? Can we maybe get “Continental Classic rules” on all matches, or at the very least get some explanation as to why we have to allow interference in other matches? Can we have the titles on the best wrestlers (in kayfabe)?