AEW Dynamite: Boston, 7/15/26
Though we are usually indie wrestling girlies (in the gender neutral sense of girlies), with AEW Dynamite happening a mere three miles from our home, we decided we had to get a ticket and check it out!
The event was at MGM Music Hall in Boston, a venue we’ve been to many times for higher education events related to our non-wrestling job. The vibes were somewhat different at Dynamite. For one thing, the line for the merch table was much longer. (Seriously—it went from the lobby up the stairs to the mezzanine when we arrived a little after seven pm). (Also seriously—there really is a merch table at the graduations I attend at this venue!)
The venue had a number of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks for sale, including a mocktail menu that allowed patrons to pay 11 dollars for a fancy soda! We, sophisticated consumers, did not fall for that trick and only paid 8 dollars for a can of water!
Said water, by the way, was Liquid Death brand. Also on the menu was Liquid Death’s Arnold Palmer product, which they call Dead Billionaire. No cans of Dead Billionaire were for sale, however. We are sure that the presence of AEW’s billionaire owner Tony Khan in the building had nothing to do with this! Probably just a coincidence!
The colossal video screens played an interview between AEW interviewer Renée Paquette and wrestler Hikaru Shida. The two had great chemistry, and Shida was charismatic and interesting, and the interview made us look forward to seeing her wrestle! Unfortunately, she was not on the card!
Extremely dapper ring announcer Justin Roberts emerged at around 7:40 and told us there would be a Ring of Honor trios match before Dynamite went live at 8. And so there was! We don’t remember who competed or who won! But it was definitely wrestling!
The crew transformed the ring from a Ring of Honor branded ring to an AEW Dynamite branded ring in the space of about sixty seconds, and the crew should definitely be included among the great performances we saw over the course of the evening.
The broadcast opened with a promo with Jon Moxley telling Will Ospreay how to be tough, or something. It was, as near as we can tell, the same promo they have shot at least three times on recent episodes. One wag in the audience yelled “Nobody cares!” as Moxley monologued about the meaning of toughness or something.
We then went into a tag team match featuring Christian Cage and Adam Copeland versus the Death Riders, Daniel Garcia and Wheeler Yuta. Copeland and Cage entered separately, which gave the crowd a chance to perform a credible a capella rendition of Copeland’s walkup music, a song called, and we are not making this up, “Metalingus,” which sounds profoundly uncomfortable and could in fact lead to your tongue getting stuck to a flagpole, A Christmas Story-style, if you do it in the cold. The crowd had special animus toward Yuta, telling him that he sucks on multiple occasions. The crowd also informed Garcia that Cage is his literal father: the chants of “he’s your father,” as opposed to “he’s your daddy,” a usage we abhor but recognize to commonly mean “this person is in charge of you.” In any case, Copeland is 25 years Garcia’s senior and so could, at least as far as chronology is concerned, be his father.
We think the crowd is really on to something here, and a bitter father/son rivalry would be a great angle! Tony Khan, call us! JK! We do not fraternize with with billionaires! (not that we have the chance, but given the chance, we would disrespectfully decline, as billionaires are inherently people of low moral character that respectable people should not associate with.) (And yes, we’re also imagining that we’re respectable for this particular imaginary scenario.)
We got a promo with Andrade El Idolo, the muscular, charismatic man whose catchphrase is “how you know?” He showcased a gaudy ring that apparently belongs to recently defeated champ MJF and asked how we know. We don’t know how we know! We don’t even know at all!
Then there was another promo in which Trios champs the Conglomeration were confronted by title aspirants The Demand, led by Ricochet, who we knew as Prince Puma back in his (and our) Lucha Underground days! Another trios team, The Lethal Twist, named after Chubby Checker’s failed follow up to “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again,” attacked the Conglomeration!
Then Andrade El Idolo emerged to take on Jake Doyle from the Don Callis family. The crowd alternated between chants of “How You Know?” and “Fuck Don Callis!” (Evil mastermind Callis is a snappy dresser but...shall we say not conventionally attractive, so we’re gonna pass). Andrade dispatched Doyle and proclaimed his intention to take out as many members of the family as necessary.
Then it was time to celebrate Kenny Omega’s championship win. The crew brought out a giant wooden omega and covered the ring in red carpet with lightning speed, and announcer Tony Schiavone, who we were assured was a legend but who got a far smaller pop from the crowd than his co-anchor Taz, brought out Omega. And then Will Ospreay came out and the two offered mutual appreciation ahead of their upcoming championship in London. And then Kevin Knight came out and said he wanted a shot at the championship! Omega lectured Knight about how he was going down the wrong path by following Don Callis, and take it from us—we used to teach high school!--there’s no more effective way to change a young person’s mind than lecturing them about their mistakes in front of a crowd!
Anyway, Knight eventually went after Omega, and then Darby Allin came charging out to defend Omega, or perhaps he just felt that the segment had gone on too long. We couldn’t disagree! He was soon joined by Brian Cage (Who we remember from his and our Lucha Underground days) and the Don Callis family, and a melee ensued! For the third time in less than ninety minutes!
We got up to go to the bathroom, figuring there’d be a long commercial break and transition from red carpet back to wrestling ring, but we heard a match being announced on our way to the can! “Well,” we thought, “we’ll catch the rest of it after we micturate.” Sadly, when we returned to our seat a mere five minutes later, we’d missed the match in its entirety. Bandido and Brody King defeated Nick Comoroto and Aaron Solo, and apparently the crowd chanted “Fuck ICE!” That’s what we get for trying to stay hydrated on a stiflingly hot day!
Next, another promo, and then International Champion Kyle Fletcher took on masked luchador Komander. Komander pulled off some spectacular moves, twice running along the top rope and generally doing all kinds of cool lucha stuff, but he was ultimately no match for Fletcher in what was, for us, the match of the evening.
Next up, three promos. We’re tired of describing promos at this point—it’s all on HBO Max if you’re curious or just a fan of Renée Paquette. This was followed by Darby Allin versus Brian Cage. Last week Allin got Cage with the age-old exploding skateboard trick (no, really!), and Cage was out for revenge. The early going featured the enormous bodybuilder Cage absolutely brutalizing comparatively petite goth Darby Allin. To the point where we found ourselves yelling, “He’s someone’s child, for God’s sake!” Fortunately for Darby and his parents, he managed a comeback and an improbable victory over Cage, who really should not be that agile if he’s going to be that big.
There were two more promos because apparently someone believes you can never have too many, but we are not that someone.
Finally it was time for the main event: Hometown hero Mercedes Moné teaming with Divine Dominion for a trios match against recently returned Willow Nightingale, teaming with Maya World and Hyan. Though it was challenging to root against the endlessly winning Nightingale and her teammates, we are longtime fans of silly headgear, and one member of the Divine Dominion sports some sort of tall, feathered Valkyrie headdress like she just wandered over from a production of Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Also Mercedes Moné is a hometown hero who was greeted with chants of “CEO,” which seemed inappropriate to us because she actually works.
At one point Moné had the head of one of her opponents locked between her thighs, and one wag in the audience proclaimed, “Yo, you can do that move on me!” In a just world she would have come into the crowd and chucked the perv into the ring from the balcony, but even in wrestling the world isn’t always just.
Anyway, the wily veterans were too much for the whippersnappers, and Moné and Divine Dominion won the match.
The TV broadcast was over, but there was more to come, as AEW boss Tony Khan came out to greet the crowd. We were then subjected to the unseemly spectacle of the Boston fans begging the billionaire to host a pay-per-view special in the Hub of the Universe, and said billionaire agreeing that we had been good little fans and deserved a special crumb from his groaning table that he would throw to us at some undetermined time in the future. It was a sickening display on the part of our hometown fans, rivaling the time we saw two rows of fans ejected from the Fenway Park bleachers after some shenanigans with an inflatable doll. (This really happened.)
Still, we had a fun night and saw some great wrestling, and even our neighbors’ sycophancy couldn’t ruin it for us.
Having said that, we prefer the intimacy, weirdness, and affordability of indie wrestling. Fortunately we’ve got two more indie shows to go to in July!
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