It’s time for a weekly look at the best, the worst, and the weird or otherwise notable—the Hungee—from the latest episode of AEW Dynamite.

The Good

Every once in a while, AEW does a sports entertainment-style segment, and they opened the show with one. Most of the time, these succeed – largely because they don’t do them very often – and this was no exception. The Daniel Garcia storyline is one of the best they’ve had this year, and having him push back on the JAS in the middle of a ridiculous celebration segment – a very WWE idea – was perfect framing. Working with Chris Jericho has helped Garcia improve his promo skills. He feels like a total star.

Bandido and Jericho put on a fantastic main event. Jericho’s work over the past few months has been amazing, and being able to work with Bandido in a match that showed off the fast-paced offense that Bandido excels at was very impressive when you consider Jericho’s age. Jericho doing a cheap shot on Bobby Cruise was fantastic, too.

I really liked the Jon Moxley vs. Juice Robinson match. It was awkward that a solid chunk of the most impressive stuff came in the first commercial break.

Wheeler Yuta did a lot better on the mic this week. There’s a very real argument that they should have just gone ahead and done him vs. MJF this week – they were in the one place where MJF was guaranteed to get the heel reaction he would need against Yuta. But Yuta came off incredibly cool, which he didn’t last week.

The Bad

The start of Saraya in AEW was inauspicious. This was another sports entertainment-style segment, but it felt like the worst kind of dreck that would show up on Raw. I don’t think any of this was intentional. Still, this big timed the division, was very WWE in just randomly tying the heels and faces together who had never done been connected before, and made the division look terribly shallow on the face side when Skye Blue & Willow Nightingale are coming out. All it needed was Norm Macdonald introducing all the stars. It reminded me of the segment years ago in WWE where Stephanie McMahon split the women’s division into random teams. It stunk then, and it stinks now. This was just horribly structured.

I was also really down on the Toni Storm-Serena Deeb match that followed. It felt extremely WWE-like to have a lumberjack match with minimal build, and to spend the first several minutes doing the very tired “heel lumberjacks attack a face, and then the face lumberjacks attack a heel” spots. Saraya was also rough on commentary here. Toni Storm’s piledrivers are awesome, though, and they did eventually get the crowd somewhat back after it absolutely died during the preceding segment.

And we still don’t know if Saraya is actually going to wrestle, or if she’s purely in a non-physical role.

I don’t think she’s dead in the water or anything, but this wasn’t how you wanted to start her run.

Filing a three-star match here would almost always be wrong, but when it’s a Bryan Danielson singles match, I’ll do it. He’s one of the best wrestlers of all-time and to only have a kinda good match with Matt Menard was absolutely disappointing.

Maybe it’s just rust or coming back from the injury, but Menard’s offense looked rough.

The Andrade Family Office feels completely dead in the water. I think Private Party has improved, and they deserve to get featured somewhere, but I’m not particularly hot on tying them back to Matt Hardy.

The Hungee

I know there were attempts to cancel Luigi Primo over the past week due to his views on COVID-19. That doesn’t change the fact that he was extremely entertaining in the opening segment. He was the perfect addition to a Jericho segment that he often has – it wasn’t necessary at all, but it definitely added to the proceedings.

There were a lot of pre-tapes on this show, arguably too many. Given the situation with Hurricane Ian affecting plans for the show, this wasn’t surprising but unusual.

Hangman Page had a sick Dolly Parton shirt.

Overall Rating

7/10. A solid show with a great opening segment and a fantastic main event, but a rough near-half hour focusing on the women’s division.

Fred Morlan’s Chris Jericho’s Sports Entertainer of the Week

Chris Jericho has to take this home, as he was key to the best segment and best match of the show

Match Star Ratings

  • Bryan Danielson defeated Matt Menard: ***
  • Jon Moxley defeated Juice Robinson: ****
  • Toni Storm defended the AEW Interim World Women’s Championship against Serena Deeb in a lumberjack match: *1/4
  • Ricky Starks defeated Eli Isom: 3/4*
  • Chris Jericho defended the Ring of Honor World Championship against Bandido: ****1/2

You can follow Fred on Twitter at @flagrantrasslin. He just launched a podcast with Tyler Forness based on this article; the latest episode is available here.

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