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

It’s rare to see a celebration segment work in pro wrestling, but The Acclaimed pulled it off. The crowd adores these guys right now, and they put together a really fun segment. It set up a future rematch with Swerve Strickland and (one assumes) Keith Lee, and further teased the anticipated Swerve heel turn.

Moxley also cut a good promo after the Adam Page-Rush match that I appreciated. He’s a natural at being Jon Moxley, and that’s a main event character.

Other than the squash, I would recommend to varying levels the matches on this show. Top of the stack for me would be the main event tag – I thought everyone looked great in it and Daniel Garcia came out of the loss looking like a star. MJF vs. Yuta was also excellent, with both doing good, largely technical-based work. Brian Cage and Wardlow had a high spot filled match that was a lot of fun. The women’s trios match was fun, and Willow Nightingale feels like she’s going to be an absolute superstar. Page vs. Rush and Lethal vs. Darby were both very solid as well.

We finally know that Saraya is cleared, resolving one big concern about her position in the division. It also felt less like she is being set up as the protagonist of the women’s division, which was a nice change from last week. We’ll see how the direction goes moving forward.

The Bad

There was way too much pushback online regarding the emphasis of Ring of Honor stuff on this show. Still, I agree that tonally it is very unusual for there to be so much Ring of Honor material on a show that would ostensibly celebrate AEW’s third anniversary.

I had one issue with the ordering on this show: the first two matches ended with angles about heels considering doing a handshake, which played weird to me.

The Hungee

The continuity of Jake Hager not only wearing the bucket Daniel Garcia rejected, but shouting “I LIKE THIS HAT” off mic was extremely good stuff.

Mark Sterling is a perfect stooge. He’s just a delightful geek every time he’s on screen.

One saving grace of the Andrade drama is that his out of nowhere mask vs. career match with Preston Vance was pulled. That particular stipulation had no build to set it up.

Putting Jungle Boy opposite Christian in the debut Toronto show feels like a really bad idea if your goal is to keep JB a babyface.

Interestingly, the main event didn’t even bother to tease Daniel Garcia doing a Ric Flair-on-Sting-style turn on Bryan Danielson, since that was the vibe it was giving off leading into it.

Overall rating

8/10. A very fun show filled with good to great matches, of course, the first-ever National Scissoring Day was a delight.

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

Everybody loves The Acclaimed!

Match Star Ratings

MJF defeated Wheeler Yuta: ****1/4

Darby Allin defeated Jay Lethal: ***1/2

Wardlow defeated Brian Cage: ****

Athena, Toni Storm, & Willow Nightingale defeated Jamie Hayter, Penelope Ford, & Serena Deeb: ***1/2

Adam Page defeated Rush: ***1/2

Luchasaurus defeated Fuego del Sol: ¾*

Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara defeated Bryan Danielson & Daniel Garcia: ****1/2

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

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