AEW Booms and Duds: Hangman Page’s mystery partner is underwhelming

After ten weeks of fantastic television, I guess having an average show is to be expected. It’s also understandable. Unlike their counterparts on Mondays and Fridays, even the average shows for AEW are enjoyable at this point. Here are the “booms” (hits) and “duds” (misses) for Mar. 11, 2020.

Is it just me, or did last night’s episode of AEW Dynamite have a “two steps forward, one step back” feeling? There wasn’t anything terrible on the show, but it seemed like for every couple of positives, there were a few interesting decisions.

It’s not like my qualms have to do only with what happened in the ring, or only with happened on the mic.

Rather, unlike previous episodes, I wasn’t left with a sense of wanting to see the next episode, at least as enthusiastically as the previous editions of this piece. I was left with questions rather than anticipation.

As a reminder of my criteria, I’m not going to run through each match/segment. Rather, I will identify a couple of segments that either worked (“boom”) or didn’t for whatever reason (“dud”).

My criteria includes quality of match/segment and how it starts and/or builds stories. After all, we watch partly to be caught up in the stories. If a great work-rate match happens with no context or bearing on the stories, it’s going to be a miss.

Also, just because something is a hit/miss doesn’t mean it was an overwhelming choice. The selection could be 51 percent hit, 75 percent miss, and so on.

There are other subtleties to my criteria, but those are pretty much the parameters.

The night started off with Cody vs. Ortiz; Women’s Champion Nyla Rose and Bea Priestley vs. Hikaru Shida and Kris Statlander; MFJ, The Butcher, and The Blade vs. Jurassic Express; the debut of Death Triangle (Trianglo de la Muerte) against Private Party and Joey Janela; and Adam Page and a mystery partner vs. Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara.

Here’s a boom to start.