Welcome to Critic’s Corner where I will give my honest opinion about September 3, 2025 edition of AEW Dynamite.
Overall, the show didn’t drag and moved along nicely, but upon further review, there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense. Let’s go over what was good and bad about the show.
Crowd and Atmosphere
First off, we saw about 900 people at the 2300 Arena. I’d rather watch a show with 900 rabid fans than 2,000 people in a 10,000-seat arena where everything is dark and tarped-off. That being said, I can only imagine what the part-time viewer is thinking when they tune into this show, see 900 fans—similar to WWE’s developmental brand, NXT—and then tune into Raw and SmackDown and see 12,000 fans with a drone flying through the arena to show the huge crowd.
A lot of people are saying it’s a great move for AEW to run smaller buildings to get a better atmosphere, while ignoring the fact that they need to do this because they can’t come close to filling a 5,000-seat building on a regular basis anymore for Dynamite. On the positive side, at least this crowd was loud and made for a better TV show than a tarped-off arena.
Opening Segment
In the opening segment, we had a nice brawl between Darby Allin and Gabe Kidd until we had involvement from The Death Riders and The Opps. Hook’s music played and he barely walked to the ring. If he were friends with Allin, he would’ve ran to the ring like Powerhouse Hobbs and Samoa Joe did a minute later as they raced past him.
They all fought in the ring. Allin and Kidd made their way to the back. Allin put Kidd in a body bag, hooked him up to a truck, and sped off. They cut back to the announcers, and we find Taz and Tony Schiavone laughing instead of treating this like a life-or-death situation. At this point, how can we take this seriously when the lead announcers are laughing about it? Oh, and what happened to the Death Riders and Opps? They were nowhere to be found when they cut to the announce desk.
Mercedes Mone vs Alex Windsor
Mercedes Mone came to the ring with nine belts. Okay, I’m not sure how anybody can compare this to Ultimo Guerrero’s belts from the ’90s. Guerrero’s belts were all pretty well known. Can anybody name the belts Mone has? Most of them are independent belts from promotions that run shows sporadically. Has anybody seen Southside Wrestling, EWA, or BestYa? You probably didn’t know those are three of the belts. One of the titles isn’t even a title—the Owen Hart belt was a tournament. Adam Page isn’t coming out with the belt he won for winning the men’s Owen Hart tournament.
That being said, I enjoyed her match with Alex Windsor. Solid match that made sense—probably my favorite match on the show. Riho made her return, and there’s no explanation why she’s getting the title match against Mone at All Out. All that being said, I have to give credit to the AEW Women’s Division for making noticeable improvements over the last year in terms of talent and storytelling
Ricochet and Hurt Syndicate
I enjoyed Ricochet acknowledging his past with the Hurt Syndicate. I’m more into storytelling than moves. He challenged the Hurt Syndicate to fight him and GOA. MVP accepted later in the show. So far, I’m looking forward to this match at All Out.
Briscoe vs. Archer
Mark Briscoe vs. Lance Archer was kept short between two guys who hardly ever win, let alone big matches. The right man won for storyline reasons, with Briscoe going over.
Toni Storm Challenge
Timeless Toni Storm issued an open challenge for the AEW Women’s Championship. With an hour left in the show, nobody stepped up. Wow—if nobody in the locker room cares, why should we?
Statlander and Shafir
Marina Shafir confronted Kris Statlander. Statlander told her to “tell our friend that I got his message.” This is good—something to follow storyline-wise regarding who this mystery person is.
Bandido vs. Death Riders
This match should have been announced last week to build up the match. I realize Bandido is the ROH Champion, but they shouldn’t call it a World Championship. It dilutes the AEW Championship, especially when it’s nowhere near the same level. Marina Shafir jumped on the ring apron to distract the referee. Why is the referee arguing with her to get off the ring? Why doesn’t he just count to five and disqualify the Death Riders? It’s not like she’s interfering to save the belts and the referee wants a clean finish so the baby faces don’t get screwed. If the Death Riders get disqualified, the baby faces retain the titles.
If we ignore this psychology, it was a good match until Jon Moxley showed up. Allin attacked him from behind. We have an hour left in the show and nobody even asked Allin where he drove Gabe Kidd to. We have no updates, nor any mention of the incident. I guess it didn’t matter after all when the announcers laughed it off.
FTR / Copeland / Cage Angle
FTR–Adam Copeland/Christian Cage angle. For some reason, they sent the ROH locker room out to break this up. Wow—these guys don’t look ready for prime time. I saw Jordan Oliver there. I remember seeing him in MLW and GCW and thought he had potential. They pushed Adam Priest as the one to stand up to Dax Harwood. Looking at this crew, I’m thinking no wonder Bandido is ROH Champion—and another reason not to call it a world championship.
Later in the show, instead of having Priest stand up for himself to establish him as someone who has no fear of FTR, he apologized and was told to “get his bitch ass out of here,” which he did. Way to castrate your new babyface.
Main Event
Adam Page, Kenny Omega, JetSpeed vs. Kyle Fetcher, Josh Alexander, and the Young Bucks. This was all action and the crowd was into it. There was a spot where the referee allowed the Bucks and Omega/Page to all be in the ring and fight for about three minutes with no attempt to restore order. If there’s no issue with this, why make tags at all? Then they went back to tags after this—why? We already established this is okay.
I’ll let that go, though, as it happens in almost every tag team match in 2025. Just part of the changes in modern wrestling, I guess. Overall, a very entertaining match.
Positive note:
One other good thing about tonight’s show is we have three matches announced for Collision this week. There are so many weeks where little or nothing is advertised for Collision and Dynamite. AEW says they like to put matches on social media on the day of the show. The statistics show the ratings are higher when you set up the matches in advance on the television shows. Even if people are following social media throughout the day of the show, by advertising the matches on the previous show, you’ve reached more people who might be interested in watching the next show. With three matches announced for Collision, I’m sure this will hold true again and surpass the record low of 195,000 viewers Collision had this past weekend.
Click here for results from last night’s AEW Dynamite
