This week’s episode of “AEW Dynamite” kicked off with former AEW World Champion Jon Moxley wrestling in not only the building where he beat CM Punk in three minutes, but in his home state of Ohio against the man MVP apparently hates (I’m thinking it’s the lack of shoes), “Speedball” Mike Bailey. It was a good, to very good TV wrestling match that also set up Moxley’s match with Kevin Knight for next week in Moxley’s hometown of Cincinnati, but also saw the kidnapping of Wheeler Yuta by Darby Allin, with Allin leaving Yuta in a body bag out in the parking lot with a piece of paper that had “Forbidden Door” written on it stuck to his head.
As you can probably imagine, this is all setting up to Moxley vs. Darby on August 24, a match that will almost bring the whole Death Riders arc of Moxley full circle, as Darby was the first man he wrestled after turning on Bryan Danielson at All Out 2024. I don’t have a problem with that, and quite frankly, Moxley and Darby are a great pairing that, when given the freedom to do whatever they want, will produce a pay-per-view classic. The problem I have is actually more beyond that match, which is very simply: what is next for Jon Moxley? The answer is currently “I don’t know,” but that worries me somewhat.
The problem that Moxley will have heading into the back-end of the year is that the whole purpose of the Death Riders’ story was for Moxley to sit atop AEW as the champion, force everyone to get to his level, and bring AEW up as a company in the process. That has basically been achieved as Hangman Page has now defeated Moxley twice, with Darby essentially being a loose end due to his absence throughout the first half of the year to climb Mount Everest. The problem is that without the AEW World Championship, Moxley is effectively directionless in his current state.
He is far too big of a star to be milling around in the AEW TNT Championship picture, the AEW Unified Championship is currently held by a heel in Kazuchika Okada (that is unless Swerve Strickland has his way at Forbidden Door), and it wouldn’t really make any sense to have him lumped in with the tag team division despite its current lack of depth. However, you can’t keep having Moxley go after Hangman, no matter how good they are as opponents, because it will just get stale. Moxley is in a weird place where his role as AEW’s top guy is no longer his, but he’s almost too much of a big guy to fall dramatically down the card.
Granted, his direction could be a lot more clear by the time an event like All Out rolls around, and maybe I’m just impatient, but after his match with Darby at Forbidden Door, something will need to change in Moxley in order to keep him fresh.
Written by Sam Palmer
