I'm stuffed full of enfrijoladas and ready for a holiday bash, bayyyy beeeee!

We're closing in on the final weeks of the C2 and I don't know if my finals predictions are going to come through at this point. As of the start of the show, I think everything I laid out is still mathematically possible. I'm just not certain it's the direction they're going in with the various storylines in and out of the tournament.

Tonight's Dynamite is a stacked card with a surprise Shibata appearance that I only learned about this afternoon. I'm probably looking most forward to Ospreay/Darby just because I know it's going to be a spectacle, but Shelton Benjamin vs The Beast Mortos has a real chance of being match of the night. Shelton has been fantastic since coming to AEW and Mortos is always the best.

Anna Jay had the best match of her AEW career against Mercedes Moné

Anna Jay has been on a solid run since coming back from her STARDOM sojourn earlier this year. Not only that, but it seems like her improving in-ring skills have endeared her to the crowds even more the past few months.

Tonight, she challenged Mercedes Moné for the TBS Title and looked great even in defeat. It helped that the crowd was especially into basically everything both Anna and Mercedes did from bell to bell. There were a couple of nearfalls and near-submissions for Anna toward the end where she fully had the crowd in the palm of her hand.

I think if they keep Anna consistently involved in a storyline so she doesn't fade to the background, she could really be doing something special by this time next year. As long as she's continuing to get the reps in and expanding what she does both in-ring and character-wise, there's no reason to believe she could be TBS Champion sometime in 2025.

Plus, as has been established, she has the better Gory Bomb finisher variation and that earns her a lot of points in my book.

One C2 match didn't meet my expectations and the other far exceeded them

Shelton Benjamin vs The Beast Mortos wasn't as great as I had hoped it would be, but it was still a fun match. There was some sloppiness early on that hurt the flow of the match, but after weirdly repeating the same spot (once in picture in picture, once back from break) they seemed to gel together.

For a brief moment I entertained the idea that Shelton was going to eat another loss here in order to tease some tension with Ricochet coming back around and trying to replace him in the group. That didn't come to pass as Mortos continued to rack up losses in the tournament and Benjamin moved to 6 points.

Will Ospreay was back to his regular hair this week, sparing us from the oddball choice to straighten his hair. Please, Will – never again.

After seeing Darby hit one of the gnarliest apron Coffin Drops I've ever seen, I'm starting to thin he might not actually want to climb Mount Everest and is just looking for a way out of it.

The Code Red -> Hidden Blade -> Stormbreaker -> Code Red sequence was one of the wildest things I've seen happen in the span of like four seconds of a wrestling match. Just unreal ability on both of those guys to pull that shit off so cleanly and precisely. Just wrestlers operating on a completely different wavelength than 90% of all other wrestlers.

Darby Allin and Will Ospreay have perfect wrestler brain in the way that they're both going to do the dumbest/craziest/coolest shit on any given show and that their brains work in such a way that they're able to compute counters and counters to counters that shouldn't work on paper but absolutely do. It helps that Darby Allin is absolutely feral. The Stormbreaker into Code Red counter was nuts but I wasn't expecting at all the Stormbreaker into Scorpion Death Drop counter. Just complete pro wrestling magic.

What a fucking match. I had picked a draw for this match and was dead wrong, but whatever. This was a match I don't think I'll soon forget.

Toni Storm is on another level

I was bullish on "Timeless" Toni Storm at first. It was too goofy at times and the character work overshadowed the in-ring work and made bad matches out of some matches that could have been quite good.

Everything got dialed in at a certain point, though, and "Timeless" became can't-miss basically every time she was on screen.

After losing the World Title to Mariah May, Toni disappeared from AEW TV though she still showed up in Mexico and Japan. Last week, though, she came back with in her original Toni Storm form.

Tonight, ala the "Timeless" interview segments, Toni sat down with RJ City to talk turkey. And, yet again, Toni Storm showed why she's one of the best character actors in wrestling right now.

Is this a Toni Storm who has some kind of amnesia and actually thinks she's back in AEW for the first-time ever? Or is this "Timeless" Toni Storm playing the role of her younger self? She is showing signs of remembering her past – whether it was almost absent-mindedly doing the "Timeless" pose before hitting the hip attack last week on Rampage or having to pause an extra second tonight when asked about Mariah May.

There's one thing I know for sure: Toni Storm is all about professional wrestling, rock music... heh... and the grind.

The deepening rift in "Team AEW"

The main event of Jon Moxley, PAC, and Wheeler Yuta vs Orange Cassidy, Jay White, and Hangman Page was a fun sprint that continued to highlight the disarray amongst Moxley's challengers at Worlds End.

Early in the match, fed up and ready to go completely out of his damn mind, Hangman bailed and turned this into a 3-on-2 match in favor of Death Riders.

While OC and Jay worked well together, once Hangman stormed back into the match to beat on Mox everything started to fall apart.

As Hangman setup for a Buckshot Lariat on Mox, OC beat him to the literal punch by laying Mox out with the Orange Punch. Hanger and OC argued while Wheeler Yuta crept up behind Cassidy in the ring. Hangman went for the Buckshot, seemingly aiming for Cassidy, but Cassidy ducked allowing Wheeler to be laid out.

PAC, charging into the ring, was sidestepped into a Blade Runner from Jay White. In their collapse, they're actually quite cohesive!

That was all she wrote for the cohesion, though; as Hangman and Jay argued back and forth and OC looked on, Mox snuck a schoolboy pin for the win.

Heading into Worlds End, it's still clear that Hangman, Jay, and Cassidy can't get on the same page for whatever greater good each guy thinks they're fighting for. The egos and anger are too far out of control and it's creating situation where the pot is fully ready to boil over.

It's a fun way to build to a four-way match! While I prefer the ECW style of multi-person matches with elimination rules rather than "fatal four way" rules, I'm sure the World Title four-way is still going to be a bonkers good time with a lot of storytelling to be done in the ring before Mox inevitably plays the snake striking at the perfect time to retain his title.

Wrapping Up

The opening of the show was a bit odd bouncing from interview to interview. It didn't feel like the old Collision cold opens, maybe because some of the promos included an interviewer rather than just being wrestlers cutting promos into camera while fun music played behind them.

That said, Jay White, Orange Cassidy, and Hangman Page are just three cool guys in black jackets – a fact that Jay White yelled about just as I was typing this sentence out. Am I Jay White?! Maybe. Probably not, though. Could be!

I still could not care less about this MJF/Adam Cole thing but I always enjoy an old fashioned "Is it live or is it Memorex?" promo/sneak attack. They earned a little bit of good will for that but not enough to actually make me want to see anything else.

Tonight gave us our first guarantee, more or less, that Kenny Omega is on his way back to AEW. Not only did we get a bit of promotion for Wrestle Dynasty where Kenny will wrestle Gabe Kidd (and hopefully not break his legs), but we got an ~informative video package~ for Omega's impending return. I don't know where Kenny is going to fit into the landscape when he's back, especially with The Young Bucks having disappeared, so it'll be interesting to see who gets pegged for his first feud back.

Bobby Lashley always looks like if he sneezes he's going to rip every piece of clothing he's wearing. Ricochet being such a shameless little suck-up to The Hurt Syndicate is such a hilarious character trait. Whether this is a smokescreen and he'll harden up to turn heel and join the group or he'll realign himself as a full babyface to feud with them remains to be seen. For now, I'm getting a kick out of them making him look like a dork trying to get in MVP's good graces.

I went 1-1 with picks this week, correctly guessing that Shelton Benjamin would beat The Beast Mortos but falling short of a draw between Darby Allin and Will Ospreay.