In our WrestleDream review, I wrote about how happy I was that Edge, one of my all-time favorite wrestlers, had arrived in AEW as Adam Copeland. Not just happy for him and the fact that he gets to spend the last leg of his career with his best friend, but happy for me, as a fan who wants to love AEW but usually doesn’t.

Well, we’ve had Edge’s first “Dynamite” appearance now, and it gives me no pleasure to say that we’re 0-1.

One thing I want to emphasize: The segment with Edge and Christian (gonna be REALLY hard not calling them that) was incredibly well-performed. Copeland has legit acting chops, which most wrestlers don’t, and Christian was doing some amazing stuff here with his facial expressions alone. As usual with AEW, my problem isn’t with the performances, but with the writing.

So at WrestleDream, Copeland came out to oppose Christian and prevent him from hitting Sting with a chair while Christian looked like he’d seen a ghost. Great, that’s rad. You can go lots of places from there, but you have established one thing: Copeland stands in opposition to Christian. Christian tried to do an evil thing; Copeland stopped him. Right there, you’ve immediately set up the expectation that Copeland is here to stop Christian from doing bad things, which is maybe a little simplistic but basically what you’d expect from this kind of storyline. And it works well, because Copeland is naturally going to be a massive babyface in AEW, whereas Christian has been a heartless monster for more than a year now.

…except they can’t just do it that way. First, Copeland has to bring in his post-WrestleDream press conference line about how his daughter told him to come to AEW so he can “have fun with Uncle Jay.” This immediately muddies the waters, because why would anyone think they could just show up to AEW in 2023 and “have fun” with Christian Cage? Adam, buddy, did you watch the part of that same press conference where they asked Christian about you and he reiterated that he has no friends except Luchasaurus? Have you been paying attention to anything the man has been doing lately? Because I assumed you had been, which is why you ran in to stop him, but apparently you only did that because his victim was Sting, a man you suddenly idolize. (I’m not saying Copeland doesn’t idolize Sting; maybe he does, but it was beyond weird hearing the man whose Hulk Hogan fandom was so well-known that they won the tag titles together talking about his lifelong reverence for Sting, of all people.)

So then Copeland tells Christian he wants to be a tag team again, which is very on-the-nose for the audience who also would like that to happen, but still an odd choice for the character. If Christian’s attack on Sting was so heinous, why would you then want to be in a tag team with him? They hug it out, but then Christian says “Go f*** yourself” and leaves, which doesn’t make him look more evil so much as it makes Copeland look like a moron for not seeing The Most Predictable Thing coming. And best of all, nothing has been accomplished from a character standpoint. At the end of WrestleDream, Copeland and Christian were on opposite sides. At the end of “Dynamite,” Copeland and Christian were on opposite sides. Everything in between was just a route recommended by Google Maps — a pointless detour that leaves you back where you started, but more confused.