AEW Forbidden Door is done and dusted and in the history books for this year (Check out Stunning Sean’s liveblog right here for full details!), but “Claire,” you ask, “how was the show?” Let’s talk about it, and let’s talk about it on a bunch of different axes.
If you’ve been hanging out here at Cageside Seats for a while you might remember back when I did match recommendation posts for New Japan Pro Wrestling shows and we’re gonna bring a little bit of that “on a scale of 1-5, do you need to watch this if you missed it?” energy (and remember, those aren’t star ratings, they’re not direct commentary on the quality of a match, just me casually telling you whether I think a match is worth going out of your way to check out or not), a little bit of bullet point fun, we’re gonna rank some stuff, we’re gonna compare some stuff, we’re gonna break the door down!
First up, a quickie rapid-fire round for the pre-show matches which, as you might expect were all fun enough, fine enough, but none of them are appointment viewing.
Sky Team vs. Unbound Co. vs. Young Bucks
Kenny Omega vs. Zack Sabre, Jr.
Bandido vs. Jon Moxley (c) (AEW Continental Championship)
PAC vs. Shota Umino (IWGP Global Heavyweight Championship)
Starlight Kid vs. Thekla (c) (AEW Women’s World Championship)
Adam Copeland & Christian Cage (c) vs. the Dogs (AEW Men’s World Tag Team Championship)
Maya World vs. Mercedes Mone (Women’s Owen Hart Foundation Tournament Finals)
Team Briscoe vs. Team DCMJF (Steel Cage Match)
Shane “Swerve” Strickland vs. Will Ospreay (Men’s Owen Hart Foundation Tournament Finals)
Was Forbidden Door a good show? Yeah, it was a great show. All In is starting to take shape, some of the matches were better than others but there wasn’t a bum in the bunch. Really my only complaint is that if you look at the matches I found most exciting and worthy of recommendation… only Omega vs. Sabre was a *Forbidden Door* match as such.
But gimme a great show that could have been more on-theme over a mediocre show that was perfectly on theme any day, and Forbidden Door was very much the former.
What do y’all think, Cagesiders?
