This week's recap of AEW's YouTube show, Dark: Elevation. Episode 99 on January 23rd 2023
This week’s Elevation came to you from Fresno California, with 6 matches featuring the Dark Order, the Wingmen & Spanish Announce Project and more... Here are your Highlights
#1 Upcoming Jay Briscoe Tribute
I think the biggest takeaway this week was the length of this week’s show, with a total run time of only 35 minutes, as opposed to the usual 60. As we know, Tony Khan took to Twitter last Wednesday to let us know that there will be a Tribute show for the tragic passing of Jay Briscoe. It’s understood that this was all filmed last Wednesday, which would explain why this week’s episode is noticeably shorter, and rightly so...
Always good to welcome back long time voice of ROH, Ian Riccaboni to Elevation too, so I would also assume he will be present on the upcoming ROH tribute show. “Happy Wrestling Everybody”.
#2 ‘Athena v Yuka’ Builds
Sticking with the theme of ROH, in last week’s recap I covered Yuka interrupting Athena’s beat down of a local talent, and made the call that this week would potentially feature another ROH Women’s title defence. I’m happy to say I was wrong, instead we did have a bit of build-up on this storyline, with Athena hunting down the Magical Girl backstage.
#3 The ‘Mask Collector’s’
As detailed last week the LFI are on the warpath against masked wrestlers. This week the theme continued, but with one difference, we had a double un-masking!
Preston Vance & Rush found themselves in tag team action this week, against local guys Papacito Blanco & Papacito Negro. Perro Peligroso made his way to the ring this week with Misterioso’s torn mask (from last week) and picked up the win with Rush, in quick fashion. And yep, you guessed it, they continued the beat down post-bell and proudly removed the loser’s masks.
Bonus Stat for the week: next week will be AEW’s centenary Dark: Elevation! It will be interesting to see what they do to celebrate this milestone.
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