Credit: All Elite Wrestling
The hatred between Swerve Strickland and Hangman Page entering All Out was so intense that it demanded the first ever Lights Out Steel Cage Match. The only problem was that the violence the two had inflicted on each other over the course of their rivalry, dating back to last year had been so visceral and graphic that there were real questions about its ability to live up to the hype.
Even with the loftiest of expectations, it managed to.
Chairs, tables, a staple gun, a concrete block, and the steel confines of the cage itself all inflicted punishment on the combatants. Still, it felt relatively tame given all that fans had witnessed between them to that point.
Enter, the hypodermic needle.
Page retrieved it from his plastic box of implements and proceeded to stick it through the cheek of his opponent in a match that had even the toughest fans squirming. From there, he uncorked an unprotected steel chair shot to the head and the referee called for the bell, awarding the match to the villain.
Hangman took sickening pride in his actions and celebrated the win as if he had somehow been proven right; as if he was the conquering hero to Strickland’s vile heel. As Harvey Dent famously said in The Dark Knight, however, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Page had long ago surpassed that and his actions in the main event were reflective of that.
Kudos to both participants for creatively playing on a spot from one of their previous encounters, when Strickland literally drank Page’s blood. Saturday, the latter repaid him by quite literally using a wooden stake from Swerve’s now-charred childhood home, as if he was attempting to extinguish Nosferatu.
The match-ending chair shot was a bit much, especially after we just witnessed Jack Perry get bludgeoned with one at the conclusion of the most recent Blood & Guts match, and AEW would be wise to lighten up on the depraved violence, but this was the main event it needed to be, featuring two guys whose rivalry has helped carry the promotion for the better part of a year.