It starts with Danhausen.

Actually, it started with Cole Karter. When Ricky Starks announced that he was putting the FTW World Championship up for grabs in an open challenge, he’s who answered. You might think that Karter, fresh from a failed NXT run as a two-bit mafioso, was an unlikely pick to unseat Starks, and he was, but the point of an open challenge is uncertainty. A cocky champion, a challenger with nothing to lose.

Karter/Starks wasn’t very good, or at least not for me as someone in the crowd, but it did judge Starks out of his tag team storyline with Powerhouse Hobbs, where they were the obvious third wheel in a scorcher of a triple threat match with the Young Bucks and Swerve Strickland and Keith Lee. There’s nothing wrong with being the third wheel, it’s just that the pairing didn’t feel like progress for Starks or Hobbs, where for Strickland and Lee were gaining momentum and getting over the wounds of their respective WWE runs.

Getting out of that situation was good for both men, but we’re not there yet. We’re on Cole Karter. I don’t see what Tony Khan sees in him, but the point of the match was to give Ricky Starks someone who’d make him sweat just a little, but not enough for him to hit the showers. So Starks got on the mic, said he still had something in the tank, and threw out another challenge.

Danhausen answered.

I don’t get Danhausen, but whatever. I don’t believe in things like “title prestige” or wrestlers I don’t like damaging that kind of thing, especially for a title that exists outside of official recognition because they were created to taunt Sabu, but even if I did, Danhausen’s not a bad pick for an open challenge match. He’s pretty much bulletproof in his role as the “send the crowd home happy” guy, so if Tony Nese knees him in the face or Starks hits him with a spear, it’s all good.

Starks begging off for a week to make Danhausen seem like something of a threat to him was a nice touch. Danhausen’s a guy who lives and dies on flash roll-ups though, so his big shot, a schoolboy out of the corner after Starks missed him and hit the turnbuckles, saw him get cut down with a spear. All done, night over.

Only Ricky threw out another open challenge, and rather than begging off for next week on Dynamite, left it open for whoever walked out.

That was Hook.

This wasn’t because of the Hookhausen connection between he and Danhausen. He wasn’t coming to the aid of the little freak who buys him the good chips from Detroit. He was coming for the FTW Championship, his father’s championship, dressed primarily in orange when he’d preciously eschewed many of the trappings, if not the maneuvers, of Taz’s legacy.

The match is perfect, one of those sub-three minute bangers that knows exactly what it needs to accomplish and has no fat on it. Starks, leaning babyface after two weeks of handing out opportunities and issuing compliments, is surprised that Hook answers, but, even nursing a sore neck that leaves him prone to Hook’s “I’m going to fuck up your neck” style, lets the bell ring. Starks recognizes what he’s done, Hook recognizes what he’s given, and the two minutes that play out between them are less student vs. teacher then they are someone who has outgrown the role he has vs someone who is fit to occupy it in his stead.

Every opening Starks gets, be it his suplex or his spear, hurts his neck and gives him pause. Where he was able to cover Danhausen immediately after cutting him down, in the second he spends holding his neck, he realizes that his best chance of defeating Hook is the Roshambo. Hook slips behind him, slaps on REDRUM, and despite Starks rolling and making it close to the ropes, Hook’s grip is tight, Starks’ neck is screwed, and that’s it.

Again, this is perfect. Unlike TNT Championship open challenge series that stretch beyond the horizon, the FTW World Championship doesn’t bear the same narrative weight. It isn’t on the level of other titles AEW promotes, but it is a signifier that the person who holds it is worth paying attention to, Brian Cage aside. Rickey Starks has been beyond whatever meaning the FTW Championship has for months, and with Team Taz semi-dormant on a week-to-week basis, right now is the perfect time for him to ditch the title.

In Hook, you have someone who is custom made for this kind of title, and not because he’s Taz’s kid. Hook is incredibly over with the audience, having lost none of the heat from his AEW debut. But he’s young, relatively inexperienced in the ring, and largely wrestles in short, dominant matches that protect his aura while limiting his exposure. He is, in a sense, like Jade Cargill, who also won a title while learning on the job, and whose mystique comes not in the moments where she’s muscling women around, but in the moments when she’s in trouble.

This match, short as it is, teases so much out of what Hook will/is growing into from match to match. His hold exchanges with Starks are lightning fast, smooth, and exciting. He’s showing how Redrum isn’t just a submission with a set-up, but is a viable, deadly weapon when he’s on defense. Both men get their flavor in this match, Starks loses nothing in tapping, and you get these flashes of future Hook and babyface Starks that are deeply satisfying within the world of the match itself. Three minutes. That’s hard to do.

Starks hitting Hook with a fist bump and taking the mic after the match, only to get brutalized with a blindside clothesline to the back of his hurting neck, was the icing on the cake. If you watched Starks over the past two weeks, or have noticed growing fan appreciation for him and other “homegrown” AEW talent since MJF left the company, you knew this was coming. He is a great heel, but he is the kind of heel who, like The Rock, is so infectious in his love of himself that one cannot help but buy into him.

With Starks losing the FTW Championship comes a long-needed reconfiguration of Team Taz. While the concept of the stable is a strong one and Taz is a great manager, the group has stagnated because all three wrestlers in it hit a ceiling and needed something to break it. That it was one member losing the stable’s championship to another member is perfect. If you think about wrestlers or tag teams as universes unto themselves, Hook is free to do Hook things with the FTW Championship, and Hobbs and Starks will settle their newfound beef. In the middle of all of that is Taz, an excellent commentator and font of knowledge, but someone who should be on television in the role of coach. Who he goes with, Starks or Hobbs, is the question. Either way, the door to the Team Taz Dojo is open, and I’m looking forward to seeing who steps in.