Throughout the spring and summer of 2022, Eddie Kingston feuded with Chris Jericho, with each match upping the violence as their hatred grew.
The two squared off in a singles match at Revolution, where Jericho refused to shake Kingston’s hand…
…followed by Anarchy in the Arena at Double or Nothing, where Kingston doused Jericho in gasoline and tried to set him ablaze…
…and even a two-ring Blood & Guts match, where Eddie locked Chris in a stretch plum atop the steel cage. But since it was Matt Menard and not Chris Jericho who tapped, Eddie Kingston was not satisfied.
There was only one way to settle this blood feud once and for all: a Discovery Channel tie-in match.
Three weeks after Blood & Guts, and four days before Shark Week, Eddie Kingston and Chris Jericho battled in a Barbed Wire Everywhere Shark Cage match.
Barbed wire everywhere, they said? Even… down there? We’d have to wait and see…
…but there was certainly barbed wire in a lot of places, including Justin Roberts’s microphone.
Per the rules, the rest of the Jericho Appreciation Society would have to spend the match suspended in a shark cage.
Guarding the key and the controls was Ruby Soho, the logic apparently being that no one would hit a woman with a broken arm.
In keeping with the Shark Week theme, Chris Jericho came out to a special one-off entrance song: the viral hit children’s song, “Baby Shark”.
Kidding! It was the same “Judas” theme he’d always used. But what was different was his adoption of the “Painmaker” moniker, complete with spiked metal jacket, fedora, mask…
…and an entrance that saw him blasted out of a tiny circle amid a cloud of gas.
The Painmaker get-up proved what a legend Jericho was in the wrestling business. Had anyone less than a legend worn this gear and makeup, the whole locker room would have told him how stupid he looked.
Eddie Kingston attacked Jericho right out of the gate, beating him in the head with the microphone. Jericho’s scalp was perforated with hundreds of tiny holes… and without anesthesia this time!
Kingston then addressed the crowd as Jericho bladed his stupid pumpkin face.
Eddie proceeded to punish Jericho with various barbed wire spots…
…even crotching Jericho on the wired ropes. “Sliced-Up Yam Bag City right there!” said Taz. I guess the barbed wire really was everywhere!
Even the ring bell got the wire treatment.
The stipulation began to unravel as Tay Conti jumped Ruby Soho at ringside, hoping to free the JAS. Anna Jay then came down and sided with Tay, knocking Ruby out of commission. It was a shame —
— if only Anna had turned a few weeks earlier, Ruby wouldn’t have had to hold her own arm in that car door.
Anna lowered the shark cage with the controls, which really should have been wrapped in barbed wire, too.
All Tay had to do now was unlock the shark cage…
…which proved difficult in the heat of the moment. Unwilling to keep their faction’s namesake waiting…
…the Jericho Appreciation Society simply slithered through the bars and rushed to the ring. I guess that’s why they call it a shark cage and not a “human cage”.
It makes you wonder why they didn’t escape sooner; the cage wasn’t even that high up.
The JAS rushed the ring and attacked Kingston…
…until Eddie’s pals ran them off.
With the JAS gone, Eddie Kingston had this match wrapped up; it seemed there was no one left to help Chris out…
…save for referee Aubrey Edwards, who untangled thousands of dollars worth of his hair from the wire.
Jericho kicked out of Kingston’s back fist, so Eddie reached under the ring for his secret weapon…
…barbed wire! What would he think of next!
But Jericho had one last ace up his sleeve.
No, not The Rock, whose appearance during the commercial break proved inconsequential.
It was Sammy Guevara, last seen falling off the Blood & Guts cage. With the Spanish God’s help, Jericho hit a barbed-wire Judas Effect to pin Kingston.
Not content with the victory, Sammy and Chris wanted to dole out one last bit of punishment, which backfired predictably.
Eddie mule-kicked Sammy in the groin, then did a go-behind on Jericho, who then locked up with his own ally in a collar-and-elbow tie-up before Eddie missed his spinning back fist. Okay, maybe that wasn’t so predictable.
Fed up, Eddie simply tossed Guevara out of the ring…
…and walked Jericho to the apron, where he chucked him into a wire-covered crash pad.
As Dynamite signed off, the Painmaker twitched like he hadn’t already taken half a dozen of these bumps…
…while Eddie looked about as pleased as you’d expect with the post-match sequence.
