The Dark Order may be just another irrelevant faction in today’s AEW, but it wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time, they were…
…well, a group of buddies. But before that, they were a formidable heel faction led by Brodie Lee.
But before that, they were a laughingstock.
They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, but Dark Order had at least two, and they sh*t the bed on both of them.
The Dark Order began at AEW’s first pay-per-view, Double or Nothing 2019.
Just as Best Friends shared a post-match hug, the lights went out. In AEW? It sounds unbelievable, but bear with me.
When the lights went back on, there stood none other than… Uh, Excalibur, who was that?Alex Marvez admittedly had no clue…
…but it was in fact the Super Smash Brothers.
Yes, they’d started out as a video game-themed tag team in CHIKARA, but now they were evil…
…like Danhausen? No! Not like Danhausen! Really, actually evil.
And to prove it, they turned the lights out again…
…and after an eternity, turned them back on to reveal a whole army of goofy masked men…
…some skinny…
…some pudgy…
…some dramatic…
…some Eric Andre…
…but all diabolical.
Neither Marvez, nor Jim Ross, nor the fans (who chanted, “Who are you?”) knew who any of these guys were…
…but they were shocked by the group’s actions. Or at the very least, annoyed.
The masked men then formed a human stool. Boy, did they ever.
We later learned that these men were Evil Uno, Stu Grayson, and their personal Putty Patrol known as the Creepers.
No one knew who the Creepers were, but you could always find tons of them in any locker room in the country (and the UK).
If the Creepers seemed like a ragtag bunch of losers and misfits, it’s because they were. And you too could apply for membership in the cult on their website! (Now available)
These recruitment ads continued until the last Dynamite of the year…
…when Uno, Grayson, and their faceless new minions attacked SCU and the Young Bucks for a very, very long time. It was like the Nexus, except you didn’t know who anybody was, and nobody did anything interesting.
When Kenny Omega and Cody Rhodes tried to intervene, they met the same terrible fate…
…but nowhere near as terrible a fate as Dustin Rhodes, who had to sell wrestling’s fakest punches right there on the hard cam.
Instead of ushering in a new era of darkness in AEW, the Dark Order had to do damage control…
…working the mishap into the storyline and punishing the phantom-puncher for “showing mercy”.
The Dark Order then lived up to its name by wrestling exclusively on AEW’s YouTube show for the next two months…
…while AEW banished all (capital-C) Creepers from their locker room.
You’d think that after the failure of the Dark Order invasion, wrestling promotions would have learned their lesson about armies of masked goons. But no —
— the following year, WWE ran its ludicrous Retribution angle…
…while as of this writing, AEW has just concluded its months-long Devil mystery that no one enjoyed.
Can you think of anything more lazy and formulaic?
