Samoa Joe was written off the show during Wednesday’s episode of AEW Dynamite, where he fought Chris Jericho in a street fight.
Big Bill and Bryan Keith assisted Jericho in the match because HOOK had not been cleared to travel after receiving a fireball to the face from Jericho the previous week. Katsuyori Shibata did not appear on the show.
Jericho loaded Joe onto a forklift and then drove him through a wall during the fight. Joe was unable to continue, so the bout was called off, and he was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to an ambulance following the match.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer mentioned that Joe was written off because he is going to film the second season of Peacock’s “Twisted Metal,” in which he plays “Sweet Tooth.” He will be gone through October.
Bryan Alvarez said, “And Samoa Joe did a big-time injury angle with Chris Jericho on the show tonight. He was run through a wall on a forklift. And they’d stretched him out and sent [[him] out in the ambulance solo like he was badly injured. What’s he doing?”
Meltzer added, “He was in the first season of that, what’s the TV show? “Twisted Metal,” I think. And the second season starts filming in a couple of weeks. He’s gonna be filming until, I think, October, maybe. But that’s the deal. It was an injury angle to cover that he’s going to be out of action. So, yep, that’s the situation. So that’s why that whole thing. That’s why he lost the street fight. That’s why he’s doing the injury angle. And then when he comes back, he’s got a built-in grudge with Jericho to come back for.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
