AEW Five Fingers of Death Part 1 2/28-3/6

Big week this week so we are breaking it up, with the second half (and PPV) coming on Wednesday


AEW Dynamite 3/2

Bryan Danielson vs. Christopher Daniels

MD: I get that Khan was excited about the ROH deal and probably couldn't keep it quiet long (and surprises help with ratings, certainly) but it probably would have been better to do this after the PPV. Still, AEW is good at doing a lot of things at once in a single match and the post-match accomplished what it had to here. As for the match itself, past some Danielson control and (maybe, if you believe Tony and JR and I'm not sure I do) back focus in the middle, it really did feel like a 2002 ROH tribute. It started with the handshake and stayed pretty back and forth with pin exchanges and strike exchanges and counters and what you'd expect. Danielson is still 2022 Danielson though, so he had that underlying aggression and made sure to slip in the confident flourishes, and in turn let Daniels clown him in response (which drew some respectable Fallen Angel chants). He also pulled at the face multiple times, first in response to getting clowned and later to counter the second Iconoclasm attempt, proper heeling which made proceedings more interesting than they might have been. The big critique against Daniels over the years is that his stuff always looked too smooth and too clean to the point where it seemed artificial and he's aged like fine wine in that regard. I haven't seen his stuff in years but wear and tear of a hard career has made him rougher around the edges and given him a welcome grit. I can't say this didn't overall feel just a little out of place, especially so close to the big Mox vs. Danielson match but Bryan kept it just nuanced enough to make it work.

AEW Rampage 3/4

Darby Allin vs. Sammy Guevara vs. Andrade

MD: This was a three-way and it had some of the problems you'd expect a three-way to have, but a lot of that was tempered by picture perfect execution and timing that fostered the illusion and the underlying characters at play. Darby and Sammy started out aligned against Andrade, which came into play throughout a majority, though not all, of the match. The numbers game won out early, until someone actually tried to win and Sammy and Darby broke ranks against one another. Andrade was out of the ring for a bit too long here (the cardinal sin of these matches). I think he could have gotten away with it if he returned to playing up his start-of-the-match instinct to leave the ring and not face uneven odds. Instead of coming off as opportunistic, however, he visibly (in the corner of the screen just mulling about) sold that early offense almost too much.

Regardless, the payoff was him coming in for a big tower of doom spot, made unique by Sammy holding Darby up on the top rope while waiting for the superplex. I can't say I 100% bought this because I can't remember Sammy doing a lingering superplex like this to begin with, but Darby does have a tendency to try the upside down knee counter when up for a normal suplex and the spot was cool enough visually that I could sort of go for it. I liked the thematic consistency of Andrade's heat (returning to the 1 on 2 motif during the break), where he dropped one wrestler over the ropes and the second over the turnbuckle and the first back over the guardrail and used his belt for good measure. They came back by forcing a 2 on 1 strike exchange, which made Andrade look like a star. The double flip moonsault, in general, might be the single worst move in all of wrestling but it sort of worked here considering he was targeting one person with the first moonsault and a second with the second. It popped the announcers at least.

Down the stretch, they paid off a lot of what had been happening in the match and took the characters to logical conclusions (including a revenge belt shot on Andrade). Sammy hit a coast-to-coast on Andrade while Darby was diving for him. Darby stole Sammy's dive by shooting in from off screen as only he can to nail Andrade on the outside. They had the quick pin exchanges you'd expect from the two of them and then ultimately went to a choreographed-but-you'd-hardly-know-it finishing stretch of dodges and shots and bombs before Darby got Sammy out of the way after the GTH but not far enough out of the way that he couldn't come back in and steal back the win that Darby had already almost stolen. There were a lot of moving parts here but I think it worked more than not given the impossible hill to climb that any three-way match has. That doesn't mean it didn't have a contrived spot or two but when the spots are executed so well by people who can manage nearly impossible things, the laws of physics bend just a little to provide a crutch to your tottering suspension of disbelief. So it wobbles under its own weight but never entirely falls.