AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/16 - 10/22

AEW Collision 10/21/23

Bryan Danielson vs Andrade el Idolo

MD: I'm going to pass on the battle royal. There were a couple of cute bits (even some involving Dustin) but nothing I feel the need to write about. 

I don't have a strong "in" on this one either. What it showed me, more than anything else, is that we missed out on another heel run from Danielson due to injuries in 2023. It would have done the elite feud a world of good for a heel Danielson to be able to be on some of the TV matches leading to Anarchy in the Arena or Blood and Guts. It's unlikely, given that he's on his end-of-fulltime-career odyssey right now that we'll really see him get to go full heel over the next nine months either. This match, where he's up against a guy determined to stand as a babyface when LFI is right there waiting for him, let him stretch those January 2022 muscles a bit though. 

This started out clean. It almost felt a little like a lucha match in its own way. They started chain wrestling (first set of exchanges) and escalated into rope running (second set) before things boiled over with Danielson throwing a chop, Andrade following suit, and Danielson escalating further with the kicks. Who knows if they had Mistico vs Rocky on their mind. Once Danielson took out the arm, though, things really opened up. That included the jumping jacks during the commercial break with Andrade rushing in,  hot-headed, which is about the only time I've seen that actually get under someone's skin (other than the crowd's) during his AEW run. The problem was, and this is going to be a problem for the next year if Danielson ever wants to lean this way, that the crowd wanted to chant for him. You'd get either "This is awesome" chants or "Danielson"/"Bryan." To be fair, Andrade has been a heel for so much of the last few years that while he's fought valiantly against the House of Black or Bullet Club Gold, I don't think the fans really buy into it yet. We'll see if the Miro feud changes that. My guess is that they get behind Miro; the Andretti match later in the night was very smartly put together but the fans kept on chanting for Miro despite it. 

I really liked the transition towards the comeback and finishing stretch. Danielson threw that right arm clothesline (not exactly a Danielson staple) a week or two ago. He's got the Luger-implant now, the bionic arm, and it gives him one extra narrative weapon to throw around, potentially a KO blow in a way that you wouldn't normally expect from a guy his size and style. Andrade ducked it though, which brought them into the stretch. Pulling back to last week's review, Bryan had me a little worried after the back elbow. It was just the way some of those first few roll-ups went. Fool me twice, shame on me, I guess, but it'll probably keep working again and again until All In next year. Danielson's doing amazing work; you can see here how he chose to work this one a darker shade of grey. I'd hate to lose even one potential match while we still have him like this.

Eddie Kingston vs Jeff Jarret

MD: First and foremost, the execution here was top notch. Eddie was excellent throughout, acting, reacting, being the valiant hero, fist-busting Dave Brown, standing up to the odds as defiantly as possible, and creating all the big moments. Jarrett was a big, blustery, over the top villain, willing to take every insult Eddie was going throw at him, physical, emotional, or otherwise. All of Jarrett's coterie played their parts well. Sometimes that meant Sonjay running into a fist and sometimes it meant Lethal hitting a cutter through a table.

It was just the theory that was off. It's one thing to do a tribute. It's another to shove it down people's throats. I know that Jarrett lived it. Given the timing, Tony almost certainly had the DVDVR Memphis set and sure, Eddie had Memphis' Bloodiest Matches, but this felt like a copy of a copy of a copy. At some point, you lose fidelity. What made Memphis so special was that the chaos erupted around a steady baseline. Lance was master of ceremonies just trying to run a TV show (or Eddie Marlin trying to run an arena show) and the pressure created by these insane characters and their penchant for uncontrollable violence tore at the seams of the format. The characters were insane, but instead of things happening organically, this played out like the characters running through an elaborately designed set piece. It was more like the final stage of Double Dare, than the sort of streetfight you'd want between Jarrett and Kingston. 

That they went to the concession stand in Tupelo was a symptom of what was going on, not the disease itself. As with things that have been mythologized over the years, the underlying meaning and associated sensation, which are almost always more important than the trappings themselves, get lost in translation. So while there was blood, mustard, and tables, it all felt like a parody awash in sports entertainment instead of pure pro wrestling mayhem. That it still managed to work at all was down to the performances of the wrestlers.