AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/19 - 8/25 Part 2

All In 8/25/24

Bryan Danielson vs. Swerve Strickland

MD: I cried a little, maybe. It's important I lead with that because the next sentence is going make it seem like I'm less engaged than I should be. Look, here's the deal... one reason that I get these reviews out so quickly is because the brain doesn't shut off. It never shuts off. It's just who I am, right? I watch a match and I'm thinking, thinking, thinking. I'm thinking all sorts of things, but one thing I'm thinking about is what I'm going to say, if I'm going to say something at all. I don't watch a Bryan Danielson match without that in my head. What's the hook? What's the entry point? What's the unifying element that will get me into a review. Once I get in, I'm good. And maybe you might feel like that's a terrible way to consume any form of entertainment, art, whatever, but I'm not just consuming. I'm constantly engaging. It's built into my DNA. I can't fix it. It doesn't mean I'm less tapped in; it means I'm more tapped in, or at least that's how I feel. Here's the point, as I'm watching this thing, I'm thinking to myself: how am I ever going to write about this? I posted the master list recently. I had written up something like 90 Danielson matches from the last few years. What is there that I can possibly say about this that is additive or useful or meaningful or something you don't already know?

Maybe I don't go timeless. Maybe I go topical (and find something timeless by doing so). Let's try that, because I'm struggling a bit here. This is way bigger than me. Here goes. There was some talk last week about storytelling, whether it existed around and before a match or whether it exists in a match itself. I'm going to quote my pal Charles here. "I really disagree with the idea of wrestling and storytelling somehow being at odds with each other. It's about the overall viewing experience, and it all should work together and be cohesive. There are some skewed ideas now of what storytelling is." And my god, isn't this the perfect example of that?

There were so many elements set up in the build, so much rich narrative and character to draw from. With Danielson, it was a culmination of a lifetime of wrestling, of so many failed attempts at winning the AEW title, of the tension between family and passion and accomplishment, of going out on your own terms given the trauma of the first retirement, of finding drive and pushing yourself over the finish line when you're so close to peace and serenity and your final reward. For Swerve, it was about knowing just how far you climbed to get to the top, all the things you did that you had to live with, all the doubters you had to prove wrong, balancing the adulation of the crowd with the knowledge that in order to justify it all, you'd do anything, absolutely anything to keep it. It was about carrying the company only to realize that this night wasn't even about you, that your opponent was looking past you, not towards glory or victory but towards peace and finality, something you couldn't even imagine given the fire burning in your heart, and trying to find some way to bring that all together to become a force that could the change the fate of one night and define history for all time.

That was all before the bell rang! And then when it did, these forces began to crash and clash against one another. Early feeling out faded quickly as Swerve, mutable like water in his movements, tried for an early float around suplex. Danielson, however, had trained for all of Swerve's moves, and more than that, for his unique way of moving, and jammed it with a knee shot so that he could follow up by dismantling Swerve's shoulder. Swerve, champion that he is, was able to fight forward, to endure the first set of attacks, both grounded and daring, only for Danielson to lock in a headscissors in the ropes and target the shoulder again. Realizing that he wasn't going to beat him on these terms, he took advantage of a distracted ref and Nana's assistance and crushed Danielson's head onto the ring bell. Everything in the last paragraph, everything that these two are and were and might ever be led into everything in this paragraph. You can draw direct lines, direct correlation. It's a snake eating itself, backstory feeding action drawing on character and creating reaction. When wrestling hits like this, when it is allowed to draw upon decades of history and lifetimes of desires, there's nothing else in the world like it.

Things progressed along these lines. Danielson, bloodied yet resilient, came back (maybe using the iron in his arm on clotheslines? Maybe not; there are so many elements in here that you can tap into that it's hard to know where to stop). Certainly he showed his versatility and relentlessness by turning a Cattle Mutilation attempt into a pair of brutal Tiger Suplexes. Swerve, in response, put him down with the Vertebreaker. Again, so much was at play, not just Danielson's history of head and neck injuries, including his current vulnerability for which he says he needs surgery, but the fact that the Vertebreaker is such a dangerous, forbidden, rare move (not unlike the Tiger Suplexes that preceded it, actually; parallels are great too. Excess isn't usually a good thing but the time to unleash it is on the biggest match at the biggest stage; you hold it back in other matches exactly for this moment).

As Swerve drove the doctors away, the match shifted into a gripping third act. All throughout, Bryan Danielson's family presented themselves as a character in this play, with a splotch of pink standing out among this massive sea of humanity: Birdie's hat. You found yourself looking in their direction whenever the camera allowed us to see their reaction, to see their connection with the action in the ring. When Swerve took his first major advantage using the ring bell, he pulled a bloodied Bryan out to stomp his face in front of them and proclaim himself as Birdie's hero since he'd be the one to send Bryan back to her once and for all. Now, after the Vertebreaker, as Swerve hit Danielson with House Call after House Call, Bryan's hand extended to them and he mouthed an apology that somehow felt so much more sincere and heartfelt (empowered perhaps by a certain level of human ambiguity as opposed to something more contrived) than the one Bryan's own trainer made at Wrestlemania XXVI. He refused to stay down. More than that, he stood. An apology gave way to a declaration of love as he absorbed blow after blow and then turned to face Swerve as the crowd took a collective breath, and threw forth a resounding slap, one of the truly great comeback moments of this century.

From there it was a finishing stretch deserving of what came before, with both wrestlers surviving each other's best shots and one last bit of dangling plot, Swerve's own past coming home to roost as Hangman Page rode his way past security to disrupt Swerve's final defiantly indomitable moment. Just that last bit of narrative protection for a champion that earned it, for a man that will be here day in and day out in the years to come. Swerve would do everything to win, but there was a cost and some of those costs you pay for the rest of your life. With that cost paid once more (not for the last time), the smoke cleared and Danielson stood in the ring with his family as the fireworks went off and the show came to a close.

Here's another disclosure. I didn't see this live. I didn't get to see this until a few hours later, actually. I was able to see parts of the show live but not all of it. Why, you may ask? I took two (2) nature walks with my six year old daughter yesterday (2 is a lot for one day). We saw three foxes, two turtles and a blue heron. She caught multiple bugs in her net including a couple of end band net-wing beetles. That was on top of assisting her with Super Monkey Ball, reading a Franny K. Stein book to her, and overall helping prep her and her sister to be ready for the first day of school today. So maybe you weren't looking for that splotch of pink every moment of the match, but I was, and maybe your eyes were dry at the end, but mine weren't. It's funny. If she told me tomorrow that I should give up something I love to hang out with her more, I'd probably hedge. She's not the most rational entity I've ever dealt with. She's the sort that'll refuse to budge for ten minutes because she's still hunting a moth. She's six. She's also the third kid. I've seen a couple of other six year olds go down the path first. That said, if you stacked up all the most valuable and worthwhile times in my life, those couple of years during COVID when I was working from home every day and here, home, watching these kids grow up every moment that I could... well, that would top the list, I think. So maybe I wouldn't make exactly the call that Bryan is making here, but I can certainly understand it, and I'm certainly going to make something akin to it each and every time I can, even if that means I don't get to have the shared experience of watching this match with the rest of you live. It was still there for me when I was able to catch up. And that ring will be there for Bryan when he's ready for it again. For now, though, the Countdown keeps ticking down, and we'll be there for every moment (even if I might be a little late for some because of a more pressing engagement with a six year old).

AEW Five Fingers of Death Master List