AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 11/25 - 12/1

AEW Dynamite 11/27/24

Darby Allin vs Brody King

MD: Darby's an interesting case right now, in general and for the tournament. He's the guy. He almost has to be, right? He's 31. He's the heir to Sting. He's been positioned as the one making the big dramatic over the top saves recently. We're also relatively early into the Moxley run. And there's a mountain between them and the finale. Everett looms and Darby has to be protected but he can't be launched into the stratosphere until it's time. He can't peak too early because he's got a peak to climb. 

Wrestling doesn't have to seem real. It has to seem consistent, but even more than that, it has to seem compelling. I'd argue that consistency is part of being compelling, but I'm annoying that way. I'll also argue that occasionally, a push towards a sort of real helps wrestling be compelling, because the point is to help suspend your disbelief like you do when you're consuming any fictional medium. That's where Darby shines. I have no idea where the line blurs between work and shoot with how banged up he is at any one point. You tell me he's feeling the effects of the worked car crash from Saturday night and I tend to believe it. You tell me he broke his clavicle in a motorcycle stunt last Tuesday? Sure. You tell me he set himself on fire by trying to fry his turkey with a flamethrower? It's plausible. 

That helps, right? It helps bridge the gap and explain away why he, the lead babyface in the company, is going to lose to Claudio one week and Brody the next and probably a few more times during this tournament. Wins and losses matter. They absolutely matter. But it's not math. What matters more is the presentation. What matters is how things are framed because that's how it works in life. This isn't just some sort of numerical exercise. Life isn't quantitative. What's the cost of a win? How does a loss make a wrestler grow? How hard did he fight? I get the impression sometimes that AEW is full of wrestlers who are hesitant to take losses (That makes Darby come off all the better, by the way). But what matters is the way it's shown on screen and how it's presented to the audience. 

Darby was fighting a monster. He was hurt. He'd beaten the monster once or twice. He'd lost to him once or twice. He got absolutely thrashed at the start. He had to fight his way back the entire match. He came close! That matters. It matters if it's shown on screen to matter. It matters if the audience open their heart and let it matter. If you just look at the results on paper you can start griping about how they let Darby lose when he might have to carry the company next year. If you actually watch the match, you know he didn't lose a single thing in defeat in this one and he came out looking just as strong as he came in (though I wouldn't necessarily say stronger). 

Real life things can help. When the sound dropped out due to Brody crashing into the post, that broke from the norm; it was literally exceptional, and it was all due to the force that Brody brings to the table. Yes, we lost commentary for a bit but how could you see that and not even be more drawn in than you were a moment before? Likewise, the looming mountain. There's such an opportunity for that to be worked into the story, for Darby to find what he needs as part of that journey to vanquish Moxley in a way that would be impossible now. It's Hero's Journey stuff. It just has to be framed and sold and presented that way. Wins and losses matter, but they matter because of what they mean in a fictional sense, not what they mean in a real one. That balance between real and worked is all part of what makes pro wrestling so unique and wonderful. 

Claudio Castagnoli vs Ricochet

MD: This was problematic. Let me lay out the pieces here. Claudio Castagnoli is a monster. He was presented at the end of the episode, chair in hand, looming as he meant to do permanent harm to Darby Allin, as a behemoth. It was meant to matter when Brody King, who he will face the following week in the tournament, stood up against him. He was to be respected, feared, reviled. He betrayed Bryan Danielson. That betrayal was on Jon Moxley's order, but it came at Claudio Castagnoli's hand. He struck the blow. 

Ricochet is a new hire. He chose to come to AEW to be free of creative chains, to wrestle the way that he always wanted to wrestle on a huge stage. He's supposed to be a trailblazer who helped set the current style due to his battle with Ospreay years ago. He's presented as something of an equal to him (him being the guy they present as the best wrestler in the world). He just came off of big loss to Takeshita. 

They both happen to be bald. So is the referee, Rick Knox.

This was the second match of the Continental Classic, the engine that is going to drive AEW through the month of December, something that was a legitimate ratings draw last year. It was Claudio vs Ricochet, one of the greatest bases of the century vs a high-flyer. It should have been a big bounceback match for Ricochet who hasn't quite connected the way he was expected to as of  yet. 

The match starts like you'd expect with Claudio basing. It builds to a big moment where Claudio, who had walked away from previous dives, catching Ricochet's dive impressively, crushing him to start the heat. Ricochet sells, emoting well, using his face and body language to try to draw the crowd in.

The problem is that they're all bald. And the crowd starts chanting about it. The commercial break starts. The heat continues. Ricochet tries to fight from underneath as Claudio leans down on him. The crowd creatively chants different things about baldness. Tony Khan then tweets about how wonderful this all is.

None of this is good. If it was on last week's Rampage which had a dance off between Nyla and Mina, a ten-count punch off between Butcher and Juice, and a Redneck Kung-Fu off between Briscoe and Silver, that would have been fine, good even.

There was supposed to be some level of gravitas about the tournament though. Claudio is not just a heel, but a guy who just went over the lead babyface in the company clean last week. He's a monster. He's not just a in-ring monster, but he's the guy who betrayed Bryan Danielson. If you can't get heat from that, what can you possibly get heat from? What hope is there? 

"Putting smiles on faces," having babyfaces lose and shrug it off with a smile? That's the 2010s WWE style that AEW was created to push up against and compete with, to be an alternative to. The fans were sure having fun. But they weren't connected or engaged to what the company was actually presenting, and what they were presenting should have been compelling. The start of a beloved and anticipated tournament. An impressive spot. A monstrous heel. A babyface trying his hardest to draw them in. 

It's on Khan not to celebrate that. He's celebrating that his product completely failed to compel the audience to react in the way that they were supposed to react despite doing everything right on paper. That's not worthy of a celebratory tweet. It's a presentation disaster. It's failure. Honestly, it's kind of frightening. If I was AEW creative, I'd be frightened. If you do everything right (and I think they DID do everything right here!) and it still doesn't work, what could possibly work? 

I do think Khan is part of the problem. He celebrates every This is Awesome chant like it's a victory. Sometimes things aren't suppose to be awesome. Sometimes awesome isn't the goal. A lot of times awesome isn't the goal. Most of the time you're trying to create other emotions and move people in different ways. For them to have that wash right off of them and for them to just neutrally celebrate what they're watching means that it's not reaching them emotionally in the way it was intended. 

Wrestling is broken. I do fully believe that Khan wants to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. He's the leader of the company and he's, to a degree, a leader in how the fans receive its product. In order to do so, he needs to take a step back and try to think what went wrong here and how he can help to fix it moving forward.