AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 10/20 - 10/26

AEW Dynamite 10/22/25

Jon Moxley vs. Kyle O'Reilly

MD: Jon Moxley has mouths to feed.

He's got bodies to stack up. He's got things to prove. He's a strongman with an army. But that army needs to eat. He's convinced them that it's the post-apocalypse, that it's kill or be killed. 

And he went and got himself killed. He lost his title. He won a battle against Darby Allin but not the war. And there, in the center of the ring, he was made to quit. 

He feels the wolves nipping at his heels. He's supposed to be the wolf. He'd been the wolf with his back against the wall but then the wall fell in on him. Now they're behind him, getting ever closer. Now forget wolves. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

But he's still Jon Moxley. He's a barefist fighter. He's a bloodspot warrior. He's a submission scrapper. He's the best at what he does. And there's opportunity around every corner.

Kyle O'Reilly is a perfect opportunity. He represents everything Moxley claims to hate, everything that he rails against, the world that he's trying to destroy. O'Reilly has all the tools, all the training, all the skills, all the fight, but a weak liver, a tender heart. He wants to sit on a couch and make funny videos with his friends, wants a cheesy sitcom theme song, wants to make faces for memes as Mark Briscoe comes up with the word of the day. All this instead of being a champion. He's everything the BCC was created to stamp out and everything the Death Riders were escalated to burn to ashes.

So he faces him in the middle of the ring. He scraps with him on the mat. And he comes up lacking. O'Reilly wrestles him even and then takes it a step further, flying over into a cross arm breaker, outwrestling him. Moxley immediately grinds his heel into O'Reilly's face, bites at his ear, stomps his hand on the steel steps. So what if he got outwrestled. So what if he even got outstriked. He's Jon Moxley and he'd outrough him, would punish him for his foolishness, his temerity. 

But Mox wanted it too badly. He needed it too badly. He overextended, went sailing over the top rope, ended up on a chair with O'Reilly's feet slamming into his jaw. 

Even that's okay, though. Because he's Jon Moxley and finishing stretches are where he rules supreme. That last bit of a fight, one last gasp, one last takedown. A pile driver. A lock in of that bulldog choke, using his strength, leaning into his toughness, riding over, pressing down. O'Reilly kicks out, putting up a fight, but that's okay too. That'd just make Moxley look stronger in victory like he had so many times.

Except for that's not what happened. This isn't the same Jon Moxley. This is a Jon Moxley that's bleeding out, that feels those wolves getting ever closer, that can hear the rumbling of his men's stomachs, and that knows it's only a matter of time before he starts looking less like predator and more like prey. 

O'Reilly has an answer to everything Moxley throws at him. He snatches an ankle lock. He crashes down off the top rope with a stomp onto the leg. He is unrelenting. No smiles. No funny faces. No laughter. Instead, everything Moxley claimed he wanted out of him, wanted out of his competition, wanted out of AEW. Mox didn't want it all that much anymore, did he? 

He felt it all slipping away and so he did the only thing he could. He pulled himself to one foot, the other grasped, twisted, contorted. He used the referee to pull himself up and then, instead of quitting, he overturned the board, smashing the ref, drawing the DQ. One might say that he took fate into his own hands, but then surrender manifests itself in many forms, doesn't it? 

What a performance then from these two. What a complex, desperate, human story that they told through our beloved, rarely stretched and rarely challenged, all too comfortable and familiar medium of pro wrestling. There were strands of Hemmingway here: short, stilted sentences, the depravity of humanity, a man at the very end of his rope. 

What's really exciting though, even more than what they were able to accomplish here, is that Moxley hasn't even begun to hit bottom yet.

There's more to come.