AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 10/27 - 11/2

AEW Dynamite 10/29/25

Jon Moxley vs Kyle O'Reilly

MD: I covered their last match last week and people seemed to enjoy it. Part of me wanted to go super stylized once again. 

Kyle O'Reilly was a man who lost it all. 

After failing to defeat Jon Moxley for a world title opportunity in 2022, he underwent neck surgery. He still does not have full strength in his arm. There was a time immediately thereafter when he never knew if he'd be able to hold his newborn.

But what he lost in strength he gained in focus, redoubling his efforts to train and to let technique push him back towards victory. Along the way, he found friends and lost them again, Paragon only barely forming before Adam Cole ended up on the shelf, possibly indefinitely. But he's a man who rolls with the punches, and with a smile on his face, he found the fun-loving whimsy still within him that was necessary to be the heart and soul of the Conglomeration. 

So on and so forth. I'd write about how this time, after scoring one of the biggest victories of his career but having been robbed of an even greater one by Jon Moxley's cowardice, he marched down to the ring with a more serious expression, how he had one more chance to snatch glory long past a point that anyone thought he'd still be in contention for it. 

But then he hit the ring and Moxley, after taking a few shots from Marina to warm him up, followed him in, and I saw the match and now that's just not what I want to write. 

I think that was a great way to remind everyone of the greatness of the first match, but here, it's worth really delving in to the storytelling at play.

Look, we take it for granted. In 2025, just as often as not, maybe more often than not, the logic is flipped. Wrestlers think up big spots and then they work the match around them. They work backwards from the special effects instead of crafting a story worthy of those fireworks and then inserting them in.

This was the very opposite of that.

What I wrote above and what I wrote last week... those things aren't just fluff. They're not just stylized dramatizations. They distill characters. Characters have motivations, hopes, fears, things that drive them. In a perfect world of fiction, these things then intersect with their attributes, physical and skill both, and impacted by environment, then underpin every single action and reaction. This should be the bare minimum in any fictional narrative but all too often in wrestling, it's an afterthought at best or ignored or shoehorned completely in order to try to pop people with something cool or with endless excess.

Not here. 

You could see it from the initial exchange. Character drove the strategic approach of both wrestlers. O'Reilly rolled to try to pick a leg right from the start. Moxley backed off and then tried to bully his way into holds, combining technique with aggression. O'Reilly had an answer to everything, in part because his technique was superior and in part because Moxley was out of control. Mox would go to the eyes, to the nose, to the ear, to anything soft to try to squeeze out an advantage, but O'Reilly was ready for it. In countering those underhanded tactics, he got a little hot though, could maybe feel Moxley's desperation and he charged in with a knee in the ropes that Moxley was then able to use to heft him up and over the top, truly taking over for the first time.

You can continue to follow these threads. Moxley attacked the hand first, worried about O'Reilly's cross arm breaker. But he couldn't help rubbing it in, couldn't help grinding down, couldn't help stomping away. That gave O'Reilly an opening to snatch the leg and starting to work upon it. Moxley, panicking, went right back to the eye and then, not just wanting to win but needing to main, shifted to the neck, the same neck that had been damaged out of their match back in 2022. But O'Reilly knew he had him rattled and he met him standing with strikes getting a seeming advantage but really falling into Moxley's trap, a pile driver.

It's all right there in the text, all shaped by the context, driven by the subtext. Moxley had his back against the wall, respected his opponent, hated his opponent, wanted to stick it to the fans. He'd not just run him to the stairs to slam his head in but would carefully bring him over in a full nelson. He'd lose the advantage by focusing too much on the fans and charging shoulder first into the post, allowing O'Reilly to utilize a dragon screw leg whip. He was cruel and careful one moment and entirely erratic the next. When he was in the ankle lock this time, he was staring at Aubrey Edwards and everyone had to wonder if he'd slug her too.

And O'Reilly balanced the opportunistic counters of a level-headed practitioner with a man with so much left to prove. He occasionally overshot but never so much that he couldn't recover. Moxley would catch his foot when he tried to stand even with him and throw punches and kicks, but he'd be able to spin out and hit something else. When Moxley went for the Gotch Pile Driver, he kept a cool head and turned it into a triangle. This match was his moment, and while he never stopped knowing it, he refused to let it shake him.

Watch this again. At every moment, it was character driving the action, character informing the reactions, character creating outcomes. 

That took them all the way to the finish. This time, back in the ankle lock, Moxley doesn't attack the ref. He dives towards the ropes instead. That throws O'Reilly off but they both end up on the floor. After one or two rotations, O'Reilly locks in a floating guillotine. The count ticks up and Kyle, lost in the moment (his moment), loses sight of the bigger picture. Aubrey counts them out, Moxley survives again even in symbolic defeat, Shafir turns out to be the one to attack Aubrey, and the tension builds in a very organic way for Blood and Guts where Moxley will not be able to escape. 

It's all right there, and in truth, it shouldn't be worth me having to lean so hard into. In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to. If every match operated like this, like so much of other fiction does, then we could take this for granted. But matches aren't like this. This is an outlier. This is special, and the only reason I even could dramatize it and stylize it like I did last week is because they put so much into it. We should expect more. We should expect this. But until we get it match in and match out, we should raise this sort of pro wrestling onto the pedestal it deserves.    

Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy vs Wheeler Yuta/Daniel Garcia

MD: Just a couple of paragraphs about this since Darby is someone we write about and I really enjoyed this match. It was there to further the Death Riders vs Darby/Conglomeration story. On paper, you wouldn't necessarily want this to be a tornado tag, even if it does suit Darby, but the four way for the tag title shot was going to follow it, and the two matches needed to feel different. 

With a tornado tag you usually get a spot-first approach as mentioned above. Here, the characters were really driving it, Darby's intensity, Cassidy's mind-games, Garcia's chip on his shoulder, Yuta just being an irritating menace. Garcia's particularly great at showing (selling) how Cassidy going to the pockets gets to him, but he also got drawn in by Darby teasing with the skateboard. Character-driven spots. My favorite bit might have been when Cassidy leaped over the rail to stymie a Garcia whip only for Yuta to nail him from off-screen (both for Yuta's trademark appearance from off camera to cheapshot, and because of Garcia's reaction). That led to Darby diving onto all of them. Or it might have been how, after jamming Cassidy's skull onto the guardrail with a brainbuster, Yuta shoved Darby off the top and Garcia and Yuta both jawed with the fans, drawing real, true, honest, genuine heat in 2025 by being as obnoxious and proud and unlikable as possible. Yuta going under the ring and only finding his middle finger to piss off the crowd would be a not distant third.

They built to a big comeback (set up by Cassidy putting his hands in his pockets while the two were on the outside) and them paying off what they had set up earlier (including, literally, a table). I hadn't expected Garcia and Yuta to lean into each other like this. It felt like they were heading towards immediate dissension. Bowens/Caster and Takeshita/Okada are already in that lane though, so it can always come later though. For now, this is a (death) ride worth enjoying.