AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 1/5 - 1/11/26 (Part 1?)

AEW Dynamite 1/7/26

Jon Moxley vs Shelton Benjamin

Jon Moxley is, in fact, wrestling through it. 

And why not? He wasn't the first. Kris Statlander betrayed her very best friend out of jealousy. She aligned herself with Stokely of all people. Hangman Page burned a man's childhood house down. He brutally ended Christopher Daniels career. They fought their way back into the hearts of the fans, quite literally fought. Maybe Hangman apologized after the fact. Maybe Statlander turned down the Death Riders after the fact, but by then, the fans had already embraced them. By then, the fans had already helped support them en route to championships. 

They won. That's what mattered.

And now Jon Moxley has won as well. In AEW, maybe might does makes right.

It seems to make right for Shelton Benjamin too. The fans love the Hurt Syndicate and why? Because they do what they say they're going to do; they hurt people. Shelton spent a large part of his career forced to be something he wasn't, someone who did too much, who wrestled like a junior heavweight in a heavyweight's body. He was in the land of the giants. His most memorial moment might have been jumping into Shawn Michaels' foot. 

But he's been granted one last chance. He was always big, but now the world's gotten smaller around him. Once upon a time, he had Brock Lesnar beside him and it was a hard shadow to escape. Now, with Bobby Lashley beside him, he still towers over everyone around him. At 50 years old, he's as looming a presence as he's ever been, larger than life.

And here he was with a shot to win, to make might right, to get something he hasn't had in a long time, a major singles belt all his own (maybe the last time was in Puerto Rico in 2010?). He just had to take Jon Moxley to the limit through an eliminator match to get the opportunity to face him for the Continental Championship. 

He's bigger, stronger, more athletic, with sharper amateur skills, and he hadn't been through the crucible of the Continental Classic like Moxley, not this year at least. 

Through twists and turns of fate, Benjamin stood across the ring from one of the biggest stars of the last ten years as an equal, maybe even a superior in many ways. Accordingly, he held out his hand for a shake. 

Moxley slapped it aside. Of course he did. His wounds may have been healing. Given how he came out from the back energized, basking in the fans' unlikely adoration, maybe he felt like the world was healing, but he's no fool. He knew what he was up against. He had to throw Benjamin off balance.

Instead, Benjamin threw him head over feet and with absolute ease, slipping under him and flipping him, getting behind him for a very early German. Moxley dodged out of the way and tried for a choke. Shelton tripped him and went for the ankle lock on that damaged leg (something he had a very direct lineage with). Moxley went for strikes and Shelton met him right in the center, escalating almost immediately to a spin kick that Mox ducked just by the skin of his teeth. Mox tried piefacing him. Shelton hit another effortless German. Moxley went for chops (perhaps weakened ones due to a poor base from his leg injury). Shelton outchopped him. 

But then, Mox got a foot up in the corner, knocked Shelton out with a clothesline over the top, and ah, this would be when the wheels would turn. Now Shelton was in Moxley's world on the floor. The only thing that turned, however, was Moxley as Shelton reversed a whip into the barricade and then clotheslined him over it. They brawled up and down the stairs and into the crowd. Moxley seized a momentary advantage as one might expect, coming back over the rail first and grabbing a chair, but Shelton was right there, leaping over it with a flying clothesline. Mox went in and out of the ring to break the count and buy some space. He got caught on the way out, German'd again. 

Shelton was running him ragged but he was Jon Moxley and still had a lot in the tank. Maybe that was enough to throw Shelton off after all, maybe. They pressed head against head on the floor, and Mox goaded him in, allowing him to pry off an arm and use it to toss Shelton arm-first into the ringsteps.

I'm going to put a marker here because this is where what I've been trying to do (maybe not all that easy already) got a lot harder.

Up until this point, there had been some lip service on commentary on how Shelton and MVP had talked a gameplan and how he wasn't supposed to follow Mox to the floor or around the arena, but it hadn't really played out. You could make an argument that Mox had a momentary advantage after coming out of the stands. You could make one that he had rope-a-doped Shelton a bit on the floor, eating that German to create an opening with the arm. You can make a lot of arguments. I'm not sure in this case that the actual creative decisions, selling, or the overall portrayal holds up.

Let's continue and see how it goes though. So Moxley had created an opinion with the arm. He tries to press it. Shelton struggles against it both by locking fingers on a cross-armbreaker and through punching his way out. Mox does chip away at the arm though and that takes them through the commercial break. At the end of the day, that's ALL it does though, for as they come back, Mox is up on the top rope for no real discernible reason other than to set up Shelton's spot where he leaps up and tosses him off. That arm? That one opening Mox earned? He won't go to it again. Shelton won't sell it again. 

Instead, Shelton tosses Moxley around a bit more on as part of a babyface-coded comeback. The match hadn't given the crowd a ton to work with when it came who to root for. Mox had been valiantly fighting from underneath for a lot of this. But he'd pushed away the shake at the start. He went to the eye once. Shelton worked underneath during the break. There were chants for both men throughout. Time was ticking down and the onus was on Benjamin to either win or last to the limit because even if Moxley loses here, it only sets up a title match. 

They end up working the back third 50-50. Mox comes back with a cutter out of nowhere. Shelton drops him with a power bomb out of corner ten count punching. Mox survives a STF of sorts and follows it up with a low bridge counter and a dive to the floor. He's bleeding now, because of course he is, but he's up and with an advantage. He runs into Paydirt (but kicks out). Shelton goes to the injured knee to hit a superkick but Mox is ready for a second one and hits the Paradigm shift (Shelton survives it). And they go into a fevered last minute, ending with Shelton getting stacked up out of nowhere on a triangle choke with only seconds left on the clock.

And, if you read back through that, it's a bit of a mess. It's ugly. The match was ugly. Some of the execution was ugly. Not everything hit clean. The selling was ugly. The crowd wasn't directed one way or another. There was less focus on Moxley's leg than you'd think and a lot of it was implicit. Past setting him up for a superkick, it had nothing to do with the back half of the match. That armwork that Mox used to contain Shelton? That was just for the commercial break. It didn't connect well with the rest of the match. 

There was no reason why Mox went to the top when he was in control other than to set up a spot to come back from the break to. There was no reason why he didn't do more to go back to the arm later since it had been working for him when nothing else was. You could rationalize that he, as a character, lost the plot and was getting desperate and lashing out or whatever else. And I've done that if you've read what I've written over the last few months. But I didn't feel that here. I didn't get that connective tissue. The text and the performances don't back it up to me. 

What I'm trying to say is this. What I've done lately with Moxley isn't rocket science. It's not Shakespeare. It's pulling together narrative threads from the text and context, from the performances and creative choices and creating a narrative throughline, just pulling it all together to try to highlight the themes and the mood and the big plot points, to highlight the story being presented.

And that was harder here than with other matches. The data points didn't necessarily line up with a clean narrative. What I personally came out with wasn't nice and neat. 

It was ugly and messy and I didn't necessarily enjoy it as much as the other matches. Most of the spots made sense in the moment but they didn't come together the same way for me. The transitions and momentum shifts didn't stand up in the same way. What was being presented on commentary didn't entirely bear out on screen. My understanding of the characters as presented didn't sync with what I was watching and I couldn't easily course correct with the new information I was given.

Maybe that was me. Maybe it made more sense to someone else. I think the live crowd at times weren't sure what they were supposed to feel. 

Now all that said, it was still a pretty entertaining match, and maybe even a successful one. Shelton came out looking strong. Mox came out looking like he just barely survived, but that he survived (and shoot Shelton's hand at the end, another step on his journey or more of his bullshit exhibited, I don't know). It gave people a fresh match-up. Maybe it did numbers to start the show. Maybe it's something they can go back to later. Maybe it'll lead to something more with Lashley. Or maybe it just marked time before Moxley ends up in a more focused feud. 

And not everything needs to be a nice, neat story. Sometimes the story can be that life is ugly and pro wrestling is ugly and two guys fighting each other is ugly and not everything in life does make sense. This did create a sort of mood of being nasty and uncooperative and competitive. 

But I would argue that almost everything is better with tighter storytelling. You can still get that feeling that things are going off the rails without things actually going off the rails and a lot of times, if done with care and focus, that feeling becomes all the more tangible and visceral. Sometimes that is explicit. Sometimes it's just making sure that the things that are done are sold and framed and resonate. 

There are so many matches in 2025/2026 where it doesn't happen nearly as well as it could or it arguably should. I don't tend to write about those matches. I wrote about this one in part to highlight how special so many of those other matches are in comparison, and that even though tight, coherent storytelling ought to be the starting point that everything builds upon, so often it isn't.  

To pull out one thing and get ahead of a counter-argument, the issue here isn't that Shelton didn't sell the arm. It's not about checking a box. The issue is that time was spent (invested!) where it seemed like the armwork was working and then that didn't have consequence in the match and it didn't make sense why Moxley went away from it. For me, the wrestlers didn't do enough to explain why things went from moment A to moment B and explore well enough the consequences of both the individual moments and the moments put together. This match had multiple instances like that and they left aside some natural storytelling beats that would have pulled things together better.

Did that somehow invalidate the work that they did do? No, I don't think so. Could that work have been better enhanced? Yeah, probably, and if it had been, and if it had all come together better, I could have made this last paragraph here more evocative and thematic. Instead of talking at a distance, I could have been leaning harder into the heartbreak of an opportunity slipping through Shelton's fingers when he had wrestled so strong a match and how this fits into Moxley's redemption story despite the possibility of tragedy being right around the corner. The tragedy instead, I suppose, was that the match though full of gripping individual moments didn't quite get me there in the end.