AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 5/19 - 5/25

AEW Double or Nothing 5/25/25

Ricochet vs Mark Briscoe (Stretcher Match)

MD: What a tricky line to walk. The first half of this was full of comedy, full of real shine. The back half was a bloody horrorshow. It was, from start to finish, a stretcher match, a grudge match. From the second Ricochet walked out in his cosplay robe, he had heat. From the moment Mark Briscoe walked down with his mohawk, he was lauded. There was a "This is Awesome" chant towards the end despite it all.

So many disparate things on paper. If you had read that paragraph to me a year ago, I would have told you that the match had to a discombobulated mess, something that refused to commit, that tried to be everything to everyone and ultimately was not enough of anything.

But that wasn't this match. Not at all. Everything in that first paragraph came together to form a singular vision. That actually doesn't do it justice. It gets it backwards. All of those things didn't come together to create a vision, they were created by the vision itself.

It all comes down to how thoroughly Ricochet commits as a performer. The nexus of the character is that he is so gotten to by the crowd, by his opponents, by his own place in the world, that everything becomes a slight and every slight becomes a drive towards lashing out, towards a level of violence that far exceeds the transgressions.

There's never a sense that he's in on the joke, never a sense that he's out there "entertaining" the crowd. It's always that they're getting under his skin, always that they're causing an affront, always that he wants to strike back at them and the babyfaces they love so much. He never looks down. When he's in charge, he's gloating and sticking it to him. When he's getting his comeuppance, he throws everything into it. Even though he hits "cool" offense, he makes it so it never seems as such. He makes amazing things irritating just by doing them. He went so far as to tease the table and push it back under the ring just to deny the fans even a little bit of what they wanted. That takes an amazing level of commitment and confidence. It's laudable. It's almost the exact opposite approach that one would have thought he would have taken in AEW.

And Briscoe, as a wrestler, as a character, is wise to the world. He is confident in himself and confident in the crowd. He wants to cause Ricochet as much pain as possible but he knows there's more pain to be inflicted on the inside than on the outside. He married humiliation (even the mohawk!) with physical damage here. And it went well for him (and for the crowd) right until it didn't.

He used the cleaning spray on Ricochet's head. Ricochet used it in his eyes. He meant to use the chair as a springboard. Ricochet tossed it into his face. The response was an escalation to the action, because Ricochet was well and fully gotten to, because, in his heart of hearts, he was selling the pain he felt on the inside.

Once he took over, he didn't look back, he didn't stop. Once he drew blood, he meant to keep drawing it again and again and again. But then Mark Briscoe, a folk hero, once awoken, wasn't one to stop either. He could go forever, the human representation of that memorable, symbolic image of a crutch stopping the ambulance door from closing.

In the end, it went even a step even farther, Ricochet hiding the scissors around the ring, a preemptive attack even before Briscoe did the first thing to his bald head (one that shows the hypocrisy of Ricochet's argument all the clearer). When even that wasn't enough, he was ready with a low blow, a low as could be for Ricochet has no bottom. He'll sink forever selling his emotional damage all the way. And that's why this worked when so many similar things simply never would. That's why the This Is Awesome chant was about Ricochet getting comeuppance and not about fans enjoying spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Embracing vulnerability is a hell of a thing. More wrestlers should try it.

Hurt Syndicate vs Sons of Texas

MD: When we look back at this one down the line, we'll think more about the MJF moments, accidentally distracting the ref for the Unnatural Kick, offering the ring to Shelton which let Dustin and Sammy get back into it, that ultimate moment of Lashley embracing him after teasing dissent and then crashing through the barricade and his opponent. The story will play out and we'll see the match for the things that went right and went wrong for MJF.

As it's own entity, it was probably the best Hurt Syndicate match so far. When Dustin was in there with Shelton, they were scrapping hard. When Shelton was in there with Sammy, he knew exactly what to give. That's no small thing. Shelton's a big guy but he spent a chunk of his career in the land of the giants. For him to shift to a relative super heavyweight this late into his career is impressive. And of course Lashley vs Sammy was all sorts of amazing feats of strength (and agility for Sammy taking them).

Because this followed the Ricochet match, we didn't get that bloody Dustin face-in-peril we might have gotten otherwise. The point of this match was to further the broader story while giving the Syndicate a good challenge. It wasn't abut Dustin reliving his Double or Nothing past. Here, the Syndicate had to lean a bit more unlikable. That meant we didn't get to see Shelton pinball Sammy back and forth between the apron and the barricade (which  I badly wanted). Instead he did it once so that MJF could choke him while the ref wasn't looking. It's ok. Sometimes a match has to be what it needs to be and not what I want it to be. And this was what it needed to be and a very good version of that as well. Maybe someday in the future we'll still get to see Sammy pinballed. One can always hope.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/20 - 5/26 Part 2

AEW Collision 5/25/24

Bryan Danielson/FTR vs Jeff Jarrett/Jay Lethal/Satnam Singh

MD: I thought about skipping this because I already said everything that needed to be said for the Dynamite singles match. I thought about just mentioning how great the commercial break was with Satnam doing damage while Jarrett and Jay (and Karen) sat on chairs on the outside and Nigel had a great one-liner about how he never called Tony "Whipped him into the ropes" as that would be silly. I thought about just noting that I'll write five-thousand words if they ever give us a Jarrett vs Danielson singles match. But this was really good. I don't need to say too much about it, but it was really good. You had Danielson getting one upped by Jarrett early and then instead of it working into a shine where the heel gets his comeuppance, it not playing out until the end. You had Satnam showing how dangerous he could and should be by just reaching over and cutting off Dax's shine and draping him over the top; it's as easy as that. You have the protection of Satnam by him not doing all of his big spots every match. He didn't do the body press here. He did do the head-dribbling; he hadn't done that in the Danielson match. That's a huge failing of modern wrestling, the Andrade Effect. Andrade's double moonsault should happen one out of five, maybe even ten matches. He should hit the moonsault most matches and only do the double one on the rare occasion that someone is going to organically roll out of the way. It's 2024 here. We're not all so bull-headed that we're trying to power bomb kidman when we've never done a power bomb in a life. I know that Ric Flair felt like he needed to get all of his signature stuff in because he would have been disappointed if Ray Stevens didn't, but it's better to draw the crowd into something immersive than just give them rote ritual. Don't do anything for the sake of doing it. If Satnam has a number of physically amazing spots, the fans will appreciate seeing the one or two that they actually got to see that sometimes others didn't get to see, as opposed to everyone always getting to see all of them.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Danielson vs Jarrett. Jarrett feeding for Danielson's stuff was so great, just the way he'd slam his whole body back and forth in response. I hated that they were doing the quick camera cuts on Danielson's dropkicks. It's Danielson and Jarrett! We're not talking someone from the Nightmare Factory who only has 40 matches under their belt (and those people will get there but at least then I get the impulse, right?). Don't do the camera cut and rob me of the chance to see Jeff Jarrett respond and react to Danielson flying at him! It'll be ok. I trust them. They trust each other. Production guy who will never, ever read this; please trust them too.

So yeah, this was good. In this case, it was even better at 15 minutes than it would have been at twenty five and it gave them so much to go back to. I just hope there's time to before it's all said and done.

AEW Double or Nothing 2024 5/26/24

Anarchy in the Arena

MD: There's no way to talk about any of these matches coherently. So let me tell a story instead. I caught this the morning after but hadn't been spoiled. Kind of weird thing happened midway through, though. My 11 year old woke up. One of the firm and fast rules of pro wrestling in the household is that it never gets in the way of my family life. I've told this story before but I basically moved in with my then five-year old stepson the same month of the Benoit incident and it was very informative on how much wrestling I have the kids consume. My main feeling is that if they came across it on their own and took an interest, great, I'd show them stuff. Otherwise, there was a firm line. I don't necessarily hide it from any of them, but I usually do stop watching if they come around and want to do something. But she was up early and I wanted to see the end of the match so I tossed her a headphone and we watched the back half together.

I'm not saying this was absolutely her first match ever, but she really doesn't have a working knowledge of the tropes, even if she great at English and has a strong sense of fiction in general. We came in at the point where all of the babyfaces were put through tables which built to the fire spot. And I have to admit, it was pretty tough. I had to explain why they set up the table instead of just laying someone on and jumping on them. Thankfully pro wrestling logic more or less works out. More importantly, I had to explain why everyone was bloody right at the get go. The first time she saw Dax or Danielson, she let out a "Ohhh!" in shock, and then was even more so when I explained how that happened and she was aghast and wanted to know why anyone would do that, to which I reminded her that the second she saw it, she went "Ohhh!" She was more shocked by the fire spot as you can imagine. But she didn't get how he was able to recover and come back later. In general, I repeated, multiple times, that this is the sort of thing they only do once a year.

The nicest thing I can say is that overall, I was able to explain the way causality and consequence worked here. Once Darby got tied up, even as his partners tried to save him, there was a sense that he just had to end up hanging up. It was inevitable. Once upon a time, the sheer threat of it would have been enough, and it would have been like knights saving a princess from a tower before a dragon devoured them. Now, the fans demand to see the dragon devour the princess, even if he spits her out later. But the idea of the Bucks' shoes ending up in Danielson's hands made total sense to her. That sense of hubris and comeuppance is universal. The heels did something that was dangerous but also the height of vanity and it backfired upon them. That sort of thing is primal. All of that is to say that the match mostly held together. If anything, you could be annoyed as a viewer that Perry was able to come back in and even get the win but you're sort of supposed to be annoyed by that, so long as he ultimately gets his comeuppance later on. But still, it would have been better if something like that could have mattered more. But you could say that about almost everything on the card, right?

I did go back to show her the beginning again, because she likes Final Countdown and I thought she'd get a kick out of it. That meant I had to explain why Perry was the Scapegoat so that was another headache. The match was full of things (fire, exploding weapons, gimmicked shoes, the music) that all were callbacks; it's very true that this drained some of the organic sense of violence of it all and the next time they run something like this it needs to be raw. At times it felt more like the Jarrett vs Briscoe Concession Stand Brawl (a WWE style food fight) than, let's say Mad Dog vs Demus. Next time they run this, they should be sure everyone is expecting the former and lean hard with the latter. Some of the individual moments were transcendent though, most especially some of the things Darby let happen to him and the two big musical moments: Darby hitting the coffin drop right as the words hit and the shot of Danielson reveling in it all with the wide shot. Still, it's best to remind yourself that it only happens once a year, give or take Stadium Stampede. It just means that the rest of the year should try harder to be like the two Satnam matches and define a baseline of meaning so that the rare match like this can play off of it. Anyway, right after this we watched To Catch a Thief together and that was a more wholesome family experience.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/22 - 5/28 (Part 2)

AEW Double or Nothing 2023

MJF vs Sammy Guevara vs Darby Allin vs Jungle Boy

MD: We're almost a month from DEAN's passing now. I think about him all the time and about how he'd feel about this match or that. I miss his presence IMMEDIATELY after every single pro wrestling show was over, when he'd drop his train of thought, endless paragraph full of all the DEAN-isms you'd want. He was wildly positive, so much so that I kind of hate invoking him at the start of what's going to be a pretty negative write-up, but for all that the DVDVR guys disagreed on, there was one thing all of them, even the big guy, were all sure of: four-way matches are terrible. 

And sorry, but so was this.

Let's pull it back a bit and generalize. Why are these matches terrible? On paper, having more wrestlers in there should lead to more possibilities, more interactions. It should allow for more creative nearfalls due to break-ups, a better ability to hit and protect big moves. There should be different stories you can tell: temporary alliances, betrayals, fighting against the odds, etc. Unfortunately, all of that comes at a price. Wrestling is ultimately subjective. We all know that. Different people value different things. I put a lot on coherence and consequence. I want build and payoff. I want things to resonate and matter. You can only get that build and you can only achieve meaningful payoff if everything matters along the way. You get that resonance, that stickiness, that mattering through struggle and selling, through measured escalation and bringing things up and down and up again, through leaning into certain expectations and inverting others. The thread that runs through any match is suspension of disbelief and the ultimate killer of that is anything that raises a question in the mind of the viewer. If they're wondering why something happened or why something more logical or reasonable or simple didn't happen, then something's gone wrong. Thankfully, wrestlers have a lot of tools in their belt. It's not reality or an assurance of objective truth that guides the viewer but instead those tropes and expectations. It lets them accept an Irish Whip or a head going down for a back body drop, certain aspects of physics. It allows the viewer to accept a lot of things, so long as the execution is sharp enough. 

Not everything though, and any four-way is riddled with contrived moments. The language of pro wrestling tends to be communicated with two people in the ring at the same time. That's how lock-ups work. That's how most holds work. That's how struggle-filled competitive spots work. When you put a third or a fourth person in there, it changes the dynamic. All of the tropes and expectations start to fall apart. The natural state of a four-way is to have people asking "why?" and questioning things that are generally accepted in wrestling. It's not sustainable in the way a double team during a 5 second interval or even things breaking down towards the end of the match in a tag may be. When it's an exceptional state, it can work. When it's the baseline for a match, it becomes far more difficult. Therefore, much of the match is spent figuring out how to get wrestlers out of the picture, how to leave them prone on the outside so it can slip back to a more comfortable one on one engagement. 

Then, you couple that contrived necessity with the need to stress all the inherent possibilities in the most creative ways. What's the point of having a match like this if you don't push the envelope with it, right? That leads to guys waiting around for complex and cooperative multi-man spots for the sake of clever visuals. That's not bad in a vacuum but when you're starting from a point where that all important thread of disbelief being suspended is already frayed, it leads to one "Why" moment after the other, when the answer, more often than not, is that in a match like this, the spots are the point and the creativity is the point. Instead of trying to use the inherent possibilities to create a more compelling narrative end, the possibilities become the point in and of themselves. It means you might get one or two very clever, character driven, logical moments, but they get lost in an overflowing sea of sensation and creativity. 

So, those are the generalities. I don't want to get too into the specifics as this had the deck stacked against it to begin with by the nature of the match itself. What made it worse was the metatextual underpinnings of the specific storyline. You already had the dual-pressures of getting guys out of the match temporarily and the emotional need to push the creativity to the limit. On top of that, the wrestlers weren't necessarily wrestling to win but to prove their own importance and show off their legacy and cement their spot. In a controlled environment, you can still make that work. In a four-way with these specific wrestlers in this specific moment? Even the good things (and there were good things, the best of all being MJF's reactions) were drowned out. Let's just leave it at that. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/22 - 5/28 (Part 1?)

MD: I'm only two hours through ROH, but it was a good show so far, with nothing that I felt an absolute need to write about. There was also a Fletcher vs Cassidy match from Dynamite. I like Fletcher as the guy who contrasts HOOK for the next decade. There's a lot of upside there. He's still at a stage where he's just giving up the struggle to set up the next spot at times, but his reactions are good. I would have liked a bit more character-driven rationale (immaturity from Fletcher) for the kickouts towards the end. Too many bombs. I get that they're getting over Cassidy's resilience under impossible circumstance, but it was a bit much. I'll start the PPV here and maybe do the pillars match on Wednesday if I get around to it.

AEW Double or Nothing 2023

Blackjack Battle Royal for the International Championship

MD: You can tell a lot about someone's love of wrestling when it comes to how they feel about battle royals. There's nothing wrong with a person not liking them, complaining about it being too hard to see the action or too much hugging in the corner, etc., not enough "action," the notion that if you've seen one, you've seen them all. I wouldn't necessarily hold that against someone, but I'm always glad when someone appreciates the possibilities inherent. 

Before my time watching, a Battle Royal, like the big San Francisco one, but others as well, was a chance to see wrestlers you wouldn't normally see interacting with the local stars. They built it up as the most dangerous sort of match possible (despite that lack of action) where a punch could come from any direction and a freak injury could occur at any moment. That made a lot of sense during in age where kayfabe was protected and strikes and holds, not spots, were the glue that held wrestling together. 

When I started watching, towards the late 80s or early 90s, WWF Battle Royals were a way to break up the stultifying structure of the WWF feud system. The British Bulldog would feud for eight months with the Warlord and you'd rarely see him up against else during that time. A battle royal would let him interact with the Barbarian or Haku or Ted Dibiase and also brush shoulders with some of the other babyfaces, a brief save, a little nod, a quick team-up. That stuff was magic for a kid who wanted a more coherent universe in his wrestling and not just a series of isolated feuds. So maybe there's some level of comfort food for me in battle royals.

In AEW, it's not that guys don't cross streams and interact. Khan books random matches all the time. It's more a case that we can never have enough of it. There's only so much time and there are hierarchical needs that keep certain wrestlers away from one another. That was true a few weeks ago in the Darby vs Swerve match. It was true in Ricky Starks vs Jay White. For us to get matches like that every week, it makes continuous elevation of certain wrestlers tricky. In a Battle Royal, though? There's very little harm in getting knocked over the top. Moreover, here the wrestlers are encouraged to interact with one another and, more often than not, the spots are frequent and clever. 

I have no idea who agented this one, but they absolutely earned their keep. While there was brawling and guys hanging from the ropes and certain guys disappeared from the action (Butcher didn't get much shine for a change), it was one signature spot after the next, one interesting interaction after the next. The Lucha Bros, working with Bandido and Komander, interacting with Jay White, for instance, were standouts. The most memorable moment of the match might have been Bandido hefting up Nese for a delayed vertical suplex as Fenix and Penta fought off all comers. Brian Cage and especially Big Bill got plenty of shine. Bill's a guy who has been delivering and entertaining week in and week out and this felt like the first step in moving him to whatever might be next. I know people were high on the Swerve vs Cassidy finishing stretch but I find Swerve best as a heel and against someone with a little contrast, a few less twists and rolls, someone a bit more conventional. I worry that a straight up match between the two would frustrate me. Here though, as just a taste at the end of a very well put together Battle Royal, just a taste of it was more than enough. Cassidy was especially good at selling the cumulative damage of weeks on his back and hand, in the midst of a match where that wasn't the narrative centerpiece. It was just another detail in a twenty minute stretch of AEW that had a ton of excellent ones.

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