AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/16 - 12/22 Part 2

AEW Collision 12/21/24

Claudio Castagnoli vs Darby Allin

MD: This had a great beginning and a great finishing stretch and both were somewhat invalidated by what immediately happened thereafter. Claudio is a guy who, like Christian, is used to working matches against the same opponent multiple times. While Christian is a genius in that area, Claudio is no slouch. The C2 in general has allowed him to play upon spots and finishes and invert them over time.

In this case, Claudio and Darby played off the start of their last match together, where Claudio kept moving out of the way whenever he got knocked to the floor early, thwarting Darby's attempt to dive on him. This time, he didn't wait for the bell. Instead he leaped right at Claudio, clinging on to him all the way up the ramp and enabling the balcony dive. That was a great start considering what had come before, but I don't think it meant much in the grand scheme of the match. Once the bell rang, Claudio hit a lifter and followed it with a ridiculous Giant Swing. That did give him the advantage but it also gave him a huge round of applause. Remember, this is the guy who betrayed Bryan Danielson. At times, the crowd is going to have to "give it to him" because he is so impressive but doing one of the biggest swings ever in AEW in front of this slightly smarkier crowd was probably a mistake. There's been too many such things out of Claudio as of late and it's not doing any favors for the Deathriders storyline, already struggling as it's cordoned off into one small area of the main event and not creating any overarching effect on the show overall (save for the first few weeks). 

Of course these two are a natural pair for heat and hopespots and comeback and it was all impressive. I liked how Claudio would at times just lift Darby up by the waist and that's something he ought to do more if he can. And then the finishing stretch hit just right with another big spot through a table on the floor, and Claudio going for his recent finishing move, that clothesline after an opponent barely makes it in from the count. Sometimes patterns can get too repetitive and take you out of a match because it's no longer believable but I buy these guys getting into this situation given the physical force that is Claudio Castagnoli. So Darby ducks it and they keep going through levels of escalation, with Darby finally getting hit with it and kicking out, with Claudio going for the Ricola Bomb only for Darby to turn it into a Code Red, for Claudio to get his knees up on the Coffin Drop, and then to hit the Ricola Bomb leading to a kickout not once but twice. With anyone else it might be a bit much but with Darby, at this point so late in the C2 it felt like proper escalation.

It built to a pretty clever finish where Claudio, frustrated by Darby's resilience in the face of his best moves, went for a chair. The ref took it and when distracted, Claudio hit him with knucks. Clever finish, right? 

One little problem.

Red Velvet had turned heel the night before doing it to Leyla Hirsch in an even more clever way since she used a turnbuckle rod and a hidden wrench she had gotten from under the ring. Same finish (which is not a common finish! I've barely ever seen the sort of switcheroo played out here, ever!) two nights in a row in front of the same crowd, one of which being a heel turn. Not to mention that the knucks would be a better gimmick for Velvet anyway as a puncher (I've got a campaign going for her to dust off the Heart Punch; I think it'd be unique and super over). I don't even know what to say. I haven't seen a lot of complaining online so they probably get away with it, but you'd almost have to put Velvet in the Deathriders and say that Claudio had been inspired by her actions or something otherwise to cover it. They lucked out I guess, but it, like the Swing and the opening flourish not meaning anything, definitely put a blemish on an otherwise excellent match. 

ROH Final Battle 12/20/24

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs The Righteous (Double Bullrope Match)

MD: This was a good complete package with a solid build that added something different (and violent) to a pretty well put together PPV overall. I think, especially given the build, I would have wanted a bit more of a straight brawl instead of something so plunder-filled with tables and ladders and what have you, but that's hard to avoid in almost any match of this sort in the era that we live in. We see what Blood and Guts and War Games look like these days. 

That said, my favorite parts of this were when Dutch and Dustin were brawling out on the ramp (even if it devolved quickly into Dutch's Bossman slam) and surprisingly Sammy laying in forearms on Vincent on the floor (which quickly led to Sammy hitting the post and eating an Orange Sunshine). I could have used about thirty percent more of that (or sixty, or ninety, but I get it). Speaking of Sammy taking that, despite the Tornado Tag nature, they did a good job of getting people out of the way so that the big themes could play out, most especially through Dutch going through the barbed wire table of course. And Sammy wiping out as well. 

I thought those key moments hit. The nearfalls with Sammy making a last second save all worked for me. What worked even more was how at one key juncture, it was Vincent, having escaped the Rope, using it to choke out Dustin. You'd expect that moment and the subsequent comeback by Dustin to belong to Dutch, and Dutch was the one Dustin beat in the end, but despite the familial connection being Dutch's, Vincent was the one who was pulling the strings, and in this case, pulling the rope around Dustin's neck. 

At some point, I really would like to see AEW/ROH trust in a crowd to do a more minimalist brawl, especially when there's a solidly built issue like this one, but maybe this wasn't the match for that (I'm not entirely sure Dustin feels like what he has to offer along those lines is enough for a 2024 audience, though it is, 100% because no one can do it like he can). It certainly wasn't the crowd. More on that momentarily. 

Athena vs Billie Starkz

MD: When you look at a match as a thought experiment interesting things can happen. In this case, they were putting together and executing a match with over a year of build, yes, but also with just a few weeks of build, but more importantly, one where most of the crowd and the audience watching at home weren't actually familiar with either. That's fascinating. I had misgivings about the build, which I noted last week, but the reaction online didn't pick up on my misgivings at all; instead people were just frustrated that Billie didn't win on her second chance and that Athena wasn't freed up to go to the main roster. 

It showed a clear lack of understanding of the week to week storytelling that was occurring. Tourists dipping in on ROH for a PPV and the year end PPV at that, and ones with ulterior motives and interests as well. They didn't plan on hanging around ROH so they wanted Athena where they could more easily and regularly see her. They're more familiar with the idea of Billie Starkz than the Billie Starkz who has been on screen in 2024 and more than that, the idea of an idea of someone like Billie Starkz, a young talent beloved because of her indie run who was ready to take a title. 

I won't speak to real life, but on screen, she wasn't. She absolutely wasn't ready to win. I know everyone made fun of Heyman noting how early the Bloodline storyline was in being completed, but here it's valid. Billie hasn't even really seen the light yet. She's still a heel. She's just a bullied, put upon heel who petulantly stomped her foot until she got a title shot. She wanted more attention not Athena. She didn't outright claim that Athena was evil or wrong or had to be stopped. If anything, she was trying to be her own Athena. If their match last year really got her established in MIT, then ultimately this one should start the road for her to leave it and find herself, but I'm not 100% that's the path they're going to take with her. I do think Athena is headed for bigger and better things, at least in the short term. I'd like to see Billie get some different mentor but outside of Emi Sakura (and wouldn't that be interesting?), no one in house really fits the bill. 

I thought the match itself was good. Just to focus on the finishing stretch, the moment where Athena clearly has an advantage and could go for the O-Face but chooses to use the mic instead out of paranoia/a lack of more fiber/Lexy wanting to please her and then almost losing because of that was a perfect character beat. And that moment in the corner after she had eaten Billie's finisher once and ended up back on her shoulders with the turnbuckle pad in hand is an absolutely perfect encapsulation of Athena as a talent. Yes she's agile. Yes she's believable. But it's her emotiveness in the moment! She went from the worry that she was up in the electric chair position to the surprise that she had the turnbuckle pad in her hand to the savvy bit of control that she could hit the poison rana all within a split second and it played out on her face like a method actor. She was living it and it was all organic and not overwrought. No one else in wrestling today can do that. 

But yeah, it must be weirdly aggravating to book a PPV more or less how you should, but having the fans just unprepared for what they're about to see. The 2024 ROH PPVs have a much better build than 2023 ROH PPVs, with the TV really setting things up, even if I don't agree with every decision, but it's almost wasted on the audience that tunes in a couple of times a year relative to the crazy sort of sickos matches they were doing without build previously. Like I said, an interesting thought experiment. This match certainly deserved a better reception online overall.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/6 - 11/12

AEW Dynamite 11/8/23

Darby Allin/Sting vs Outrunners

MD: This was a tight piece of business, obviously, a way to keep the Sting farewell tour feeling special, in front of a crowd that was chanting for him in the early going, and a nice way to throw a bone to the Outrunners who ape his early aesthetic, maybe by way of the Beverly Brothers. That meant they could lean on Darby coming off of injury and let the Outrunners play the numbers game early, sneak in the clever tag out of a suplex position that we saw Darby and Orange Cassidy use when they were teaming in the already-missed house show run, and give Sting his iconic moment of shrugging off the double back elbow. Small nitpick: maybe have him win with the Death Drop considering that a Scorpion Deathlock played into the finish of the previous match, but at the end of the day, let Sting be Sting too, you know? A fun match that lets everyone in the crowd who hadn't been watching wrestling in 89 say that they got to see Sting live.

Ring of Honor 11/9/23

Eddie Kingston vs Angelico

MD: Of all of Eddie's great quality, maybe the greatest is that every match he's in, no matter how little build or notice it gets, instantly becomes a grudge match. It's because the chip on his shoulder is so big that any contest, be it an enhancement match or a dream match, tumbles right into it. Just to stand across the ring from him unlocks all sorts of grievances. Heel, face, storyline or no, he takes it personal and he makes it personal. You look at him the wrong way and it's an insult. And there's no right way to look at him if you're his opponent. That gives us, as viewers, reason to care about each and every match. 

It can be a little exhausting too. It's a good thing, don't get me wrong, but you don't let go and relax when watching Eddie wrestle. He carries a weight and you carry it with him. That feels good. It has substance to it. When he walks a mile, you walk that mile with him, and you're better off for it, but it's hard. And sometimes, it leaves some possibilities on the table. An Eddie Kingston match is going to be a fight. This isn't Bryan Danielson who is endlessly adaptable and reactive. Eddie's a black hole and you can't escape his gravitational pull. Traditionally, if you're wrestling Eddie, it can only be about one thing, that chip, that insult, that grievance.

The belt kind of changes that though. Yes, sure, Eddie is going to see it in personal terms; you want to take away what he cares about, what he clawed and scraped for, what he fights for every day, something he cares about more than you ever could. But it's also business too. And more than that, it's wrestling, the grandeur of wrestling along with the blood, something that you might not think a guy like Eddie would understand. But he does, because he understands what it means to be an ace, to carry a weight upon his back that's not just the burden of life, to carry a company, the hopes and dreams of everyone in the back, the reputation of everything that came before. 

That means we get to see a little bit of a different side to Eddie in these matches. Yes, he took it personal when Angelico made the challenge, but that didn't define this match; it just provided some extra color to it. Eddie's used to charging forward with a certain sort of abandon. He's used to being a man with nothing to lose. Now he has something to protect. That meant he came at this different. Angelico's always dangerous so he started the match by switching from one hand to the next, and avoiding a lock up, cautious. But he's Eddie so he got goaded in and threw a shot that let Angelico start to twist and tear at his hand. But he's Eddie so he pushed through it and kept throwing those chops, relentless. 

In return, Angelico realized that he wasn't going to get a quick tap on Eddie, no matter how skillfully he tied him up. He started throwing low kicks, started throwing his body at Eddie with dives. Angelico could chip away at his arm or his leg, but he couldn't make a chip larger than that one already on Eddie's shoulder though. All it ever takes is one backfist to change the complexion of the match and that's what it did here. Still, they gave Angelico a kickout and then finished things with the Northern Lights Driver, a nice hierarchy decision that helps keep over one of Eddie's four viable finishers after the story with Claudio where he needed to escalate to the power bomb. The variety of opponents and the more ace-tinted approach to these matches has been a nice change of pace, especially knowing that Eddie can take things deep into a land of grudges whenever the situation calls for it.

AEW Collision 11/11/23

Adam Copeland/Sting/Darby Allin vs Vincent/Dutch/Lance Archer

MD: Very complete, very satisfying match given that it had two commercial breaks, a little less time than some other Collision main events, and a lot of personalities to highlight on the face side. We've seen some matches lately where they hold back Sting and you sort of would expect them to do that with Copeland too here but they cycled through all of the faces early on (teasing Darby being in trouble and having him smack Archer away and dart to the corner) and gave the crowd a taste of everyone before they leaned into the first commercial break not with the usual transition into heat but with chaos and everything breaking down. That gave us the great shot of Sting elatedly dragging Vincent around the ringside area. It wasn't until the end of the break that they had Dutch jump him to lead into the first face-in-peril. It's important to have a little bit of variety now and again.

I always see the commercial breaks as an opportunity. Someday when AEW's on a streaming service and people are going back through these the same way that we watch 1992 WCW or 95 All Japan or 84 Mid South or old Houston footage, we'll hopefully have the international feed to watch and not have to worry about picture and picture and it'll be a net positive overall. It stops the proclivity for pure action for the sake of action and forces interaction with the crowd and a doubling down with the story at hand. 

This was our second look at Copeland and while he was fine against Luchasaurus, he wrestled like someone with something to prove here, hitting a dive, asserting himself with clotheslines, hitting a double team with Sting which harkened back to his late 90s creativity with Christian, eating Dutch's Bossman Slam with wild momentum. He's such an interesting case in some ways, someone who great up as much of a fan of wrestling as could be, but that has spent the entirety of his time within a carefully controlled system. He's someone that excelled in gimmick matches, that had offense which maybe wouldn't have held up in a less produced environment. He can't compete with the conditioning of  a lot of the AEW talent, but relying on smoke and mirrors instead of sheer athleticism might make him stand out, especially if he leans into his height a bit more than he has in his career. A lot of his major WWE feuds were against his size or larger than him. I'm curious how he resets this last act; he's suggested an interest in facing a lot of the ex-WWE guys that he missed in the 2010s, the Samoa Joes and Andrades and Malakai Blacks of the world, and to port his WWE act over against new a generation he missed could be of some interest, but the real value would be if he took what made him special over the years and tried to figure out how to refine it in a world without corporate limits and monolithic preferences. That doesn't necessarily mean aping Sting's proclivity for crazy dives. It doesn't just mean blood and pile drivers and a freedom of speech either. I don't entirely know what it means. Were I Copeland, I'd be spending every second of this borrowed time that was an impossibility ten years ago trying to figure out the myriad possibilities before me though. For the first time in two and a half decades, he can be anything and do anything; for someone who loves pro wrestling, what could that possibly look like? 

Here, in this bizarre WAR six-man with Jake Roberts on the outside and very unlikely partners on the inside, it looked like a pretty good start actually.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 9/25 - 10/1 Part 1

AEW Rampage 9/29/23

Eddie Kingston vs. Rocky Romero

MD: I wanted to hit at least one of the TV matches and while there's a lot to cover with the 8 man tag, it's a lot to work through again. I liked how it felt like worlds were coming together and how they held off on using both Bill and then Danielson, but I don't have a ton to say there and AEW is just producing so much content. As I write this on Monday, I haven't even been able to watch Danielson vs. ZSJ yet.

AEW has had a good year when it comes to reigns and I'm hoping we get just that from Eddie over the next six months or so. Theoretically, we can get matches both on AEW and ROH TV and whatever NJPW tends to be doing with their Strong guys against a variety of opponents. Rocky fits really well in that "variety" mold. He's never quite the spiritual successor of Ogawa that I want him to be, but you get just enough of it, tempered by his own eclectic background that it becomes interesting. That was at play here. He'd slam right into Eddie despite the size differential and then pieface him to try to goad Eddie into a headscissors takeover (it worked). He'd throw himself at him with three topes in a row (that didn't work). Meanwhile, Eddie would keep asking for more, goading Rocky back and maybe drawing him out of his game as well, not necessarily out of some sort of grand strategy, but just because Eddie's Eddie and how do you even deal with that level of stubbornness? It let them rationalize Eddie staying in position in the ropes to set up one more or another; he was just asking for more until Rocky gave him enough to keep him stuck there for a few extra seconds.

So yeah, I want to see Eddie against quick guys (for ROH, Gravity and Blake and Andretti/Martin are right there, for instance), and big guys (JD Drake, Lance Archer, Shane Taylor) and sneaky guys like Rocky or Moriarty. As a match in and of itself, this wasn't necessarily going to be as memorable as most of what we got over the weekend, but as a match as part of a memorable title reign, it fit right in.

AEW WrestleDream 10/1/23

MJF vs. The Righteous

MD: I know. I still haven't seen the Danielson match and I'm detouring for this. I'll get there. We have to pace ourselves in this world. Speaking of that, I thought a lot about Punk as the heir to "neo-Bret-ism" which is the idea of making moves matter, or at least that's how I define it. You can see that in some of the reviews here in the last two years. It's about creating a sports-like approach using pro-wrestling tropes and norms that's based in logic and consequence. I don't actually think MJF is that, but he's doing something very similar. He's being the heir to Dusty.

Phil (Schneider not Brooks) and I are both big fans of minimalism in wrestling, but I think Phil leans more towards amazing execution, as in the sheer amount you can accomplish with a punch that either looks legit or is legit. Simple, straightforward, primal, violent, right? For me, the ultimate goal of pro wrestling is to do as much as possible with as little as possible. That's the height of the art form, to manipulate hearts and minds with as little pressure put upon the lever as possible. It's a work, not a sport. You're supposed to work people. Doing it with as little as possible to the highest possible effect means that you leave more in the tank for later.

I loved MJF talking to Alvarez in the post-show scrum trying to explain that this wasn't a gimmick; it was the point, and that by getting the crowd to care about personalities, you can get anything over. I wouldn't put it exactly that way. I think a lot of it has to do with narrative structure and storytelling, and commitment to character and being on all the time (if you believe, they will believe; if you show consequence, they will feel consequence), but it's close enough that I have lots of warm feelings towards this entire endeavor. My feeling on the historiography of pro wrestling, or maybe, I guess, the history of criticism, was that fans in the early 80s were absolutely spoiled with this sort of working, with the artfulness of someone like Dusty or Valiant knowing how to do so, so much with exactly as much as they needed, finding every shortcut (And shortcuts are amazing to watch and appreciate), with guys like Lawler and Bockwinkel knowing when to pick up the pace and control the tempo, to bring things up and then back down. They didn't know how good they had it and became desensitized to the wonders of the form. Something like Dynamite vs Tiger Mask was candy, pure and simple, a drug right into the pleasure center of their brains, and a way to rebel against artfulness through sheer sensation.

And over time what was truly valuable ended up lost traded instead for what was physically difficult but mentally easy, a lowest common denominator put up upon a pedestal as the highest treasure of the land. MJF is trying to reclaim what was lost, one stupid gimmicky move at the time. He walks to the ring setting up the body slam, setting up the kangaroo kick, setting up the idea of choking out Joe, setting up ramming a head into an ass, and then he builds a match to the payoff, teasing it, denying it, fighting for it. And then he provides it. He's the Pied Piper, the Music Man, the Monorail Salesman, and he wove it all together in the face of difficult odds and fighting from underneath and hope lost and gained once more, and it's every wonderful, ridiculous, serene thing wrestling can be when you just lean into making things matter and creating meaning. How can wrestling be better than that?

I guess maybe ask me again on Wednesday after I've seen Danielson vs ZSJ.

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