AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/4 - 12/10 Part 1

AEW Rampage 12/8/23

Bryan Danielson vs. Daniel Garcia

MD: This was a hell of a match. It's almost too much to keep track of, especially when you factor in Danielson's post match promo, when you factor in Garcia's tournament, his year, the feud they had last year. Sometimes it's tough to find an "in" to write about a match. Here, I have too many and I'm not sure how to keep track of all of them. Bear with me this one time with the bullet points. Wrestling at its best contains multitudes.

• This exists within the confines of the tournament. Danielson was a match behind everyone and lives in a world where Brody King is already up 6-0. Remember, as much as Kingston put on the line here, this tournament was created for Danielson as part of his last fully active year. He never made it to the G1 and this is his one shot. It means so much to him to compete on this level, and here he is banged up, broken with escalating injuries, with the finish line so close and so very far away.
• Meanwhile, you have Garcia, 0-2, with a string of big losses before that, a guy who likely got into the tournament by the skin of his teeth, a guy who was let down by the mentor he had given up everything for, who was forced into a world of contradiction by the people who helped drive him towards those decisions in the first place. He's trying to find his way, but despite opening up to what looked to be the path to success (or maybe was a get rich quick scheme enacted by someone who can't help but put in the work), he's worse off than he was a year ago.
• Then there's the relationship between them: Danielson is Garcia's idol, Garcia is someone who Danielson saw as a potential successor. Danielson has all of the baggage of being a parent. There's a moment when your kids are young that they want to be with you all the time. You're the center of their world. There are glimpses however, when you start to realize that you're only a few years away from them barricading themselves in their room and that ending. As someone who got to be in the house each and every day with his then three year old during the pandemic, I'm acutely aware of how special those years are. Throughout this, Garcia was seeing the idol who didn't shine bright enough for him to be a true north that would light his path and keep him from straying towards temptation and Danielson conflated Garcia with his own children, understanding how the youth may eventually see you as obsolete and abandon you. Neither of them had the respective wisdom and serenity to make it past their current anxiety and grief.
• And of course, at the heart of it all, you have Garcia trying to find himself. Here he came out as the Red Death, towel around his neck. When he beat Danielson last year, it wasn't clean. Tony Schiavone likens "Sports Entertainment" to "Systemic Cheating." I personally don't feel like they ever fully played it out to its logical conclusion: Sports Entertainment as a fighting style as much as BJJ or whatever else, channeling the reactions of the fans and the uniqueness of pro wrestling in a way that something like the People's Elbow or the Worm could be as devastating as the Busaiku Knee, or a way to reach some higher level of physical prowess not through meditation but through doing an electrifying dance that gets a giant pop. There was something there, and for Garcia's year to mean anything and to have been something other a waste of time bringing him just back to where he was in mid 2022, he has to find that middle ground, has to solve that riddle that no one else has been able to solve, not even Chris Jericho.
• That is to say, I don't think he would have won, even channeling all of his rage, even learning and growing throughout the tournament, even knowing his opponent so well. He's not Misawa. Danielson is not Jumbo. They're different. Early on, after Danielson's initial role as first the aggressor and then a goading troll as Garcia got upset with it, they were purely reactive. This is why Danielson sees a successor in Garcia. One offensive attempt flowed into the next. It almost felt like a sprint in the way they were able to keep the motion going. Garcia studied Danielson: he was able to throw the elbows, able to use a small package just as Danielson had for years, able to channel that same energy and kick his head off. And, of course, Danielson had an answer for all of it because that's who he is. At the same time, Garcia studied himself. He was ready to the Dragontamer to be countered and this time he did hit the pile driver. He had gotten close before but now he pulled it off, getting just a little closer every match.
• People are saying he lost because he made one mistake. He lost because he took a step backwards instead of fully moving forward. If there is a dark side and a light side, if there is Sports Entertainment and Pro Wrestling, Garcia's going to have to figure out the path through it. Only then will he be ascendant. Only then will he be able to defeat Bryan Danielson. He won't be the first to travel that road. Look at Fujiwara's comedy spots. Look at that one confounding Karl Gotch WWWF match we have. What they had that he does not, however, is that purity of vision and endless confidence in themselves. Red Death Daniel Garcia couldn't beat Bryan Danielson on his own. Dancing Danny Garcia couldn't beat Bryan Danielson on his own. Yet somewhere in there, there's someone who can. The JAS couldn't get him there. The BCC can't get him there. He's going to have to do it himself. He has until Wembley to figure it out. And no one wants him to and no one needs him to more than Bryan Danielson, even if he's just starting to come to that understanding.

AEW Dynamite 12/6/23

Christian Cage vs. Adam Copeland

MD: I still struggle with that fith Finger. Someone suggested Mark Briscoe and that was a good suggestion. I still gravitate towards Athena, RUSH, and Christian though. The problem with all of them is that a lot of what I'd have to say is repetitive. Athena has that mix of unpredictability and commitment and athleticism. RUSH is just a force of nature, an unrelenting tasmanian devil that sweeps up all in his path. And Christian, I'll get to in a second. We'll keep it open for now but I might drop any of them (or Briscoe, or anyone else that really makes sense) depending on what's going on in any week.

Here we had a big featured singles bout between Copeland and Edge, their first in many, many years, and it was a title match in Canada on top of that. Christian's a guy who I'm very high on. The one-two punch of instantly starting a family and the other thing that happened in June 2007 got me off regular wrestling watching for a couple of years. When I came back in 2009, the modern stuff that appealed to me the most was Christian's ace ECW champion run. He had the feud with Regal and his Ruthless Roundtable, but it was the week in and week out TV work that drew me in, especially given the freedoms that being on the C show let him have. It's not unlike Athena in ROH right now. People clamor for her to be featured on Dynamite but she'd not have the time and freedom to really stretch there that she has now.

There have been great TV workers over the years, be it Regal or Rey or even Orange Cassidy in the last 18 months, but what made Christian so special and so uniquely suited for that turn of the 2010s WWE period was his ability to work his opponents' offense into his matches in varied and interesting ways. It was almost a wrestling savant level of genius, especially when he had to wrestle multiple matches against the same opponent which wasn't at all uncommon for the time.

What makes him stand out in 2023, however, is that he's one of the only guys on the roster that gets real heat. Heat is a currency. A lot of things are currency. Legitimacy. Look. A winning streak. Athleticism. Heat's some of the most value though. Having a crowd that hates you (or at least are willing to go further along the lines of pretending to hate you than they will for just about anyone else) before the lock up means that the battle is already halfway won. He came into this match having turned his back on Copeland. Whether we want it to be or not, AEW is about friendship. It's about love. Copeland left a cushy gig "up north," to finish his career with his best friend. Cage turned his back on that and said he was going to break Copeland's neck. And on some level, can you blame him? This is a guy who spent his career in Copeland's shadow, the CLB, the guy who Vince wanted to put a bag on, someone who could only ever be an ace in a secondary promotion or on the C-show or when Edge had to retire (and even then, they didn't trust him to be the babyface lead, even if the fans wanted it; he could only be the guy who feuded with the guy). Now he's evolved into his final form, an outright Bond villain towering above his heel peers of trolls and scoundrels. Well, I don't blame him, but the fans sure do.

So even though he's not working the same opponents week in and week out, he's able to squeeze as much value as possible out of every motion and every moment because of the heat he generates. And he still works his opponent's offense into the match in creative, interesting ways. It's just usually without that familiarity and variety that you can only get from building sequences and counters from match to match that takes it over the top. With Copeland, however, that familiarity was baked in. He's as acutely aware of Adam's strengths and his weaknesses as anyone and they put together one of Copeland's best non-gimmicked singles matches ever.

Copeland rushed in from the start, beating Christian around the ringside area. Cage went for a low blow as soon as he could, trying to escape with a DQ but Copeland caught him and started working over the hand, proper punishment for his misdeeds. When Cage was able to get a slight edge on the outside, he tossed Copeland over the rail and immediately pulled the ref in to start the count. He wanted out. During the commercial break, he started in on Copeland's neck. He couldn't fully capitalize due to the damaged hand, however. That would be Copeland's wedge to come back in it. Cage would pose and preen, showing off his 50 year old muscles, but Copeland would bite at the hand.

In a lot of ways, this felt like the sort of match that could have existed in WWE, an added attraction to a night of pure AEW tournament action. What put it over the top was the freedom in violence though. Some of that was how viscerally Copeland's attack began, but a lot of it was in the few big spots they did choose to do after said hand biting, a Russian leg sweep off the second turnbuckle, a big power bomb out of the corner. Both of them were moves that Copeland wouldn't normally hit and both fit perfectly into the match. When it came to some of the oddball things that he did hit, that's where the familiarity came into play. Maybe not the clothesline off the top onto Cage on the apron that happened after the blocked pendulum kick, but certainly the Edge-o-Match which they slipped in as a killswitch counter, and the spear which came crashing headlong into Christian's own after a ducked belt shot (which itself was after the awesome moment where Christian low blowed the out of position ref). So while some of the big beats, like the finish, felt a little alien to AEW but all too familiar, the trappings, structural, detail-oriented, over-the-top in ways that might not be allowed elsewhere, made it all work. Cage is a wrestling savant and he's someone that is only ever stronger on the second or third try. I'd like to see them move on from this feud for now, but if they do go back to it, I know the next match will be even stronger for what they'll be able to build off of this one.