AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/25 - 12/31 Part 2

AEW World's End 12/30/23

Eddie Kingston vs Jon Moxley

MD: Eddie vs Claudio is mythic. Eddie vs Danielson is masterful. Eddie vs Mox just tugs at your heartstrings, though, doesn't it? Wrestling can be such a simplistic thing sometimes and yet here? Let's break it down. We know what Eddie wants. Eddie leveraged his taste of success, all that hard work, into his life's greatest gamble, the creation of an American Triple Crown. What does Mox want? He doesn't want to prove himself to anyone else. He doesn't want fame, fortune, credit. He just wants a challenge worthy of his name. He wants a fight that'll go long and hard enough to make him feel alive. He wants a thrill that he can't allow himself to get anywhere else, because he's a family man, dammit. He wants the endorphins to pop. He wants to taste his own blood intermingled with someone else's. He wants to battle back all of the dark feelings that torment mankind with his fists alone. And if he wins too, all the better, because that means there's more to come, and because deep down, it would have meant that Eddie wasn't strong enough to carry his own dream. Mox is though, strong enough to never take that fishing trip, strong enough to carry this PPV, strong enough to march until the very end of the world, one foot after another, dragging dirt and dust and grime behind him. And if Eddie wins? Well, that's ok too, because it will have meant Eddie beat him, and that would have given validity to everything Eddie's fought for. He can dig that too. That's Mox for you.

Even in 2023, maybe especially in 2023, wrestling asks more of us than almost anything else. There's nothing truly comparable. The stakes are entirely artificial, but that's true with any TV show, right? We can relate to a TV drama, be it about life or death, be it about making ends meet, be it about finding love or getting respect. A belt though? What is a belt? What is a title? We're never going to win championships like this in our life. We can't go out and compete for them tomorrow. Just like speculative fiction or something with incredibly high stakes, it comes down to making it relatable, making us care, seeing ourselves in the wrestlers and our hopes and dreams in their hopes and dreams. We understand Eddie. And despite ourselves, we understand Mox too. Sometimes we want to look away, but we can't because they burn too bright. It hurts our eyes and it hurts our souls, but we understand and we relate and because they care, we care. For some of us, it goes back to Eddie's youth and our own fandom, to remembering how it felt to see Tenryu overcome Jumbo for the first time for Kawada to finally get what he fought his whole life for. We all look to the lens of our own experience for understanding, right? What stood out from Mox's book, more than anything else, was how different his experience was to mine even though we're only a few years apart. You read that book and you see a guy who made it to the mid 2000s, if not later, with no discernible idea what the internet was. He wasn't arguing whether or not Robert Gibson was better than Lance Storm on DVDVR, let me tell you that. But still, we see clearly what he shows us, and we watch, and we know, and we believe, and we're so damn lucky to get to. This was important, to the company, to the crowd, to the wrestlers, to us.

And it felt so, so good to watch Eddie Kingston ascendent, to watch him be an ace on a night where the company needed an ace. I know how they presented them, "The Ace of the World" and the "King of the Bums", but to me, Moxley was the Warrior King upon his throne and Kingston was the ace who learned, who studied, who had prepared his whole life for this moment. He controlled the center. He was poised. He was focused. He drew Moxley to him, told him to come charging in. He wrestled, as much as possible, a perfect match against a dangerous foe. The mistake he made, and it was a large one, was not down to planning or strategy, but the limits of his own body. He had to go big to keep control and he threw a dive that cost him. It was the right move but it meant rolling the dice and his number came up.

But that was ok, because underneath it all, underneath the poise, underneath the channeling of Misasa and Kawada and Taue and Kobashi (and Akiyama and Hase and on and on and on), there is still the white hot core that is Eddie Kingston. There's still the toughness, the animosity, the grievances tearing at him, the never say die attitude. So he fought back, and once he was in a position to do so, he found his center and the ace's mentality once more. He goaded Mox into an exchange, had him charge in, and then he ducked and took him over with an exploder. Mox tried to fire up but his leg gave way, and Eddie went in for the kill. This was the Eddie I've been watching in ROH, the one who controlled the ring, the one who locked his hips and threw, the one who planted his feet and fired away. He dropped Mox.

And then that fire underneath raised its ugly head once more. Mox had defeated him once upon a time with a bulldog choke. And there was Mox lying there prone, practically defeated. And Eddie, more human than you, or me, or any of us, cracked just a little. There are temptations in life and certainly temptations in the fantastical, fictional world of pro wrestling. These are storytellers. These are mythic beings living in stories. And there is no greater hubris than a story that ends clean and neat and perfect. The second Kingston lunged down to lock in his own bulldog choke, the whole world seemed to groan. I certainly did. Mox knew this hold. He trained for it. He owned it. He had the counter. Eddie followed with the hammer and anvil elbows and even though he made them his own, he was goading himself towards disaster. It went like clockwork: Mox reversed it, locked in a tight, inescapable choke. Here, at the precipice of glory, Eddie was Eddie once again. He was about to defeat himself. Again.

The thing is, though, Eddie Kingston, at his best and his worst and his truest, is a fighter. That ball of rage and angst may drive him to disaster, but it's a hell of a sturdy vehicle empowered by that roiling, writhing engine that's unlike anything else we've ever seen. If he had not wrestled so perfect a match up til that point, if he had not been the ace throughout, if Mox wasn't beaten down, if Eddie didn't have so much to fight for, then he would have been swept under, a fitting, imperfect end to the story of Eddie Kingston. But had spent the first two thirds of the match as the ace, and that put him in a position where the engine alone could take him over the finish line. He would have never been able to overcome Jon Moxley with heart and determination alone, but when he only had to call upon that for the final stretch, having shrugged off all the trappings of the heroes that came before him?

Eddie wrestled most of this match as a perfect, poised champion. He won it as Eddie Kingston at his rawest and most vulnerable. And here, at the end of this tournament and the end of this review, I don't have the words to explain to you how the combination of the two made it absolutely perfect. But it's ok, you were there too. They care, I care, you care. And here in the heart of winter, we're all less alone for that caring.

Swerve Strickland vs Dustin Rhodes

MD: There's theory and there's execution, right? On paper, the theory behind this one was rough. The match already had the deck stacked against it due to a number of things we know and some we can assume. Here's what we most likely know: Lee vs Strickland both had a monumental build and almost no build at all. Strickland had to keep his momentum from the Continental Classic. He was going to be over (as a face) with this specific crowd almost no matter what he did. There was a PPV that needed to be planned out fairly precisely time-wise. Dustin was a logical replacement as Lee's partner. His contract is up in a few months if you believe the rumors and there's no saying what happens then, but he's a guy always treated with respect and dignity and that brings certain skills to the table that almost no one else in the company has. There are things we don't know too. For instance, we have no idea when Lee might be able to go again. We have no idea if the cinder block gimmick and the overall layout were meant for the Lee match (it makes sense that they were, but we don't know!). There were other snakebit elements about the PPV, of course. So, do you stray from the gimmick? Do you just squash Dustin? Do you have Dustin fight on after the cinder block shot but get almost no offense in, just tiny hope spots? Do you accept that it'll mean more for Swerve to win after Dustin has a full comeback? Wrestling lore has it that you put over the babyface in a situation like this, but who's even the crowd favorite here? I don't know. I personally think that either you do the cinder block post-match or you do it and then have Dustin just get some amazing hope spots in but no real control. With the post-match possibility, maybe it logically forces the idea of a suspension for Swerve more than if he does it before the match and Dustin wants to fight on anyway? I don't know. Obviously they went the way they did with this one. So that's the theory. I don't think it was entirely sound.

But the execution? That made it work. Dustin is just that good and Swerve is just that ascendant. The world doesn't revolve around our personal preferences. Swerve isn't my guy. Some of his offense is just too floaty for me. Some of the tricked out move entrances don't fit a guy at his level in my eyes. Occasionally, the match layout gets wonky for my liking. But even though Swerve isn't my guy, I don't for a second deny the fact that he is The Guy right now, and that 2024 should be his year. He brings any number of things to the table, but the most important is the most important thing anyone can possibly bring, his presence in the moment. Some of that fluidity that throws me off is also often channeled into a positive. He's just floating through the air out there, moving with a sort of grace and ease that makes it seem like most of the rest of the roster is trudging through mud. That's not just in the moves he hits and takes either. It's in his expressions, his reactions, the way he seethes and roils and portrays elation. You believe that there's something boiling underneath the surface that emerges in the most dynamic, engrossing ways (not unlike Eddie, actually). He's a star and he shines and while I don't always appreciate what he chooses to do or how he chooses to do it, I do want to see the emotion he carries and the ripples he creates through the reality of the ring despite it all. When Dustin started to come back, Swerve had the most believable look of disgust or shock or resignation or exasperation. When Swerve cut him off with a quick shot to the leg, there was smugness and satisfaction and relief. In a world where everyone rushes to the next spot, he's getting better every week at letting the moment settle in and showing the world exactly how he feels about it. And if he cares so much, the crowd cares too. That's how wrestling works. It's the absolute antithesis of the irony that occasionally gets splattered over AEW and that wasn't on this show at all.

And if course, if you give Dustin a body part to sell, you've got a match. I'm not sure I've seen anything quite so sublime in pro wrestling this month than his seated shots while on the top rope, which really is saying a lot. He built his way back from defensive body motions to desperately placed strikes to finding a way to stand tall to his big signature spots, doling out the proper amount of selling to establish the lingering consequence at each point. And then, after all that crawling and climbing back to fighting strength and getting a semblance of revenge, Swerve cut him off with the tiniest shot to the leg. So much accomplished with so little. Between circumstance, expectation, and the decision to lead with the cinder block (which might have worked perfectly in cutting Lee down to size but far less so here given hierarchy and more comparable size), this was an impossible situation. But Dustin, with all of his skills and savvy, and Swerve, so tremendous at bringing emotion to the forefront at this point in time, somehow found a way to make the impossible work.

Adam Cole

MD: I don't do this often, but what's the point of writing on a blog if you can't make use of the long form to make an open letter to the new lead heel. Look, Cole comes off like a nice guy, the nicest. I thought for certain some of the dissonance with his offense and actual personality would have been better served with him as a babyface, and we barely got to see whether it would or not given the injury (and some of his early year programs), but he's a heel again. He's not just any heel but the unveiled mastermind, the man in the shadows, the archvillain who took away the one thing the AEW audience cares about the most, friendship. He's the guy who built up Max to make him seem like he might be better, like there might be something good in this world, like there might be hope even for scumbags, and then tore it all away. He has a chance to be an actual booed, hated heel. That means, however, no storytime with Adam Cole, no Boom, no Baybee. It means denying the fans all of these things that they want. Cole claims that he's such a good heel that he can give the fans all of these things and then, once the bell rings, get them to hate him anyway. I've always had my doubts about that in practice, just from the evidence of my own two eyes. But if he really wants this to work, all of that stuff needs to go into the closet. When he brings it back in a year, imagine how much more over it'll be for its absence. MJF spent his entire year experimenting, trying new and different things, trying to pull back elements from how wrestling used to be and to push them forward to how wrestling might be. Not everything hit, but it sure as hell wasn't for lack of trying, and those things that did hit are things that might make a huge difference in the years to come. Now it's Cole's turn. He can be the same old cool heel, get mixed reactions, have the fans chanting along, lean on all of the old crutches, or he can take this opportunity, the biggest heel move possible in a company like AEW and really run with it, really get into the hearts and minds of the fanbase and figure out how to do something new to restore that old feeling of animosity. I hope he's up for the challenge.