AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/19 - 8/25 Part 4

AEW All In 8/25/24

Darby Allin vs Jack Perry (Coffin Match)

MD: I've noted this before but one thing I like about Darby being part of the 5 is that he ends up in more matches which, on paper, I don't necessarily want to see and that I almost certainly don't want to write about. This broadens my horizons a bit. It forces me out of my comfort zone. It's good for me. On top of that, he's a miracle worker, right? I've written about almost 70 Darby matches as part of this project and they've almost all been very good, and a number of them probably shouldn't have been (on paper).

This one should have had a fighting chance. I was never a fan of babyface tag team Perry. I imagine we have very different views on what makes for good tag team wrestling, most acutely when it comes how early in the match things should break down and the value of structure over well... cool stuff that pops the crowd. We haven't had a ton of chances to see heel Perry, but I will say that I think he did well enough against Hook in their two matches last year, including the All In one. I think there's something to him getting heat by just laying around with a shit eating grin during the TNT title ladder match too.

Sometimes his stuff seems uniquely orchestrated in a way that should take you out of the match, a bit too focused on "clever moments," maybe. Here it was during the glass pouring exactly as they went to a wide cut and it did take me a little out of the moment, but then he has the cover of egotism and the Elite angle. You believe that Jack Perry the character, knowing he'd set up the glass under the ring in a bag and planned to pour it, would tell the producers that when he had a chance to use it, they should do certain things with the camera. If anything, they should lean into that more overtly, make it clear that he's using his power like that. Here, it backfired on him. He was the one who went into the glass and maybe him caring so much about the moment getting caught on camera could have been part of that. It's okay for a heel to be full of himself and self-centered and desperately crave attention. He's a heel! In this case maybe we aren't supposed to think "Oh yeah, he has a point," but instead think he's full of shit and ideally people will want to see him get his head kicked in. If they try to play it with shades of grey though, it'll probably end up the worst of both worlds.

So the balance maybe felt a little bit off when it came to the big moments and how they were milked on this, but even then, Darby, in and of himself, in an environment where he could come in with tacks glued to his face, where he could crash in burn against the coffin, where he could get his hands tied up and still fight from underneath like that, well... it still should have worked. Watching it the first time it seemed almost too maximalist (everything was big, absolutely nothing was small) and too minimalist (there wasn't enough overall, including enough reactions; they moved from one giant thing to the next without anything getting to resonate), even at the same time.

There are always things that we can't know as viewers (reviewers/critics/fans/consumers, whatever you want to call it). We primarily engage with the text as it is presented to us, especially when it comes to current wrestling. Sometimes with older matches, you can carry a bunch of known context with you as well and that gives you different entry points into the matches. I'm pretty sure it was the Observer (Radio) that reported due to the firm ending time for the show, Darby vs Perry got rushed and could only go around ten minutes. No idea if this is accurate or how many more minutes they would have gotten if things had gone as planned. It does, however, offer a very feasible explanation for the weird feel of the match and why it didn't work relative to almost every other Darby match and every other Darby Coffin match. There is only so much improvisation one can do in a match with so many moving parts (tacks, chairs, the coffin, glass, the tape, the belt, and, you know, Sting). Certainly, a match with three more minutes of Darby trying to fight from underneath with his hands tied would have been far more interesting. Do I think if it was Darby in there with Christian things might have gone better? Maybe. But the match also more or less served its purpose, to give the crowd a few big memorable moments before the emotional roller coaster of the main event, to keep heat on Perry especially if he was to challenge for the world title at All Out, to provide the thrill of Sting saving the day.

None of that means I'm going to give the match a pass. As a match, it's not magically better because of mitigating factors. But it does mean I might give the wrestlers a bit of a pass. I'm not necessarily going to hold this against Perry too much (he has another chance against Danielson in a week). I'm not going to see Darby as any less of a miracle worker overall. And I'm certainly not going to write any differently moving forward. There are always going to be things I can't know. That doesn't mean I can't joust with the text as provided and put down my thoughts to the best of my ability. It doesn't make it a less worthwhile endeavor to try to make sense of it all. If new information comes to light, I'll readjust my opinions accordingly. Save for many the most dogmatic and driven of the listmakers, most of us aren't searching for some sort of objective truth. Our hands will always be a little tied as we're sitting on the outside looking in and discussing an artform veiled in secrecy and impossible, incomplete knowledge, but with the right mix of confidence and humility, we can make those leaps of faith just as well as Darby.