AEW Five Fingers of Death 3/16 - 3/122

AEW Dynamite 3/18/26

Darby Allin vs Gabe Kidd [Coffin Match]

MD: Darby Allin coffin matches are bulletproof, right?

Maybe not.

There was a real booker's dilemma here. Kidd is a guy that they want to push over time. He's the apparent centerpiece of the new heel stable, a pretty dynamic and over the top persona, the kind of wrestler that maybe you can market. 

Darby, on the other hand, after getting mobbed and mogged by the Dogs for the last month or two, is ready to move on. He's not just ready to move on but to be pushed back into the world title scene. The Coffin Match is his match. Theoretically, it makes things easier since you don't need a pinfall or submission. It's perfect for a heel to slip on a banana peel and get shut in.

Finally, AEW prides itself on fostering the wrestlers' creativity and that is honestly wonderful in a processed, overly produced top-down world of pro wrestling. It doesn't always work out and it can lead to excess and bloat, but when you sum it all out, this sort of creative freedom is ultimately a good thing.

So where did that get things here? This time, Darby ambushed Kidd outside the arena. Every else was banned so he didn't have to worry about numbers, and he used his pluck and canniness to ether Kidd, toss him in the truck of a car, and immediately crash it. While both would be battered, Darby was more prepared and accustomed to that sort of insanity and he had the advantage. He pressed that advantage by carting Kidd into the arena and trying to put a straightjacket on him. He got most of the way there, limiting his motion. Kidd fought back, but got swept under again, allowing Darby to cinch the straightjacket, giving him even more of an advantage. Kidd, with no arms, had a last burst of offense anyway, and then, even after surviving two Coffin Drops, was so tough that needed to be crashed into by Darby at full speed to go into the Coffin. 

On paper, it checks boxes, right? Darby gets to be creative and do a big stunt that people will remember, one that gives some poetic closure to the Dogs' out of ring ambushes. The character of Darby is shown to be clever and a world-beater. Kidd is doubly protected, both for the car crash and then the straightjacket. Maybe triply so for all that he survives. Darby moves on with a definitive win, ending the feud, and goes into the main event scene.

So where does this go wrong?

Let's start with the car crash. They noted that cameras were on the scene. Maybe not the best rationale but better than some omnipotent outside force. This was supposed to be live though. Darby ambushing Kidd by where he parked a beat up car, Darby using the ether rag, Darby stuffing him in the trunk. All plausible enough. Darby setting things up so that there was a trash pile right in front of the car that would cause a perfect flip? I mean, he's Darby, maybe? Likewise that Kidd would be more hurt by Darby. Hell, maybe Darby even wore a seatbelt. Seatbelts save lives. 

Maybe that's me giving all of this a lot of grace, but I've seen some crazy things out of Darby over the last few years. 

But those picture perfect camera shots? A bridge too far. I buy that a camera and production crew used to filming live wrestling would be able to cut from one shot to another relatively quickly. But that's around ringside in a controlled environment. Here, in the midst of what was supposed to be the insane antics of two madmen, some of those cuts were just too perfect, whether it was the flip, the aftermath, Kidd falling out of the trunk. You can do something like this if you really feel the need to, but you have to make it plausible, which they did well enough, and then make sure it's not so polished that it seems like it's just part of the show. Here, it absolutely did.

Which leads me to the straightjacket. In principle, it's a fun idea. Darby's a trickster, to a degree, maybe not as much so as Orange Cassidy, but he's a trickster nonetheless. He's an underdog. He's resilient and resourceful. He's done arts and crafts before to create weapons of war. Kidd had an obvious physical advantage. This helped to level the scales. 

Plus I love the idea of wrestling around limitations. The coolest part of the match wasn't the car crash (Sorry), but after Kidd was fully locked in the straightjacket when he kicked the ref into the ropes to stumble Darby and somehow hit a running power slam with no arms. Just like endless, boundless, borderless creativity has its charms, so does creativity within firm limits, even limits that wrestlers don't have to usually deal with. And this created a sense of the real. He really couldn't move his arms. That draws you in immediately.

The problem was, maybe, that Kidd isn't the guy I was supposed root for here, and this wasn't just Darby being clever and resourceful. It was Darby laying a trap on top of a trap on top of a trap. This isn't Home Alone. There's a size disadvantage, but it's one thing to set up a rake for your opponent to step on; it's another to ether him and put him in a trunk for a car crash. There's a different power dynamic there. This was partially mitigated by the first half of the match where Kidd was slowed down but had his hands still free, and this was leaning on a lot of bad actions that Kidd and his cronies had done up until this point, making this more of a revenge fantasy against bullies, but by the end of it, you were maybe left wondering just who the real bully in this situation was. 

Again, there's an interesting story there that could possible be told, but it's not the one that they were telling and not the one that will propel Darby back into the main event scene. We're used to the notion of a babyface having to fight back against the odds, and wrestling is set up so that what matters the most is what's happening in the moment. Instead, Kidd had the deck stacked against him from the get go, and he came off as an almost valiant madman who refused to quit in the face of adversity, which is, in so many ways, Darby's own deal. 

Even on the finish, it was just too much. Kidd had made his last burst after being helpless. Just let him get put away with the two Coffin Drops. Don't have him fight back onto his feet after that. It protects him just a little more, maybe, but it doesn't necessarily protect him as a heel. That's borderline heroic stuff in today's pro wrestling. It's one thing for the monster to rise up one last time, a boss' final form, before the hero finally slays him. That doesn't work if the monster's in a straightjacket and is an easy target. It's a headshot on a helpless opponent. 

You can't fault them for what they went through, how they put their bodies on the line, how hard they worked, and you also have to be sympathetic to the way this was laid out, because on paper, it did check certain boxes. In reality, however, this one crashed off course (and maybe did a flip in mid air along the way).