Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live: Sarah Logan cut three promo shards that established her as the new Stone Cold Steve Austin, if Austin had gone to the dentist before every show for a root canal and was high as balls every time he talked.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live for December 12, 2017.
Worst: Not Showing The Fashion Files On TV
There’s a lot of stuff to complain about this week — brace yourselves, The Internet, this is the first time anyone’s complained about WWE’s product — but the most heinous act from Smackdown had to be advertising via WWE.com that Breezango was going to pay tribute to their fallen brothers The Ascension on a “Very Special Episode of the Fashion Files,” only to show just the very end of the segment with the Ascension there like nothing happened. Then they were like, “heh, go on the Internet to watch the rest of it!” Hey guys, how about use your two hours of programming to show us this four minutes of good stuff instead of the hour-56 of everything else?
Thanks to Smackdown deciding not to show the good part of Smackdown, we missed quotes like “they weren’t a GOOD tag team, but they were a tag team,” and Viktor explaining that The Wasteland is full of “sadness and poisonous gas.” We also missed the great “face the Bludgeon Brothers” [pause] “no!” into credits gag.
But hey, at least we got two straight disqualifications to open the show! AND a Singh Brothers promo!
Best: Singh A Sad Song
Smackdown clearly has no more material for this AJ Styles vs. Jinder Mahal story, as they’ve already done an inexplicably long title run for a jobber to set up an appearance in India, did a title change right before that appearance to make the whole thing feel like a waste of time, had Jinder lose to Triple H in his India match and spent several weeks having AJ trounce the Singhs in various forms. What’s left?
What’s left is, apparently, the Singh Brothers trying to convince Styles that they’re done with Mahal and want to be in his corner at Clash of Champions, the most obvious attempt at a swerve in modern wrestling history. These guys make Big Show’s turns look like Hogan joining the nWo. The good news is that Styles’ response is, “social media exists,” and he just punches them in the face about it. I didn’t love the segment, but I’m giving Styles having a brain in his head a Best. I also like that he presented the evidence that they were full of shit before throwing hands at them, and really only did so because he knew the Jinder Mahal attack was coming.
They get some revenge on My Guest At This Time™ later when it doesn’t matter as much, and the highlight is 100% Jinder’s accidental Christmas shirt.
Worst: The Two Straight Disqualifications
Last week, Dolph Ziggler caused a disqualification in Bobby Roode’s match with Baron Corbin to beat up both men. This week, Bobby Roode causes a disqualification in Dolph Ziggler’s match with Baron Corbin to beat up both men. You know Road Dogg is somewhere mad at himself that he timed it wrong, and can’t do “Baron Corbin causes a disqualification in Bobby Roode’s match with Dolph Ziggler to beat up both men” before Clash of Champions.
I know the “Smackdown watches what Absolution does on Raw and then does a worse version of it with the Riott Squadd on Tuesday” talking point isn’t getting fresher, but it’s also not going away.
So on Raw, Absolution showed up to attack the best singles competitor in the division, Asuka, 3-on-1. They were about to put her away when the Raw women’s division showed up to make the save.
On Smackdown, it seems like it’s going to go another way. Rubyy Riott is facing Charlotte Flair with Natalya on color commentary. Putting Natalya on commentary is like setting a pair of scissors on fire and telling a little kid to run with them, but whatever. Natalya interferes, the match gets thrown out, and it turns into — surprise! — the Riott Squad attacking the best singles competitor in the division 3-on-1. Naomi returns to make the save, and again you’re like, “okay, at least it’s a little different,” and then as the Squad’s trying to escape the rest of the division shows up to run them off. So it was what happened on Raw with like, extra steps.
Anyway, check out this exclusive clip of Absolution and the Riott Squad meeting at the Royal Rumble.
Best: Chikara On Chikara Violence
In what ended up being maybe the most generation-spanning Chikara match in WWE television history, The Bludgies squashed Colin Delaney, of WWE ECW fame, and Juan Francisco de Coronado, current Chikara Grand Champion. Don’t let “Grand Champion” fool you, he is absolutely half the size of one of Harper’s legs.
Here’s exclusive footage of Quack watching the his Grand Champion not only get squashed, not only be the worst jobber of a two-jobber team, but also have the announce team make fun of him for letting out a high-pitched scream when he got slammed:
Although honestly, who knows? Maybe Triple H, Road Dogg and Billy Gunn are winning next year’s King of Trios.
THE USOS ARE NOT ROMAN REIGNS, Or, “Aiden English Has Pinned The Tag Team Champions!”
At this point I couldn’t say something new about the “challenger has pinned the champion!” trope if you held a gun to my head, so I want to take a minute to say excuse me, WWE, but the Usos are not Roman Reigns. I’m okay with the … I guess “friendlier” tone they’ve been taking over the past few weeks, but having them show up as Usos Classic in Day One Ish costumes to cut a bad promo about how Aiden English needs a “new toupee” for Christmas is the dirt worst. Just the dirt-ass worst. Do not take the precious Usos from me, WWE. They are not here to talk about Jack and the Beanstalk.
On the positive side of things … Rusev won? Oh, and we got a few more days of the 12 Days Of Rusev, which I hope will be performed in its entirety on the Clash of Champions kickoff. Rusev and Lana and Larry-Steve and maybe Dog Ziggler under a Christmas tree while Aiden English sings about Rusev Day is at least infinity better than a Zack Ryder match.
Best: I Want A Yep Movement Shirt
Before I fuss about the rest of this, I want a Yep Movement shirt so badly. Almost as badly as I wanted Sign Guy to get in the ring to “occupy Smackdown” only to get powerbombed into the ring apron.
So.
WWE does this really unfortunate thing sometimes where they decide the moral of their story is, “it’s actually GOOD to be controlled by an evil boss.” Blame it on Capitalism or something, I dunno. Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn show up to protest Shane McMahon’s weird power trip and literally NOBODY shows up to help the out. And yeah, the idea is that they’re supposed to be too obnoxious to make friends or whatever and they betrayed the Smackdown roster at Survivor Series, but the major point seems to be not that, but “what Shane McMahon is doing to punish you all is fine. This is how a boss should react to employees he doesn’t like.” And a lot of that is the same problem I talked about last week, where a heel does something and a face gets revenge, and then a face keeps getting revenge over and over and justifying it, and it being okay because people like him. We confuse “truth” with “popularity.”
Having Daniel Bryan show up to chastise them about it felt especially iffy, but it wasn’t all the way terrible for me until Nakamura vs. Owens. During the match, Byron Saxton goes from “obnoxious but mostly inoffensive punching bag” to “THE MOST UNLIKABLE CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE COMPANY” with an absolutely bizarre, unexplained, ENDLESS ragging on Daniel Bryan and the insistence that whatever his boss says is right is right because he’s an employee, and employees are supposed to blindly listen to their boss no matter what. It’s like Vince McMahon had an out of body experience and possessed him for a match. Add to that his idea that nothing that happened before WWE or outside of a WWE show “matters” or should be remembered and you’ve got a breakneck combination of annoying Michael Cole shout-banter and deep, frightening soullessness.
Just an awful, awful episode, and I’m really sorry if that just comes across as me “not liking the product.” I don’t like Smackdown right now, but I want to. I want this to be better, and I’m worried that nobody’s noticing that they’re doing the bare minimum to get by. Fingers crossed for Clash of Champions, and for WrestleMania season to right the ship a little.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
The Real Birdman
Sounds like there’s still some animosity between Saxton & Byron from NXT Season 4
Really upset Gable isn’t watching this match sitting backwards in a chair out-dorking Jason Jordan
LUNI_TUNZ
“I have a phenomenal memory, I don’t care what they say about CTE.”
Endy_Mion
Randy calling somebody self-entitled. It’d be hilarious if Nak just said, “I don’t agree with his sentiment, we just both like kicking dudes in the head”
Clay Quartermain
Bonus points if Mojo brings Eve Torres to the preshow
Amaterasu’s Son
The sound guy is still recovering from the shock of playing Dolph’s music and messed up on Daniel’s.
Mr. Bliss
Singh bros: “we have to park behind his house while he puts his car in his modern day ma-garage-a!”
Dave M J
DANIEL BRYAN HATES KENTUCKY GAME MEAT for sign of the year!
Bobby Roode just shortened a Dolph Ziggler match.
Who said he doesn’t work as a babyface?
That’s it for this week’s show. There’s a pay-per-view this weekend, somehow!
The GM situation is so weird. Daniel Bryan trusts Shane McMahon, but made himself the second special guest referee. That led to WWE’s announce team going WAY TOO HARD on the “Daniel Bryan’s gonna SCREW Shane McMahon” talking point, so what, now the finish is either Shane turning and joining Owens and Zayn in the most WCW-ass swerve ever, or I guess Orton turning on Nakamura for some reason and Bryan having to count that pin? Is there an outcome that actually makes the show better, other than Bryan, Zayn and Owens forming a group so good at sports entertainment and great at wrestling that the crowd turns them face, and Shane reforms the Corporation and they retcon it so we’re supposed to have been booing Shane all this time? What else is there?
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