Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown: Nothing! The show aired on Thanksgiving night, which meant we were off and missed it. If you didn’t watch — and according to the ratings, not many of you did — you missed Heath Slater revealing that he has a signature dish, Dean Ambrose becoming #1 contender to the Intercontinental Championship, and Xavier Woods dressed up as the Gobbledy Gooker. Eh, maybe I should’ve worked on Thanksgiving.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown for December 3, 2015.
Best: Making Fun Of Roman Reigns’ Revolving Door Of T-Shirt Slogans
Okay, so this episode of Smackdown is maybe the most Smackdown thing you’ve ever seen: it opens with a heel faction teaming with a different heel faction to announce that a THIRD heel faction has put them in a series of matches aimed at stacking the odds against one dude. That’s Roman Reigns, if you hadn’t guessed. If Dean Ambrose and The Usos can defeat The New Day in a 6-man tag team match, they’ll be Roman’s partners in the main event. If not, Roman will have to go it alone against the entire League of Nations, which, if you’ll recall, features both the WWE World Heavyweight and United States Champions.
I could complain about this set up again — How do these situations make anyone seem like a threat? Why is Roman going up against and beating four guys including two champions in a new, top heel stable a day after they formed? — but you’re sick of reading that, aren’t you? It’s Smackdown. At some point I have to accept that this version of the show is like a Half Raw. Right now even Raw is struggling with developing characters, maintaining consistent storylines and making new stars, so Smackdown’s like … half of that. It’s the work Raw’s done, sent through another cycle. It’s just “extra wrestling.” If you start thinking of it like a really long episode of Main Event, it’s a little better. Don’t go into it expecting story progression or something you’ll be excited to tell your friends about.
That said, I enjoyed The New Day (surprise) making fun of Roman being “one versus all,” because that guy legit has 1-3 new t-shirts out every week. He’s the Juggernaut! He’s the Big Dog! He’s the Epitome of Power! He’s the Powerhouse of the Shield! He’s mitochondria! He hits hard, hits often! He’s one versus all! He’s in the Roman Empire! He spares no one and spears everyone! He brings the fight! Believe that! If WWE put as much effort into writing as they do into Roman Reigns t-shirt production, they’d be Breaking Bad. Roman Reigns: BREAKING BAD. Somebody print that!
Best/Worst: Can We Re-Do This Same Match At Full Sail?
The canned noise is always really bad on Smackdown — listen to those boos for Sheamus during the opening segment — but it’s never as noticeable as when two wrestlers are having a good match, the crowd is visibly unmoved and you HEAR them going nuts. That was Neville vs. Tyler Breeze. It wasn’t the best match I’ve seen from them, but it was a good one, and the crowd couldn’t care less. I don’t know if it was a response to the opening having all the healthy heels yelling at all the healthy faces or what, but they just weren’t into it.
On the plus side, Dolph Ziggler was kinda great on commentary. He’s got a good head for it, and managed to get Neville and Breeze (or at least Neville) over between the announce team’s stories of “talking to whoever earlier.” They’re still balls-deep in I TALKED TO SUMMER RAE EARLIER IN THE DAY when the wrestlers are going home. I dunno. I think they bring out these shallow characters every few months just to give King a new excuse to use every “arrogant person” joke he’s ever heard. Also on the plus side, Breeze got a win! And they called his Unprettier an Unprettier, which is an improvement from “ballgame” or “what an impact” or whatever they’d been calling it.
The other plus is the backstage followup, wherein The Miz shows up out of the blue and decides he wants Neville as his new protege. I was hoping they’d get Brad Maddox in that spot, but you know. Miz drops the “I took Daniel Bryan under my wing and he main-evented WrestleMania just like I did,” which is true, and I hope they expound on that. Miz is such a natural heat magnet that anybody he takes under his wing turns into a massive babyface, then (more often than not) fizzles and dies when they disassociate from him. Bryan was a special case because he’s Daniel Bryan, but think about Alex Riley. Riley was over HUGE for a couple of weeks, and then nothing. Think about Damien Sandow. Sandow was basically everyone’s favorite wrestler and the highlight of the show for months, and then the payoff to the angle stalled, and the breakup was D.O.A. Riley and Sandow would KILL to get that Miz apprentice spot back.
I’m interested to see what they can do with Neville in that spot, because I think (or at least hope) that he’d be closer to Bryan than Riley. Plus, maybe we can get Neville out of that Unbreakable poncho and into something that guarantees him upward momentum. And hey, if it helps get the Miz something besides “I talk to people in the ring sometimes,” that’s gravy.
Worst: Brie Bella Talking
No, Brie, the word “goalbowl” is not in the dictionary.
Best: Becky Lynch As The Fulcrum Of A Story
I’m not down with a lot of the reasoning behind it, but Becky Lynch getting a spotlight and getting to be the point of a story is a nice change of pace. I honestly think she’s only had one, during the build for the match against Sasha Banks, and that was just “Becky’s actually really good, we’ve just been treading water with her.” The Prince Devitt videos are like, her second best story. It’s so easy to get a crowd to love her, you just have to do something with her. You can’t have her be the lady in the background in the weird goggles.
As for the story itself … yeah, I don’t know. Charlotte cheated Becky out of a match for no real reason after not wanting to have the match at all, which makes her at best a terrible friend. This week, she can’t wait an additional five seconds for Brie Bella to tap out to rush the ring and beat her up, which causes her to pull Brie OUT of a submission and cause a disqualification. Paige is lurking in the background with valid points, but she was just making fun of a dead kid so she’s about as heel as it gets. So Becky’s basically trying to find a place for herself on a show full of jerks? Is that the story? I can get behind that, if it ends with Becky being a hero and not just getting ganged up on by everyone else like the other “rational lady vs. The Divas Division” stories have ended.
Best: New, Day Wins
It’d be very easy to make the “One Versus All” story of the night even more convoluted by having Dean Ambrose and the Usos lose via distraction or cheating, but they didn’t, and that makes me happy. Both teams wrestled a competitive match, and New Day just got lucky with the timing and execution of the big end-of-match sprint. Also known as “everybody run in and do everything.”
I also really liked that it made sense psychologically, with Jimmy Uso hopping down onto the apron and tweaking the knee he injured on Monday night. It makes the shows seem like they relate to each other, and like they aren’t these free-floating entities connected by recap videos. He comes down hard on the knee, struggles to get back into the ring, and Kofi Kingston manages to Trouble in Paradise him in the leg to take him out. He even gets his foot tangled in the ropes, which didn’t seem intentional but ended up being a nice touch. Woods just runs him over with a Shining Wizard (basically) and gets the pin. No tights, no Sheamus running out and saying HEY USOS LOOK AT ME, just the heel team prevailing by being opportunistic and well-oiled.
Also this sets up Roman vs. four guys in the main event, which he’ll totally lose! Right?
Best: R-un
Before the Bray Wyatt/D-Von Dudley match, the Wyatt Family BLEARP graphic summons R-Truth. I don’t know why. It’s a continuation of him coming out and assuming he’s part of matches he isn’t, I guess, and the announce team explains that he “took a wrong turn.” He waves to the crowd, and a second BLEARP erases him from existence. My theory is that that wasn’t current R-Truth, it was Truth from another point in time. Future, past, he’s looked exactly like that for like 10 years, so it could be anything. Maybe that Truth thought it was a daydream.
(I don’t want them to do the Truth joke too much and spoil the fun of it happening, but damn if I don’t enjoy that man not understanding how wrestling etiquette works and accidentally finding himself in other peoples’ gimmicks and situations. I want to see him come up through the stage in Gangrel’s fire hole.)
Best: The Match Bray Wyatt Should’ve Had When He Had The Undertaker’s Powers
Remember when Bray Wyatt kidnapped Kane and the Undertaker and claimed to have absorbed their powers by harvesting their souls? It happened like a month ago, so if you don’t remember it you’re in the target demographic. Regardless, the payoff to that was Bray being able to cause lightning pyro but not changing at all in the ring, which made everything seem flat.
Here, he absolutely SQUASHES D-Von Dudley. And yeah, it’s D-Von Dudley, but he still beats him clean in like a minute with Sister Abigail. That’s what the “powerful” Wyatt should’ve done for a few weeks before whatever versions of Kane and Undertaker remained emerged. He should’ve been himself, but super-powered, and able to at least instantly Critical you with his big moves. You don’t have to have him killing Cena or anything, but if half of a tag team steps in his way, he should be able to nod in their direction and do max damage.
The post match is fun, too, with Wyatt goading Tommy Dreamer and Bubba Dudley into the ring for a 3-on-1 Family attack. Wyatt bails, which makes it even better, and eventually Strowman starts breaking the kendo sticks and the faces are f*cked. Dreamer ends up going through a table, and that’s when Wyatt pops back in to gloat. He stacks them up in a pile and poses on them — a trail of dead bodies is what “follow the buzzards” is supposed to mean, after all — and the only thing missing is him being able to set them on fire via special effects cues.
Worst: What The Hell Even Is This, Or
Best: Let’s Look For The Positives In The Smackdowniest Main Event
Positives:
1. Having a team gives King Barrett something to do.
2. Alberto Del Rio doesn’t have to be in MexAmerica anymore.
3. Roman didn’t just beat them all up and instantly no-sell everything, he won via a weird ref call and a desperate, last-minute count-out.
Those things are all good.
On the negative side, I’ve watched this a couple of times and I’m still not sure why it was booked. You’ve got a member of a 4-man team in a 4-on-1 handicap match getting sent to the back for cheating, which is especially weird considering it’s the most basic kind of tag cheating. It’s not like he ran into the ring with a chair and got his team disqualified, he just grabbed the man’s legs. Worst case, that’s a thing where the referee goes HEY STOP THAT and gets distracted for something else. If that’s enough to send the man to the back, isn’t that enough for a DQ? How many instances of tag teams losing members like this have there even been? It’s so unorthodox. It’s like the Rob Van Dam’s feet of ref calls.
You’ve also got a man winning a match against a tag team via count-out, which is such an awkward thing to do. I mean, I guess you only have to have the legal man for the team on the outside past a 10-count, but again, does this ever happen? The rarity of all this tricks my brain into thinking the match was fresh and creative, but the other parts of my brain are like, “but that doesn’t work.” I can’t decide where I fall on it. It was different? That’s … good?
Ah well, King Barrett managed to be so bad at his job he lost a tag team match before the other guys in his team did, so that’s something.
