Oh God, Uncle Big Show is telling his waffle story again.
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Best: Honor Don’t Pay the Bills
While I’m not as down on Seth Rollins’ mic skills as some, he’s been turning out some pretty uninspired stuff lately. Most recent Rollins promos have been, nasally delivery aside, indistinguishable from Randy Orton promos, which is disappointing, because Rollins really is better than that. Smackdown’s opening segment was the guy showing what he’s capable of.
Rollins gleefully owning up to the fact that he sold out is something we should see more from him. Too often he huffs and puffs and looks angry when he’s accused of being in The Authority’s pocket, but he should be too smart to care. A scumbag and proud of it. Also, he’s not wrong when he says most folks would sell out our brothers, parents and grandparents under the right circumstances, although he was probably going a bit far when he said we’d sell out our dogs. I’m pretty sure it isn’t possible to sell out a creature who doesn’t understand the concept of betrayal anyways.
Best: A One Track Match
Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler was pretty much a one note match. Basically the whole thing revolved around Rollins obsessively trying to hit a turnbuckle powerbomb and Ziggler reversing time and time again. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – sometimes the opener of Smackdown doesn’t have to be a multifaceted epic, y’know? Finally, after a few tries Rollins got the corner powerbomb, then immediately hit the curb stomp and won. It doesn’t lend itself to a lot of dissection and commentary, but it was a nice clean, simple match.
Sorry Dean, they’re saving the face removal spots for the main event.
Worst: Dean Ambrose Wants to F*ck Seth Rollins’ Corpse
So, Dean Ambrose came out after the match and the part of his brain that comes up with tough guy threats kinda fell off the ol’ hamster wheel.
Not only is Ambrose going to tear Rollins’ face off, but he wants to stick one boot down his throat and the other up his ass. At the same time? Those are some…uncomfortably penetrative threats. Then he said he was going to do something to Rollins he can’t even say on TV. Considering he just said he’s going to remove Rollins’ face and double-penetrate him with his feet, I’d rather not speculate on what Ambrose considers too edgy for TV. Maybe just stick to “I’m going to punch and kick you a lot and throw you into a chain-link fence”. Keep it honest.
Worst: The Two-Minute AJ Special
I’m finding it difficult to care about AJ matches anymore. They’re all two-minutes or less of sloppy kicking and weird floppy bumping, then AJ gets the Black Widow outta nowhere and wins. They treat AJ like she’s a Total Divas f*ck-up who can’t be trusted to go for more than 90-seconds without losing the plot, and I’m not sure why. Hell, no-hopers like Cameron and Eva Marie regularly do longer matches than AJ. Do they think AJ being a tiny person means she can only wrestle tiny matches? Speaking of which, they need to stop putting poor AJ in the ring with lanky-ass Alicia Fox…
Additional Worst for the announcers bothering Paige about having a crush on JBL whenever she’s on guest-commentary like a bunch of creepy uncles. Paige guest-commentary spots are the ultimate argument for promoting Renee Young to the main roster commentary team, if only to act as a firewall for the grossness.
Worst: Sheamoose
I think I may have turned on the Usos. As I’ll discuss in the next section, they’re not blowing my hair back in the ring these days, and their backstage segments are just, man, I dunno. I think WWE noticed the Usos have sort of the same cadence as the Rock, so they’re trying to give them Rock-esque material and it’s just not working. Tonight they kept calling Sheamus “Sheamoose” and then started going on about how much they liked 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito vehicle Twins, and it was just weird and stupid. Also, as mentioned, Sheamus was there, which never helps a backstage segment.
Worst: I Can’t Watch This Any More
I’m sorry, I can’t. The Usos vs. Gold and Stardust is always good, but my brain just goes into power-saving mode when they wrestle now, and adding The Miz and Sheamus to the mix doesn’t exactly freshen things up. And there was some good stuff in this match! Goldust in particular was cookin’ with a rad spinebuster early on and a nice near fall off a powerslam closer to the end. But it doesn’t matter. At his point Goldust could bust out a Red Arrow on an Uso and I wouldn’t particularly care.
That said, I can’t move onto the next segment without giving Damien Sandow at least a supplemental Best. The match was a bit too frantic to watch him as closely as I’d like, but I definitely did catch him standing there, holding an invisible top rope whenever Miz was waiting on the apron. Guys, if you want to just skip any further Usos/Dusts matches and just give Sandow 10-minutes of free-form improvisational time on each show, I’d be more than okay with that.
Best: The Giant Dads
They’re taking way too long to get to the fireworks factory with this Big Show/Mark Henry thing. I’ve been on tenterhooks for weeks now waiting for Mark Henry to World’s Strongest Slam Show, but I suppose the turn will be a bit more meaningful if we spend more time establishing the friendship, and admittedly I’m pretty okay watching these two giant men chum around in their giant dad pants. Big Show fawning over how great Henry smells (I shower) and then launching into slightly embarrassing Waffle House vandalism stories was wonderfully cringe-worthy. Big Show’s totally that guy who overcompensates when he senses a friendship is going bad and just makes things worse. We’ve all known somebody like that. Hell, most of us have been somebody like that from time to time.
So yeah, I’m certainly not going to Worst WWE doing carefully built, character-based storytelling, but on the other hand, I’m giving his storyline until Hell in a Cell – if nothing happens by then, I’m done-zo.
Oh, and considering you were born around the same time as the Ford Pinto came out, I’m not sure I’d brag that much about having an American-made spine, Big Show.
Renee just realized what she’s hitched her career to.
Worst: The Bitch Match
I didn’t know until I watched Smackdown (and I hope most of you have enough going on in your lives that you didn’t either) but apparently Nikki Bella challenged Brie to PPV “Loser Has To Be The Winner’s Bitch” match after Raw. Yeah. Yup. That’s right. I mean, I suppose a Bella being another Bella’s bitch holds some, uh, interesting possibilities, but WWE can’t/won’t actually explore them. They just get a charge out of having pretty girls say words that have been allowed on network TV since the mid-70s.
Oh, and Nikki Bella, the girl with a perfectly flat, action figure stomach, is now fat. A WWE face said it, so it’s true and Jerry Lawler will be repeating it soon. God-dammit.
Best: NIKKI vs. Naomi
This match wasn’t anything special – Nikki didn’t get to bust out her hossy clothesline and Naomi got a near fall off the Rear View, so I probably should be Worsting this. Still, Nikki Bella is now fat, so the Nikki/Naomi/Bayley WWE booty Renaissance may soon be coming an end, so I’m going to enjoy this while I can. Hell, I may even give a temporary pass to ass-based offense.
Best: Keystone Kane
I wasn’t looking forward to Ambrose vs. Kane at all, but it was surprisingly decent, probably because Kane is pretty much a slapstick figure now. This entire match was Kane bumbling around like a boob, falling over the ropes at every opportunity and having every serious attempt at offense thwarted. If the Vaudevillians ever make it to the main roster, they desperately need to get Kane an old-timey cop uniform and police wagon.
And hey, it wasn’t just Kane taking pratfalls. The finish of the match saw Ambrose go for his ridiculously overused rebound clothesline and get pulled out of the ring by Rollins. Seeing that dumb clothesline get interrupted was almost as satisfying as a Randy Orton hanging clothesline reversal. Maybe I shouldn’t be cheering for everyone being made to look sort of dumb, but whatevs – you find your entertainment where you can while watching Smackdown.
