Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown: An episode you’ve seen before.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live for February 13, 2018.
Worst: It’s Gonna Be A Tag Team Match [Checks Notes] Series Of Singles Matches, Playa!
Writing about Smackdown makes me feel like I’m Alantutorial. It’s a work of metafiction. Like, I start banging on the table screaming, “I WROTE A SMACKDOWN COLUMN,” and UPROXX slides a dollar under the door.
Over the past several (several) months, Daniel Bryan, Shane McMahon, AJ Styles, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn have been breathlessly feuding in a pentagon over what everyone thinks of each other, and to a lesser degree, the WWE Championship. Owens and Zayn seem like the only guys getting title shots for a long time — and last year I’m pretty sure Styles, Orton, Mahal and Nakamura are the only people who wrestled for the WWE Championship between WrestleMania and like, November — so while they’re passive-aggressively feuding, the Smackdown authority figures come up with a brilliant new idea: the Smackdown Top 10, polling the roster about who most deserves opportunities. Shane just yelled POPULARITY CONTEST, GO into the locker room, so the champions (who already have opportunities, because they are the champions) got ranked first.
So Smackdown, The Land Of Opportunity™, comes up with has a plan to freshen up the main event of Fastlane and eliminate some “is Daniel Bryan helping Sami and Kevin or isn’t he” drama: Dolph Ziggler vs. Baron Corbin on Smackdown, with the winner joining the Fastlane match to make it a fatal four-way. If you’re keeping score, that match features:
- Baron Corbin, who spent most of the fall losing to Sin Cara and got mad and beat everyone up when he was eliminated second in the Royal Rumble, and who is not even on the Smackdown Top 10 list for opportunities at all
- Dolph Ziggler, a guy who won the United States Championship only to immediately forfeit it and apparently quit the show, then showed up unannounced at #30 in the Royal Rumble somehow and was unceremoniously eliminated two minutes later. He is ALSO not even on the Smackdown Top 10 list for opportunities
Then, after advertising that match all week, they open the show with it and it ends in a no contest before it begins. Later, Shane McMahon finishes running several miles straight to work from his hotel (or whatever) and sweatily tells Bryan it’ll now be Sami Zayn vs. Dolph Ziggler and Kevin Owens vs. Baron Corbin, and if Ziggler and Corbin can now win those matches, they’ll be added to the Fastlane main event. He’s very insistent about them “deserving opportunities,” which again makes that Top 10 pretty hilariously useless, and never mentions that whole “Corbin agreed to be special guest referee for Owens so they could screw AJ Styles” stuff from a couple of months ago. Not that I’d expect him to, I guess, as Smackdown characters now get new backstories and stat rolls before every episode.
It’s also weird to hear Shane passive-aggressively arguing with Bryan about this STILL, and announcing that if Zayn and Owens interfere in each other’s matches, they will be OUT of the Fastlane main. Which introduces a lot of “thinking too much about it” questions like, “if Shane is Bryan’s boss and can do what he wants, and can declare that Owens and Zayn will be out of the match if they do this one thing, why can’t he just take them out of the match? Why did they agree to it? Could they have just helped each other anyway and been fine, like when Shane had to beat the Undertaker for control of Raw, lost, and was given the job anyway? Why are they arguing with each other, they aren’t Shane and Stephanie, they don’t have the same amount of vague power in WWE’s authority hierarchy, Shane is Bryan’s boss, right?” Everyone’s like 65% heel, what they say or do is randomized based on what the writers need for the situation, and everyone has bosses, but not really, and they can fight them.
Once you start thinking too much about stuff like that, you start going to simpler questions, such as, “why does Dolph Ziggler sometimes stop his music with a record scratch, and then sometimes it just plays like normal, but then OTHER times it record scratches and stops and then starts again and he walks to the ring like it’s fine?” And then you get into the midcard where Charlotte’s in a blood feud with the Riott Squad or whatever and nobody can really tell you why, other than “making an impact” or “grabbing the brass ring” or something they put together using Smackdown booking fridge magnets. Shit starts folding back in on itself and happening to set up booking, even though it’s only happening BECAUSE OF THE BOOKING IT’S ATTEMPTING TO SET UP.
My blue Smackdown chair got knocked over, and I’m trying to pick it up, but I can’t stop crying, and I’m not sure what’s going on.
Worst: About That Top 10
You know, if they’d hyped up a “brand new Smackdown top 10” and suggested it was gonna be important and then did it once and it wasn’t, sure, whatever. Let it slide. But the insanity of Smackdown comes in the introduction of the concept, executing the concept so badly it negates the only announced purpose of its existence, going through the trouble of announcing 10 names that deserve opportunities only to give your next, biggest opportunity to two people who weren’t on it, and then using the previously announced, forgotten purpose of the list as promo fodder to set up another Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal feud. Oh, and Mahal is out here running down Orton for not being respected enough to be at the top of the list about opportunities when he’s trying to have a United States Championship match via “open challenge.” Which also doesn’t take that list into consideration, and is just like, “who wants to wrestle for this?” And then one person a week miraculously does.
If that paragraph seemed confusing, imagine having to write about it!
The only thing I got out of this segment is Bobby Roode explaining to Orton that nobody in the locker room likes him because they’re tired of him running up to them from out of nowhere and hitting RKOs on them. They could be doing a lot of actual interesting personal interaction stuff with the roster, but instead they just start doing finishers to each other, and JINDER MAHAL wins, and Bobby Roode is still a plucky babyface, and for the first time in 15 years Randy Orton might not have a Road to WrestleMania, or whatever.
Road Dogg isn’t actually in charge of these shows, he just hands the writers a Jackson Pollock painting on Tuesday afternoon and says, “do these ideas.”
Fine: The Actual Matches
Both Fastlane qualifying matches are watchable, like you’d expect, because again, the talent on this show is not even close the reason why it’s so bad right now. Nothing creative, though, as (1) both Ziggler and Corbin win, making the match a fatal five-way and fulfilling the destiny of that early match announcement leak (with Ziggler replacing Nakamura), and (2) Sami and Kevin don’t interfere in each other’s matches, because Shane said a thing and that thing matters. It is what it is, man. Smackdown devoted about 35 minutes of their show to a heel vs. heel match ending when two heels attack, setting up two separate heel vs. heel matches. And now Shane McMahon’s good friend AJ Styles is defending the championship against four heels at Fastlane.
And while I’m thinking about it, does anyone else think it was weird that Asuka and Shinsuke Nakamura won Royal Rumble matches, but neither of them were on their brand’s shows this week? I mean, at least Asuka got a video package.
Also There Was This Match
65% Heel babyface Charlotte Flair takes on 65% heel Sarah Logan, as Flair continues her month-long quest to destroy the Riott Squad for beating her up that one time. Do the Riott Squad have any announced goals, really? I know everyone’s kind of on the show to Make An Impact or whatever. Do they have to wait to find out what Absolution’s goals are?
I’m not sure what happened to Sarah Logan between the Mae Young Classic and the Riott Squad, but I’m really not enjoying her work. I think that “lime game” promo gave her a lot of internalized bad will and right now she feels kinda like Sin Cara, where even if she’s doing well in the ring you’re still like, “lol, can’t wait to see Sin Cara mess up.” Her offense is “unorthodox” according to the announcers, but a lot of stuff like the tackle from behind just ends up looking awkward. I’d complain more about her SUPER blatant headstand sell of the Natural Selection with her arms folded in front of her to support her, but that’s become an established sell for cutters and such on the indies, so consider me Principal Skinner assuming the children are wrong on that one.
Like the men’s qualifiers, this was fine, if not extremely flat. It’s mostly filler to set up a six-woman tag for next week. These characters need motivations and goals, and we need to hear about them.
Best: Chad Gable Versus Pancakes
The lone highlight … sorry, I’m phrasing that wrong. The lone thing of note, I guess, worth mentioning on this week’s show is the continued wonderful awfulness of entitled dickhead Chad Gable, who interrupts Big E’s attempt at breaking a pancake-related world record by being all, UH, THE OLYMPICS? I kinda love that his character has become Kurt Angle if Angle hadn’t won the gold medal, but still thought he was hot shit for competing.
That said, the match itself wasn’t great. Not counting the two matches that didn’t happen, it might’ve actually been the least interesting match on the show. New Day’s pancake obsession is starting to be a little less funny and a little more Sonny Boy and WWE apparently has no idea what they wanna do with Gable and Benjamin, so they just keep setting them up to succeed and then knocking them down. They lose to New Day here in about five minutes because the referee missed a tag and cheated them, because everyone is about 65% heel.
And that, somehow, is Smackdown. WWE television has been worse, much worse, but I don’t think it’s ever been as fundamentally and structurally broken as it is right now. It’s the third best WWE show on Tuesdays.
Best: Top 8-ish Comments Of The Week
Blade_222
This 205 reboot is doing better than the last 30 TNA reboots.
AshBlue
Have hope for Dolph=depression and disappointment
Give up on Dolph entirely=Dolph wins matchWell played, WWE. Well played.
The Real Birdman
*Dolph Ziggler points at Mania sign*
*Mania sign turns around*
Just once, I want Renee to interject during one of those Dolph promos and be like “But you keep losing”
shockabra
That cricket mascot shaking the WWE belt in Dolph’ s face is pretty savage.
Sinclair
The New Day’s promos lately have been a lot like pancakes: All exciting at first, but by the end you’re fucking sick of ’em.
cyniclone
By my calculations, if Dolph Ziggler quits two more times, he can be the majority shareholder in WWE!
Clay Quartermain
Man, these are a lot of dark matches before the Mix Match challenge
hooray
That’s it for this week. If you loved this week’s show and are dropping into the comments section to tell me I just hate wrestling and should stop watching it, go for it, but after watching Smackdown I think I forgot how to read.
Anyway, thanks as always. Join us next week when Viktor and Erick Rowan go one-on-one to see who will be added to the Fastlane main event.
Have you checked out our wrestling podcast?
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