The Best And Worst Of WWE Smackdown Live 6/5/18: Batter Up


WWE Smackdown Live

Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live: Large Cassidy interrupted a perfectly good Daniel Bryan vs. Samoa Joe match, Lana cheated in a dance-off, and Shinsuke Nakamura was the “last man standing” against Tye Dillinger.

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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live for June 5, 2018.

Worst: Words Matter!

This week’s show’s drama is built around two conceits:

Maybe this is only a problem with the Enzo Amore Extended Cinematic Universe, but I think it’s emblematic of where WWE booking’s at right now. Everything this year has been a jumbled mess. They finally got to the Royal Rumble, but everything between the Rumble and WrestleMania’s about the “road to WrestleMania.” That means part-timers get prominent roles, celebrity guest stars show up, and everyone in the mid-card has to kinda chill and wait for the next go-round. But then instead of moving forward like normal, WWE booked a six-hour customs house show in Saudi Arabia with a WrestleMania card for two weeks after WrestleMania. Then they had another pay-per-view right after that. The first couple of weeks in this Money in the Bank cycle were great because they finally allowed regular TV matches to have consequence — you win and you get into this wacky gimmick match — and it gave the show a sense of urgency it’d been missing. But wait just a minute, folks, there’s TOO MUCH time between pay-per-views now, so after a couple of weeks of urgency we’re right back to, “everyone just hang out and try not to get hurt so we can get to the next show.”

That leaves us with a bunch of matches between Money in the Bank ladder match competitors without anything on the line other than the announce team’s nebulous “building momentum.” That also means people who are tasked with cutting promos to put over matches don’t have anything to say, really, because nothing’s happening. There’s nothing for them to get mad about, so they just kinda have to say “I’m gonna unmask Asuka!” even though that doesn’t make sense, or “Daniel Bryan has never faced someone like me” even though he just did. It’s about showing the moments, not earning them. Saying a thing is important, not proving it.

Now that that talking point’s out of the way, let’s discuss the positives, and how at least Smackdown wasn’t the nightmarish hellscape of this week’s Raw.

Best: Sonya Deville

While the set-up left a lot to be desired — a show-opening promo that doesn’t make a lot of sense, followed by heel interruptions and the GM making a handicap match — the actual showdown between Asuka and the Artists Formerly Known As Absolution was a lot of fun. Mandy Rose has been showing a lot of improvement lately, and as I’ve said before, I think a couple of years from now Sonya Deville’s going to be one of the tent poles of the division. She doesn’t have Ronda Rousey’s star power or Shayna Baszler’s friends and street cred, but she’s this made-for-WWE MMA type who’s important simply by existing and being as good as she is, and who could help shape WWE’s interpretation of what mixed-martial artists need to do when they get pro wrestling jobs.

That stuff aside, just watch the finishing sequence. Asuka never wrestles the match like her opponents don’t matter … even though it’s two-on-one, she CHOSE this handicap match, and by making the match look difficult to win, put herself over while also elevating her opponents. The catch-as-catch-can stuff at the end with Deville using her scientific know-how and Asuka just rolling with it until she can pro-wres her to death was awesome.

The post-match stuff with Carmella was less effective for me, but I get that you have to at least make it seem like Asuka wouldn’t just kick through her entire chest five seconds into a match and win. Looks like we’re in for the long haul on this Carmella title run, which is the kind of thing I type when I want to jinx myself.

Best: This Daniel Bryan Promo That Wasn’t Even On The Show

I’ll spare you another write-up of Big Cass’ promo and just tell you it put me to sleep, and that he looks and sounds like a 7-foot tall version of Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The best part of the Cass promo is actually this “exclusive” from WWE.com, in which Daniel Bryan considers what Cass has to say, says all the shit I’ve been typing, then looks directly into the camera and cuts one of the best wrestling promos you’ve heard in WWE this year. It’s all about intensity, and believing what you’re saying. Bryan does that. He also works in, “shin bone to the dome, when your mana ain’t home,” which sounds like something The Rock would say if he’d ever done a kick better than that leg-wiggle stomp he loves.

Let wrestlers sound like themselves on television, please! It would help everybody, especially the people who are fucking up trying to read your clumsy-ass soap opera dialogue.

Best: Nakamura Trolls Styles

AJ Styles when Nakamura kept making excuses about the pens not working:

It’s one of those segments you book when there are two weeks to kill and you’re out of ideas, but it works. Don’t ask why this one needs a contract signing, but the other four we saw over the last month didn’t, it’s just how wrestling works. Paige is doing a solid job in the general manager role, though, possibly anchored by the fact that she doesn’t have a second and third authority figure feuding with her like the Human Centipede of GMs on Raw.

Troll Shinsuke is always good as well, and I like that he’s officially in AJ’s head now. Previous to this he was just in his scrotum. I want the matches to start being as good as Nakamura’s character work.

Best: Naomi Could Totally Take Aiden English In A Fight, Right?

I don’t expect WWE to embrace intergender wrestling any time soon, but it was a lot of fun to see Naomi getting to put it all out there against Aiden English. The crossbody at the end to set up the finish ruled, and I’m really happy she had a competent wrestler to catch her on that suicide dive so she didn’t Lita herself into the floor. Naomi vs. Aiden English would rule, right? I’m not making that up?

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if Smackdown and Raw used some of their TV time to create these self-contained little stories that move forward week to week and don’t necessarily need a big old-timey “pay-per-view blowoff.” If something happens one week, we can have a match resulting from that that moves things forward. It doesn’t have to be Wrestler A vs. Wrestler B five times in a row to “build momentum” heading into whatever. Just tell the stories, let them be told, and let the wrestlers do what they’re good at. Easy stuff.

Best: Andrade Doesn’t Cara All

Speaking of that, I really enjoy the setup for this eventual Andrade ‘Cien’ Almas vs. Sin Cara match. It quickly elevates Almas from that “fight a jobber every week and then get put into a big program you aren’t ready for” thing WWE loves to do lately to competent, rostered pro wrestler by taking a week or two to say how these characters relate, what their history is, and why that matters. It’s still a lot of exposition and not a lot of payoff, but it’s attempting to tell a cohesive story, and I appreciate that. It focuses on Zelina Vega and clearly says, “the success this man is having is because this woman is good at her job, and not everybody’s gonna be able to accept that.” Almas is going to truck Sin Cara, and he’ll look better for having done it.

Most of the backstage stuff was really good this week. If you don’t believe me, please click this link and watch Big E gasp-laugh while Miz puts his hand in a top hat full of pancake batter. Big E’s like the world’s strongest Muttley.

Worst: Can The Bludgeon Brothers Not Wrestle For More Than Two Minutes?

I like Luke Harper as much as the next guy, but he’s being absolutely wasted as a talent in these two minute Erick Rowan-friendly squashes. Either the Bludgies beat a team in 90 seconds, take 3-5 minutes to beat a team like The Usos, or get put into really short singles matches they lose by roll-up. It’s tired and lazy, and the Bludgeons don’t have the real-world intensity necessary to pull off a Road Warriors thing. They just seem like normal guys who are very tall, grew beards, and are pretending to be monsters on TV. Not great.

In a related note, The Club is still so boring they’d get put into a group called “the club” with no modifiers.

Best: Wrestling!

On the better side of things, we actually got something resembling a real match between Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch. I thought for sure this would end with an IIconics run-in or a big “everybody into the pool” segment to put over the Money in the Bank ladder match coming up, but nope, they just wrestled a good match for about eight minutes and gave it a clean finish. Wrrrrestling!

Flair’s the statistical favorite to win Money in the Bank, so I don’t mind her taking a few corny losses between her big WrestleMania win and the ladder match. She’s got enough clout right now that she can handle it, especially when it’s something like this, where she’s wrestling her friend who knows her entire act. I bought the finish more as Charlotte deciding to give up in the submission rather than fight it and risk injury before the match that matters than just losing clean in sub-10-minutes, and I wish the announce team would’ve stopped chuckling amongst themselves long enough to point it out.

Best: House Show Madness

Finally we have the main event, which maintains a lot of Flair vs. Lynch’s house show quality. It’s good, and it’s fun to watch, but it doesn’t really matter. And like I’ve said a couple of times, after the last two episodes of Raw, I’ll take “nothing matters but it’s not a chore to sit through.”

The main event ends up being New Day vs. the Brandon Stroud super team of The Miz, Samoa Joe and Rusev. If they’d added the IIconics and Daniel Bryan they’d have lumped all my favorite Smackdown people together. It goes about how you’d expect, culminating in a cute moment where Miz decides to grandiosely attack New Day with their own pancakes as revenge for his earlier hat-battering and accidentally hits his own teammates. They bail on him, leaving him to get trounced 3-on-1 by the New Day. New Day gets a big win to “keep their momentum” heading into Money in the Bank, the “which member of the New Day will compete” mystery is still in play — it should just be all three of them, because the ladder match is no disqualification, who’s going to stop them? — and Miz manages to put over the heels and the faces all at once.

I’m telling you, if WWE was in a place right now where words and actions mattered at all, Smackdown would be really good. Even so, it feels like watching NXT compared to Raw.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

Amaterasu’s Son

Interesting. Each team here has a prior to 2010 veteran, a hoss NXT alumni, and a TNA transplant.

I hate to break it to you announce team. Miz being concerned about which New Day member is gonna be in the match is not paranoia…it’s the Usos.

The Real Birdman

Should’ve cien that coming, Sin Cara

Mella: “Who’s it gonna be: Mandy or Sonya?”
Paige: “You don’t make matches. Who’s it gonna be: Mandy or Sonya?”

troi

“pipes clang in Spanish”

Obi Wan Jabroni

He’s Big.
He’s Cass.
Big, big, big
Cass, Cass, Cass
It’s the Itchy and Cass-y show!

Former IC Champion Pdragon

Can we get Constable Corbin to come arrest Cass for noise pollution?

blacksnakemoan

“You beat up my face!”
“You grabbed my nuts…”

Sixteen Candles-1984
Smackdown Live-2018

This is a handicap match, because both Mandy and Sonya could end up handicapped.

Brute Farce

It’s no coincidence that Styles left when TNA became GLOBAL Force Wrestling.


That’s it for this week’s column, as a final note, please remember to drop a comment below, share the column on your social media, and tell everyone you’ve ever met that a moonwalk is supposed to look like you’re walking forward while you walk backwards, you aren’t just shuffling your feet backwards

WWE Smackdown Live

Thanks, everybody.

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