Smackdown for 1/29

Hopefully this will be better than the last show.

A video package promising me DX vs the Straight Edge Society! Oh boy. What a main event! Wait why is this happening first? And now Rey? What the fuck? Triple H and Shawn both tell Rey, and vicariously the audience, that he is not to be taken seriously. Rey challenges them to a fight. What is going on? Punk and The Gang come out. Triple H makes fun of them. Teddy Long tells me that the main event is off. Why did they show us the video package then? Instead it’s going to be Triple H and Punk. The match is… a match. You’ve watched a Triple H match before, right? This is kind of like a good one of those. More or less just there. Then there is a fairly intense gang-beating on HHH after… and Shawn somehow manages to come in and break it up before they shave his head. Really? Shawn is going to out box a fucking GANG of skinhead hardline thugs? No. No he is not.

Chris Jericho and R-Truth have another match that is a match. Hooray!

Batista interview backstage. Says something about wanting to put the spotlight back on him. Well. You know, if Batista ran out and attacked everyone who had a spotlight put on him for whatever reason, that’d probably be the greatest thing in the world.

John Morrison cuts a really lackluster promo. John Morrison then has a really lackluster match with Drew McIntyre. I’d go as far as to say ‘bad’ or ‘boring’. Like ‘check my email instead of watching this’ boring. Or ‘unwrapping Heat on Blu-ray’ boring.

Holy fuck Michelle McCool’s act doesn’t work without Layla, at ALL. Yes, Layla comes out in a fat suit eventually. Still doesn’t make the rest of this shit worthwhile.

Batista tells Shawn to stay away from his spotlight or he’ll go Incredible Hulk. Well, not really. But this was fun!

Shawn vs Rey was… well, I thought this was actually pretty disappointing. I don’t think it’s really possible to not be a Rey Mysterio ‘guy’, especially after the past couple years when he’s been out of his FUCKING mind awesome. And I really like Shawn. Maybe not his matches so much, because I’m a strong believer that you can like someone and acknowledge that they pretty much suck (Edge, for example, is another of my favorites, and when the fuck will you see me praising Edge’s work?). But I like him, and so I had high hopes. Instead this match was just kind of… there. I honestly didn’t even think it was good as the earlier “RAW infects Smackdown awesomeness” match from this same show. Rey looked fine, not particularly great, but he didn’t have much to work with. I wonder how much of that was the general confusion here, Rey can work just about any style but these are two small faces who primarily work from underneath, neither are really used to working long lengths of time mid-match where they’re the ones getting the heat as opposed to selling. And Shawn is pretty clearly incapable of working the type of babyface sprint that you’d get from Rey and, say, Evan Bourne. I did think it was kind of interesting how they seemed to be working with Shawn, the bigger man, working as the de facto heel at the start, quickly realizing he can’t really work heat segments, and when we came back from commercial break it was Shawn selling and Rey working the heat. The problem there is that Shawn is either mailing in his selling or just can’t do it anymore, and Rey doesn’t really have the sort of vicious big man offense that’s going to not give Shawn a choice – and therefore the kind of big man offense that’d make this match work. As it is the match never really goes anywhere. The springboard into the superkick is cool for how contrived it was, but really that’s just about the only thing I liked in this match. Batista’s run in is well done, because he is laughing at Shawn and then sees Rey and gets all pissed off again. Then Triple H and Undertaker do their respective run ins and it’s kinda lame. But yeah this match isn’t coming close to making a ‘best of the year’ type of list.

Best matches: HHH/Punk, HBK/Rey, Truth/Jericho. Best angle: Batista being a dick