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

Smackdown for 1/22

Oh Lord.

Batista’s spotlight intro is amazing. Did Finlay dye his hair for this match? Match is incredibly short, but it’s fun and Finlay eats punishment like a champ. Post match is quite violent also. Actually once Batista grabs the microphone and goes on about how ‘this is what I’m gonna do to everyone in the Rumble’, it’s by far the least violent looking of his attacks. Which is a bit strange. These two need maybe seven minutes together, I think that’d work for me.

More of Punk’s Straight Edge Jesus act. It’s still a really great act. This week they save young Serena, bringing her into the fold as Punk’s own personal Anne. Plenty of creepy goodness here.

Tag match, John Morrison and R-Truth against Chris Jericho and Drew McIntyre. Terrible. Really terrible. Boring and just oh fuck this I can’t finish the match. Next.

Pretty good women’s segment with, well, basically the entire division. I re-watched it. Yeah. It was good. I have no idea what in the fuck Michelle yelled before shoving the pig in Mickie’s face though. Not sure if the whole “Facial Abuse” look is really PG friendly, either. But a quality angle.

Cryme Tyme against Charlie Haas and Mike Knox’s Beard, I thought, had potential, but it started by JTG immediately running through his spots and then Kane runs out and savagely kills four men. So.

Holy shit, watching Matt Hardy and the Hart kids play wrestle is SO UNINTERESTING.

Main event interview is cool. Rey does his ‘I will never say die’ part well. Undertaker does his ‘literally a gateway into the Christian definition of Hell’ part well. Batista does his ‘I will go wherever I want and kill whatever I want’ thing well. This was a success. Not the best Smackdown though, great angles but where were the matches?

Best match: Batista/Finlay. Best angles: Punk saves Serena, ‘Taker and Rey have a stand-off, Mickie sticks up for herself and winds up on a throat fucking video shoot.

Smackdown for 1/15

Chorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre.

Mr. Chris Jericho, complete with a makeup job on his jaw, cuts your standard “Chris Jericho is angry at DX promo”. Ok. John Morrison’s smile coming out of the slow motion entrance looks really unnatural, although when he gives the glasses he does look genuine. I guess these two are going to have a match now? Ok. There is immediately a shitty Morrison clothesline sending Jericho over the top and then Drew McIntyre comes out. What? I guess he’s going to sit outside and provide Morrison motivation to hulk up. No, really, that’s a spot they did. Morrison is in the Walls of Jericho, McIntyre taunts him with the Intercontinental title, and this leads Morrison to gritting his teeth and dragging him over to the ropes. What a match. Not in a good way, though.

“One nation under Punk, indivisible, with integrity and sobriety for all.” Fantastic. Punk as late-night informercial televangelist and Luke Gallows as his testimonial is the best act in WWE. “Luke, go get me that man.” That man is Trevor, Trevor is better at being the test subject than James was last week. “He doesn’t even know!” The best part of these segments is that Punk gets better and more maniacal each week. Him going borderline psychotic with excitement if he demands to know if Trevor is “true ‘till death” is wonderful. Totally wonderful. And then they have to go and ruin it by transitioning into a match. Fuck. Actually, technically we have Trevor’s pit stains first. Those aren’t very nice either. But yeah, they ruin it with a match. And the worst part is that they just play Khali’s music, and I’m like ‘holy shit are they going to have Khali, the party playboy guy, try to defend Trevor’s rights to pound beers and snort lines?’ and then Matt Hardy comes out too and it’s a four-way tag match with three teams that aren’t very good. The match, accordingly, is not very good. And then Trevor’s pit stains come back. They’re still not very good. But at least he’s a reminder of when this whole paragraph DID represent good things.

Josh Matthews, who @cockswoggle HATES, knocks on Batista’s door for an interview. Batista has this great look when he opens the door that basically says “look, I have Kelly Kelly back there and she sucks a mean dick, so do you HAVE to be bothering me right now?” This is confirmed when he just glares at Josh the entire time, blows off his questions, and says “knock on this door one more time and… you know what I’m saying?” Somebody’s gon’ get dey ass licked.

Undertaker has promo time. I support this in general but I also start yawning viciously during his entrance. Promo is what you’d expect, collecting souls and all that. He puts a hilarious emphasis on ‘two decades’ when informing us of exactly how long he’s been collecting souls for. Good promo, I guess.

Mickie James and Beth Phoenix have a match. It’s actually the best and most violent match on this show so far. It is followed by Michelle McCool and Layla attacking Mickie, which is accordingly the most violent angle on the show thus far. If it wasn’t for the incredible Trevor head shaving deal, it’d probably be the best single segment on the show (main event pending, I suppose). Interesting.

Oh GOOD it’s Kane, perfect. This match is kinda neat at first because Kane is beating the ever living piss out of Dolph Ziggler and I’m like hey, I like Ziggler, I don’t want him getting squashed really but at least it’s not going to be an even longer version of their last couple matches. Nope, I was wrong. Very wrong. This is the longest edition yet and really, once you realize it’s going a while, the only interesting part if how fucking ridiculous Ziggler’s hair gets. Like Sycho Sid ridiculous. It’s what you’d expect after the last two, not terrible or anything, probably the second best of their matches. maybe even the best. But it’s too long and you can’t run the same thing three weeks in a row unless it keeps getting better or it was really good to start with. And this wasn’t.

The Royal Rumble ad campaign this year sucked. What the fuck, is this The Matrix? A subtle attempt to promote Mr. Anderson in TNA?

Batista vs Rey! Surely this won’t have another Undertaker finish. It’s in a CAGE! And holy shit it’s awesome. Batista is all “wellll I COULD win but you called me out of Kelly Kelly’s meat wallet for this so I might as well fuck with the little beaner who’s been fucking with my shit for the last three months”. Rey quickly realizes that he has two options, escape or die. He tries to wrestle the match, sets Batista up for the 619, is like ‘oh shit there’s a cage’ here and Batista just starts laughing at him. Batista is a glorious, glorious man. So the rest of the match is “Rey fights for his life and tries to escape while Batista is really just being an asshole and tossing the little boy around”. And then Rey wins! And it’s awesome. So fucking awesome. A fine way to end a show of wrestling.

Best matches are Batista/Rey, Mickie/Beth, Kane/Ziggler. Best angles are Punk saves Trevor, Michelle and Layla attack Mickie.