BRM Reviews the 7/10/2018 Smackdown

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 7/10/2018 Smackdown

Post by Big Red Machine » Jul 10th, '18, 22:14

MIZ TV WITH SPECIAL GUESTS DANIEL BRYAN & KANE- not good
Didn’t last week’s show also start with Team Hell No being interviewed? Also, didn’t Miz ban Bryan from MizTV for life a few months ago?
Bryan, the babyface, immediately threatens violence towards The Miz, and it is KANE who has to be the cool-headed one and talk him down. And now Kane is sharing his opinion on the possibility of an N*SYNC reunion. What the f*ck has this company come to?
Miz shows a video package of terrible things Kane has done to Bryan in an attempt to break them up. Like me, Bryan is very annoyed by this show constantly doing the same thing over and over again. Miz says mean things. Kane has to keep Bryan from attacking Miz, but when Miz calls Kane “broken-down” Kane snaps and goozles him. This all feels pointless. Also, someone please let the Creative know that there is a direct correlation between how many times the word “demon” is used in a segment and how scripted and unnatural that segment feels.
The Bludgeon Brothers show up just in time to make Kane not chokeslam Miz, but before they can get the whole way down the aisle, SAnitY’s music plays, because why the f*ck not? They come from the crowd and jump Team Hell No. They toss Kane to the outside so that the Bludgeon Brothers can beat him up while they work Bryan over in the ring themselves. Then New Day came out to make the save. They are apparently facing SAnitY in a Tables Match at the PPV.
Everyone brawls all around, and no one is coming out to stop them. It’s quite the crazy contrast between Raw and Smackdown, isn’t it? Oh look. Here are some referees and Road Agents to yell at the heels to stop beating the babyfaces up. I wonder if that will work? Apparently not. Who could have seen that coming?
Because this is WWE, we apparently MUST have someone’s music playing at the end of the segment, so they played the Bludgeon Brothers’ music, which once again made SAnitY look secondary.

SHINSUKE NAKAMURA vs. AJ STYLES- 7/10
They had their big blow-off at the last PPV, and WWE can’t even keep them apart for an entire month. Making this all even sillier, the announcers are constantly trying to sell me on this match being a big deal by telling that it’s “a WrestleMania rematch,” and all but completely ignoring the fact that these guys have wrestled each other for the WWE World Heavyweight Title on every single big show since then, too.
Rusev & English came out to distract AJ before the match, allowing Nakamura to get the jump on him, which is basically the same thing that happened last week… although at least last week they had the bell ring first. This time it’s really all the referee’s fault for calling for the bell when AJ clearly wasn’t ready.
They’re trying to build Rusev up as a dangerous challenger for AJ’s WWE World Heavyweight Title… and yet during the commercial, there was a snickers commercial with him running around a supermarket being a goofball. Mixed messages.
He sat down to do commentary after the commercial break, which made him and Aiden feel like an extremely frustrating Sword of Damocles hanging over the match, because just the fact that AJ is the WWE World Heavyweight Champion and Nakamura is challenging Jeff Hardy for the US Title at the PPV means that there was never a chance of this match ending in any way other than a DQ. AJ and Nakamura tried to give us something worthwhile before the DQ (and succeeded), but the very fact that the DQ felt inevitable made this match not be anywhere near as fun to watch as it should have been.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- fine
The inevitable DQ happened. Jeff Hardy came out to save AJ from the beat-down. Then Paige came out and booked a tag team match for right now.

AJ STYLES & JEFF HARDY vs. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA & RUSEV (w/Aiden English)- 6.5/10
This match, shockingly, did have a clean finish. Rusev beat Jeff, which feels like the wrong finish to me, as I think Rusev needed to beat AJ to really establish some credibility as a threat. The other problem, of course, is that this sets Rusev up for a US Title shot that he likely will never get, even if AJ and Jeff both retain, because WWE rarely thinks of the consequences of things beyond the upcoming PPV.

JAMES ELLSWORTH AND CARMELLA BACKSTAGE- Ellsworth winked at Carmella, so she threatened to beat him. And we’re apparently supposed to laugh at threats of domestic abuse because the target is James Ellsworth.

LUMBERJILL MATCH: Asuka vs. James Ellsworth- no rating, stupid segment
Everything about this is completely moronic. First all, this “Battle of the Sexes” bullsh*t needs to stop. What is the point of this? To make the women look good? How does it make them look good if you take the best woman in the company and put her against the worst man in the company, and you still need to stack the deck heavily in her favor? That actually just makes them look worse.
Also, we know that WWE won’t let Ellsworth actually hit Asuka, which makes this feel like a very unfair fight. There is no glory in hitting someone who can’t hit back, which is exactly what Asuka is doing here. It’s not kayfabe, but it’s a hard feeling to escape nonetheless, and even harder after Carmella’s threat of domestic violence earlier. Then we have the fact that this supposed “story” they’ve been telling about Asuka trying to get her hands on Ellsworth has been completely pointless because every single installment of that smaller story has ended the exact same way that pretty much every installment of the larger Asuka vs. Carmella story has ended: Carmella taking advantage of Asuka’s focus being elsewhere to lay her out from behind. It’s same sh*t, different week… which is what pretty much the entire main roster product has felt like Backlash.

TEAM HELL NO & THE NEW DAY HAVE A STRATEGY SESSION BACKSTAGE-
Bryan suggests working their opponents’ knees and chopping the big giants down. Kane objects, saying “we need something more permanent, like setting them on fire and dragging them to hell.” A few things here:
1. This man is supposed to be a babyface
2. New Day had absolutely no reaction to this terrifying suggestion
3. Being myself, I have to point out that everyone who has been “dragged to hell” has reappeared the next week, so it is not, as Kane claims, a “permanent” solution. (And if you want to argue that it permanently removes the drag-ee from the match then I will counter by pointing out that the dragger also tends not to reappear for the rest of that segment, so they wouldn’t be helping their odds any).

The only response we got to this was Bryan Danielson, on WWE TV, saying the following:
How, exactly, do you expect us to do that? You think we’re just gonna summon Satan and he’ll open up a portal for us?”
While their tag team partners are engaged in a serious debate about whether or not it’s a good strategy to open a boomtube to the other side of the River Styx and throw their opponents into it, New Day advise them that their real problem is that they aren’t working together, claiming that this is what let their foes get the drop on them earlier. I’m pretty sure it was the attacking them from behind that let the bad guys get the advantage earlier.
Arguing happened, and stupid things were said. Bryan and Big E. both yelled a lot. Everyone came out of this looking like complete and total goofballs.

PAIGE, CARMELLA, & ELLSWORTH BACKSTAGE- Ellsworth acted like a creep and a dork. Paige tells them that at the PPV, Ellsworth will be suspended above the ring in a shark cage. At this point I would like to remind everyone that the last time WWE put a small man in a shark cage above the ring, he still managed to escape- and that man (Enzo) is much bigger than Ellsworth is. Also, the time before that that WWE put someone in a shark cage above the ring to prevent him from interfering in the match, he dropped his pal a weapon to use. And the same thing happened the time before that. Why don’t these promotions just take my advice and have the wrestler handcuffed to a radiator backstage?

SIN CARA vs. ANDRADE “CIEN” ALMAS (w/Zelina Vega)- 5.5/10
Oh yeah. Almas is on Smackdown now. I totally forgot. Are ANY of this year’s call-ups doing well? The one who seems to be doing the best is Ember Moon, who is a generic mid-card babyface. Almas dominated the match and got the win, but Sin Cara was given enough to look credible.

SAnitY PROMO- bad
This was goofy, scripted bullsh*t. It’s clear that Creative has no intentions of giving these characters any sort of motivation beyond the idea of “creating chaos” and will use that to justify having them do whatever Creative needs to them to do that particular day. As you’ll recall, this was the exact same attitude that doomed Bray Wyatt. So yeah… they’ll never learn.
Then the Bludgeon Brothers showed up and Erick Rowan said “Let the bludgeoning begin.” You can put them down in the same category as SAnitY.

SAnitY & THE BLUDGEON BROTHERS vs. TEAM HELL NO & THE NEW DAY- 7/10
Tom Phillips tried to convince me that beating New Day would be a big deal for SAnitY, and it really should feel that way, but it doesn’t. That probably has something to do with New Day spending the past few months being goofballs who are obsessed with eating pancakes rather than doing something that isn’t stupid.
They had a match that was fine for a large ten-man tag main event, but it was also just clear filler. No portals to hell were opened. It felt like a New Japan Road to… show main event. Bryan pinned Eric Young, so not only did SAnitY lose yet again, but they lost in a situation where it would have made a lot more sense for Bryan- a challenger for the tag titles- to pin one of the tag champs. That shows you how low on the totem pole SAnitY is.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- We got a goofy spot where Bryan tried to summon Kane’s pyro. He failed several times, but then succeeded. So does he have Undertaker powers now?

This was a fine episode of Smackdown in the ring and a serviceable go-home show, but it wasn’t at all interesting or exciting, which is a major problem in WWE right now. Team Hell No is making it very hard for me to enjoy my two favorite wrestlers because Creative seems to feel the need to force dumb comedy into all of their segments. WWE is getting harder and harder to watch.


STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Corey Graves started to tell us about the main event by telling us that “Paige does things unconventionally.”
How the hell is taking the ten guys involved in a show-opening brawl and booking them all in a ten-man tag in the main-event “unconventional?” It’s practically the opposite of unconventional!
(And a side note to Vince or Creative or Graves or whoever came up with this: the GM is the person booking the show. We don’t want “unconventional.” All we want is “competent.” So how about you stop spending your time thinking up nebulous platitudes to attach to the authority figure and spent it on creating a competent wrestling show for her to present to us instead?)
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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NWK2000
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Re: BRM Reviews the 7/10/2018 Smackdown

Post by NWK2000 » Jul 11th, '18, 06:49

Big Red Machine wrote: Jul 10th, '18, 22:14
POST-MATCH SEGMENT- We got a goofy spot where Bryan tried to summon Kane’s pyro. He failed several times, but then succeeded. So does he have Undertaker powers now?
I like to imagine Kane made the pyro go off without doing the pose after a few tries so Bryan felt like he did it, like when you when you tell your little cousin they can change the traffic light with the Jedi hand motion, and then you tell them to do it, and it happens.
NWK Reviews is closed for business for now.

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KILLdozer
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Re: BRM Reviews the 7/10/2018 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Jul 11th, '18, 13:38

NWK2000 wrote: Jul 11th, '18, 06:49
Big Red Machine wrote: Jul 10th, '18, 22:14
POST-MATCH SEGMENT- We got a goofy spot where Bryan tried to summon Kane’s pyro. He failed several times, but then succeeded. So does he have Undertaker powers now?
I like to imagine Kane made the pyro go off without doing the pose after a few tries so Bryan felt like he did it, like when you when you tell your little cousin they can change the traffic light with the Jedi hand motion, and then you tell them to do it, and it happens.
...."Jedi hand motion"?!??!!!?!?

KICK THIS MAN'S ASS!!!!
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