BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by Big Red Machine » Nov 1st, '17, 23:57

SHANE MCMAHON PROMO- HORRID!
Shane says that Smackdown decided to “lay siege” (so I see they’ve finally found the correct verb for the word siege, but still haven’t actually hit upon its definition yet) to Raw because “Raw has always looked at Smackdown as the inferior brand.” He says that this perception goes from Stephanie all the way down to “the very lowest part of the Raw common denominator.” Forget Scott Steiner vs. the English language. We need Shane McMahon vs. the English language.

Anyway, I don’t remember hearing ANYONE say that during this brand split other than the authority figures, and even that was always treated as playful banter between them (and if any of the wrestlers have said it, I guarantee you it was during the build to last year’s Survivor Series, when it shouldn’t have been taken as anything more than the usual grandstanding).
Shane then asked “what is the one thing that Smackdown could do to change this perception?”
Um… beat them in the ratings? Draw a bigger house to your shows? Get more PPV buys? Put on a more critically acclaimed television show? Defeat them in a friendly competition like the one coming up at Survivor Series?
Shane’s list of things he tried that didn’t work was to make Daniel Bryan the GM, go live, make their show “the land of opportunity,” and “have fun.” Those didn’t work because they’re not really things that in any way affect that quality of your product, especially as compares to Raw! People don’t get tons of opportunities on Raw? That’s clearly not true. The only difference is that Shane and Bryan tried to make it into a catchphrase, which just makes it even more grating and glaring when they’re being hypocritical about it. People “have fun” on Raw. If they didn’t, New Day and Enzo & Cass and Dean Ambrose and many other humorous wrestlers wouldn’t have been big parts of the show since the brand split. I guess you could argue that Bryan is more popular than Mick Foley, but what does it say that the only way Shane could think of to make his show better than Raw is to have a more popular authority figure as general manager?
This whole speech makes it look like a major the reason Smackdown is seen as less than Raw is because Shane’s an idiot! He thinks the shows are in some sort of competition in which his show needs to prove its superiority to earn its due respect, and none of the things he lists that he tried to do in order to create the perception that his show is better have any sort of even remotely measurable metric! If you want people to accept that you are better, then you need to SHOW THEM WHAT YOU ARE DOING BETTER!
So what grand idea did Shane finally come up with? None by himself. Instead, he called a “team meeting” in which WWE wants me to believe that everyone from Smackdown got together in a room and all together they came up with this evil plan to attack Raw in order to prove their superiority. How the hell is jumping someone who doesn’t expect it while also ensuring that you always have superior numbers going to make them think that you even deserve to be respected as equals, never mind that you are better than them? It’s just going to make them think that you’re a bunch of cheap-ass punks who needed not just one but two different types of unfair advantage to beat them. Wouldn’t just trying to beat them in a series of fair fights- which were already booked- do a much better job at earning their respect? And even worse, now they’re telling me that this wasn’t just Shane’s stupidity, but that most of the wrestlers were in on this as well, so none of them thought that it might work better to just beat them in a fair fight?
Shane puts over his employees’ hard work for the fans and declares that “we’ve got heart!” Oh yeah? Well you sure as hell don’t have any guts or any genitals. If you did, you wouldn’t feel the need to jump someone before a fight.

Now Shane begins to deal with the assault on Daniel Bryan. Shane frames this by saying that “Bryan went to Smackdown last night to explain our point of view.” Really? Because I don’t ever remember Bryan saying anything that Shane said here. Bryan went to Raw to apologize for Shane (and apparently everyone else’s) bullsh*t, and it’s not like Shane had sent Bryan to do deliver a message and Bryan delivered his own instead because Bryan said last night that Shane didn’t even know he was there. Bryan went to Raw to apologize for Shane’s wrongdoings because he vehemently disagreed with Shane’s actions, and the innocent Bryan got assaulted as retaliation... and now here is Shane trying to spin this sh*t as if Bryan was acting on his behalf and spinning this to try to justify the very actions that Bryan was protesting and apologizing for. What a piece of sh*t! My immediate thought was to compare this to the Warrior Award, but I realized that, as scummy as what WWE did to twist the last wishes of a man who insisted on giving recognition to the behind the scenes heroes who never get any public recognition is, this is actually one step worse. This is would be the equivalent to them funding everything they do for the Warrior Award by cutting the production crew and merch designers’ pay.
You all remember how much I hated Steph’s guts and just wanted her to go away forever after appearing in just one segment on last night’s show? Well Shane hasn’t even finished his first segment and he has already managed to supplant Stephanie as the most annoying McMahon of the week.

And how he’s pissed that neither Steph nor Kurt were there when Bryan was put on the stretcher! Why would they be? Most people who set someone up for a vicious beating don’t show up to comfort that person when they’re being loaded into the ambulance, but I guess that’s what Shane thought Steph and Kurt were supposed to do. “They didn’t care!” he says. “They just put him on a slab basically and just stretcher him out.” That “slab” is a piece of medical equipment specifically designed for the purpose of helping people in Bryan’s situation as much as possible you obtuse ass-hat! You’d think that of all people Shane McMahon would understand how a stretcher works, considering that he’s made a career of taking bumps that result in him being put on one! You remember when Kane hooked up Shane’s testicles to a car battery? This whole angle post-facto justifies Kane’s actions.

Shane seems to know that Braun is on Kurt’s team. Since when? This seems like the sort of thing that they should have announced and made us aware of BEFORE Shane causally mentioned it. Shane of course not only puts himself on the Smackdown team, but also makes himself the captain… and I think that right there tells us what this is all really about.
As I said above, one of the MAJOR problems with this whole angle is that this supposed pervasive animosity that Shane is talking about is not something that we have ever been shown on screen! Compare this to the first few years of the original brand extension when we would see Bischoff and Steph competing for talent and actively doing things to undermine each other’s show, and the announcers from each show would always tell you that their show was better, with the heel announcers even burying the other show. When Booker T was traded from Raw to Smackdown they had him actually cutting promo complaining about being traded to the “minor league.”
And even then there was never anything like what happened last week on Raw. A brawl once started because they were all already in the same place and Bischoff decided to be a dick and turns the lights off during a Smackdown match, and then, a few weeks later, Raw once sent TWO DUDES to Smackdown to attack two other dudes who they were already booked in a match against. That was it (Melina kidnapping Trish was never portrayed as part of the Raw vs. Smackdown feud). Nothing Shane is saying meshes in any way with anything we’ve been shown on TV over the past year and a half, so the angle feels contrived and Shane and his brand come off as massive heels, as we viewers are left asking ourselves “what is he talking about? Where is any of this coming from?”
Last night I took the liberty of diagnosing Stephanie McMahon with some sort of narcissistic personality disorder based on her speech last night where she somehow decided that Shane’s invasion had to be about Shane being jealous of her and thus wanting to mess with her even though she hadn’t even been mentioned on Raw in over six months, so now let me diagnose Shane: He’s got a small penis. He’s also got a paranoid personality disorder and is projecting his own feelings onto his perception of Smackdown.
The World Health Organization has a list of seven symptoms, of which a person needs to exhibit three of them in order to have a paranoid personality disorder. For Shane, those three would be:
• suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;
• a combative and tenacious sense of self-righteousness out of keeping with the actual situation;
• tendency to experience excessive self-aggrandizing, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;

The first of those is evident in his use of Kurt’s clearly friendly banter (and apparently Foley and Steph’s in the past) as a horrific slight upon himself and his show. That second one is exactly what Shane has been displaying in his promos throughout this whole angle, coming up with various lines of bullsh*t to insist that his clearly immoral actions were justified and he is actually the babyface and Raw are the heels. The third one is, quite frankly, what we see every f*cking time that Smackdown involved Shane making a totally pointless speech that does nothing but waste time and often makes the wrestlers feel like secondary elements to the show on which it is Shane himself to whom we should be paying attention (the segment where they revealed the women’s MITB briefcase was the most egregious of these, but there have been many others). Now throw in the fact that he is sure that not only do Steph and Kurt look down upon him and his show, but every single person on Raw does so as well, even though he has no evidence of it, and that seems pretty paranoid to me.
Now we move on to the small penis part, which was mostly a humorous way of referring to an inferiority complex that happens to work out really well in this case because it can also reference Shane’s cowardly assault on Raw, and it also allows me to make a joke about him being made very uncomfortable that Raw is longer than Smackdown if I need to go down that route for the sake of a cheap laugh.
But listen to Shane’s promo again. He is convinced that people on Raw don’t think his show is as good as theirs, so he did all of these cockamamie things to try to prove them wrong and still they won’t see it his way so now he has resorted to physical violence… but he didn’t even have the confidence to think he’d be able to win a fair fight, so he launched a sneak attack to try to debilitate the other team in order to increase his chances of winning. And this inferiority complex has probably been fed quite a bit over the past few years. He left the family business to try to make it on his own but his big business venture failed. Now he has moved back into the house and he’s lost every single match he’s been in (including at least one with his kids watching from the front row) except for last year’s Survivor Series match in which he was dead weight for his team, not eliminating a single member of the opposition, and as a GM his show doesn’t get the attention that his sister’s does, just like she has been the one whose ideas daddy has always liked better, which is why she was the one working on the wrestling while he as off doing things like the website, publishing, and distribution (important roles, yes, but not directly involved in the wrestling product itself).

Sorry about the rant. I’m not a trained psychiatrist, but I am someone who gets extremely annoyed at self-righteous bullsh*t.

2 OUT OF 3 FALLS MATCH FOR A SPOT ON SMACKDOWN’S SURVIVOR SERIES TEAM: Bobby Roode vs. Dolph Ziggler- 7.25/10
This was a great match, with a very well-designed finish, playing off of not only the finish of the first fall but also the finishes of their previous matches. A fine blow-off for this little feud.
Corey Graves is one of the few people who remember that at the 2014 Survivor Series, Dolph Ziggler “saved WWE from The Authority.” The same Authority who would continue to be the top heels in the company in their same role as ‘evil owners with all the power’ for the vast majority of the next year and a half. And they want us to think that these Raw vs. SD matches at Survivor Series are going to have consequences? Even their matches that have codified consequences don’t really have any lasting consequences.

RENEE YOUNG INTERVIEWS THE WINNER- I guess it built up the idea of teammates not getting along in a way that is different from how WWE (and everyone else, to be fair) usually do it, but other than that this was pretty pointless.

Oh. Tom Phillips is back. Did they even acknowledge this?

NEW DAY, RUSEV, & ENGLISH BACKSTAGE-
New Day are dressed up as Jimmy Hart, Akeem, and Brother Love. They are acting like goofballs. Rusev chides them for being playful when Raw could invade at any moment. He said that the strangers they were giving candy to might be spies from Raw. That was the only bit of this that was remotely funny. New Day insisted that they could fight in their costumes, which is fair enough, but it doesn’t counter Rusev’s point that the strangers might be spies. Then again, there really shouldn’t be any unknown individuals walking around backstage. I guess Shane’s security is really bad at their jobs. Rusev declared that “Halloween is a dumb holiday! For dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, little children!” Rusev is correct. If you want your kid to have candy, you buy it! Don’t expect me to buy your kid candy and then let you interrupt my day to give it him!
Rusev said that Rusev Day is the only holiday that matters, then took Big E.’s bucket of candy and poured it out into the floor and stomped on it. Big E. got angry and challenged Rusev to a match, which Rusev accepted, and they called each other suckers.

SMACKOWN WOMEN’S TEAM BACKSTAGE- terrible.
Becky Lynch is giving her Survivor Series team a pep-talk. Also, Ellsworth is there because he’s hanging out with Carmella, and Lana is there because she apparently has nothing else to do. Doesn’t she have a husband on this show who might be able to use her managerial advice?
Because this is WWE and they are neurotic about the stupidest sh*t, Becky has all of her troops standing in a line facing the same direction, and she herself is also standing facing that same direction. You know… because if she was actually facing the people she was talking to, then we wouldn’t be able to see her face and thus no one would be able to tell who was talking. If only she had something like a distinctive hair color or accent to allow us to identify her even when she’s facing away from us. Oh well.
Ellsworth is now a full-on furry, dressed up in a dog costume under his t-shirt and growling. Becky sprays him with a giant spray bottle and Carmella tells him to sit, then yanks him down to his butt on the floor and tells him to stay. This Ellsworth stuff is all stupid, but the thing that annoys me the most about it is that I’m 100% certain that WWE has no idea where they’re going with it. There is no endgame here; it’s just a thing they do from week to week purely for the sake of doing it.

Anyway, Becky says a bunch of sh*t that I feel like I’ve heard a million times already, and I’m barely a quarter of the way through the second episode of Smackdown since this angle began. The only thing Becky said that was in any way new was that rather than just lecture her teammates about how they all need to put aside their differences and work together, she actually tried to facilitate an addressing of grievances by encouraging anyone with a grievance to air it now so they could deal with it tonight and not have it be an issue during the match. You’d think that this would have led to Charlotte cutting a promo on Lana for attacking her during last week’s match, seeing as how that would actually justify Lana’s presence in this segment, but instead they all just did Charlotte and Becky’s dumb tea-drinking thing.

Once that was done, Nattie showed up with her title and stood in front of all of them so that she could turn and look over her shoulder to speak to Becky. I know this happens all the time in WWE, but I am bringing it up here for two reasons. First because it really stood out to me this time, and secondly because many props are due to Nattie for her body language and facial expression when she stood in front of them, and for clearing her throat before she started to talk. Little things like that make this sort of WWE bullsh*t more tolerable because it makes the act of standing in front of all of them feel more like character-work rather than idiotic WWE blocking.
Nattie proceeded to cut a bad promo on the babyfaces, just for the purpose of bothering them. I guess the idea here is that Nattie wants Becky to fail because she sees the idea of Becky being a captain as a threat to her spot as the top dog in the division, but you’d think that she’d be more concerned with the fact that Charlotte has an outstanding win over her and really should be owed a title shot. It also flies in the face of this extreme brand unity they’ve been pushing, but I guess that’s actually a good thing.

BARON CORBIN vs. SIN CARA- no rating, AWESOME segment!
These two have apparently being saying very mean, very personal things about each other on social media. Maybe we could have them say these things on the air, so that we can see them with the full emotion (and so I can get all of the necessary information by just watching the show rather than having to do research during the week)?
They were angry at each other so Corbin went after Sin Cara’s mask and that pissed Cara off and they had a short but great brawl on the floor (they went to a double count-out) that ended when Corbin ran away through the crowd after Cara threw one of the big office-sized announcer’s chairs at him. AWESOME!

RENEE YOUNG INTERVIEWS THE USOS- They cut a meh promo on Rollins & Ambrose. Then Shelton & Gable showed up and announced they were getting their tag title shot next week. Then they did another attempt at Gable rapping like last week, but whereas that one somehow worked, this was this embarrassing.

JINDER MAHAL PROMO- this was actually a pretty great “heel who talks a big game but we all know he can’t back it up” promo. The only way it would have been better was if Jinder wasn’t completely justified in his complaint that he had been ejected from ringside unfairly.

AJ STYLES vs. SAMIR SINGH (w/Sunil Singh & Jinder Mahal)- no rating, great segment.
The Singh Brothers introduced Jinder the same way they did last week, and I am certain that Corey Graves said the same thing he did last week about it being a bad idea to mock Heyman because it would make Brock angry, word for word (this happened when they came out before Jinder’s promo, but I already wrote it here and I’m trying to get to bed before 6:30 am for the first time in four days, so I’m not going to bother moving it).
AJ squashed Samir in less than a minute but jumped by Jinder immediately afterwards and beaten down by Jinder and Sunil. This was a great heel beat-down and got some GREAT heat. Props to WWE for doing everything little thing perfectly to make us expect that this would just be a repeat of last week’s segment, then subverting our expectations.

OWENS & ZAYN BACKSTAGE- AWESOME! They were perfect hypocritical heels. If only their criticisms about Shane hadn’t been 100% correct.

BLUDGEON BROTHERS PROMO- still terrible. You can’t do the POV destroying the camera shot twice in the same promo!

RUSEV (w/Aiden English) vs. BIG E. (w/The New Day)- 4.5/10
They had match that was nowhere near as good as I hoped. Stuff happened on the outside that lead to Rusev winning. Corey Graves was F*CKING AMAZING on commentary in his dealings with Byron Saxton’s denial of Rusev Day. It included in the following exchange:
Byron: Corey’s living on the fantasy farm right now.
Graves: That sounds like website you visit, Saxton.

RENEE YOUNG ASKS SIN CARA ABOUT THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS MASK- GREAT babyface promo by Sin Cara.

FASHION FILES- skipped it.

SHANE MCMAHON, AIDEN ENGLISH, & RUSEV BACKSTAGE- Rusev was so awesome here. So awesome that he managed to make Shane not intolerable. Rusev wants to be on Team Smackdown, noting that he won tonight and helped beat up the Raw roster last week. Shane books Rusev in a “winner gets to be on Team Smackdown” match next week against AJ STYLES!
1) This match will be awesome!
2) Why is Shane taking up a spot when he could have both AJ Styles AND Rusev on his team?

WINNER GETS TO BE ON TEAM SMACKDOWN AT SURVIVOR SERIES: Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Kevin Owens- 7/10
Zayn came out to help Owens but nothing they tried worked. Orton then came out and took out Zayn, which distracted Owen enough for Nakamura to hit the Kinshasa for the win.


A shockingly enjoyable episode of Smackdown, once you get the opening segment out of the way. If fact, if you just pretend that none of this Survivor Series stuff is happening and the matches are all regular matches with no stips and ignore the segments about the teams, the entire WWE product is pretty good right now.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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KILLdozer
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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Nov 2nd, '17, 12:09

Mahal V Styles has now been announced for Next week. Rusev V AJ or not, AJ will win and Face Lesnar, possibly even defeating Rusev the same night as becoming Champion, then also going onto to work SS twice, in a huge push that produces a legitimate bonafide new star immediately.

He could possibly even lead SD to victory, that's if this stuff being talked of about Zayn and Owens bothering Shane doesn't happen.
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by cero2k » Nov 2nd, '17, 12:15

KILLdozer wrote: Nov 2nd, '17, 12:09 Mahal V Styles has now been announced for Next week. Rusev V AJ or not, AJ will win and Face Lesnar, possibly even defeating Rusev the same night as becoming Champion, then also going onto to work SS twice, in a huge push that produces a legitimate bonafide new star immediately.

He could possibly even lead SD to victory, that's if this stuff being talked of about Zayn and Owens bothering Shane doesn't happen.
i know you can't wait for Mahal to lose the title, but he ain't losing against Styles. dude is keeping that title til WM so brapadoooo can win his 17th run
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KILLdozer
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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Nov 2nd, '17, 12:28

Nonsense! Lol, perhaps my way could be to legitimately beneficial and intelligent for WWE booking.

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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by cero2k » Nov 2nd, '17, 12:46

KILLdozer wrote: Nov 2nd, '17, 12:28 Nonsense! Lol, perhaps my way could be to legitimately beneficial and intelligent for WWE booking.

DID YOU SEE MY LEG TATTOO?
lol I did. you mean the date one, right?
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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Nov 2nd, '17, 12:48

Yes lol. My sister's birthday.
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Nov 2nd, '17, 13:01

Definitely another one and style of tattoo I've wanted for a while.
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by cero2k » Nov 2nd, '17, 14:03

KILLdozer wrote: Nov 2nd, '17, 12:48 Yes lol. My sister's birthday.
i was wondering what it meant actually, plus I didn't even know you had a sister
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Re: BRM Reviews the 10/31/2017 Smackdown

Post by KILLdozer » Nov 2nd, '17, 14:32

Yeah , her name is on my left bicep as well actually.
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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