Just seventeen nights away from WrestleMania but you couldn't tell by the product. Daniel Bryan opens the show and brings up WrestleMania. He rightly mentions that his favorites growing up would make the Intercontinental Championship more entertaining than the World Heavyweight Championship. He announces that he will be in the Ladder Match at Mania. Bad News Barrett interrupts, leading to Dolph Ziggler, Luke Harper, Stardust an dDean Ambrose all coming out. Of course, we get short words from each guy and a lot of pointing to the WrestleMania sign. It still amazes me how over Ambrose is despite what the company has done to him since October. Also, Stardust is so strange that even Harper looks at him confused. R-Truth, the holder of the title comes to the stage. He says he's going to hold onto it for safe keeping until WrestleMania. He stays up top and everyone else brawls in the ring. In classic Teddy Long fashion, this leads us to a six man tag main event. At least the Intercontinental Title is the focal point of Smackdown, which is what I wanted. It's something right?
I guess we are getting some sort of multi-team tag team match at WrestleMania. It hasn't been officially made yet but after New Day beat the champions and Los Matadores beat the Usos on Raw I can only assume. We get an eight man tag here as New Day teams with the Usos against Tyson Kidd, Cesaro and Los Matadores. Yes, there is just one heel team. Nattie was looking pretty good. This goes about seven minutes and is rather fun. Los Matadores get the pin for their team. We get the Sting video package from Raw, which is still strange as hell. He says he's been waiting 14 years to do this. I guess his plan to the WWE got delayed in Orlando for a while.
We are now taken to highlights of what went down on Raw between John Cena and Rusev. It sucked. Ryback and his mismatched attire come out to face the Miz in a preview of the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal. There was an interview with Miz and Mizdow where Mizdow tried to warn him about Ryback's power. Miz didn't care, leading to him losing in less than three minutes. After a recap of Paul Heyman's excellence on Raw, Roman Reigns comes out to address it. Don't you think that would have been a better idea to do on Raw? You know, when Reigns could actually come face to face with Brock Lesnar? Mark Henry, in all his irrelevance, appears to interrupt. He doesn't BELEE DAT and thinks Brock will kill Roman. They get into it, Roman hits the Superman punch and it ends with him spearing Henry through the guardrail. Why was Henry in his ring attire? There was no match. That's a small thing that always annoys me.
It's not Smackdown without recaps, as we see Undertaker's shit response to Bray Wyatt's WrestleMania challenge. Time for Divas action! Cameron and Summer Rae get the jobber entrance, accompanied by Eva Marie. They face AJ Lee and Paige, while the Bella Twins are on commentary. Unfortunately, we're back to really short Divas matches as this only gets two and a half minutes. Michael Cole keeps trying to say that Paige & AJ are known as the "Odd Couple" in the WWE. Nobody calls them that. Also, Nikki says it's odd that Paige & AJ are friends one day and enemies the next. Um, isn't that the case with Nikki and Brie? Anyway, Paige and AJ win and nearly get into a fight with the Bellas post match.
Backstage, Mark Henry says he pushed Roman Reigns to test him and now he believes. Talk about cringeworthy. We get a long interview with Randy Orton but it's nothing special as it is the same one posted earlier in the week. His feud with Seth Rollins has sucked. Main event time as we get the Intercontinental Title competitors in six man tag action. This was excellent as all six guys did their thing in fifteen minutes. Cole goes to interview the winners, who all get jealous of each other. Dolph is kinda peeved that Bryan stole the pin on Harper, while Ambrose thinks that Dolph has an inferiority complex because he doesn't believe he's better than Bryan. Ambrose calls Bryan a turd and so does Dolph. That's it. The show ends like that. Awkward, strange, goofy and ridiculous. I bet Vince McMahon was in stitches backstage. Despite the odd ending and the awful Reigns stuff, the show was decent around it. 5/10.
