Top-Down Smackdown – Earth-2 WWE

I wasn’t able to watch all of the WWE Elimination Chamber event due to being at Twin Galaxies most of the day, but what I did see – aside from the laugh I got that the poster ended up being a spoiler for the main event – made me wonder if I was on parallel Earth. John Cena lost clean to Kevin Owens? R-Truth pinned Wade Barrett? Ryback got endorsed by Daniel Bryan?

If it hadn’t been for that idiotically botched bit of shtick involving Sheamus picking a lock with the cross medallion he wears, I could have sworn this was WWE, Jim, but not as we know it.

In the end, what I think happened here was that the entire card was designed to get people over who were not. Get Roman Reigns cheers by having him help the eminently more likable and talented Dean Ambrose. Get Ryback over by having Daniel Bryan endorse him. Make Kevin Owens an instant contender by having him defeat the top guy right off the bat. To that end, it was an unusual mix of what we say we want versus what we perceive Vince McMahon to want – we say we want new stars, so he gives us Reigns and Ryback. We say we want Cena beaten, so he lets us have that. Is this all tokenism, or will there be actual change down the line?

Had they stuck with the Dean Ambrose championship win that we briefly thought we had, my mind would have been blown: in his current gimmick, I cannot see Ambrose ever being pushed as the top guy in the company (although, like the obvious point of comparison Mick Foley, he could be a stalwart of the main event for many years, and maybe get a token reign of a couple weeks sometimes). The take-backsies of the “Dusty finish” were annoying, but much like Ric Flair’s constant evasions of Lex Luger circa 1988, they keep both men strong.

Ryback on one level seems to have missed his moment – he was white hot a couple years ago, until he turned on Cena and became just another victim of the FU. That may have been merited; nipping another Goldberg in the bud, while bad for merchandising, is good for long-term business. Side-note: I just rewatched some of Tough Enough season 1 on WWE Network with the DVD deleted scenes, and those versions include Triple H cutting a major shoot promo on Goldberg in front of the trainee kids as to why they should not be choosing him as a role model. Had it ever made it to air originally, I doubt Goldberg would ever have signed with WWE or agreed to wrestle Triple H at all. Still, the point stands – if Ryback has been as sloppy as Goldberg was, and not pushing him sooner spared us another “Bret Hart having a stroke” moment, it was the right call. My problem is I’m not interested in him any more – I liked him as a Goldberg/Warrior raging monster and as a bad-guy bully, but now he’s just a generic musclehead. Some better creative choices for him are in order, though somehow I fear the easy WWE solution is to put him with a female manager and do a love triangle.

Owens over Cena is an even bigger streak-breaker than Lesnar over Undertaker, and I fear WWE may be painting themselves into a corner here – either that, or (far more likely) it’ll turn out to be a one-off upset and we shall never speak of it again, as a pay-per-view rematch has already been scheduled. Let’s say Owens wins again, though – what happens after that? You have to either put him in a feud with somebody else that Cena has decisively beaten over and over again, i.e. everyone on the main roster, or you elevate somebody like Sami Zayn from NXT to pursue him to Raw. And yes, now that he has beaten Cena you have to keep him on the main roster, unless the goal is to elevate NXT to an equal footing in the public’s eyes – something I fear would ruin NXT from what it is now. Regardless, Owens shouldn’t be taking on Seth Rollins any time soon.

Yet another big signature event in two weeks is far too soon – WWE needs to be spreading out their key gimmicks, even if the storyline does call for a tournament-style main event and a new Mr. Money in the Bank. With the network, it’s less of a financial issue, but it forces the company to rely less on gimmicks and more on compelling matches and angles the rest of the year – something the company is questionable at quite often. We already had a bit of a fake Money in the Bank match at ‘Mania, so I just hope there’s a much better finish for this next one than twenty headbutts.

If the goal was to make me curious about tonight, it was achieved. As RuPaul says, good luck and don’t fuck it up.