SmackDown this week kicked off with Chris Jericho coming to the ring to cut a promo on the gelatinous tapeworms in the crowd for eating too much on Thanksgiving, before talking up his record in TLC matches (it’s one win and one loss but Jericho makes himself sound like an unbeatable experienced veteran when it comes to these matches) while again putting over that DX have never been tag team champions.  Were it not for the fact that WWE doesn’t really care about tag team wrestling I’d say this was leading to DX taking the belts at the PPV – and with Big Show missing this weeks’ television through injury I’d suspect that is where things are heading anyway.

At the end of the segment, Teddy Long comes out and announces Jericho v. Undertaker in a non-title match tonight.  I thought it was dumb when they gave away the first Jericho/Undertaker singles match ever for free on TV with one week build, but giving it away again with two hours build is borderline retarded.

The opening match was yet another contest between Cryme Tyme and The Hart Dynasty.  These two teams have good matches together, probably because, as the only two permanent tag teams on SmackDown they work all the house shows together as well as their numerous TV bouts.  This one saw the Harts win when Shad was distracted by Kidd, allowing David Hart Smith to hit a back suplex for the pin.

After this, a backstage segment aired with John Morrison and Teddy Long’s ridiculously horrible acting as Long pretends to be cool and Morrison’s best mate, but JoMo is humouring him, which makes him look even more of a geek than Teddy.  Vickie Guerrero interrupts to remind Teddy he’s still on probation, and says Eric Escobar should get an IC Title shot.  Morrison seems fine with this so Teddy makes the match.

Curiously, the match itself didn’t air on the UK broadcast (even though they still had time to edit out half of CM Punk’s promo and also include a From The Vault match), so I can’t tell you too much about it except that from reading other recaps online this morning from the US airing, Morrison won and they did a break-up with Guerrero and Escobar.

CM Punk came out with Luke Gallows, the former Festus, and took credit for getting him off medication and teaching him that Straight Edge is the way forward. That’s such a great development for Punk’s character, and Gallows was pretty damn great as Festus, and now he’s slimmed down a little while still being tall and intimidating he’s a really good fit for a role as Punk’s bodyguard.  Then there was an edit, and we got Matt Hardy coming out to defend Jeff, so I guess Punk must have slated him in the guise of plugging the new Jeff Hardy DVD that’s coming out soon.

This was followed by a Punk-Matt match which ended with Matt wining by DQ when Gallows hit the ring and laid out Hardy.  He held Matt in position in the corner for Punk to hit the running knee, and then took Matt down with an inverted full-nelson slam, which Striker called Gallows Pole.

Mickie James was interviewed by Josh Matthews about the Piggy James segment last week, and says that no matter what McCool and Layla say about her, she won’t be intimidated into leaving SmackDown.

Then we got Batista v. Kane.  This got 15 minutes, and was about as negative for Batista’s heel character as you would expect a 15-minute Batista v. Kane match to be.  Big Dave as the silent psycho human wrecking ball is awesome, Big Dave going for leg submissions and being all “look at me, I watch MMA” can fuck right off.

Then at this point in the show was where the Escobar/Morrison match should’ve been broadcast but wasn’t, before  a recap of Jesse Ventura’s excellent appearance on the three-hour RAW as guest host, in particular going back on commentary with Vince McMahon, which was totally great.  People have given Vince a lot of heat for sounding older than he did 20 years ago, which I think is dumb because after all IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO, and an older Vince who everyone now knows runs the company came across a lot more distinguished than the old Vince who was just a shilling announcer used to.

The main event was Undertaker v. Jericho, and yet again it was awesome.  Batista was on commentary (again saying nothing just like in the Rey Mysterio/Tyson Kidd match last week) and at one point he got up and walked to Undertaker to have a confrontation, although Batista eventually backed away and sat back down.  Taker and Jericho had another awesome match, just by doing all their trademark stuff and knowing how to play off each other, with a veterans instinct you don’t see often.  My favourite part of the match was after Jericho hit the lionsault, he raised his arm in victory, but Taker sat up, Jericho freaked out, and Taker grabbed his throat before standing him up for the chokeslam.  Written down it sounds like nothing, but these two did it fantastically, which such great timing and working of the camera that it came off looking awesome.

The ending saw Taker about to hit the tombstone when Batista ran in and kicked Taker in the leg, before Jericho hit the codebreaker and Batista laid out Taker with multiple chairshots, which I guess sets up the C match at the PPV.

Mark Bright
mark@ifight365.com