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One sign of a successful go-home show is it makes all the matches at the pay-per-view matter, regardless of their ultimate outcomes. I don’t mean viewers should come away without a rooting interest—quite the opposite, in fact. There should be a result that fans desperately want to see and one they would absolutely hate seeing, and both possibilities crucially need to be able to spin out the next chapter of the story. This is just the fundamental logic of faces and heels, of course. Take the SmackDown Tag Team Championship: After Chad Gable’s injury knocked American Alpha out of the tournament, Shane McMahon and Daniel Bryan announced on Talking Smack that Backlash would see the newly heel Usos and the Hype Bros square off for the right to face Heath Slater and Rhyno for the title.

The key with all this is that the undesired result needs to be unwanted for in-universe reasons. The Usos shouldn’t be the inaugural SmackDown Tag Team Championship winners because they’re despicable villains who injured Chad Gable and then—if they were indeed to win—beat down the Hype Bros and denied Health Slater his long-awaited contract. Those are all really good reasons for them not to win, which would make it just the perfect kind of awful if that’s what ended up happening. That’s very different from the Usos shouldn’t win because they’re stale or dull or whatever else. It’s not that it’s illegitimate to feel those things—neither is a particularly hot take on the Usos—but for this whole wrestling thing to work, SmackDown needs to be given an opportunity to tell a compelling story that can move them to someplace new, and tonight’s bit of business with American Alpha accomplishes that.


Tournaments are great at giving all involved a chance to show off their in-ring capabilities: Breezango look like real contenders after that shockingly good 10-minute match with Gable and Jordan in the opening round, and even the Ascension regained a smidge of credibility after getting in some offense against the Usos. Tournaments are less great at bringing out character, especially when Miss Renee isn’t prepared to go to every wrestler’s single-wide, and that fact hasn’t done many favors for American Alpha, who at this point haven’t shown much beyond some admittedly awesome in-ring ability. Gable’s setback gives them a story to pursue with the Usos in two to four weeks, while also not putting them in the potentially awkward spot of having to beat Slater and Rhyno in the final, which—absent a Rhyno betrayal that I don’t think any of us are emotionally prepared for—is going to make whoever beats them the most hated villains in the company. Instead, the Usos, American Alpha, and maybe even the Hype Bros and Breezango—plus Slater and Rhyno if they do emerge victorious—can come out of this month as engaging teams with compelling stories.


SmackDown is at a similar point with the women’s division, although the obligatory six-woman tag match doesn’t accomplish all that much beyond establishing both Becky Lynch and Nikki Bella—the two most plausible winners of the SmackDown Women’s Championship—have injury concerns that could cost them the title on Sunday. Honestly, the much bigger development came in Daniel Bryan’s opening address, as the general manager declared Sunday’s match would in fact be an elimination six-pack challenge. That really ought to mean the match is going to get a decent amount of time, which is always good to hear as WWE works to prove it takes women’s wrestling seriously. It also provides way more options to create new stories. The feud between Carmella and Nikki Bella appears well-established, but Becky could end up being paired with either Natalya or Alexa Bliss. (Both of whom are obviously just keeping the seat warm until Eva Marie gets back. Obviously.)

An elimination match also gives someone a chance to look strong while still suffering ultimate defeat, and yes, every part of my being is demanding I go ahead and replace “someone” with “Becky Lynch,” because short of somehow throwing Cesaro in this match, that’s the most Becky Lynch sentence ever written. Perhaps more than all that, the elimination stipulation takes a lot of pressure off of who actually wins this thing. I try not to put too much stock in smarky concerns like whether a particular title has been legitimized or not, because the truth is that titles are just storytelling devices, and they can instantly be made to matter just by having characters take it seriously—look no further than the Miz and the Never Ending Intercontinental Championship World Tour for proof of that. But an elimination match suggests a genuine, multifaceted battle is going to be fought for that belt, and even if the eventual winner is opportunistic, she likely won’t be a total fluke.


As for the I.C. title scene, it’s good to see the Miz and Daniel Bryan share the scene once again after that legendary Talking Smack confrontation. Last week suggested WWE was backing down a little for fear of building fan expectations of a match between the Miz and Bryan, but tonight’s interaction works beautifully in once again legitimizing the latter’s perspective while still keeping the focus on the ring in anticipation of the title match between the Miz and Ziggler. As LaToya pointed out last week, there’s been a subtle shift in just what the criticism of the Miz is: Two weeks ago, Bryan said he wrestled like a coward, a style-based critique that allowed the Miz to go for the jugular by bringing up their divergent injury histories. But now that the Miz is just straight-up ducking any confrontation with Ziggler, it’s not that he wrestles like a coward, but rather that he simply is a coward.

That’s a much more straightforward idea to get across, and it’s one that makes Ziggler look good independent of his win-loss (mostly loss) record, which is his own separate thing to worry about. This feud feels slapped together, as anything with a two-week build is likely going to, but both the Miz and Ziggler come into Backlash with something to prove about themselves. That they don’t exactly have something to prove to each other suggests this shouldn’t be a decisive endpoint for either of their stories, but again every conceivable result—victory for the Miz, DQ or count-out victory for Ziggler while the Miz retains, or Ziggler victory—suggests a possible way forward. That’s really all I can ask for, especially given the tight turnaround between SummerSlam and Backlash.


I might as well lay my cards down on the table with the WWE World Championship scene: I started regularly watching WWE for the first time ever with this year’s Royal Rumble, which means I began the same night A.J. Styles debuted. I am an A.J. Styles super-fan, and I think both of his matches with John Cena and both of his matches with Roman Reigns were, well, phenomenal. I pretty desperately want him to win the championship on Sunday, even if he’s a total shithead now. And yet, and yet, he’s proven so good at playing a shithead that I’m actually starting to second-guess that. I still think the best use of Styles from a storytelling perspective is to give him the title, let him put on match-of-the-year candidates in the main event for the next several months, and then make whoever ultimately beats him look incredible, but I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure I’m prepared to back the kind of scoundrel who intimidates poor production assistants and throws a tantrum when presented with the objectively funny sight of him stuck atop that rope.

Give credit to Dean Ambrose here as well, whose underwhelming SummerSlam match left him looking like a non-entity next to the white-hot Styles. It’s not surprising that giving Ambrose a mic is the best way to let him remind us all of his value as champion. He’s still a bit of a cocksure asshole, which works rather less well here when paired with the clearly villainous Styles than it did with the fiery underdog Ziggler, but no matter. Ambrose’s promo addresses the big question I had for this match, which is how Ambrose could credibly beat Styles after the guy kicked out of John Cena’s entire damn arsenal. As Dean explains, A.J. is indeed the best wrestler on SmackDown, and he absolutely out-wrestled Cena at SummerSlam. But Ambrose doesn’t wrestle, he fights, and he will go to war to protect the championship he scraped and clawed to get his hands on.


If Styles loses here, it’s not necessarily because of some meta reason about who the company has faith in or how the WWE despises guys who made their name elsewhere. No, it’s because Ambrose presents a chaotic element Styles can’t strategize against like he did with Cena. Is Ambrose too much of a lunatic for even the phenomenal one to handle? That’s a fine story for Styles and Ambrose to tell in the ring on Sunday, and either answer to that question can lead good places. As with the other title matches, there are clear stakes here, even if Styles’ ridiculous talent makes it a little harder to position this in terms of traditional face-heel dynamics. Given no time at all to put together its first exclusive pay-per-view, SmackDown has provided three weeks of solid, occasionally inspired storytelling, and that’s enough for Team Blue to head into Backlash in good shape.

Stray observations