How was that for a rambling precap? I think I’m past the ad box, which you should totally click on before reading on.

Segment 1: Did you click the ad box?

Here comes Edge to start the show. He gets in the ring and tells us that… ugh… we’ve got a contract signing segment tonight, him and Alberto Del Rio. I despise contract signing segments. Per usual, I’m going to gloss over that crap—which I’m sure will be the main event promo—unless something truly interesting happens.

Edge says he’s looking forward to the contract signing so he can bitch at ADR, especially because he interrupted Edge’s celebration last week. His celebration, that is, of getting Vickie Guerrero getting the axe. So Edge wants to start where they left off, and wants to lead the crowd in the Goodbye Song.

But Drew McIntyre chooses that moment to hit the ring and be an asshole, but Edge dispatches him in an instant.

After that, here comes Teddy Long. He first gives his undying thanks to Drew, since it was Drew who lost last week causing Vickie to get fired. And now, if Drew doesn’t get in the ring right now, he’s fired.

Edge agrees though that it’s all thanks to Drew that Vickie is gone, so he leads the crowd in a short “Thank you Drew! Thank you Drew!” chant before we fade to commercial.

Segment 2 [Singles Match]: Edge defeats Drew McIntyre by submission. Solid match but nothing special. The story was Drew beating on Edge’s arm, which is still hurt from ADR’s attack last week. But Edge was able to gain control in the ring and hit the Spear, made the pin… but pulled him up at two. Then Edge put on a submission… uh… was it the Edge-e-cution? [Ed. Note: I think the Edge-u-cution is his implant DDT. The modified sharpshooter thing might have been the Edge-u-cator, though; if so, I'm glad it's not being called as such now that he's dusting it off again.] I know Edge has a move called that but I forget what it is. Basically, this submission was a Texas Cloverleaf with a camel clutch added on. Pretty sweet, and Drew tapped in short order.

Segment 3: Rey Mysterio music fires up, and “Rey” comes out from the back, except he’s a foot taller and wearing a dark gray suit with brown wingtips. That’s got to be a fashion faux pas. Turns out it’s Cody Rhodes, who pulls off the Rey mask, though he’s still wearing his clear plastic Phantom of the Opera mask.

Cody gets to the ring and delivers an overly long promo about how sexually exciting it was to shred Rey’s face against the metal grating of the stage last week. He also threatens to beat Rey and unmask him at WrestleMania. Except it took him a good five to seven minutes to get all that out.

Segment 4: Kane is in the back, and the whole of The Corre arrives and surrounds him. He reminds Kane that his greatest win came with Corre’s help; that is, Kane won over Undertaker in a Buried Alive match with Nexus’s help, back when Nexus was still Nexus (and not Punk’s New Nexus). They wish him patronizing luck against Big Show tonight, then leave without incident. Hm.

Segment 5 [Tag Match for the WWE Tag Titles]: Heath Slater & Justin Gabriel (w/ The Corre) defeat Santino Marella & Vladimir Kozlov by pin, and retain. So, I guess Santino and Vlad are finally getting their rematch? Doesn’t matter either way: Santino lost thanks to The Corre being jerks and giving them all kinds of distractions. Santino managed to hit Wade with the Cobra, but Heath ended him a moment after with a reverse falling neckbreaker.

Segment 6: ADR is in the back and is, apparently, getting a portrait painted of him. And… that’s it. Guess we’ll figure out what that’s about later.

Segment 7: Time for the return of the Undertaker to SmackDown! Taker pops out with his usual entrance but to Johnny Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.” I wonder if that’s his new music or something. I certainly hope not, or at least I hope he’ll use his funeral march at WrestleMania.

Taker does his full entrance and makes his way to the ring. The lights stay low as he talks, saying that as you get older, you realize your limitations… mountains you can’t climb, seas you can’t sail… and streaks you cannot break. Huge pop for that, and I do like that line.

Taker goes on that he heard Triple H’s promo on RAW, and there were some things he agreed with. He agrees that he and Trips are the last of an era, the end of a dying breed of superstars, and that Trips himself is awesome (“maybe the greatest WWE Champion over the last 15 years”). But Taker doesn’t agree with it all: especially not the sentiment that the only thing it would take to permanently destroy Taker is to beat him at WrestleMania.

“Easier said than done” anyway, Taker says. See, Trips only thinks he can beat him, mostly because he’s betting with his career and accolades against Taker’s streak (whatever that means). If Trips wins, he’ll be a legend among legends; but if he loses, he’s nothing but a statistic, and another name on a list of Taker’s WrestleMania victims.

Taker tells Trips that he plays no games and bows to no one, especially not “the King of Kings.” Trips will find out what “18 other men” found out, that Taker is indeed the last outlaw. So, uh, the first half of that sentence isn’t literally true, and the second half is nonsensical confusing. But Taker continues that Trips will lose, and will find out what it means to rest… in… peace… and we get a Gay Spooky thunder crash as the music fires up again.

Well, that started strong, but Trips is winning 1-0 in the verbal battle right now. It’s enough to work for Taker’s idiom, but he’s done better. (See: the last 24 months of promos he’s cut against Shawn Michaels.)

Segment 8 [Tag Match]: Laycool defeat Beth Phoenix & Rosa Mendes by pin. If I can channel my biological urges for a moment—as if I don’t already do that at least twice for every single recap—I must say that that Rosa Mendes is now my #6 of my top-5. (Call her an “honorary mention” I guess.) It must be the black hair, because I didn’t give a shit about her until she dyed it. Or, un-dyed it, depending on her natural color. I love long black hair.

Anyway, the match lasted about as long as it took me to write that last paragraph. Time-compressed formula here, with Rosa as the Face in Peril. Layla and Michelle at one point got shoved into each other and almost started coming to blows, but they got their shit together to deal with the inevitable Pier Four Brawl. Beth managed to do a running powerslam to Layla and almost put her down for the count, but Michelle broke the pin attempt. Behind the ref’s back, Michelle hit Beth with the shittiest roundhouse ever: it caught Beth in the upper bicep and Beth still sold the face. Layla covered Beth up after that, and the heels took the win.

Michelle was still sporting the metal boot for her right foot, and I forget what her exact injury is or was. That’s the foot she used for the kick, so either she just aimed wrong, or the added weight of the boot kept her from getting it up to Beth’s face level. Either way, the commentators sold it that the added weight of the boot also caused fifty times the damage, which I suppose works well enough for story purposes. It does make me wonder if Michelle is actually still even hurt, either in reality or in the storylines, and is just using the boot to be a mean bitch.

After the match, Layla collapsed into Michelle’s waiting arms as they sat together on the canvas, and Layla kissed Michelle’s metal boot. So I guess as long as they keep winning, they can forgive minor in-match arguments.

Segment 9 [Singles Match]: Big Show defeats Kane by disqualification. So, the match was about 60 seconds long. After a few moves from each guy, the Corre hit the ring and tossed in a chair for Kane. (This is in answer to Show getting a chair and evening the odds last week, incase you forget.) Kane looked at it, shrugged, and smashed Show in the back.

Corre then hit the ring and beat on Show, who tried to defend himself. Show wound up shoving Justin Gabriel, but Justin went into Kane. Kane no-likey South Africans invading his personal space, so he swung his chair again and delivered a sick blow to Justin’s back.

The rest of Corre bailed, with Wade dragging Justin’s corpse out of the ring. The crowd cheered, so I guess Kane is now a tweener. As Kane stalked the ring and gave the stink eye to Corre, he mouthed “I don’t trust you” or something. Wade just looked offended and confused as we went to commercial.

Segment 10: Even though the bell is rung and Tony Chimel says this is a match, we’ve got a long blathering segment first. Jack Swagger hits the ring, and during his entrance, we get a video recap of Michael Cole introducing Jack as his trainer on Monday night.

Cole voices over his own video recap, then decides to join Jack in the ring. Cole puts Jack over, then himself over, then announces that he’ll announce his guest referee on Monday. He says his guest ref is flamboyant and “is awesome.” Is this a double-reverse mindfuck? Because it seems so obviously that his guest ref will be The Miz that it just can’t be The Miz, unless WWE wants to fuck with that mindset and make it Miz after all.

Whatever. Cole finishes that he, Jack, his ref, and LaBron James all hate Cleveland… and, of course, they’re in Cleveland, so this is the cheapest of cheap heat, since it really didn’t blend into his promo whatsoever.

And then we fade to commercial. That was pointless. In fact, it was so pointless that when I was skipping through commercials, I initially skipped through all of that because I first thought it was a continuation of the replay of the Cole promo on RAW, until I noticed the blue ropes. And trust me, it wasn’t really worth backing up for that.

Segment 11 [Singles Match]: Jack Swagger squashes JTG by submission. Cole didn’t shut the fuck up for the whole match, which easily lasted under 75 seconds.

After the match, I will say that Cole did the “run around the ring with arms extended like the soaring eagle” with Jack, and it was enjoyable. It really looked like watching someone’s retarded toddler cousin chasing invisible dinosaurs in the front yard.

Segment 12: Edge is WALKING~! and runs into the artist from earlier, who has the “painting” of ADR… which is clearly not a painting but a blown-up framed picture. But the artist is still inexplicably carrying his paintbrush and pallet, so Edge takes it upon himself to paint a mustache, unibrow, and devil goatee on the painting/poster. Then Edge tosses down the brush and, as the artist picks it up, kicks him in the ass. This has the magical ability of sending the artist ten feet down the hallway and he collapses without moving, thus revealing him to be as easily knocked out as the Pope’s Popemobile driver in Family Guy. (Except weaker, since at least that guy needed a headshot.)

I hate pro wrestling sometimes.

Segment 13: Time for the contract signing which, as predicted, is the “main event.” (Or, more accurately, this means that JTG was officially part of the SmackDown main event tonight. And was squashed. Which makes it officially and inarguably worse than RAW’s main event even with Alex Riley involved.)

As usual with contract signing segments, and as I said earlier, I absolutely refuse to recap this shit in detail. One neat touch is that ADR decked out the ring in Mexican flags and bunting just to be a jerk, and there was a single amusing line… or rather, a single amusing stage direction. Teddy had said he wanted just one contract signing not ending in chaos. Edge’s final line was, “Hey Teddy, you know that favor you asked for that didn’t want a contract signing to end in chaos? I have your answer.” And Teddy looked at Edge, looked at ADR, looked at Edge, then ran like hell. That was funny.

But anyway, a fight broke out, Edge took the damage thanks to Ricardo Rodriguez helping him out. Edge wound up with a legit and nasty bloody nose, and ADR wanted to end him by trapping his arm in a chair and slamming it into the floor. But then Christian came running down to make the save. Now, all night, they had been saying that Christian was going to appear next week, and I was going to hold off talking about that in my final thoughts, so this a nice surprise in the meantime.

Christian just did mounted punching in the ring, then out of the ring on the ramp, before the refs pulled him off. Christian’s music played as he checked over Edge, and we faded out with that.

Final Thoughts: I had been wondering where Christian was and I was going to say something about it this week, but WWE went ahead and revealed him anyway, so… awesome! Christian is one of my favorites of all time, and easily the most underutilized guy on the current roster. Hopefully that will change this year.

Overall, the night was pretty bad. If you hated the time management of RAW, you’d hate SmackDown more. We got replays of Cena/Rock, Miz/Rock, Cole/Jerry, Trips/Taker, Shawn/Taker, and of course a few replays of shit that happened last week on SD. Thank god for DVR shifting.

I don’t know. I cannot honestly tell you why RAW was entertaining to me, despite all the video packages, and why SD was not entertaining to me despite probably a similar number of them. Maybe cause at least the video packages on RAW were new to me, and everything tonight were replays. But it was what it was… and what it wasn’t was worth watching.

Maybe next week will be better. If memory serves, most of the WWE roster isn’t even in the States at the moment and are doing some tours in some other country or continent or something. It’s no real excuse—hell, I’d argue that the Road to WrestleMania is a length of time when the rosters shouldn’t even consider leaving the country, except for maybe a one-off show in Canada—but I suppose it can explain why there is a sudden dearth of actual wrestling.

Bottom line, you can skip this SD and not feel like you missed anything. Hopefully we’ll get back on track next week with dense, entertaining shows as we close in on April 3rd.

Episode Grade: D+