Top 3 things that went wrong on the Jan. 21 episode of SmackDown

Going by last night’s Daily DDT Twitter poll, plenty of viewers (albeit with a small sample size of 43 votes) enjoyed this week’s episode of SmackDown. This lends itself to the idea that if you’re going to spend your Friday evening watching this show, you’re going to be more inclined to enjoy it.

Of course, that’s not to say that WWE didn’t offer anything worthwhile to watch on this show (including bringing wrestlers over from Raw to paper over the SmackDown roster’s lack of star power), but the substance of what WWE did on the broadcast left plenty to be desired from a creative standpoint.

Today, we’re going to discuss the primary missteps.

These are the top three things that went wrong on the Jan. 21 episode of SmackDown.

Too many rematches

Of the six matches that filled SmackDown’s two-hour runtime, FOUR of them were rematches from the previous week. It’s likely a consequence of how barren the roster is, but that doesn’t let WWE off the hook given how so much of their issues with its talent pool are self-inflicted.

This isn’t an indictment on the quality of the matches — Madcap Moss vs. Kofi Kingston wasn’t terrible and Sheamus vs. Ricochet was pretty fun — but there are only so many times that fans can literally watch the same matches before the shows start to feel like reruns. These aren’t house show loops where wrestlers work a similar match in front of different crowds after all.

If it’s that much of a struggle to produce fresh matches on a weekly basis, then maybe it’s time to consider ending the brand split again.

DQ finishes

Along with the rematches, bad finishes were also apparently the order of the day for WWE on this week’s SmackDown, specifically disqualification finishes. The first came during the Natalya vs. Aliyah rematch, which lasted two minutes and ended when Nattie got DQed for stomping on Aliyah in the corner and ignoring the referee’s five-count (A.K.A getting DQed for kicking too much a**).

Then we saw another DQ in, as Michael Cole noted throughout the show, the high-stakes main event between The Usos, Kevin Owens, and Seth Rollins.

The match carried the stipulations that Rollins would lose his Universal Championship match and that the Usos would be banned from ringside during the Rollins/Reigns match if Owens and Rollins won and just after Rollins delivered The Stomp to Jimmy Uso, Roman Reigns ran in and Superman Punched Rollins to trigger the DQ.

In both cases, WWE clearly went “Well, we can’t have any of these wrestlers get pinned, so let’s book this bad finish to protect everyone”, even though it often has the opposite effect, and such was the case with both of these matches.

WWE rehashes the Montreal Screwjob…again!

Astonishingly, though, those two DQ finishes weren’t the worst ones on the show. For that “honor”, we must turn to the Charlotte Flair vs. Naomi Championship Contender’s match. Adam Pearce made this match last week as the payoff to those dumb bits with the thermostat, and since he made no stipulation to keep Sonya Deville from getting involved, you can guess what happened.

If you guessed “Sonya Deville interferes and screws Naomi”, congratulations (sort of)! Yes, it was time for another chapter of the Naomi/Deville saga, which resembled one of the previous chapters when Deville made herself the special guest referee.

From there, Sonya refused to count the pinfall for Naomi after Naomi hit the Rear View on Flair and recreated the Montreal Screwjob by immediately calling for the bell once Flair locked Naomi in the Figure Eight. And all of this was a setup for Pearce booking Naomi vs. Deville for next week (with no stipulations to keep Deville from backing out of the match or changing the rules).

Setting aside how pulling stunts like this in advertised matches causes fans to become less invested in the next advertised match (though given how this storyline has gone, most fans are likely used to it by this point), WWE rehashing the Screwjob (an even that took place in 1997!) illustrates the promotion’s eternal pettiness and scarcity of ideas for a feud that has dragged on for far too long.