Top 3 things that went wrong on the April 22 episode of SmackDown

Man, these episodes of WWE SmackDown are getting harder and harder to sit through. This isn’t to say that the shows are terrible — though they certainly aren’t good — but the startling lack of compelling characters, attention-grabbing storylines, and top stars makes one wonder why anyone bothers to watch this show, particularly on a Friday.

Ostensibly, this show continued the build to May’s WrestleMania Backlash premium live event, specifically for the tag team championship unification match and the I Quit match for the SmackDown Women’s Championship.

While WWE chose the most rote, uninteresting ways to advance those programs, they weren’t outright bad. The following matches and angles, however, were.

These were the top three things that went wrong on the April 22 episode of SmackDown.

Sami Zayn escapes…FROM A LUMBERJACK MATCH

A reminder: The point of a lumberjack match is to prevent the wrestlers from fleeing the fight. But this is WWE we’re talking about, a promotion that sees undermining logic and reasoning as a weekly challenge, especially if it’s in service of extending a feud far longer than necessary.

As a result, we got a lumberjack match between Sami Zayn and Drew McIntyre that ended in an apparent no contest after Zayn used the brawling lumberjacks (another overused trope) to once again scamper into the crowd, rendering the eight-minute match a waste of time.

Finishes like this are why so many of WWE’s stipulation matches — and WWE matches in general — fail to maintain the fans’ interest. After all, why bother emotionally investing in who wins or loses a match if you don’t expect to get a conclusive outcome, particularly in a stipulation match where the entire promotional premise is centered around receiving that closure.

As a consequence, fans will be less interested in the next lumberjack match WWE advertises, as they now know what the company is capable of when booking these bouts (if last year’s zombie lumberjack match didn’t already alert them).

But don’t worry folks! There REALLY won’t be anywhere for Zayn to escape next week when he faces McIntyre again in a steel cage match…if you ignore that WWE cage matches literally have “escape the cage” as an avenue for victory.

Babyface Lacey Evans

As someone who is pretty far left on the political spectrum, these Lacey Evans confessionals — designed to repackage Evans as a babyface — do not resonate when she goes on about not taking “handouts” and not relying on others for help through the traumatic experiences in her life or (even for applying makeup).

It comes across as very “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” and “I’m more resilient than others because I overcame this on my own”, which undercuts her saying that she doesn’t think she’s better than anyone else (she literally said that she felt bad for people who didn’t go through situations that “scare them to death”).

What makes is all the more frustrating is that Evans’ story is inspirational and could make her an easy babyface to get behind in the right context. That context, however, isn’t “right-wing framed capitalist pipe dream”.

Madcap Moss

To be fair, WWE did give Madcap Moss another clean win with his finisher over a member of Los Lotharios. If WWE truly wants to push Moss as a babyface, this is what gives him the best chance to succeed.

What doesn’t give him the best chance to succeed, however, is letting him continue with the same gimmick he had as a heel, right down to telling the same awful jokes. Those punchlines didn’t work from a “they’re supposed to be bad and annoying for heat” perspective. Now, WWE expects fans to laugh with Moss when he delivers these same corny lines at the expense of the heels.

It might work in this feud with Happy Corbin because of how much fans dislike Corbin, but there’s an equal chance of it backfiring, causing fans to reject both acts. And even if things go as planned, there’s little guarantee that they will once Moss moves on from Corbin.

Also, booking Corbin to steal the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal trophy from Moss means nothing because no one cares about that trophy (because WWE has shown that it doesn’t care).