Friday Night SmackDown Review - September 23, 2011

Mark Henry decimates the SmackDown lumberjacks.

Decent segment to open up the show, but it doesn't seem that John Laurinitis standing in the middle of the ring when viewers turn on SmakcDown is something that will keep them hooked. Christian is a broken record at this point, and it's merely the way because of the way he's heel character has been been booked. World Heavyweight Champion Mark Henry was cheered, but I'm not sure that's what they were looking for. On a side note, it's funny to note that nearly half of the Superstars standing at ring-side throughout this entire segment were either Raw Superstars, NXT rookies, or commentators.

Nice squash from Sheamus over Heath Slater. It was good to see Slater get a bit of offense in before being destroyed in the end, but getting Sheamus over as a badass face was the main goal here and succeeded.

Quality match from Justin Gabriel and Wade Barrett. Gabriel was able to pull out some exciting set of maneuvers, but the bout as a whole was too short to transfer this into an actual program. Given their history, a rivalry could benefit both foreign Superstars tremendously. Although I was pleased to see Barrett go over here, both former Nexus members need wins badly, otherwise the crowd won't care in the end who wins or loses.

Typical Divas tag team squash. It seems to be a pattern in having the Divas of Doom lose on Raw, only to go to SmackDown and dominate everyone there. NXT Season Three winner Kaitlyn is absolutely terrible, so I'm glad she had limited time in the ring, but this match could have gone longer if AJ was given more time.

With this being the third time these two have met in the last month, Randy Orton vs. Cody Rhodes has become immensely redundant, so the match was nothing special. However, Orton's beat-down on the Intercontinental Champion following the contest was brutally vicious, and once again has me questioning as to why the Viper is looked at as the top face of the blue brand. Even though the product is PG, I would liked to see more shots of the legitimate pools of blood from the down pouring face of Cody Rhodes, since many fans were disappointed it didn't make television.

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Intercontinental Champion Cody Rhodes

Complete throwaway featuring Jinder Mahal and the unfortunately newly-turned face Great Khali. Please let this be the end of this lackluster feud, as I can no longer witness more younger credible talent being buried. It's disappointing enough that Khali reverted back to his catchy face tune he hasn't in months.

Good match from Daniel Bryan and Sin Cara, but the botches took away from the action for this viewer given these two workers had a five-star match back in May. The trading places furthered the story-line between the two different Sin Caras, but it didn't make much sense seeing that the original Cara was about to win anyways. Creative must give viewers a way to tell these two apart before the wrong Superstar starts getting the wrong reaction come their eventual one-on-one bout.

In what turned out to be the most exciting match of the night, Air Boom taking on the Usos was very suspensful given how much chemistry the two teams have with each other. The action was too short, but I hope the Usos receive another chance at the WWE Tag Team Champions soon, as more matches between the two factions are highly anticipated.

Not much to say about the main event, as they once again succeeded at having Mark Henry come off as a absolute beast. The World Heavyweight Championship stipulation wasn't really needed, but hopefully it shuts Christian up for a good while. The fans were really given an incentive on who to root for, but the action with the Lumberjacks mostly made up for that. One can surely hope that this title defense wasn't just used to give Henry one defense before losing the title back to Randy Orton at Hell in Cell, as that would be considered a major mistake.

Overall, a lagging show that didn't further many story-lines, which isn't a good thing seeing that the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view is just next Sunday. With eight matches on the card for last night's show, I didn't expect much focus to go into each contest, but they were mostly predictable as a whole.

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