Best: Vickie Guerrero’s Wah-Wah Delivery Of Everything

The story is awful — we are seriously in week 3 of a scandal storyline about two single people who may or may not have hooked up, orchestrated as a power grab from a lady who has exclusively been involved in “hooking up with wrestlers” angles and wears a gold “cougar” necklace — but Vickie Guerrero trying to get John Cena to break character and laugh on TV is my new favorite thing.

Vickie was AMAZING last night. From the impossibly-overconfident stuff here, breaking out phrases like “Johnny Boy” for no reason and goof-smiling her way through shit like THIS IS FROM A DIFFERENT SECURITY CAMERA BUT OF THE SAME ROOM as though any human being ever would buy it, to the Vince McMahon on-air meeting where she kept being forced to make decisions and tried to slide Dolph Ziggler into the discussion, she was the best kind of pro wrestling character. She was slimy and borderline-invalided, but she was fun to watch, and she was clearly having fun doing it.

If John Laurinaitis isn’t going to return as the Raw General Manager, Comedy Vickie isn’t a bad replacement.

Worst: Stop Using Secret Footage As A Crutch

That all said, man, who in WWE Creative has a hard-on for voyeur porn and thinks stories revolving around people obtaining security footage of shit is awesome? It’s never good, it rarely ever reveals anything (which you’d think would be the entire purpose of introducing VIDEO FOOTAGE OF SOMETHING HAPPENING to prove that SOMETHING HAPPENED) and it takes wrestlers weeks to piece together.

If Vickie had footage of John Cena and AJ buttf**king it wouldn’t matter, because again, they are two single people who are allowed to hook up, and even if it was an abuse of power thing, AJ’s been removed from power over it and life goes on. Proving John Cena is a liar isn’t something you need security camera footage for, all you gotta do is play that clip of him yelling REAL MEN WEAR PINK and follow it up with every gay joke he’s ever told. But yeah, if you have evidence of wrong-doing and you’re obsessed with being “right” and making Cena and AJ admit that they’re bad people, why stagger it and reveal a tiny bit every Monday? WHY ARE YOU ONLY DOING THIS ON MONDAYS? Why not just say “John Cena, did you have sex with AJ and get her fired,” wait for him to say no, then say “oh rly” and drop all of it on him? You are instantly SUPER RIGHT, Cena and AJ are exposed as liars and you can just witch cackle until they Charlie-Brown-walk away in shame.

If you’re Kaitlyn and you’re trying to get to the bottom of who attacked you, don’t make grand statements like “the person who attacked me … WAS A BLONDE” like you’re playing some big real-life game of Guess Who, give the proper authorities ALL THE INFORMATION YOU CAN GATHER and spend longer than from “when the show starts” to “when my segment happens” watching it. These are important things happening in your lives, you dumb fictional characters, take your lives seriously.

Best/Worst: Daniel Bryan Is The Most Popular Guy In The Room (And Losing In 2 Minutes)

British chants are funny. They’ll cheer for anything stupid you want. They love the “what” chant, they have quaint interpretations of assy smark chants (“YOU CAHN’T WRESTLE!”) and when the guy who says YES shows up they LOSE THEIR MINDS OVER YES. Daniel Bryan gets a Best for being the most over non-European person on the show and for getting “DAN-IEL BRY-AN” chants, even as he was losing.

The Worst is the losing. Not that he lost, necessarily, because Cody Rhodes is great and WWE loves the idea that a tag team wrestler loses singles matches easily (which they’ve always done, whether it makes sense or not … I guess if a tag team guy wrestles without his partner he’s only got a 50% chance of winning*!) (*WWE math), but because you’ve got Daniel Bryan wrestling Cody Rhodes in front of a hot crowd that wants to see them go and you take it home two minutes in to set up a different thing down the road. Can’t you set up the thing and take advantage of the thing happening right now at the same time? Couldn’t we have shoe-horned in another 5-10 minutes of wrestling before that finish? People probably would’ve been excited to see them wrestle again, instead of that weird thing we all are where we’re excited at the possibility of wrestling happening when they’re scheduled to wrestle. That’s the worst.

Worst: Damien Sandow Is Suddenly Pink Again

Sorry for using tweets on two pages in a row, but if I could think of a more accurate way to say what I’m feeling, I would:

Brandon Stroud Twitter

John Cena takes off his pink stuff as soon as he’s not contractually obligated to wear it and pretend he’s not ashamed of it, and Damien Sandow gets his pink trunks back because people are supposed to wonder whether or not he’s gay.

That’s why I get shitty whenever WWE pretends to care about bullies or breast cancer. It’s fine, and I’m glad you’re using your time and money for something worthwhile, but being a wrestling fan involves accepting that you and at least 90% of the people who like what you like have some kind of mental disorder where a thing you love is about people who pretend to fight alienating as many people as possible to define who is bad and who is good and physically killing themselves to entertain America’s worst people. It sucks, but it’s the truth. Wrestling CAN be beautiful, and it CAN be an art form and it CAN bring people together and illustrated the best parts of sports, honor, fellowship and humanity, but there’s only one thing it ALWAYS is.

Anyway, I’m happy that Sandow’s back in the pink trunks so people think he’s gay, because my experience is that gay people are rad and way more fun to hang out with than the guy in the XXL t-shirt and jean shorts.

Best: Brad Maddox Is Saying Some Interesting Stuff If You Guys Would Stop Saying What And Listen To It

I guess the theme of this week is BRANDON GETS JUDGMENTAL ABOUT JUDGMENTAL PEOPLE. Sorry.

This is a pretty solid example of why we can’t have new or good characters. Brad Maddox shows up as a referee and does some crummy stuff, culminating in an inexplicable moment where he uppercuts Ryback in the junk and costs him the WWE Championship. So Maddox finally speaks and delivers a convincing, honest-sounding speech about how difficult it is to make it in WWE when you aren’t a monster or a genetic freak athlete and on the pressures of “making an impact,” and what happens? The crowd doesn’t even hear it. They’re just waiting for a pause to say “what”. Not saying “what” because they want him to shut up, saying “what” because they don’t know who he is and aren’t interested in something they don’t already know about.

It’s terrible. It’s the same reason they chanted “you can’t wrestle” at him when he talked about how he can’t do three flips in the air and land on his feet. Really? You guys don’t watch FCW, hell, you don’t even watch Smackdown, of COURSE you don’t watch FCW. You have no idea whether or not this guy can wrestle. If Chris Hero or Jon Moxley showed up on Raw and delivered the same speech, they’d get the same chant. Having to please the ignorant is one of the reasons I’ve always gravitated toward heels so much … they KNOW how ridiculous these people are, and see how fake it is when a guy like Cena says he’s only here because of them. You’re only here because you’re a handsome muscular tall guy whose dad was a wrestling promoter who got lucky because he’s got the body type and the can-do Republican troops-loving attitudes the boss of the company loves. That guy in the RVD shirt had f**king nothing to do with your success, John.

So as of now, I’m on Team Maddox. I hope next week’s Million Dollar Contract match with Ryback ends the way it should: with Brock Lesnar showing up to save the day, break Ryback’s arm and officially usher in Brad Maddox as a Paul Heyman Guy.