Ah, the life of a WWE writer, what a thankless job they have! They spend all week slaving away, trying to put together the perfect Raw script, but the ever fickle near billionaire owner of WWE, Vince McMahon, is never happy with their efforts, often ripping their script up and telling them to start again from scratch. Inevitably, the first rewrite doesn't meet his lofty standards either and they repeat this process until minutes before the show starts airing on the USA network. In a worst case scenario, someone may pitch Vince a radical idea on Monday afternoon that he immediately falls in love with, despite its inherent flaws. Known for his increasingly volatile temperament, no-one wants to rock the boat and point out to Vince the overt problems with his flash of inspiration, so everybody in the meeting pats him on the back and tells him that it's the best thing they've heard since sliced bread. Then they surely think to themselves: "Aww crap, how are we going to make this work in the limited time at our disposal?". Wash, rinse and repeat for 52 weeks a year with little or no time off. No wonder gaping plot holes develop, weird booking occurs and promoting pay-per-views is often left by the wayside; it's the nature of the beast that is the current WWE creative machine.
As Dave Meltzer reported in his subscriber only radio show today, this all to familiar scenario played out once again last Monday, at the creative team meeting where they were deciding what was going to happen on Raw and someone pitched the idea of a mass locker room walkout on Triple H:
Monday, they went through script after script after script, over and over and over, Vince changing everything, so what we got on television was not the writers' vision of what they were actually planning on doing, although there were similarities, but they were many many changes, enough changes to where it was very very different. When the reaction of the idea that everyone leaves, when people saw that, when that was suggested and Vince loved it, he loved it in a manner that everyone in the room, as far as the agents went, who know wrestling, were basically with this thing "we can't say anything because he loves it, so we'll keep our mouths shut". So when the meeting was over they're all going "we just booked ourselves into the corner". Basically every complaint that you made Monday night was exactly what the agents were saying to each other, it's like "OK, we've got house shows this weekend, we've got Smackdown tomorrow night, how does this make sense?". Well, no-one addressed that because the writers didn't write it to be like this, but Vince loved it and Vince didn't think of it and no-one was about to bring it up because they didn't want Vince to get mad at them and throw a tantrum.
I think the WWE writing team under such circumstances can be forgiven that their explanations for Smackdown and this week's house shows continuing on as normal were so flimsy. They thought on their feet and did the best they could when Vince dealt them such a rotten hand. Supposedly, there's going to be some sort of "Solidarity Rally" on next Monday's Raw, where the wrestlers who walked out on Triple H will be picketing the show and refusing to return to work until Triple H stands down as WWE's COO. But who knows, Vince might wake up Monday morning on the wrong side of his bed and think that idea absolutely sucks on a whim, meaning we end up seeing something completely different than is currently being hinted at by WWE.com.