Everybody, all together now. On Thursday, WWE was over in Saudi Arabia for one of their semiannual events with Crown Jewel. While the show was fairly well received, the bigger problem was the travel situation. A nearly halfway around the world flight back to the United States took over half of a day and that was going to make the journey a rather tight fit for WWE. Well it turns out that it was too tight and due to some mechanical issues with the flight, meaning the majority of the roster was unable to make it back to the United States for the show. WWE promised to run the show with some surprises, but who was there?
This week’s SmackDown featured a variety of guest stars, with the majority of them coming from coming from NXT. The NXT names appearing are appropriate as Survivor Series is planned to be a three way fight between Monday Night Raw, SmackDown and NXT. None of the names were announced in advanced, though there were some names previously announced after they did not go to Saudi Arabia. Here are the names and what they did, with some of them being bunched together:

Aiden English, Renee Young, Tom Phillips and Pat McAfee – Commentators

Triple H – Authority figure for NXT

Shawn Michaels – NXT coach/trainer

Shayna Baszler – Attacked Bayley and Sasha Banks

Keith Lee and Matt Riddle – Attacked Sami Zayn

Tommaso Ciampa – Appeared on MizTV and defeated the Miz

Bianca Belair – Attacked Dana Brooke and Carmella backstage

Rhea Ripley and Tegan Nox – Defeated Fire & Desire

Adam Cole – Successfully defended the NXT Title against Daniel Bryan

Roderick Strong – Came to the ring with Cole

Isaiah Scott – Appeared at the end of the show with the rest of the NXT stars

There was a lot going on here. Check out some highlights featuring the guest stars:

Opinion: If this is what we’re going to be getting until Survivor Series, we should be in for some very entertaining nights. This show felt energized and fun, which has not been the case for a very long time now. I don’t know if it is due to NXT showing up or the more disconnected nature of the show, but it is certainly something that I could go for more of in the future. NXT has a different kind of roster and a lot of fans have been wanting to see them interacting with the main roster wrestlers for a long time now. Hopefully we get something special out of this, as it certainly had a great start.

How do you expect this to go? Who had the best debut? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. His latest book is KB’s Complete 2004 Monday Night Raw Reviews.

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