Why WWE Can’t Afford To Screw Up Sister Abigail
This is a long preamble to get to the point, but the sheer duration of the Wyatt burial is the point. Wyatt isn’t damaged goods; he is irreparably broken. That may be too kind. Wyatt is actually cholera; the only ability he possesses is the infection of the living via his dead body. Wyatt requires a full character reset at this point. He is stigmatised with the fetid stench of failure - and that failure is contagious. WWE’s long-term prospect is now shorthand for flop.
In a year in which WWE has:
Booked the ‘Bayley, This Is Your Life’ segment; ruined Shinsuke Nakamura; installed Jinder Mahal as a Michelson-Morley experimental WWE Heavyweight Champion; brought back the Punjabi Prison…
…Bray Wyatt remains the only conceivable winner of the venerable WrestleCr*p’s 2017 Gooker award. There are two leading contenders, both of which centre around Wyatt: the notoriously naff House of Horrors match, and Monday’s phenomenally terrible Sister Abigail reveal.
“She was beautiful,” said Wyatt on the tron. “She knew the truth, so they feared her. They turned her into some kind of monster.” Who are “they”? What is “the truth”? Why was everybody watching left with the sinking feeling that none of this makes sense, and never will? Why has something so promising, so cool, become so lame? The answer is simple: four years of abysmal booking from which the Sister Abigail alter-ego represents the only chance of redemption. “The season of the witch is upon you,” continued Wyatt, ripping off his umpteenth horror flick. At this point, Wyatt transformed into Sister Abigail. The aesthetics were not too embarrassing, so there’s that: Abigail is Wyatt with a mesh hood and a bit mascara. Mercifully, the temptation to rib him up in drag was resisted.
The voice was something else entirely; pitch-shifted like a chipmunk, Wyatt deviated from ‘the Wyatt voice’ just once, adding a new lisp to “Irish mythology books”. Elsewhere, Wyatt spoke in the usual, parodic inflection of sniggers and staggered, hushed whispers. Not for the first time, this confusion posed a more disconcerting question: is the performer as inconsistent as the booking?
Should this Abigail enter the ring, the Unholy Gooker Trinity will be completed within the year - a year in which Wyatt was also the WWE Heavyweight Champion. That fact singularly indicts the unrecoverable failure of the Wyatt character.
A different Abigail - an Abigail who wins, who can strike fear into the hearts of his opponents through winning - might yet represent WWE’s last opportunity to restore the supernatural chapter of Windham Rotunda’s career. A full aesthetic alteration, twinned with a reconditioned aura, might be enough to disassociate the audience from Wyatt’s failings, enabling all of us to begin anew.
Hollywood, however, never could get horror sequels right. The WWE creative team stands next to no chance.