Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson of The Ranch, the Netflix show everyone’s talking about (cough), guest starred to get in the faces of Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens. Also, Sasha Banks defeated Charlotte to win the Raw Women’s Championship, which should seriously just stay the “WWE Women’s Championship” so it doesn’t sound like you’re rewarding them for being women who are raw.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for October 10, 2016.
Best: Your Stupid Woman Revolution
This week’s show starts off exactly like the August 1 edition, with new Women’s Champion Sasha Banks getting a “you deserve it” chant, thanking everyone and cutting a promo about what it finally means to be champion, only to be interrupted by Charlotte. The past two months have been a pretty blatant do-over, so here we are. The good news is that this version of the segment involves Rusev showing up looking like Track Suit Wolverine and features 100% less Enzo Amore boner-speak.
So yeah, Sasha shows up to celebrate her second first day as champion, gets interrupted by Charlotte, and they get interrupted by Lana and Rusev. Or Lana and 2013 CM Punk, I’m not sure. The idea is that Sasha wants to face Charlotte at Hell in a Cell INSIDE Hell in a Cell; a first for women in WWE, which is cool even though Hell in a Cell matches have devolved into normal wrestling matches with an unincorporated cage around them, and there’s really no danger or reason for a match to not be inside the Cell.
Rusev and Lana are, to draw more parallels to the first Sasha Banks title celebration, a “couple haters.” They take the role of that Bad Wrestling Fan who’d be like, “Hell in a Cell is for the MEN, and the women should know their place!” Sasha and Charlotte quickly eyeball each other and briefly unite for Women’s Rights, shoving Lana on her ass and double-dropkicking Rusev out of the ring.
Roman Reigns shows up because he’s still got beef with Rusev, and we end up with the totally logical mixed tag team match of Sasha Banks and Roman Reigns vs. Rusev and … uh, Charlotte. Because alignments! I guess “upcoming pay-per-view champions vs. upcoming pay-per-view challengers” is more important than what we just watched the wrestlers do.
Also, this wonderful exchange happens:
“Who the hell do you think you are??”
“I AM RUSEV!”
Love you so much, overly-literal kung fu movie henchman Rusev.
Best: That Roman Reigns Spear
Man, I hate the disconnect between how I feel about Roman Reigns The Character and Roman Reigns The Wrestler. Roman Reigns The Character is Monday Night Raw, with all the fragile masculinity and corny bullsh*t dialogue of a WWE babyface, cracking poop and balls and bad breath jokes while smirking and making wanking gestures with his aura. Roman Reigns The Wrestler is NXT. He forgets to sell sh*t sometimes, sure, but he’s really good at this, and can tell an engaging physical story while taking an absolute ass-beating. He’s WWE’s Next Top Guy or whatever because of his look and size and family connections, sure, but he works as a Top Guy because he’s so good at executing WWE’s meticulously created “moments.”
For example, Sasha Banks catches Charlotte in the Banks Statement, and Reigns has to protect it by diving over both of them and spearing Rusev. He pulls it off, and it’s pretty obviously the best spear he’s ever done in his f*cking life:
No, seriously, look at this thing. He like, swandives into it and just absolutely murders him. It might be the best spear I’ve ever seen.
A-f*cking-plus. It reminds me a lot of that time Bray Wyatt used Reigns as the bullet in his finger gun. Roman Reigns is the greatest when he just gets to be a cool wrestler, isn’t the dread focus of everything happening around him, and doesn’t have to talk or act. He’s probably the best tag team wrestler in the world, and they’re never putting him in a regular tag team again.
A supplemental Worst, however, to Sasha Banks and Roman Reigns clinking their belts together without The Revival showing up and breaking their legs.
Best: Sheamus Is My Patronus
Sheamus is supposed to be backing up Cesaro and helping him get to the “SHEAMUS AND CESARO HAVE PINNED THE TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS” part of their feud with New Day, but instead he just sits on the ring steps browsing Facebook. Suddenly, Sheamus represents how most of us watch Raw. They should’ve shown him eating Chinese food and flipping over to the Indians game to complete my personalized experience.
Aw, jeez. And you got the stink lines and everything.
Worst: Taking Forever To Finish One Statement
Cesaro vs. Kofi was pretty good, but it does that weird “insisting upon itself” thing WWE storytelling does sometimes. Most times. They want to tell us that Sheamus and Cesaro don’t get along. We got that from the years of them wrestling, but we also got it more immediately from the Best of 7 series that ended in a no contest. We also got it from them getting stuck together by Mick Foley and arguing with each other about it inside and outside of the ring. We also got it from the jobber squash they had where they argued the whole time. We also got it from the second jobber squash that was exactly like the first. We also got it from this match, and that’s all we got. The only plot advancement here is that Sheamus and Cesaro have a match with New Day (which we knew) and that they don’t like each other (which we knew). Tell the next part of the story, you know? It’s A to B to C, not A to A to A to A to A to A to A to B and then back to A 10 more times before jumping to f*cking G.
Also while I’m thinking about it, from a purely kayfabe perspective aren’t Cesaro’s European uppercuts the least effective strikes in WWE? He hits like 65 of them during a match and can’t get the pin. Sheamus does one Brogue Kick and it’s lights out. Big Show punches a guy once and they’re dead. Shawn Michaels kicks a dude once. Dolph Ziggler gets pinfalls off superkicks now, too. Cesaro’s going full Rube Goldberg to hit nonstop European uppercuts and can’t keep Kofi Kingston down. TRY PUNCHING.
Worst: Blue Gulak
Cole: “Like Larry the Cable Guy, Drew Gulak with that blue collar style! Gulak really gets her done in the ring.”
Byron: “I talked to Drew Gulak earlier today and he said that they call him TATER SALAD!”
Graves: “no you didn’t you just got here”
Cole: “you tried calling your mom before Raw and she wouldn’t even pick up”
Graves: “you should die”
Cole: “you should literally die”
Byron: […]
[long pause]
Cole: “Lince Dorado now trying to create SEPARATION and build momentum, cover now, two count only. Y’know Corey, Drew Gulak says he knows MANY WAYS to tell whether you are or aren’t a redneck, as we can see from his SMASH MOUTH style in the ring.”
Graves: “I talked to Drew Gulak earlier and asked him if he was waiting for a sign to join the cruiserweight division, and he told me, ‘here’s your sign.'”
Byron: “… I heard you guys talking, I was there too”
Cole: “I am going to shoot you with a gun”
Best: Look, It’s Sin Cara! And He’s Doing Things!
In the non-headlock-centric cruiserweight match of the night, Drew Gulak and Tony Nese, aka “Jeff Dunham with a Neville puppet,” team up to face Lince Dorado and SIN CARA, who has decided to join the cruiserweight division instead of being the most forgettable dude in a parade of Braun Strowman jobbers. Nese and Gulak are one of the announced teams in the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, so of course they lose easily to a makeshift team featuring a guy who decided he wanted to be in the match this afternoon.
Still, it’s good to see Sin Cara utilized like this. WWE should’ve immediately put its best preexisting cruiserweight wrestlers into the cruiserweight division to bridge the gap between smaller established WWE stars and the Cruiserweight Classic instead of turning the ropes purple and telling everyone to wrestle in a void. Sin Cara, Neville — especially Neville — Enzo Amore, Sami Zayn, Xavier Woods … there are a ton of dudes billed 205 and under who aren’t really doing anything and could just instantly legitimize that division and help make it feel familiar to exclusively WWE fans.
Oh, speaking of Neville here he is returning to Raw and not helping the staleness of my jokes by wearing the same damn gear as Tony Nese, same colors and everything:
Best/Worst: Three NXT Champions And Also Curtis Axel
This is supposed to be Enzo Amore and Big Cass versus Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel, but I accidentally summoned The Club with a Limit Break and got them jumped. So instead, we get the Social Outcasts versus Sami Zayn and Neville, and of course the established team loses to the guys who decided they wanted to be in the match during the commercial break.
On the plus side, Neville and Zayn are a great team. Neither of them’s doing anything, and hell, maybe we could get a high profile match between them and Team Chris and Kevin before they break up. Plus, sh*t, if you’re building up Cesaro and Sheamus as the guys to finally take the belts off the new day, how great would it be if their next challengers were SAMI ZAYN AND NEVILLE? Not only would the match be great, but you’d have the fun dynamic of face Cesaro being war buddies with face Sami Zayn, but heel Sheamus still having a ton of animosity for Zayn and Neville. It writes itself, and most importantly, it writes more than one line of itself.
Quick note: I was a little bummed that they mentioned the three former NXT Champions in the match, mentioned that Bo Dallas lost his NXT title to “none other” than Neville, but didn’t mention that Neville lost HIS NXT Championship to his own tag team partner. Ah well, we’re still miles away from NXT General Manager JBL acting like he’s never heard of these debuting NXT guys, so I won’t worry about it too much.
Worst: YOU Get A Hell In A Cell Match! YOU Get A Hell In A Cell Match! YOU Get A Hell In A Cell Match!
Somewhere in the middle of the show, Mick Foley shows up looking like Luke Harper’s aunt in a suit made out of the enormous corpse of the Brawny Man and announces that we’re getting three (3) Hell in a Cell matches at Hell in a Cell. Sasha Banks vs. Charlotte, Roman Reigns vs. Rusev and Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins (and possibly Chris Jericho) will all happen in the cage. Stephanie McMahon’s out there to prod him through his lines, and Mick straight up looks like Dean Ambrose fell asleep under an apple tree and woke up 100 years later.
So yeah, this guy who looks like somebody scooped up a wet dog turd in a paper towel announces a bunch of cage matches for Lockdown — close enough — and gets interrupted by Team Kevin and Chris. They point out the weird inconsistencies in the booking, with Mick saying people can’t just get matches because they want them, then only ever giving people matches because they’ve said they want them. Owens says he doesn’t want to have a Hell in a Cell match because he’d like to keep being a wrestler, and not end up a weird, washed-up old general manager character. Foley responds to that like a puppy who THINKS he was asked if he wants to go outside, but isn’t sure. Stephanie responds by instantaneously turning face so he can put herself over Owens, Jericho AND the list of Jericho for seemingly no reason. Because Stephanie.
Best: Chris Jericho, Though
We really don’t deserve him right now. I’ve said it a lot, but the Gift of Jericho being an actual gift of Chris Jericho acting like 1998 Chris Jericho on 2016 WWE TV is an absolute entertainment miracle. He makes everything better, and if you didn’t like the backstage segment where Tom Phillips creeps up on them and gets accused of using a “stupid idiom,” I don’t know what to tell you.
Plus, nobody is allowed to make fun of him for wearing a scarf and panties again until Mick Foley publicly apologizes for looking like Fizzgig became an executive lumberjack.
Best: The Splash Brothers
Speaking of people who look stupid, Braun Strowman gets a handicap match against No Way JoSheamus and the Battlefield Earth version of JTG:
Did they let that guy on Raw because it looks like his chest tattoo says “Reddit?”
Last week, Braun said that if he didn’t get some competition this week, he’d take it out on Mick Foley. Mick’s response was to put him up against not one comically embarrassing example of local talent, but TWO. StrowBack plows through them, powerslamming one of them and reverse chokeslamming the other guy onto the first, and says that if he doesn’t get some competition next week, he’ll so on and so forth. I hope Foley’s response is to put him in the ring with three children in a trench coat.
RIP Rosebud Abraham Ford and the love child of Angelo Dawkins and Tyler Breeze, you were too beautiful for this world.
Best: Dana Brooke Deflates The Tube Men
Bayley gets a match against a much better local talent, “Cami Fields,” aka one half of the Twisted Sisters, Holidead. I don’t feel too bad about pointing out her alter ego if she’s tweeting about it. It is pretty weird that this week’s Bayley jobber is named “Cami Fields” and Bayley previously defeated “Anna Fields,” so I don’t know if they’re supposed to be related or if WWE creative is just lazy as hell and can’t remember their own shows. Suggestion: call the next female jobber, “Dames Ellsworth.”
Nia Jax doesn’t exist in this dojo anymore, so after the match, woman 4 of the 4-woman Women’s Division jumps Bayley from behind. As you might expect, Dana’s only motivation for this is that playtime? is over, but I’m giving the attack a strong +1 for the image of Bayley’s inflatable tube men losing power and collapsing around her. Production was like, “oh, she got attacked, might as well save this air.”
Worst: TJP Likes Video Games, Have You Heard
“Hey man, hit the pause button. You’re worried that if you lose, you won’t have any more extra lives. Remember when my Nintendo 64 broke, and you bought me a new one? Well, you’ve been a real D-Pad lately. I think you should hit X on being such a square. You better hit up up instead of down down if you want to be left right. Listen, there’s no code for success. I’m not some sort of … I don’t know, ‘game genie.’ But I do know you can look into my eyes, you can CD-i, and know I’m not gonna let you cast away your dreams. Press start to continue this conversation.”
Best: The Story, Though
Jokes (and bad acting) aside, I like the story they’re telling. Instead of just “TJP was homeless! Brian Kendrick gave him a ride!” they’re having TJP actively attempting to be a good dude, while not being completely stupid. He’s approaching Kendrick and trying to reason with him as friends, but keeps his eyes open and defends himself when Kendrick tries to cheapshot him again. And then Kendrick gets to show up later and heel it up, because he can rationalize that he was just “getting up out of his chair” and TJP attacked HIM. We actually saw that, and we can’t reason that the heel was being the better person. That doesn’t happen enough these days, and I dug it.
Perkins’ match against Ariya Daivari is much more exciting in WWE Fan Nation form. Most of the commentary is just Cole interrupting Kendrick every time he tries to get over their story. At one point Cole interrupts him and just starts calling every move, which is the least believable Michael Cole interruption ever.
They’re still leaning a little too hard into homogenizing the cruiserweights into a WWE style, which kinda kills what would get people passionate about cruiserweight wrestling at all. If WCW had brought in Rey Mysterio Jr. and been like, “hey, don’t do double springboard hurricanranas, just grab a chinlock and hold it until people start clapping their hands, that’s what Roddy Piper would do,” it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. It’s not really on TJP, either. If they’d brought on Kota Ibushi and had Jinder Mahal armbar him for 10 minutes everyone would still be sitting on their hands.
Worst: No Holds Bar
Remember when Edge and Booker T feuded over who got to be in a Japanese shampoo commercial? Here’s Titus O’Neil and R-Truth feuding over who gets to say they like eating candy bars. “R-Truth got that sponsorship with Payday fair and square!”
Titus O’Neil loses the candy bar match when he gets distracted and rolled up with his feet and most of his body in the ropes. The referee just counts the three anyway. Congratulations on that one time you touched Vince McMahon when you shouldn’t, Titus, enjoy this sh*t for the rest of your life.
Best/Worst: WWE Creative Just Made The List
The unbiased Raw management team decides to make Seth Rollins vs. Chris Jericho as the main event, with the stipulation that if Jericho can beat Rollins, he’ll get added to the championship match at Hell in a Cell. Rollins is getting another shot at the Universal Championship despite losing two title shots in a row, because Stephanie … hates him? I guess that’s consistent, because Stephanie hated Roman Reigns and gave him like 15 title matches.
Anyway, they spend the entire show teasing some kind of dissolution of friendship between Jericho and Owens based on Jericho’s dormant title aspirations and Owens’ secret desire to be the most important guy in the friendship and keep Jericho under his thumb, only to have Jericho lose the match and repeat the same story beat from last week. Rollins pedigrees Jericho while Owens watches and doesn’t help. It’s the exact same thing we did before, plus a tease that something more interesting might’ve happened.
And that’s Raw these days, isn’t it? The exact same thing over and over, with the promise that if you keep watching, something good might happen.
Ah Crap: Brock Lesnar Vs. Goldberg Is Happening
I’ll have a lot of chances to write about this between now and Survivor Series (or whenever), but the major forward momentum of the show involves WWE going backwards 12 years to set up a rematch between two guys who stunk it up at WrestleMania and had to get beaten up by the referee to make the crowd happy. Yes, Paul Heyman represents Brock Lesnar in a formal challenge to Bill Goldberg, following months of heated back and forth based on who they think would win in a video game fight. It’s the exact plot of Rocky Balboa.
I’m not sure what they want to do here. They did Lesnar vs. Goldberg during the height of Lesnar’s powerful youth and the end of Goldberg’s actual relevance as an in-ring performer, and it sucked. That match happened so long ago that Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit weren’t just still alive, they were the CHAMPIONS. 15-time world champion John Cena won his first WWE secondary championship — not his first world championship, his first singles championship period — on that show. It happened like a month after Eleven from Stranger Things was born. So now they’re gonna do it again with the same disinterested Lesnar against a 50-year old Goldberg who hasn’t wrestled a one-on-one match in 12 years. The last singles match Goldberg had was that Lesnar match. Do you think 12 years of inactivity and aging is going to make it better?
Bruh, I like a spectacle as much as the next guy, but this doesn’t end well in any direction. If Goldberg wins, you’ve spent years building up Lesnar as an unstoppable monster that can only be defeated via extreme timekeeper incompetence only to have him job to a non-wrestler whose most honest modern relevance was as a condescending chant to Ryback half the chanters didn’t understand. If Lesnar wins, you’ve brought in another WCW legend just to job him out like a chump — what’s up, Stinger — for the benefit of a guy who sincerely does not need it. You just wanna give Brock his win back? Is this a Hogan/Warrior II thing?
I love Paul Heyman. I love Brock Lesnar. I loved Goldberg and lived through him being the most insane, undeniable pro wrestling phenomenon of my lifetime. This is gonna be clown shoes.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night
Full Nelson Reilly
Y’know, I would much rather see Bill Goldberg versus Dave Batista in a “Guys Who Sound Less Bad-Ass With Their First Names” match.
Calzington
Kendrick with the best ‘vet goes heel’ justification of all time.
“I’m old. I can’t wait around for things. Because I’m old. So fuck you. You’re young, you’ll have more chances. Move out of my way.”
pdragon
can we start giving +1’s to Chris Jericho’s comments?
JacksSmirkingRevenge
The Boss and the Boos.
Gratliff
Oh sh*t. Someone found my No Mercy CAWs
TANKA
Byron: “Are YOU guys really a step up?”
RuPaul: “The shade! The shade of it all!”
troi
Both of these guys will sell you weed
Larry Dickman
The man WWE finally remembered
The Perfect Tim
Man, that a guy who grew up in Minneapolis only knows, like, three words of English is a real indictment of the Minnesota public school system.
Cami
I don’t even buy Dadberg beating the traffic to pick his sons from football practice
Thanks for reading, everybody. Be sure to join me next week, when Goldberg and Brock Lesnar get interrupted by Jerry Flynn and Randy Orton, aka VIPERFOOT.
