I wanted to save it for my first TNA iMPACT! review, but I might go ahead and call this week’s installment of the column the “Worst and Worst of WWE Raw.” There are a few things keeping me from enjoying the show, and they are
1. I was incapacitated last week with a viral infection of my intestines, which ended up basically poisoning me and putting me in the hospital for three days. I didn’t do a Best and Worst last week but I watched the show, and all I can really remember is morphine and an extremely white guy retiring.
2. I spent this weekend in Philadelphia at CHIKARA’s King of Trios tournament, which included (in one place or another) the Great Sasuke, Jinsei Shinzaki, Dick Togo, Manami Toyota, Akira Tozawa, Archibald Peck of “The Band” and a handful of guys from Osaka Pro, including a Japanese Spider-man. It’s hard to go from three days of amazing wrestling to two hours of unentertaining entertainment.
3. Raw is awful.
I’m sure next week will pick back up, but here we go. I apologize in advance.
Worst: England
Not the country. It’s just that whenever Raw starts off with big flags on the stage, you automatically know that you’re in for two hours of pointless water-treading. Nothing happens in England. Sure, if William Regal is around they might trot him out for the first time in eight months to win the Intercontinental Championship or something, and that’s always fun, but other than that you know Mark Henry is going to be competing against the current whoever version of Manu, and nothing is going to happen.
Sure enough, literally nothing happened on Raw last night. The Draft is next week, so coupling that with the big flags meant you might as well be watching an unusually terrible episode of Superstars. You know, I’m not 100% against the whole “entertainment” initiative, and if you’d rather “make a movie” or tell a story than wrestle a wrestling match, sure, go for it. The only thing I ask is that you make a good movie, or tell an interesting story, and that you won’t expect “R-Truth drinks water” to be thirty minutes long.
Worst: R-Truth Drinks Water For 30 Minutes
Like I mentioned in the opening, I was in the hospital for a ruptured everything. I had a tube crammed down my nose that sucked out the contents of my body, and the only thing I ate from Friday until about the middle of Tuesday was hospital applesauce with Super No Flavor Vacancy and potassium pills. That being said, the first thirty minutes of Raw last night made me wish I was still dying from internal failure.
I can’t explain the kind of hell that the segment puts me through on paper. My two least favorite wrestlers in the entire world spend thirty minutes being weird dicks to each other about wrestling protocol, leading to a crash-TV change for a pay-per-view main event that already has about four minutes to build, and it all ends with sweaty smoking and John Morrison somehow failing to lie on the ground convincingly.
I love a good heel turn, and the actual beating up of John Morrison parts were welcomed and fine, but I can’t think of any less enjoyable way for me to start a wrestling program. John Morrison and Michael Cole have never seen anybody drink water during a match! Especially not the Rock, who did it in literally every match for about seven years and spent the week before Wrestlemania pouring bottles of water over his head. Last week R-Truth takes on three guys in a gauntlet match, and this week they make fun of him for his lack of conditioning. And I guess it has something to do with John Morrison being weird to Trish Stratus? I don’t know. The most positive thing I can muster is “well, at least I UNDERSTAND why R-Truth is beating up John Morrison,” but honestly if a child jumped the rail and starting stabbing him with a knife I would understand.
Worst: Give John Morrison a New Finisher
WWE loves DDTs, right? Give him a swinging reverse DDT. Call it the “Morrison Slam!” Let him do it and hit it properly once over the next five years.
Worst: Dolph Ziggler < Perfection
Dolph Ziggler showed up to his match with Evan Bourne (whose name I almost typed in lowercase, because he is that important) as the “new and improved Dolph Ziggler,” which means he’s Dolph Ziggler, but with brown hair. Create-a-Wrestler hair #3 if I recall correctly. Ziggler hasn’t changed otherwise, except now he’s got a big flashing arrow pointing to him that reads “THE HAIR WAS ALL HE HAD.” Now he looks like every other person who has ever wrestled, and I’ve seen him described on message boards as everything from “Evan Bourne’s dickhead older brother” to “Legacy: The Person.” Sadly? They’re right.
Ziggler is a fantastically talented guy, and if he wants to be new and improved, he should stop calling himself “Dolph Ziggler.” Maybe that’s step two in the plan. They can give him a sports celebrity sound-alike name (like “Bam Neely” or “Kenny Dykstra”) instead of a movie reference. He’s got brown hair now, call him Josh Slamilton. Or maybe Eric Jeter. Erick with a K. It’s a bad sports name AND an insider reference to the Spirit Squad!
Best (whoops): Hire Me, WWE
I am good at these names. I want this job like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine wanted to name hair dye colors. Call him Carl Schwartzel!
Worst: Bloodless Cage Matches are X-Treme
The longer version of that header is “bloodless cage matches are x-treme, just like Lita was x-treme when she was in Team X-Treme and wore cargo pants, which was crazy.” I’m not going to be the guy who points out how TNA Lockdown’s title match was a triple threat match in a cage, and I’m also not going to be the guy to point out how ridiculous it is for the wrestlers to just wander out and say what they want a match to be and have it recognized as the gospel. I am, however, going to be the guy who notices that the cage match stipulation may as well have carried a disclaimer reading “the rules include escape, which guarantees Alex Riley’s involvement, because we’re going to pretend like we care about the Miz but we really don’t, and an NXT-flavored Honky Tonk Man is exactly what everyone wants and needs.”
Predictions for Extreme Rules: Miz retains because of Alex Riley interference, John Cena gets to do his “are you kidding me” exasperated face when interference happens, and John Morrison does something cool looking but ultimately dumb with the cage stipulation, probably one of those flying crossbodies from the top that Christopher Daniels does every two months on iMPACT.
Additional worst: TNA Lockdown 2011
0:36 on the Women’s Championship match. Good job, guys.
Best: Sin Cara Cleared the Top Rope!
Weee! But wait, I mean
Worst: Sin Cara Should Probably Start Hitting Moves Soon
A legitimate “best” goes to the team of John Cena and Sin Cara, with the two biggest draws of the last ten years teaming up. I like Mistico, and I’m happy to see him competing on a big leagues American stage (in England) and getting treated like he matters. But yeah, he’s looking a little bit like Gail Kim in there since his debut, and should probably buckle down and try to hit one or two of his moves without error, or at least without looking like he’s going to go flying to the outside and die when he moves. The springboard moonsault missed by a John Morrison margin, Miz looked like he would rather be doing organic chemistry than selling a headscissors, and nobody but Primo and Evan “Grizzly Redwood” Bourne is going to take that Shiranui Kai. Come on, Cara, I know lucha libre is about 20% enjoyable botching, but I want you to be awesome and have a sustained career. I don’t have 1997 WCW guaranteeing me Super Calo on television whether he does well or not.
Worst: Do You Realize Michael Cole Is a Bad Guy?
No, seriously, he is. You should boo him!
The Michael Cole “knighting” segment is exactly the kind of thing a WWE writer is going to think is hilarious to do in England. Keeping in mind that WWE Creative is just Vince McMahon and a fat shetland pony, the only things they know about the UK are “the queen” and that the Union Jack means “British.” So of course Michael Cole is going to get knighted, and of course he’s going to kiss the Queen, and of course he’s going to start acting like he’s a king even though knights don’t really call people “peasants.” The segment accomplished nothing but making us know Michael Cole is a bad guy, which they’ve been doing for the last six months-to-ten years.
An extra special “worst” goes to Jack Swagger for botching “Hear Ye” by saying “Hear He.”
Best: Kong!
Okay, two more “bests” here. See, even at my most pessimistic I can find a thing or two to enjoy. The best thing on the two hour show was the thirty seconds of Kong vignette, where it is revealed that brunettes are also in danger from Kong’s leg-ripping awesomeness. I read that her WWE name is going to be “Kharma,” which makes her sound like a stripper and sort of has its one major catchphrase (about Kharma being a bitch) nerfed by TV-PG. Oh well, the Rock can say he wants to anally violate me with objects, maybe they’ll let wrestlers use a word you can say on Scrubs.
Best: Cobra Psychology
I like a good squash match, and Sheamus got to murder Santino here (as he should be doing all the time), but the best part was Santino going for the Cobra but being unable to do so because he is hurt. I can’t believe that the Cobra is the only instance of selling on offense on two hours of big leagues professional wrestling, but there you go.
Bestish: Punk vs. Orton
I put “bestish” because the match wasn’t anything special (and certainly wasn’t enough to save the show), but it was fifteen minutes of wrestling, and I’d rather have that than nothing. Punk continues to sort of teach Orton how wrestling works from week to week, with Orton’s surprise RKO seeming like an actual surprise this week. Of course, none of it mattered, as the Draft is next week and Punk will probably be shipped back off to Smackdown, where he’ll hopefully get in with the Corre and start wearing one of those Hostess Cupcake T-shirts. Orton will continue to be Randy Orton, doing that thing we liked for about two months for the rest of his f**king life.
Raw was bad. I’m coming at it from a biased point of view this week, but it really was. When the most memorable thing on the show was a guy smoking a cigarette, you know something is wrong. It’s not irreversible, though, and if Cara starts breaking out El Péndulo, Miz starts looking like he could win a wrestling match again, Kong shows up and Dolph Ziggler becomes Jayce Utley (hire me) we’ll be back in a good place.
