Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: New Day celebrated breaking Demolition’s longest-reigning tag team record by defeating four teams in the same night. Six days later they lost to one of those teams, because now that the record’s broken there’s no other reason to keep it going.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for December 19, 2016.
Worst: NXT TakeOver And Paul Ellering Aren’t Selling Enough WWE® Crash Cage Playsets I Guess
I like to use the, “this is like bad improv!” joke a lot because … well, I sit through a lot of bad improv in my life, but Raw’s opening segment this week was like bad improv in two ways:
1. Everybody kept talking over each other so you couldn’t hear or understand anything, causing them to repeat a bunch of their jokes twice, which absolutely does not make them better, and
2. I like everyone involved, so I had to sit through the entire thing with a smile on my face even though I hated it.
So here’s what you need to know.
Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens got powerbombed through tables at the end of Sunday night’s ROADBLOCK: END OF THE ROADBLOCK, so they show up to Raw perfectly fine and unharmed to brag about pulling off yet another “not best friends whoops still best friends, ya burnt” ruse. Mick Foley shows up looking like Gene Simmons from the ‘Lick It Up’ video with Paul Stanley’s hair on his face — Mick It Up? — and declares that since Owens can’t win a match without Jericho interfering, he’s going to (1) give Roman Reigns another goddamn title shot at Royal Rumble, and (2) suspend Chris Jericho over said match in a WWE® Crash Cage. You may remember it as the match that existed at NXT TakeOver: Toronto because a toy playset said “as featured on NXT TakeOver” and they had to follow through on it.
What Foley doesn’t get, I guess, is that “manager in the shark cage” matches only ever end one way: with the manager still being able to interfere by dropping something into the ring from the cage. Ellering tried this at TakeOver, dropping a chain down into the ring, but TM-61 and the Authors fucked it up. If they really wanted someone to interfere, they should hang them in a shark cage like, up in the nosebleeds in the back of the arena. Or like, outside.
Anyway, the biggest problem with this week’s Raw are these long talking segments, which look like they were summarized to the guys on flash cards right before they walked down the ramp. This one is rough despite featuring three talented talkers — Mick Foley not knowing what city he’s in continues Foley’s slow descent into constant sadness — and the four-team conversation before the tag team match is just as bad. It’s Day Run!
+1 to Chris Jericho for wanting to put Santa Claus on The List for having the audacity to make lists, though. That’s pretty great.
Worst: The Tag Team Division Isn’t Any Better
I think most of us were hoping that the sad state of the tag team division on Raw had been because of New Day needing to break Demolition’s record, and that now that Sheamus and Cesaro are champions, things would finally begin to move forward. Unfortunately the timing worked out for this to be a Christmas Raw, which meant if any of that’s going to happen, it’s not gonna happen here.
We do get some new tag title belts, at least, which look a hell of a lot better than the pennies, but the match we end up watching is New Day and the new champs versus the only two heel teams on the show. And New Day and the new champs just beat them clean again, because The Club couldn’t win a handicap match against James Ellsworth after he’d been cut in half vertically with a table saw.
Hoping we get a story deeper than, “none of the teams on Raw are really good enough to do anything, but we’ll keep letting them try,” after the holidays.
Let’s see how the women’s division is doing!
Best, With The Worst Result: BELLY HAS PINNED THE WOMEN’S CHAMPION!
If you missed it the two other times they’ve done it, Bayley stepped up to challenge Charlotte Flair, Charlotte was like, “sure, you aren’t any good,” and Bayley pinned her, causing Michael Cole to scream that Belly — which he honestly pronounces closer to “aioli,” so like BAOILI, I don’t even know — has pinned the Raw Women’s Champion. He screamed it twice, in case you didn’t hear.
The women’s division is increasingly defined by the review, “good match, but the ending was dumb and the booking is kinda underwhelming, I wish they’d do something else.” Instead of creating a feud between Charlotte and Bayley based on their histories and characters, they just went back to the “you’re not good” well without illustrating or proving it in any way and inserted Bayley into the Sasha role of Sasha vs. Charlotte. So what, now we get to watch THEM trade wins? That’s good for Bayley, I guess, and the matches will be good, but how hard do we have to beg for good matches with fresh, reasonable stories attached? I’m not even asking for a revolution here, I just don’t want Bayley and Sasha Banks to be interchangeable.
Speaking of Sasha, as much as I love her as a performer, I think her character might be the lamest champion of all time. She’s a three-time Women’s Champion now with zero (0) title defenses, and after losing a blood rivalry to a heel cleanly via tapping out, she’s out here on Raw talking about how much she respects Charlotte and how she’s the better woman. Part of me likes that, because you want to make your opponent sound good so you beating them makes YOU good, and also because I like babyfaces that aren’t full of their own shit and can gracefully take an L. But the character change is jarring for Sasha, who is never like this except now. And the other part of me is like, “why is Sasha Banks completely broken and on the verge of tearful retirement every time she wrestles?”
Even when Nia Jax shows up and tries to stir some shit with her, the end result is Sasha getting her crutch kicked away, getting beaten up and making sad faces in the ring. Why is Bayley suddenly Sasha, and why is Sasha suddenly Bayley? Character consistency! It’s a thing!
Best: Baby-Sized Geordie Brock Lesnar Is Back And He’s PISSED
So, the very best part of ROADBLOCK: THIS IS YOUR SECOND ROADBLOCK, SERIOUSLY, STOP YOUR CAR was the return of Neville. Seriously, for the entirety of the Cruiserweight Division’s existence and like two months before the Cruiserweight Classic I was like, “hey, where’s Neville, why isn’t Neville in this, shouldn’t Neville be upset about not being in this, SOMEBODY PHONE NEVILLE.” Then we get a few impotent months of cruisers trading chinlocks and dropkicks that hurt more because they bounced first, and then BOOM, Neville shows up jacked to the gills with the hair from the sides of his head missing and wants to kill everyone.
On Raw, he cuts a promo that tries very hard (and fails) to get him booed, revealing that he’s gone from Mighty Mouse to Vegeta. He’s like two snide sentences away from calling Rich Swann “Kakarot.”
Once again there’s way too much talking here, but God bless them for that magical moment when TJ Perkins’ music hits, he gets no pop, and then he runs out just to slide into the ring and immediately get kicked into unconsciousness. Oh man, I love it. Brother gets kicked so hard he goes limp on Neville’s leg.
I’d much rather than go straight into Neville vs. Swann instead of nerfing it by once again making it about the division’s only rivalry, Kendrick and Perkins, but whatever. Neville is great and acts like he actually cares about what he’s doing and saying, because he spent forever in NXT learning how to do this and didn’t go straight from the VFW Hall to international television without so much as a fucking pamphlet.
Worst: All Of This
Big Cass gets a ROADBLOCK: THE SHOW’S OVER SO STOP COMING UP WITH FUNNY SUBTITLES kickoff rematch against Rusev, which he loses via wrestling’s worst finish, “doing too well.” The referee stops the match due to castigo excesivo, which in WWE terms means, “punching in the corner when the referee asked you once to stop punching so much in the corner.” Lame.
So we head backstage and find Cass naming off all the best Columbus Ohio hangouts his Yelp app told him about until Enzo Amore gets a letter saying he must attend mandatory sensitivity training tonight, at the wrestling arena in the back somewhere, with cameras filming him, because HR wrote him up I guess for being naked and deciding to walk around instead of finding shorts. The other people in sensitivity training are Darren Young and Bob Backlund, Bo Dallas and Jinder Mahal, because “sensitivity training” is WWE’s version of guarding the bee. Basically Enzo doesn’t take it seriously and is as insufferable as possible, and the bits are nowhere near as good as the anger management ones that included civilians and happened in a hotel ballroom to at least make it appear legit.
Eventually everyone graduates from this like one hour session of vaguely discussing wrestling stories, and Enzo decides to hit on the lady running the class. Rusev walks in, Jinder Mahal sticks around, and they beat the piss out of him again. Somewhere in the back, Big Cass is trying to dial a phone, looking up confused, then slowly realizing that wrestling shows don’t have sensitivity training courses. The beatdown is pretty good again (when Jinder isn’t helping), but Enzo continues to be pretty much the least likeable and identifiable babyface in a beatdown ever. What’d we accomplish here? Learning that Enzo actually needs sensitivity training? He’s supposed to be the crazy friend who’ll say anything we all have, but he’s basically Pepe Le Pew with a female Gremlin aesthetic and needs to get got.
Best: BRAAAHHHHHHHHH
Finally this week, Braun Strowman is extremely upset about his “loss” to Sami Zayn and wants revenge tonight. Mick Foley thinks Sami Zayn is a precious special injured baby and sent him home hours ago, so Strowman takes out his frustrations on anything he can find. First, it’s a Sin Cara vs. Titus O’Neil match happening due to an “altercation on the Raw pre-show,” which couldn’t have been more telegraphed if they were wearing shirts that said BRAUN, PUNCH HERE.
That doesn’t get Foley’s attention, so Braun goes up to the stage and uses Sin Cara to destroy the Christmas trees and presents. Foley is like, HOW DARE YOU. Braun Strowman BELLY TO BELLY SUPLEXES A CHRISTMAS TREE.
Later in the night, Foley signs the Teddy Long Memorial Obvious Tag Team Match of Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns vs. Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho. It’s not bad but it’s the same thing you’ve seen a million times before, and only exists to set up the return of BRAHHH, who yanks Roman off the apron to cause a disqualification.
From there, Strowman destroys Reigns and Rollins to make a point, and Owens and Jericho just keep feeding them into the ring to get beaten up and bailing. It’s very smart. I’m hoping this leads to Strowman taking the United States Championship off Reigns before Royal Rumble, especially if we’re living through another Reigns championship run on top for WrestleMania, and that something, anything can shake us out of the WAIT FOR TRIPLE H holding pattern the main-event scene is in.
Also secretly hoping next week’s show is just Neville riding Braun Strowman like a Graug and destroying everything on the show.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
Dave M J
You know, when Braun eventually does get his match with Sami, I hope Kevin and Chris sit at ringside with a couch and a huge bag of popcorn.
DarO
Jinder survived a segment without being hindered!
Mark Silletti
If you don’t learn to be a more sensitive, caring individual, Rusev will BEAT THE DOG SHIT OUT OF YOU
Ryse
Looking forward to Emmalina premiering as The Duck Billed Funktapus with TM-61 as her back up dancers The Funkaroos
SuedeGuy
Sin Cara got ran over by a Strowman
The Khaki
Santa Claus: Braun Strowman, you just made the list.
Captain Fram
Dean Ambrose was in that gift!
ccxxii
“Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen and continue.” should be Raw’s mantra.
The Real Birdman
TJP used run-in!
It wasn’t very effective…
Clay Quartermain
Gallows & Anderson are the painting to AJ Styles’ Dorian Gray
Thanks for reading, everybody. At first we were like,
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Be sure to click those share buttons and help us out, and drop down into our comments like TJ Perkins getting kicked and let us know what you thought of the show. If I don’t type words you read until next week, have a safe and happy holiday.
