Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: The Drifter debuted, and that was seriously the best part of the show. We’ve never even typed that about an NXT episode. Also, Enzo Amore got attacked by someone who is definitely not The Revival, Brian Kendrick watched TV out of the corner of his eye, and Classic Goldust is back! Kind of!
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Fun note: Justin is taking a break from the Best and Worst of Smackdown Live to take care of some real life stuff, so I’ll be filling in for a while! I get to write about Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens again! And, uh, Dolph Ziggler!
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for May 29, 2017.
Worst: I Knew It All Along, You’re So Predictable
Here’s the easiest way to set up a six-man tag featuring Extreme Rules opponents for Raw: open the show with a graphic of everybody’s faces and say, “these guys have individual matches, so tonight they’re all in a six-man tag.” How long did it take you to read that sentence? That’s how much time they could’ve saved by just assuming Raw has a steady audience that has seen more than one episode of the show.
Instead, it took 12 minutes for the opening segment, a MIZ TV bit with Sheamus and Cesaro, to start. That’s longer than most entire episodes of Adult Swim shows. Once they’re in the ring, they hit some variation of the THIS MEANS BOO US phrases “you people” and “each and every one of you” until Dean Ambrose shows up to call them buttheads. Buttheads. I know it’s been a while since he was in CZW, but if you ever need a reason why I rag on Dean Ambrose so much, the guy in his thirties who once won a match after having his face sawed off is calling people buttheads. This gets the heels confident they can win a 3-on-1 fight, not thinking for a moment that Ambrose may have gotten the guys Sheamus and Cesaro are supposed to fight soon to back him up.
The setup takes about 20 minutes, which is roughly the length of an episode of Attack on Titan. I’d say more happens in a minute of that show than in 20 of Raw, and the last episode was literally just characters standing still and shouting their inner monologues at each other.
The by-the-number setup leads to the by-the-numbers match, and let me recap what’s been going on and see if you can guess the result. Before Payback, Jeff Hardy pinned Cesaro. The next week, Matt Hardy pinned Sheamus. At Payback, the Hardys pinned Sheamus and Cesaro. After that, Jeff Hardy pinned Sheamus. The next week, Matt Hardy pinned Sheamus. What comes next in this equation? Why, The Hardys and Dean Amborse pinning The Miz, Sheamus and Cesaro, of course!
I swear, if Sheamus and Cesaro lose to the Hardys at Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View® I might be the one who gets broken and starts aggressively shooting off fireworks at dilapidated boats.
Best: Jobber Sells
Last week, Elias Samson made a shockingly well-done debut on Raw, going toe-to-toe with Ambrose until the Miz interfered. That appears to be the entire plan for Samson, as he’s now been slotted into the Nia Jax and pre-Crisis Braun Strowman role of “beat up jobbers until we know what to do with you.” I love jobber matches, and I especially love jobbers, but Raw only breaks out the jobbers for this one character role. Jobbers never like, face The Club in a tag team match. You never see Roman Reigns getting an exhibition match against a guy he can just run into or pin. These guys get on a waiting list for whenever an “unstoppable force” decides to happen and needs someone completely unimpressive to defeat for six months.
It’s fun to see jobbers get their asses beaten, though, and Samson does a solid job of wrecking poor Zac Evans. Next week I hope he takes on “Zoderick Strong.” The highlight is Evans selling a running knee like he’s doing the limbo, and selling Samson’s finisher, Sister Abigail Washburn, with a downward-facing dog:
Best of luck in your future Ellsworthian endeavors, kid.
Best: Corey Graves Does An Impression Of Me Watching Raw
What Could Kurt Angle Have Done That Would Make Him An Embarrassment After All The Shit He’s Already Done
The reason Graves bails on the Raw commentary team (besides the myriad of obvious reasons he could’ve) is because “someone who tells him things” sent him a text (or something) calling Kurt Angle an “embarrassment.” Angle says that if the message is true, it could “ruin’ him.
Things that have not ruined Kurt Angle (the character) include:
- psychosexually stalking Booker T’s wife, trying to rape her and referring to sex with a black woman as “bestiality”
- sexually assaulting Stephanie McMahon
- tricking Maria into hugging him so he could beat her up and try to break her ankle
- trying to put his finger in Brock Lesnar’s butt
- wrestling in TNA for a decade
And that doesn’t even include the real-life stuff, like the drug arrest, the four DUIs and all the stuff with Rhaka Khan. Also, on a much lighter note, his movie career, featuring the grossest kissing scene in film history. Somebody calls him an embarrassment on the Internet and it’s gonna ruin him? C’mon, if that was the case, I would’ve ruined TJ Perkins 400 times by now.
Real talk: it’s gotta be William Regal sending Corey Graves those messages. He’s a WWE authority figure, he and Graves have the NXT connection and Regal’s the only guy in the WWE Universe who says “besmirched.”
Worst: Back To The Promo Room With Ye
Two weeks ago, Goldust did everyone in the world a favor and attacked R-Truth, ending the Golden Truth’s tag team run and stepping away from the nerfed, context-less version of the character that comes across far too often as a doddering cartoon character. Last week he made it even better by returning to the classic Goldust character, and while he’ll probably avoid doing classic Goldust stuff like frenching his unconscious opponents and wearing women’s underwear to wrestle Roddy Piper, a serious, focused Goldust can still rock and roll and could be inserted into the Intercontinental Championship picture as a viable threat in a snap.
Instead of moving forward with that and, you know, doing something with it, this week we get another Promo Room promo that doesn’t even get to hit until R-Truth “interrupts” it with a parody. After one week! Remember when Stardust debuted and ruled, and then they stuck him and Goldust in a promo room for like two months instead of them wrestling or doing anything? I guess it’s better than “not being on the show” or “jobbing to The Club,” but unless we’re in a two-week holding pattern to get Goldust to Extreme Rules so he can wreck Truth and move forward, it’s a hell of a missed opportunity to do something fun.
What We Did Inside The Purple Ropes This Week
Up first for the 106 and La Parka crew is Rich Swann vs. Noam Dar. I’m starting to believe Noam Dar’s never actually won a wrestling match, and is just a child who visited a planetarium, bought a cool windbreaker in the gift shop with his allowance and accidentally went home with WWE instead of his middle school.
Sasha Banks and Alicia Fox have been beefing for a few weeks over a combination of wrestling incompetence and romantic taunting, so they’re having a mixed tag team match at Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View®. It’ll be Fox and Dar against Banks and … Rich Swann, for some reason. It’d make sense for Banks to be teaming with Cedric Alexander, given Cedric’s long history with Dar and Fox and, uh, because Cedric returned from injury last week, but I don’t know. I’m not the guy in charge of the publicly traded globalized wrestling promotion. Also, there’s a good chance that’s the match Vince meant to book but he can’t tell Alexander and Swann apart, and WWE is a fear factory where nobody will tell their crazy old man boss that you can’t blow a cello.
The incredible highlight of this match is Sasha Banks’ dancing. If you were ever like, “there’s no way Sasha’s as dorky as she pretends to be on Twitter loving Sailor Moon and stuff, she’s related to Snoop Dogg, she’s probably really cool,” please consult this GIF of her doing the fucking Bernie Lean and pulling Swann toward her with an invisible rope.
This will definitely be the worst thing to happen to the women’s division in this episode!
Later in the episode we get Austin Aries and Jack Gallagher vs. Neville and TJ Perkins, which would’ve been a lot better if we hadn’t seen it a month ago, and then again two weeks ago. From the May 15 column:
Four weeks ago on Raw, Austin Aries and Jack Gallagher teamed up to defeat Neville and TJ Perkins when Aries defeated Perkins. The next week, Austin Aries defeated TJ Perkins. Last week, TJ Perkins defeated Jack Gallagher. This week, Austin Aries and Jack Gallagher lose to Neville and TJ Perkins when Perkins defeats Gallagher.
It’s maddening, isn’t it? They just keep doing this shit on loop because they don’t care, and there aren’t enough of us who care to say anything about it. But hey, Austin Aries and Jack Gallagher defeat Neville and TJ Perkins when Aries taps out Neville! Austin Aries has beaten the Cruiserweight Champion! What will happen at Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View®!
Worst: The Jack Gallagher Garbage Conundrum
You know, I like Jack Gallagher as a wrestler. He was a breath of fresh air in the Cruiserweight Classic, he was fun in his first few appearances on Raw, and even had a memorable Royal Rumble appearance. But the more we see him, and the less WWE focuses on him and limits him to doing the same two or three things for five minutes every week, it gets more and more unbearable. Two things.
1. The headbutt’s been driving me nuts for a while now, as it involves Jack doing a big giant leg slap to make a clapping noise that heads do not make when they hit each other. But now he’ll do a big knock-out sell for it every time he does it, even in matches like this where he clearly headbutts his opponent in the chest. He just acts like it hit head-to-head even when it very obviously didn’t. That’s a guy being told to do a thing and doing it, and not a wrestler who thinks about how and why he does things.
2. The handstand escape to the headlock only works if the wrestler you’re doing it to understand how a headlock’s supposed to work. In a headlock, you’re supposed to be squeezing your opponent’s head with your arms, right? Otherwise you’re just holding them in place and nothing’s happening. Watch closely as Gallagher escapes a TJ Perkins headlock and “one of the best cruiserweights ever” just holds his arms in place, like he’s headlocking an invisible man.
What the hell were you doing there, Perk? At least pretend like you’re actually trying to hurt the other guy. Watch when Gallagher does it to Aries, and Aries drops his arms to the ground like a head that was in his arms suddenly isn’t. It doesn’t have to be scientifically accurate, but don’t squat there like a fucking imbecile.
Worst: This Is Your Life, And It’s Ending One Minute At A Time
Back in 1999, Raw featured a segment called This Is Your Life, a reference to a game show that went off the air in 1961, featuring Mankind hosting a “birthday celebration” for his frenemy The Rock. It ended up being the highest-rated segment in Raw history. Since then, WWE has occasionally brought back the This Is Your Life concept, not considering that the bit was successful because it featured two of the most charismatic talkers in wrestling history interacting in their primes, and they’ve been miserable. The John Cena version is especially bad, and the re-do of Foley and Rock seven years later wasn’t much better.
This week, WWE brought the concept back again, this time giving Alexa Bliss the Herculean task of managing WWE creative’s material and hosting “Bayley, This Is Your Life.” As a reminder, This Is Your Life had been off the air for 30 years when Alexa Bliss was born. If it tells you anything, WWE Fan Nation’s highlight video emits the entire segment and jumps straight to the part where Bayley runs out and they start fighting.
If you missed it, you missed:
- the crowd figuring out the segment’s going to be terrible about 30 seconds in, launching into the “what” chants, with poor Alexa Bliss still having like 15 minutes of bad writing to go
- Bayley plays with dolls, probably!
- Bayley sucked at sports and won an award for sportsmanship!
- In high school, Bayley was voted Most Likely To Apologize, which is not a thing! (Also, you’ve got Bayley’s yearbook? Wanna fill us in on her last name? Or is she listed in her high school yearbook as “It’s Bayley”)
- THE SEGMENT IS NOT OVER, WE HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE PEOPLE
- Bayley’s fourth grade teacher says she’s nice but would cry if she was away from her father so her father went to school with her (?)
- Bayley’s best friend didn’t like wrestling as much as her!
- Bayley’s ex-boyfriend wanted to kiss her but didn’t, because she went on dates with her father and he almost kissed an older man? And then he kisses Bayley’s friend, because reasons!
- his name is “Phil Johnson,” like “feel johnson,” because he had to masturbate a lot while dating Bayley, get it
If you could even read that without skipping down to this part, imagine what it’s like to watch it. It’s an impossibly long heel promo where the heel doesn’t actually say anything heelish about the face. She’s just like, “Bayley is kind of a boring person!” That’s the hook. And also I guess she has daddy issues? Unless they’re gonna reveal at Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View that her dad is an ECW Original and her full name is “Bayley Sandman” or whatever, what’s the point? If Bayley loses, are we gonna get a mid-card angle where Dawn Marie comes back and seduces Bayley’s dad to death?
So then, after ALL OF THAT, Bayley comes out and briefly wins at fighting before STOPPING COMPLETELY to POINT AT A KENDO STICK ON A POLE, which makes her EXTREME, or something. She wanders around like an idiot until Bliss recovers and beats her down with a kendo stick again. So Bayley looked like a secondhand dorky idiot for 20 minutes, then looked like a firsthand dorky idiot in the ring.
Congratulations, Bayley This Is Your Life, you’re the new bar for terrible Raw segments in 2017. The only way this could’ve been worse is if her ex-boyfriend had been Sonny Boy.
Worst: The Kalisto Vs. Titus Brand Barn-Burner Continues
Disgusted from the tall glass of piss that was Bayley This Is Your Life? Chase it with a shot of Titus O’Neil gently tea-bagging Kalisto and holding his tights to “make it a win.”
There’s a reason Kalisto’s new entrance theme starts with the Pac-Man dying noise. That guy’s starting to make Apollo Crews feel like Shinsuke Nakamura. Carmella listens to Kalisto’s pop and talks shit.
Best: Big Cass Is Finally Going To Start Hating Enzo Amore As Much As The Rest Of Us
Last week, Enzo Amore got beaten up by a mysterious assailant. Top suspects include a group of angry chickens, a sentient box of chicken like in Little Nicky, Rusev again for some reason, a violated tromboner or anyone who’s had to sit through an Enzo and Cass segment in 2017. A little later in the episode, we saw the recently absent Dash Wilder and Scott Dawson leaving the arena, and all signs pointed to a pair of TOP GUYS doing the deed.
This week, Charles Caruso confronts The Revival about the footage, and they rightfully point out that nobody should care about Enzo Amore. When Chuck sends it back to the announce team, Corey Graves gets weirdly accusatory about Big Cass knowing who attacked Enzo, because Graves is all-in on his new “informant” gimmick I guess. Maybe William Regal told him! But yeah, Cass shows up and goes totally aggro on him about it.
Later, we find Enzo beaten up again, this time having been victimized by the CLANGY POLES, Raw’s most dangerous backstage obstacle. Cass runs in again and blames the Revival, but Angle says he saw them leave the building. Cass doth protest too much, methinks, and says he’s not leaving Enzo’s side again.
The WWE thing would be for the culprits to be The Revival after all, but Cass finally having enough of being Enzo’s accessory and trying to injure him so he can have another singles run is a GREAT idea. Another fun idea is that Enzo is just stupid and clumsy and collapses into things if Cass leaves him unsupervised. Next week Cass is gonna find him lying at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Regardless, +1 to WWE for giving us an undercard story with actual week-to-week plot progression, and not just the same jerks wrestling each other over and over.
Best: When The Main Event Stuff Is Actually The Best Part Of The Show
The fatal five-way match at Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View® will Change the Course of the New Era®, so this week we have two matches to build it. The first is a triple threat between Finn Bálor, Samoa Joe and Bray Wyatt, and it’s my choice for match of the show. It goes about 17 minutes and is built around the uneasy heel half-alliance of Joe and Wyatt, and Bálor babyfacing his ass off to fight off two monstrous fat dudes. I’m telling you, Finn has been rad in the ring since his return, and I can’t overstate the disconnect between Finn Bálor the wrestler and Finn Bálor the wrestling personality. In the ring, he gets it. His title run in NXT was the drizzling shits, but he does scrappy, timing-based competition based comebacks as well as anyone, and his size and apparent “softness” really add to it. He looks like he’s getting the shit kicked out of him every time he’s in the ring. Hell, he got hit so hard one time that Jinder Mahal got a promotion.
Joe wins in the tried and true WWE 2K17 fashion of waiting for your opponent to hit their finisher, tossing them out of the ring and pinning the guy they hit. Only two complaints here:
Worst: Two Complaints
1. The branding of the “New Era” is out of control. Michael Cole says everything could “change the face of the new era!” It’s the modern day equivalent of Tony Schiavone saying everything that happened on Nitro was the “greatest moment in the history of our sport.” Cole thinks everything could change the face of the new era. If Sasha Banks had done Gangnam Style instead of the Bernie Lean it would’ve changed the face of the new era.
2. Bray Wyatt really needs to stop pausing in the middle of what’s supposed to be a flash Sister Abigail. The reason the move originally had that pause in it where he dips them and kisses them on the forehead is because he’d splash his opponent in the corner and knock them out. It’s a taunt to show that he’s already won. When he does it to a fresh opponent and they just stay in place, they look like the biggest dopes in the world. It’s somehow even worse when they wait until they’re pulled back up to counter. Brother needs to stop doing the entire animation and just facebusting people when he gets the chance. He’s making everyone look stupid.
Also making everyone look stupid is “every other aspect of Bray Wyatt right now,” but Jesus Lord am I sick of writing about it.
Best, Except For Nerfing Seth’s Finisher: Seth Rollins Vs. Roman Reigns
The other fatal five-way preview in an endless string of them is Rollins vs. Reigns, which honestly might’ve been the best singles match between the two we’ve seen so far. They kept the pace up, which was crucial to making it feel fresher than it deserves to, and the counters and responses to moves — like Roman’s All Japan sell of the Buckle Bomb with a Superman Punch before the pain hit him — worked well with the story that these guys know each other better than anyone. The final counter of Rollins’ Rain-Trigger was a little deflating since (1) Roman had never had it attempted on him before so you’d figure that would be the one move he wouldn’t know how to counter, and (2) Rollins just got it and had it dunked on. Roman wins, because Roman Reigns.
Still, the match was fun and (god bless it) occasionally exciting, which is really all you can ask for from a Raw main. And hey, if Roman Reigns went over clean here, it gives us a little ammo to rationalize him not obviously winning at Extreme Rules. My kingdom for a Samoa Joe win, and Joe deciding in the middle of the Lesnar match that he doesn’t want to take anymore Germans.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
Sparta
Next week: 25 minute segment of R-Truth critiquing the latest Avengers movie with an obsessive level of detail.
FeltLuke
Say what you will about Roman, he seems pretty nice to let so many people play in his yard whenever they want.
Baron Von Raschke
I could get into a storyline where Enzo gets attacked offscreen and is found in a heap of metal poles every week from now until the Royal Rumble. It could be like Murder on the Orient Express (SPOILER ALERT)
It’s not one person…it’s everyone!
Nevers
“This is hard to watch” – Booker T. And y’all say Booker doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The Real Birdman
Raw having a ppv sponsored by a song off an album called “dull drums” is magnificently tone deaf
troi
Looks like Kalisto finally got that Cease and Desist from Drago
cyniclone
So 205 Live is the average viewing audience?
pdragon619
Come on Bray! How are you gonna eat the world if you fill up on pins first?
AJ Dusman
Dean Ambrose making the tag was the stiffest offense he’s ever shown.
LUNI_TUNZ
Cesaro: “It’s a shameful thing.”
Sheamus: “Lobster head.”
That’s it for this week, believe it or not. Be sure to drop down into our comments section to let us know more than like forty people in the world watched all three hours of this, and click those share buttons so I don’t get fired due to general disinterest in the show. Be here on Sunday for Extreme Rules, as well. If the show is great, I’ll be surprised.
I’m talking THIS surprised:
See you next week, some of you!
